“She just got it,” Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s managing director recently enthused about hiring onetime Ailey star Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell. Even before the pandemic, local audiences were shrinking—and the troupe size with it. “She was going to connect with Chicago, and the art she wanted to present was going to connect with Chicagoans.” And she did; it has. Exhibition A is choreographer Rennie Harris’s recent debut with the troupe. Dear Frankie pays homage to the godfather of Chicago House, the late master mixer Frankie Knuckles, whose chill, lyrical beats tick like a heart and set you dancing all night. Harris is Knuckles’s equal in wizardly invention. Admirers may praise the Ailey regular for his deep historical knowledge and living mastery of hip-hop’s every turn, but it’s how he transforms the bravado solo idiom into sustained choreographic drama that thrills. Dear Frankie appears on both programs at MOCA Chicago and in the first week of Hubbard’s New York engagement, at the Joyce. —Apollinaire Scherr