The most impressive quality of Ballet Chicago, which performed Saturday night at the Maine Center for the Arts, was the sharpness of the movement. With confidence, sparkle, and meticulousity, the 21 youthful, lithe dancers showed that Ballet Chicago, formed less than five years ago, has developed a strong character of its own. To the precision and purity of George Balanchine and the finesse of Jerome Robbins, Ballet Chicago brings whip-snapping energy and a truly American jazziness. Despite a few flubbed landings and sullied synchronizations on Saturday night, these technicians moved with an almost computergraphic accuracy. There wasn’t much grace, and there wasn’t much soul, but what the group lacked in depth, it made up for in spunky style.

In “Allegro Brillante,” a tricky neoclassic piece by Balanchine, four energetic couples formed symmetrical lines and attractive uniformity to Tchaikovsky’s Third Piano Concerto. A fifth couple offered an intricate pas de deux of crisp exactitude and an apparently effortless exertion.

“Scenes From an Italian Songbook,” a series of 10 vignettes about romance. While piped-in German singers crooned of love and longings, women in gem-colored tafetta dresses and men in formal-black outfits loosely acted out the scenes. The sections lasted just a few minutes each, and showed tortured love, rejected love, smitten love, gleeful love, and lonely love.

The romance of the music and sentiment, however, were often lost in the hyperactive movement of the dancers. In only one section, “Now let us make peace,” did choreographer Gorden Peirce Schmidt capture the ambience of devoted love. It was a breathtaking moment when Manard Stewart walked onto stage carrying ballerina Petra Adelfang on his shoulder, and the two twirled in each other’s arms as if in a lover’s dream.

In “Time Torque,” three perky modern pieces by the New York City Ballet-trained Duell, pony-tailed dancers in black leotards with flourescent trim followed the staccato notes of contemporary music by Michael Torke. This opening segment, in which the women vaguely resembled robotic poodles in an aerobics class, the dancers pranced across the stage to rock beats while a couple waltzed to a slower beat. The final section, called “Xylo-time” (because the xylophone is featured in the score) was a torchy pas de deux between a spidery ballerina dressed in a black unitard and a sinewy male dancer, whose costume — a red unitard with a lightening bolt carved into the neckline — gave him an unfortunate likeness to a superhero.

The last piece, “By Django,” another of Schmidt’s choreographies, combined show-biz pizzazz, classic ballet, and flapper flamboyancy with jazz music by Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. Mostly, the piece was a showcase for boogie-woogie funkiness or vaudevillian tongue-in-cheek humor. At all times, the dancers moved with perky virtuousity, but the choreography sometimes bore a similarity to dance-school routines in which girls place their forefingers on their chins and smile just before they curtsy.

Ballet Chicago has an admirable and entertaining sassiness to its work. But the choreography, no matter how exact, cheerful, accessible, young, and charged, lacked beauty and depth.