John Alleyne hadn’t taken a vacation in four years, but that wasn’t the only reason he found himself stuck in a hole of deep emotional darkness last year. Aside from the daily pressures of keeping a major arts organization relevant in a world of funding constraints and attention-challenged audiences, he’d recently lost both of his parents. To decompress, Ballet British Columbia’s famously driven artistic director booked a house in Curaçao, a Caribbean island not far from his place of birth in Barbados. Whereas most of us return from holidays with a clinical case of post-vacation depression, Alleyne came back with a renewed sense of energy. He’d not only climbed out of that hole and back into the light, he’d also plotted out the beginnings of an innovative new work—The Four Seasons, his first creation in two long years.

“The piece, I think, really happened because I was in a very bad place emotionally—a very, very bad place,” Alleyne says, his trim new beard starting to show grey, but looking every bit as lean and statuesque as the energized 33-year-old who took over Ballet B.C. in 1992. “I was dealing with a place of regret. And it could be an enormous culmination of how many years I’ve been in this place [Ballet B.C.], my parents passing away, my brother’s failing health… You know, when you’re in your late 40s there’s a lot going on in your life and you start questioning. My emotions are right there, as controlled as people think I am. So when they hit a low, they hit a low. I had to question a lot of things around me, and the ballet is very much about coming out of that. It’s been very cleansing.”

Looking out over the stone Curaçao terrace to the turquoise Caribbean sea, Alleyne read books that would feed the ideas behind his new ballet. Malcolm Gladwell’s pop-sociology work The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Henry Miller’s reflective essays in Sexus, Gilles Lambert’s baroque-bad-boy bio Caravaggio, and J. Maarten Troost’s ode to South Pacific escapism Getting Stoned With Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu—Alleyne has scrawled quotes from all of them in the leather-bound notebook he holds in front of him during rehearsals. The sea birds he watched flying in patterns would inspire some of the group movement in The Four Seasons, which is built around Antonio Vivaldi’s famous baroque work of the same name. And a near miss by Hurricane Felix inspired the chaotic “Summer” storm in the work. But most importantly, Alleyne took time to reminisce about his life and his work, eventually coming to some big realizations. The biggest one was that life doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it out to be.

“We here—and maybe to my fault—continually attempt to do something different. It is so tough,” he says, gesturing out his office doors in Ballet B.C.’s headquarters in downtown Vancouver’s Dance Centre. “But the sadness was not with my art. I actually remembered that I’m one of the lucky ones that loves what I do. I used to stay up till 2 a.m. working, and now I look forward to going to bed at 11 so I can get up at 6 and start working again. I love when the dancers of this company get on-stage, and have been prepared to the point where they feel so comfortable and so empowered that they leave the audience breathless.”

It’s a decidedly un-Caribbeanlike January day in Vancouver, and, fittingly, heavy snow blankets the streets below Ballet B.C.’s floor-to-ceiling windows while a “Winter” storm of dancers is swirling through the studio. Alleyne’s newfound exhilaration and drive to “empower” his performers permeate the rehearsal studio so completely on this afternoon that you’d never guess his Four Seasons grew out of a place of darkness. The artistic director bounds confidently through his dancers, his notebook open in his hands. Vivaldi’s racing violin scales fill the hall as the troupe’s rising star, Makaila Wallace, leaps high into veteran Jones Henry’s arms. At the same time, a flurry of female dancers tap diagonally across the floor en pointe. The loose narrative is a metaphor for Alleyne’s reflective mood: Henry is an angel of death who follows Wallace throughout her life, and when she finally recognizes him for who he is, she has the chance to reassess the path she’s chosen.

It’s clear The Four Seasons will be the kind of fearless, inventive work that Alleyne has made his name with in the international dance world. The piece will come complete with a live performance by members of the Vancouver Opera Orchestra, a prelude and postlude written by Canadian composer Michael Bushnell, an added corps of youth performers from Arts Umbrella, and the collaboration of two well-known local visual artists: Tiko Kerr, whose warped, colourful canvases of city scenes are instantly recognizable, will paint live on-stage, and public artist Alan Storey has designed a giant drawing machine that will digitally track Wallace’s movements during the performance (see sidebar). Storey’s device is a huge metaphor for retracing life, something Alleyne has been obsessed with over the past year: “It’s the idea that we leave a residue of movement and ideas—we don’t really leave, we carry on in this world,” he says.

Alleyne, who on this day wears a crisp blue dress shirt that he’s changed into after a day of rehearsals in a funky green screen-print T, says he looked to the past for the sources of The Four Seasons. First, it’s set in the 1960s, the era of his childhood. The 20th century’s most revolutionary decade can be seen in everything from the women’s flowy, Twiggy-style silk tunics and the men’s ruffled Austin Powers–esque shirts and mod suits to the fact that the work as a whole is very much a spontaneous art “happening”. Working with Kerr is also a blast from the past for Alleyne: the two collaborated on 1994’s Three Visible Poems and 1997’s Boy Wonder, and both see The Four Seasons as a chance to fuse their art forms more effectively.

In the piece, Alleyne has gone back to the genre-pushing techniques he first developed as an upstart choreographer. After graduating from Toronto’s National Ballet School in 1978, Alleyne went straight into Germany’s ultra-cutting-edge Stuttgart Ballet, where he both became a star and began to explore choreography. Signing on with the National Ballet of Canada in the late ’80s, he began creating works for that company and, eventually, for the still-new Ballet B.C.

“Very few people in this company have any idea what my dancing career was like,” Alleyne points out. “I hold that [experience] and it’s like this beacon that glows in me, and it’s right there. All you have to do is light it up again”

As a young choreographer, he would give dancers phrases from poetry and ask them to improvise movement around the words. The idea was to create a fresh dance vocabulary rooted in real expressive emotion. The Four Seasons finds him revisiting that approach, which he hasn’t used since 1990. It seems to have given his dancers the sense of empowerment he talks about. Alexis Fletcher, an Arts Umbrella grad who joined the company three seasons ago, admits Alleyne is pushing his artists to take creative risks like never before.

“It means the choices we’ve been making have been very much about our own impulses,” she says during a rehearsal break. “I really feel like he’s honouring the individual dancers, and that’s what this company is really about. He’s trusting us, but he’s trusting himself too.

“Sure it’s been exhausting,” Fletcher continues. “There have been days where I honestly feel like my head’s going to explode, but would you really want it any other way? It’s so intense and so exciting—especially watching him be so excited.”

Exhausting and intense are words that often come up when artists describe what it’s like to work with Alleyne. Edmond Kilpatrick, who’s finishing up his ninth and final season with the company (see sidebar), explains it this way: “He’ll do in three days what it generally will take other companies weeks to do.”

Even Kerr, a close friend, admits that working with Alleyne can be draining, albeit in the best possible way. “He’s not just courageous, he’s incredibly generous, continually throwing us forward and saying ‘The rest is up to you.’ Right now, he’s really at peace with himself. He’s flowing and excited and kicking and dancing and playful.”

Alleyne does wonder if he sometimes pushes people too hard. He believes it stems from his ability to track so much information at once—music, his literary references, the costumes, and the stagecraft. “If you’re not as passionate about something as I am, of course you can’t do this. You’ve got to discover in life what it is you’re driven to do. And when you’re driven to do something, it’s not work. It’s stress, but it’s not work.”

With live improvised visual art and a creative process that was still under way just two weeks before opening night, no one can predict exactly what The Four Seasons will look like. So it’s important to note that the large organization behind Alleyne, the administration and board who have to keep Ballet B.C.’s $2.8-million budget in the black, must take the leap along with him.

“Ballet B.C. is about innovation,” explains executive director Susan Howard. “He’s taken us all on a journey, and this innovation and risk-taking is what we’re all about. We don’t really question it—it’s just what we do.”

Although she admits that risk is “not always a comfortable word in the boardroom”, she adds of The Four Seasons: “This is not Cinderella and it’s not Swan Lake, but we do know the music. John is a practical man.”

Despite this kind of support, and despite Alleyne’s flow of fresh creativity, The Four Seasons has had its challenges. The choreographer conceived the ballet for Simone Orlando, the company’s unofficial prima ballerina, but she suffered an unspecified injury after last Christmas. That led him to set The Four Seasons on the lithe, athletic Wallace. When the flu season knocked some of his male dancers out of rehearsals, he also had to change elements at the last minute. In a testament to his new mindset, such troubles seem only to have pushed Alleyne to innovate even more intuitively.

In the bigger picture, far from reassessing his role at Ballet B.C., Alleyne clearly intends to stay with the company that he essentially built. Howard points out that the troupe plans to have Alleyne create the company’s own signature Nutcracker for the 2009–10 season. The ambitious project should launch in time for the high-exposure Olympics season and then tour for years after that—a potential juggernaut, both as an investment and as a revenue generator. These days, Alleyne seems in just the right head space to take it on.

He seems only now to fully realize what he’s achieved during his tenure at Ballet B.C. Not only has the company produced critically lauded, contemporary story-based ballets like The Faerie Queen and A Streetcar Named Desire, it has attracted hot repertoire by the likes of Twyla Tharp, Paul Taylor, Lar Lubovitch, and now Mark Morris, whose A Garden is part of The Four Seasons program. On top of that, Alleyne, with his “empowering” style of choreography, has helped spawn a whole wave of choreographers out of his dancers, including Orlando, Emily Molnar, Crystal Pite, and Chengxin Wei.

Alleyne recalls two major international conferences he’s attended in the past few years, and concludes that Ballet B.C., with its contemporary repertoire and elite corps of dancers, is unique on the continent—even on the globe. “All the major companies were there, the Bolshoi, the National Ballet of China. And they’re talking about major budgets. And I’m going, ‘Money’s my problem: without a doubt, I live in North America and I’m a small contemporary company, and money is my problem.’ It’s not my audience, it’s not my city—maybe it’s my government, but it’s not the people, it’s not the dancers. This is a pretty liberal, adventurous community. This is the West Coast. It’s not conservative like Eastern Canada. No, it’s money. But that all said and done, sitting in that room, we—my board, the company’s staff over 20-something years, the designers, the writers, the composers—we have probably been able to implement and bring about more change than anybody else there.

“So I actually do like what I’m doing,” he says, tapping on his leather-bound notebook, the computer printout of his Caribbean villa poking out from its first pages. “I just had to find that place again.”

The Four Seasons plays at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Thursday to Saturday (February 14 to 16).