The latest creation from choreographer Carolyn Deby and her Sirenscrossing dance company takes its name from Imbolc, an ancient and nearly forgotten Celtic ritual of rebirth and hope. In this new work, audience and performers alike become urban nomads, crisscrossing the city in search of meaningful visions and extraordinary places. In a sense, Imbolc (in the belly) is a kind of brief, theatricalized pilgrimage—yet Deby does not want to be pegged as some kind of neo-pagan priestess. Rather than brood over the distant past, she’d rather reimagine the urban future.

“Cities aren’t necessarily the bad guys, but we can reconsider them,” she says in an early-morning telephone interview. “We can dream of new possibilities.”

Deby’s dream is a collective one, and so Imbolc—pronounced “im-molk”—demands greater engagement from its viewers than most other artistic events. Things kick off at the Roundhouse Community Centre at 8 p.m. on Friday (February 1, with further performances running Tuesday to Saturday through February 16), but they won’t stay there.

“For several years, I’ve been working with the idea that the movement of the audience is as important as the movement of the performers,” Deby says, explaining that she aims to lead her audience through a variety of downtown and Downtown Eastside sites, where they’ll encounter “a mix of visual image, sound, performers moving, [and] performers speaking” before being bussed back to their starting place.

“I tend to call these events experiences rather than performances,” she stresses, adding that some venues and scenes might not be suitable for young children. Presumably the two 10-year-old dance and theatre students who are part of her cast won’t participate in those sequences, but their presence speaks to another of Deby’s concerns: the way contemporary urban life marginalizes the old and the young.

Vancouver, says the choreographer—a former resident now living in London, England—is obsessed with glamorized notions of eternal youth. “The main kind of drive is for this thirtysomething or twentysomething perception,” she says. “I don’t want to be preachy, but we want this to represent everybody.”

Consequently, in addition to the aforementioned grade-schoolers, her ensemble includes a pair of seniors, both with backgrounds in the performing arts, along with her core group of four dancers. Cross-generational casting “felt critical in this piece,” she notes, “because I’m thinking about different kinds of cycles, natural cycles of life. There’s the cycle of the seasons, which is part of this piece, and also the cycle of life.”

Another of Imbolc’s layers addresses the ways in which human actions affect those natural cycles. Cities and their attendant infrastructures are major contributors to climate change, and Deby hopes her work will spark ecological as well as social concern.

“It’s not going to change the world,” she allows. “But I hope it makes the audience feel thoughtful about their own place within the city. Global warming and all of these issues are ultimately about us not noticing that we are connected to the way things work, so if this piece can somehow give that message an urgency or a profundity, then I guess that’s what I would hope for. But it’s going to have to be part of many other instances, not the only thing.”