Purged by fire and then by successive waves of development, Vancouver does not have many haunted places. If ghosts exist, however, Gastown’s Blood Alley is where they will be found. Home to the city’s first jail and a long-time refuge for the down-and-out, it has a dark aura that persists to this day—as Vancouver-based actor, choreographer, and dancer Byron Chief-Moon found out one night in 2005.

In town for the biennial Dance in Vancouver festival, he decided to celebrate a successful performance with a trip to a Gastown club. After he left the venue, however, things went strangely awry.

On the way in, he explains, he hadn’t paid much attention to the poverty and homelessness endemic to the Downtown Eastside. “But when I came out, having danced for several hours in this club with this trance-like music, I was sensing everything,” he continues, reached on his cellphone during a visit to Nanaimo. “We went to the car, and I just got completely ill. I’d been performing that week, so I knew there was nothing wrong with me physically, but I couldn’t stop this outpouring of expression that was going through my body, and I didn’t know how to interpret it. But I figured there was something there, so I just kept going to the studio and just trying to find out what this story was about.”

The piece that emerged, Blood Alley—which Chief-Moon will perform at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on February 15 and 16, as part of the Talking Stick Festival (which itself runs from Tuesday to Sunday [February 12 to 17])—is as complex and strange as the experience that led to its creation. Chief-Moon reports that early versions of the work have left viewers “haunted and chilled”, but there’s more to it than a simple ghost story.

Blood Alley’s title is a sophisticated and slightly morbid pun on the fact that Chief-Moon is from the Blood tribe, part of the Samson Cree Nation of southern Alberta, and one of his goals is to examine what happens to people from a traditional culture when they find themselves in the alienating urban world.

“This is just an excerpt of a bigger picture,” Chief-Moon says, explaining that he intends to produce a full-length duet version of Blood Alley. “In the bigger picture, Angela [a character loosely based on Chief-Moon’s grandmother] has gone into the urban town to look for her brother Tom, who’s fallen under the dark side of Skid Row. The solo piece I’m doing [for the festival] is Tom’s spiral into this underground, but also it’s interpreting what’s going on with the East End, and the young women there that are being exploited by drugs and alcohol and prostitution. And there’s this other story that I’m trying to say at the same time, which is part of the Blackfoot creation story.”

Perhaps Blood Alley is all about interlocking realities: the spirit world and the city streets; the horror of addiction and the path to health; the rooted strength of traditional dance and the openness of contemporary choreography. And it certainly reflects the fluid essence of the aboriginal arts, both old and new.

“Native culture is not static,” Chief-Moon says. “We’ve never, ever stopped evolving. We’re just taking our point of view and reflecting our environment—and this is what dance does for me.”