NEW YORK, NY.- In late 2020, Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell was doing what many other dance instructors were doing: teaching all day on Zoom.

This was in Baltimore, her hometown, where she had been teaching dance for the previous 15 years at Towson University and the Baltimore School for the Arts. Before that, she had spent 13 years as a standout member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, touring the world.

That’s a full and impressive career, but as Fisher-Harrell, 52, said in an interview, she was wondering: “Is this it for me? Do I plateau?”

She came across a job posting on Facebook. “It was gigantic and very specific,” she said. “But as I read through it, I thought, ‘I can do this.’ ” When she showed the job description to her family, her children said, “This is you!”

Fisher-Harrell got the job: artistic director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, one of the country’s foremost repertory companies. She is the first woman to lead the troupe, founded in 1977, and the first person of color.

Fisher-Harrell sold her house, moved her family to Chicago and took over in March 2021 during a moment of turmoil for the company. There was the pandemic, which kept her from meeting the dancers in person for months and shut down in-person performances until November; but there were also shock waves from the recent sale of Hubbard Street’s longtime home and the disbanding of its second company.

At the start of 2022, Hubbard Street moved into a new space and touring started ramping up again. From Tuesday to Sunday, Hubbard Street will make its first New York appearances under Fisher-Harrell’s direction, performing at the Joyce Theater. Before that visit, she spoke about her plans for the company and how she fits into its history.

“It wasn’t like this was bestowed on me, at all,” she said, likening the extensive interview process to dressage: “prance forward, prance back, prance in a circle.” But neither was she an out-of-nowhere candidate. Hubbard Street was where her career started.

She was 19, and enrolled at Juilliard. “I had only started dancing in high school,” she said, “so teachers were always telling me, ‘You’re late, you have to catch up.’ By the time I got to Juilliard, I was like ‘I don’t have time for this. I need to dance.’ ”

She hadn’t seen many companies. One was Ailey, in which “I saw myself and what I wanted to do,” she said. Another was Hubbard Street: “clean, sharp, not a movement out of place, and none of them looked like the others.”

Hubbard Street was holding auditions in New York, so she gave it shot. “Sometimes ignorance is bliss,” she said. “You don’t know how frightening it is.” Lou Conte, the company’s founder, invited her to join the troupe in Chicago for a week, and then he hired her. She stayed for three years.

“It was the best education possible,” she said. “I was steeped in the practice of a professional dance company really quickly. The bar was way up high, so when I went to Ailey, I already had this high level of expectation of what I wanted my work ethic to be.”

But, it turns out, that time with Hubbard Street was also an education for her new job. “I know Lou’s standards and the origins,” she said. “That’s in my DNA.”

Conte was a Broadway dancer, born in Illinois. The company grew out of his classes on Hubbard Street in Chicago, and in the early years, it made its reputation mainly on the precision and pizazz of the dancers in his Broadway-jazz choreography. “They dance as if they and the audience were friends,” Jennifer Dunning wrote in The New York Times of the troupe’s New York debut in 1983.

Through the 1980s, Conte expanded the repertory with works by choreographers who straddled the line between Broadway and pop ballet: Margo Sappington, Lynne Taylor-Corbett. And during the years that Fisher-Harrell was with the group, 1989 to 1992, it became a repository for the work of Twyla Tharp, which was at once jazz-based, popular and experimental.

“I remember the electrifying feeling of that repertory and how we communicated with the audience,” Fisher-Harrell said.

In the 1990s, without abandoning the group’s signature style, Conte began leaning toward Europe. “We started going to the Holland Dance Festival and watching Nederlands DansTheater,” Fisher-Harrell said. Conte imported portentous modern dance pieces by that company’s director, Jiri Kylian, and by Nacho Duato, a protégé of Kylian’s, just as works by Kylian, Duato and their successors were starting to inundate American companies, especially ballet troupes.

In 2000, Conte was succeeded by Jim Vincent, who had danced with Nederlands Dans Theater (and later became its artistic director). Glenn Edgerton, who took the helm of Hubbard Street in 2009, also came from Nederlands Dans Theater, where he was a dancer and then artistic director. No wonder Gia Kourlas, reviewing Hubbard Street’s visit to the Joyce Theater in the Times in 2019, could describe it, disparagingly, as “like a Midwest branch of Nederlands.” The troupe was still popular and on-trend, but it was harder to say that its members danced as if they and the audience were still friends.

Fisher-Harrell is respectful of this recent Hubbard Street history. “I could have said, ‘Oh, I’m throwing everything out,’ but I don’t think that’s smart,” she said. Yet she acknowledges how the company’s repertory and style, following trends, had made distinguishing it from other repertory troupes more difficult.

“It’s like everybody has their Ohad, everybody has their Pite,” she said, referring to works by ubiquitous choreographers Ohad Naharin and Crystal Pite. “What about the other folks that have been out there creating?”

Bringing in those other folks is among Fisher-Harrell’s aims. One of her first decisions as director was to invite choreographer Randy Duncan. “He’s been called Chicago’s favorite choreographer, and he had choreographed on every company here, except for Hubbard Street,” she said. “I thought that was crazy.”

The Joyce program starts with another of her commissions, “As the Wind Blows,” by Amy Hall Garner. “Amy’s work is physical, musical, creative,” Fisher-Harrell said. “Sometimes contemporary dance can be very inward, but I’m interested in bringing in different voices to show that it doesn’t have to be one way.”

Hiring Duncan and Garner also aligns with another of Fisher-Harrell’s goals: “more choreographers of color.” Most of her commissions so far have gone to artists who fit that description: Jermaine Spivey, Darrell Grand Moultrie, Thang Dao, Rena Butler, the former Ailey dancer Hope Boykin and the hip-hop master and Ailey regular Rennie Harris.

“I’m conscious of the responsibility of my being in this position,” she said. “I felt like, ‘Yes, represent! Get in that position and do a great job.’ ”

“But,” she added, “I also think that greater representation broadens audience appeal. There weren’t a lot of people of color coming to see Hubbard Street. And having a more diverse swath of people onstage and behind the scenes will bring more audiences to us.”

Fisher-Harrell said she was thinking of the dancers, too. “There’s a backbone of excellence,” she said. “You’ve never seen Hubbard Street and gone, ‘Oh, those dancers need work.’ But those incredible artists need to stretch and become more versatile.”

This was part of Fisher-Harrell’s rationale for hiring Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton as resident artist. The three-year appointment is more focused on process than on product, on giving Barton and the dancers time and space to experiment and create together.

“The company is so talented and warm and committed,” Barton said, of why she accepted the position. “And Linda is so encouraging. Sometimes it’s that simple.”

Barton has made work for Hubbard Street. But it was her “Busk,” a highly theatrical piece performed by the Ailey company, that caught Fisher-Harrell’s eye.

“Busk” is also on Hubbard Street’s Joyce program, along with Naharin’s “B/olero,” Kyle Abraham’s “Show Pony” (made for and performed by Hubbard Street’s Alysia Johnson) and a duet that Spenser Theberge created for Nederlands Dans Theater. It’s a sampling of repertory that reflects a company in transition.

“You haven’t seen ‘Busk’ like this,” Fisher-Harrell said, noting that Barton had added a new section. But it might be truer to say that New York audiences haven’t seen Hubbard Street quite like this. It’s Fisher-Harrell’s company now.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.