Hubbard Street Dance Company Chicago triple-billed two of Europe’s choreographic wizards Tuesday night at The Granada, and broke the theatrical fourth wall — figuratively and literally. This 34-year-old modern dance company, which began as a neighborhood jazz dance company, has changed the history of dance in America, and recreated iconic European ballets that put to shame the current pop culture’s “repurposing” of dance.

The first two works of the UCSB Arts & Lectures production were by Czech-born choreographer Jiří Kylián. The former artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theatre revolutionized contemporary dance from the late 1970s through the ‘90s, and created such a signature style that it seemed to be a new technique in modern dance altogether. Of course, it all essentially came from a ballet and Martha Graham base, but the genius of this man and his dances now lives on through former NDT dancer and Kylián’s predecessor, Glenn Edgerton, Hubbard Street Dance Company’s current artistic director.

Edgerton recreates the choreography like you are seeing it for the first time, and it’s a vocabulary so alarmingly different and so instantly recognizable. Kylián’s signature movements — the sweeping and classically enormous windmill of legs with postural sinking in the torso, or the flexed-feet jumps with swooping bird-like arms — are not the only physicalities he demands from his dancers. Unlike Graham, there is a somewhat openness of heart and soul, and this is what so personally affects the audience in this day and age. And it’s such an incredible achievement for modern European masters dances to be living daily in the young dancers of America.

These dancers have the most diverse collection of dance training and experience you might ever see in a set of program notes, and they handled the evening as if they’ve been doing the styles their whole lives. The first piece, entitled 27’52”, referring to the dance being 27 minutes and 52 seconds long, is like a cross-section of many a troubled existence. It opened with a man shaking the life out of a woman’s long arms. It comes in such a violent manner that we know these men are controlling these on-the-edge women. There was a “performance art” decor (also by Kylián) of rolls of white vinyl flooring that lifted and wrapped over the dancers, sometimes huddling them in the black under-sided blanket of darkness. In one section, the floor was lifted by one of the men and a girl almost steps in and the dance seemed to ask us, “Do we walk into a crack of life?”

Although this one didn’t, none of the women never really escape the men, and they exulted in twitching and idiosyncratic arm movements that suggest they have truly lost their minds. Then an orgasmic pas de deux charged the audience with a violently passionate dance of sex. The electronic music of Dirk Haubrich enhanced this no man’s land and you actually love being there. The midriff white vinyl drops that moved up and down throughout the dances had the air of bleakness that magnified this joint-popping, air-slicing dance, which was sustained with immeasurable control by the dancers. The button of the dance gave focus to these gigantic slips of canvas as they were released from above and silently, but clunkily, they fall to the stage in random foldings that dismembered the stage with their visually profound landings.

The second ballet, “Petite Mort,” also by Kilián, and to Mozart’s “Piano Concerto in A Major and in C Major,” opened with six bare-chested men in skin-tone undergarments voraciously dancing with fencing foils, scaring us to the possibility of death en masse before us. Behind them stood six women in uber-sized black Baroque ball gowns, perfectly still onlookers to the fragile but painfully difficult foil dance.

Then quickly this ballet gave way to the magician Kilián’s hand as the men picked up silk flooring (this time) and ran forward with it covering the stage. Before it had time to billow down, the men were running back with it, and once discarded the women were standing there, miraculously naked but for skin-tone bodices. The black dresses stood alone like cardboard cutouts.

There was brilliant comedy throughout, but the dancers were the stars of this ballet with tumults of lifts and cross-legged catches and turns, and where never was a step repeated, musically much like Mozart. It is all danced barefoot in a kind of preposterous synchronicity.

Finally, with “Walking Mad,” Ravel’s Bolero is reinvented with a comedic romp down a back alley in Europe. Swedish dancer and choreographer, also long-time dancer and resident choreographer of NDT, Johann Inger, invents a language of dance and physical theater with modern-day clowns, mad men and mimics. Caricatures in dance are not easily pulled of these days but even when the ballet opens with a clownish man climbing onto the stage from the audience, our smiling eyes are set in motion. He reached for the bottom of the front curtain and it magically rose, revealing a single shabby-looking girl picking up various bits of clothing from around the stage. Suddenly a tall white-washed fence, with four doors (and multiple angle and floor-dropping possibilities), sped downstage toward him. He stopped it and the dance began as a hip-rolling wide-eyed girl practically attacked him with desire. A section of of pubescent boys (with dunce hats) built the dance, hopping the fence and rolling on the floor in exquisite unison, and we understood that everyone on the stage is a little “touched.”

But the choreography becomes a fresh invention of onomatopoeia; dance speaking the sounds of the music. At one point, the timeless Bolero seemed to stop suddenly but it actually continued quietly on a radio from behind that white urban fence. A single woman listened to it, then a pas de deux developed with fantastic banality of movement as both bodies were thrown against the fence in off-the-floor difficult positions and stuck to it. The theatricality of the piece is what was enjoyed most by the audience and at the marvel of re-inventing so uncompromisingly, a masterpiece of music already so “saturated in dance.

UCSB Arts & Lectures has stocked a season of dance that just gets better and better, and with Tuesday night’s solid packed house, soon we’ll be lucky to get a ticket at all.

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— Noozhawk contributing writer Liam Burke covers dance and has been published in Dance Magazine, Dance Australia and The James White Review. He can be contacted at liam@danceatlas.com.