With an obsessive eye for detail, legendary choreographer Lar Luboitch brings his jazzy Elemental to Ballet B.C.

If there's one thing that Lar Lubovitch cannot be accused of, it's getting stuck in a rut. The renowned New York choreographer, who has been creating works for almost 40 years, has designed a ballet based on Othello, crafted the choreography for award-winning productions of musicals such as The King and I and Into the Woods, mapped out routines for high-profile figure skaters including Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill, and collaborated with modern and classical dance companies around the world.

The music that he chooses as the backbone of his work is no less diverse: composers from Johann Sebastian Bach and Igor Stravinsky to Steve Reich and Brian Eno have all inhabited his creations. But Lubovitch admits that one style of music holds a special place in his heart: '50s and '60s jazz.

"I'm from Chicago originally, and Chicago is a jazz city, so I grew up with that as a sensibility and always had an ear and an interest," he says on the phone from New York. "And there is a movement language that goes with it, a language that was very popular in show and film choreography in the '50s and '60s. It's a very theatrical way of dancing, and it's a vocabulary that I enjoy very much. It just feels good."

It's also a vocabulary that Lubovitch decided to tap into when, in 2005, the San Francisco Ballet commissioned him to create a work for a dance festival in Paris. After rooting through countless compositions, the choreographer opted to base the piece on Dave Brubeck's 1963 album Time Changes.

"It's very dancey," he says. "I mean the music of the great beat jazz writers–[John] Coltrane and people like that–you wouldn't exactly get up and dance or choreograph to this music. It's much more about listening. It's cerebral. But the Brubeck is very physical, and it's easy to physicalize because it's very rhythm-driven and very kinesthetic."

Those are the same words that could be used to describe Elemental Brubeck, the Lubovitch work that Ballet B.C. is performing, along with Serge Bennathan's In and Around Kozla Street and the world premiere of Simone Orlando's Realm of Her Eclipse, starting tonight (November 22) at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Aspects of ballet, modern, and jazz movement are all at play in the piece, which begins with a broad, assertive solo, moves through a cool, romantic jazz duet, and then introduces an ensemble of six.

Although the vivid costumes evoke the Technicolor of Gene Kelly– and Fred Astaire–era films, they were actually based on the colour of the spring flowers in Paris, where the piece was premiered. (Lubovitch refers to the first soloist simply as "the Red Man".)

When he set out to make the work, Lubovitch initially listened to the Brubeck album almost obsessively–as he puts it, "countless times. Hundreds of times. All the time." That way, when he came to designing the movement, the music would be purely intuitive to him. Next, he went into the studio with his dancers and began creating–a process which, like jazz, was rooted in improvisation.

"There is no improvisation left when the choreography is finished, but it was definitely there in the process of making the dance," Lubovitch says. "But it is based on a lot of pre-information and on truly knowing the music, so by the time I'm improvising, there is a specific idea already formed in my mind–not of steps, but of how to react to the music."

According to Ballet B.C. dancer Makaila Wallace–who is in her fifth year with the company–that's exactly the approach that Lubovitch took when he came to Vancouver to work with the performers.

"It was really, really fun to work with him. He was very specific in the way that he wanted things to look, but he left a lot of responsibility to the individual," Wallace says, describing the work as organic and musical. "So it was a really wonderful experience, because I really found my joy and love of dance working with him again."

For Wallace, among the greatest rewards of learning the work–which she describes as "one of the hardest stamina pieces that I have ever done"–has been finding the outer reaches of her endurance.

For Lubovitch, the reward was learning that Dave Brubeck himself loved the work. By coincidence, the same night that Elemental Brubeck opened in San Francisco in April 2006, the jazz pianist was performing in Berkeley, just a bridge away.

The octogenarian couldn't attend that night, but his conductor did, and was so impressed that he invited Lubovitch to a Brubeck concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The choreographer accepted, and at the show Brubeck–who had since watched the work on DVD–introduced a song from Time Changes by saying that a great piece of dance had been created around it, and how honoured he'd felt.

"I was completely startled," Lubovitch says. "And I had been invited backstage to meet Dave, so when I met him, it was a complete thrill. He said that it perfectly illustrated his music, and that he was thrilled to have it choreographed. And of course, that meant a great deal to me, because you want the composer to recognize that what you have done to his music is worthy."