Review: Hubbard Street-Lines blend showcases dancers’ virtuosity

American dancers have long been the wonders of the world: committed not merely to virtuosity (prevalent everywhere) but to virtuosic versatility, the mastery of many movement languages and cultures. That mastery accounted for much of the excitement at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Friday, when Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (a modern dance repertory company) joined forces with Alonzo King Lines Ballet (a contemporary neoclassical ensemble from San Francisco). The engagement continues through Sunday.

As with millennial film technology, the temptation to use everything in a state-of-the-art arsenal all at once can lead to nonstop, numbing special effects -- and the three-part collaborative Hubbard-Lines program certainly offered examples of how fine dancers can get swallowed up in choreographic overkill.

With its large gray cubes continually rearranged by the dancers to form walls, portals and even a kind of display case, Hubbard’s “Little Mortal Jump” might have succumbed to panoramic spectacle -- but it didn’t, partly because choreographer/set designer Alejandro Cerrudo anchored his intricate, liquid ensembles with a series of intense character duets.

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Jessica Tong and Jonathan Fredrickson gave us love, sweet love, free of balletic pretensions; Alice Klock and Johnny McMillan ran at each other like young stags enjoying their prowess; Ana Lopez and Jesse Bechard deftly traced powerful emotional crosscurrents.

Using nearly every kind of music, from Tom Waits ballads to Philip Glass symphonics, Cerrudo’s suite achieved no creative breakthroughs but also never misused his dancers’ exemplary skills, unless you count at least one ugly lift in the final duet.

Alonzo King’s “Scheherazade” worked hard and successfully to reconcile the torso undulations of Middle Eastern dance with the spine-straight verticality of Western pointe technique. All his Lines women embodied this fusion brilliantly. And the duets for Kara Wilkes and David Harvey had a genuine internal reality, one in which female strength and resilience proved omnipotent.

Otherwise, the piece provided relentless, hectic, in-your-face, competition-style dancing in sequences meant to evoke Scheherazade’s 1,001 tales, perhaps, though the episodes flashed by without leaving any after-image. It was like trying to view sand paintings in a windstorm.

Incorporating a few themes from the Rimsky-Korsakov orchestral showpiece, Zakir Hussain’s propulsive score developed its own interplay between East and West. Robert Rosenwasser’s textured setting morphed and pulsed like a living thing thanks to Axel Morgenthaler’s lighting. But the choreography never developed beyond hard-sell technical assaults, except in the superbly executed Wilkes/Harvey duets.

Enlisting the Hubbard and Lines dancers, “Azimuth” allowed King to deploy his forces in artful spatial arrangements that had been largely missing in “Scheherazade.” But, despite a sensational vertical cloud-bank courtesy of visual effects specialist Jim Doyle, the piece quickly fell apart partly because it repeated too many structural ploys (including the ending) from “Scheherazade,” and partly because it imposed pointless whirlwind movement on profound and often sacred music from many religions. At such moments, the choreography became not merely excessive but obnoxious.

Ben Juodvalkis was credited as composer and the sections choreographed to pure percussion did supply momentary relief and another chance for the dancers to reclaim our unstinting admiration. Harvey and the tireless Meredith Webster emerged from the throng more than once in bold showpieces.

King has earned a legendary reputation as a teacher and if his ballets on Friday never justified their program notes about “symbolic meanings and universal truth,” they did show us what dancers can do in 2013 that they couldn’t just a few years earlier. Like Ohad Naharin of Batsheva, he’s a major force for technical innovation in contemporary dance. But the best place to appreciate his genius these days may be the classroom, not the theater.

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