Hubbard Street Dance Chicago kicks off its 46th season with a trio of works at the Harris Theater this weekend.

The main event comes last with “Return to Patience,” a company premiere officially launching Canadian American choreographer Aszure Barton’s three-year artistic residency. Faithful audience members will discover they’ve seen the other works on this weekend’s series, collectively titled “Of Peace,” several times before. It opens with Darrell Grand Moultrie’s “Dichotomy of a Journey,” and tucks Lar Lubovitch’s “Coltrane’s Favorite Things” in between.

The program is an elegant triptych that demonstrates what audiences have come to know of artistic director Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell’s key priorities: a commitment to North American choreographers, a wide array of styles and accessibility. And she’d probably say this much repetition is about building new audiences, deepening the dancer bench by rotating roles through the company and marinating each piece to let its flavors and tannins develop. Maybe. It’s also, likely, about fiscally responsibility; Fisher-Harrell essentially started from scratch building new repertoire for the company, which was in disarray when she arrived in 2021.

Whatever the reason, I was simultaneously glad to see “Dichotomy” and “Coltrane” again — and ready to be done with them for a while. Moultrie’s “Dichotomy” hits differently placed at the beginning of the evening, which defies tradition by starting with a bold, exuberant piece and ramping down to Barton’s more subdued offering. Created in 2022 to a grab bag of sounds by Ezio Bosso, Shostakovich, V. Michael McKay and Donald Lawrence, this chapter book of a dance oscillates between full-tilt ensemble work and featured solos and duets, each section not entirely connected to the last but somehow all going together like chicken and waffles. It took about half the piece for the company to relax and gel into unison, but many moments bubbled to the surface Thursday night. Morgan Clune, in just her second season, has emerged as one to watch. Here, she’s trusted with a gorgeous downstage solo and pas de deux with Elliot Hammans midway through the piece — an uncommonly beautiful duet created on and typically reserved for veteran dancers Jacqueline Burnett and David Schultz. Abdiel Figueroa Reyes personifies the piece’s signature solo as only he can: shuddering and convulsing in revelry akin to a church revival, then casually hitting a turn or extension with pinpoint precision.

“Coltrane’s Favorite Things” fits this company like a glove and is an especially good chance to notice two more exceptional dancers. Alexandria Best and Shota Miyoshi are small in stature but pack a big punch, launching their bodies across the stage like streams of paint onto the gray and mustard-hued Jackson Pollock painting that inspired the piece. With the painting as a backdrop and John Coltrane’s cover of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Favorite Things” filling the sonic space between the bodies, Lubovitch’s three-dimensional love note to two midcentury geniuses, created in 2010, has only gotten better with age.

Made in 2015 for the Juilliard School, “Return to Patience” is, in some ways, an antidote to Barton’s “Busk,” her 2009 tour de force which has become something of a signature piece for Hubbard Street.

This may or may not be a fair comparison, but it’s natural, since “Busk” is most Hubbard Street audiences’ only interaction with Barton’s work thus far. That piece — moody, sardonic and unceasing in intensity — is the yin to “Return to Patience’s” yang. This new-to-them full company piece — lit and costumed in bright white by Nicole Pearce and Fritz Masten, respectively — is less messy, holding more back in both dance and design.

That’s not to say it’s not rich or robust; Barton says a lot with that white-white pallet and restrained choreographic hand. The dancers spend more than a little time in stillness or swaying between the balls and heels of their feet. In that collective reticence, composer Caroline Shaw’s “Gustave Le Grey” for solo piano is what’s front and center. Barton seems to have considered every single keystroke of this extraordinary score, but doesn’t choose every note. A single pang compels the dancers to sharply move their feet from parallel to first position, another to bend one knee, then the other; a fourth tips them into precise balances on one leg, tipped into what yogis would recognize as Warrior Three. It’s simple, almost borrowing from George Balanchine’s “Serenade.” It’s also impossibly hard for the dancers, who are exceptional in every way but not immune to occasional wobbles and bobbles that inevitably come with something so exposing.

This simmers along until, periodically, single dancers bubble to the surface in sharp-edged, tetchy solos and small groups — but it’s all fleeting. They return to patience, in a manner of speaking, coming back to stillness. Though “Return to Patience” was made years before the pandemic, its antiseptic setting and slow boil made me think of those three years. They dance mostly in unison, but often apart from one another, oscillating between testiness, loneliness, collective empathy and apathy.

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Considered together, “Busk” and “Return to Patience” make crystal clear why Barton and Hubbard Street are so good for each other. Both are works Hubbard Street can do better than just about anyone else — but they’re not theirs. Barton’s residency has no strict rules about if or when she creates something new, though she’s scheduled to finish a world premiere by February for their winter series at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s safe to say we’re all anxiously awaiting what she will make exclusively on and for Hubbard Street; that’s going to require just a bit more patience.

Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic.

Review: “Of Peace” by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (3 stars)

When: Through 3 p.m. Sunday

Where: Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph St.

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes with two intermissions

Tickets: $55-$110 at 312-334-7777 and hubbardstreetdance.com.