Vancouver choreographer Joe Laughlin has made a name for himself by teaching his dance audiences to expect the unexpected. In the dozen years since he founded Joe Ink, the insanely versatile artistic director has featured his performers swinging on giant metal scaffolding, spent years shuttling between here and South Africa to collaborate with the racially integrated troupe Moving Into Dance Mophatong, and delved into high-tech experiments with digital projections. So to find him now, for his new TIMBER/Timbre, moving mannered, artfully costumed ballet dancers around a chessboard-like grid to baroque music might make one assume this is another big departure.

But as the affable artist settles in for a coffee near the Scotiabank Dance Centre, where TIMBER/Timbre will premiere March 14 to 17 as part of the monthlong Vancouver International Dance Festival, he reveals that his interest in ballet is actually a return to his past. More than two decades of dancing, and years of competitive gymnastics before that, have taken their toll on his body, and it’s put him in a reflective mood. The boyish Laughlin doesn’t look his 46 years, but he was forced to retire from performing last year after knee surgery.

“My knees are like tires and they’re kinda worn-out,” the self-effacing artist says with a smile. “So I was thinking a lot about my performing career and went back to where I had come from.”

Where he came from, after an ankle injury led him to leave gymnastics, was ballet—most memorably, under the instruction of late Vancouver icon and National Ballet of Canada founding member Earl Kraul, who Laughlin says helped him apply his athleticism to ballet.

In TIMBER/Timbre, he’s collected a talented trio of versatile dancers—Simone Kingman, Tara Dyberg, and Chengxin Wei—who can handle the piece’s intricate balletic movement. “I wanted to celebrate the beauty and virtuosity and technique, but also the price you have to pay for that,” hints Laughlin.

Beyond the sheer kinetics, Laughlin was also interested in the politics and history of ballet. He looked back to Louis XIV, who launched a royal dance academy in the baroque era. “It was a time when the aristocracy wanted art and architecture to show their power. So it was really for the elite,” says Laughlin, who uses ballet as a metaphor for the empire-building of the time.

It was a period Laughlin began to explore in 1997, when a Clifford E. Lee choreography prize allowed him to stage a large-scale send-up of baroque social manners called L’Etiquette for the Banff Festival Ballet; it had enough grand costumes, fluttering fans, and ornate furniture to look like the set of Marie Antoinette. But soon after that, he hooked up with Mophatong, and began a journey that would take him to South Africa several times over the next few years.

There, in Johannesburg, he went to see a visiting European ballet troupe at a theatre, and as the sole white man among a group of black dance colleagues and students, he looked around and realized that 10 years prior they might not even have been allowed in the auditorium. The realm of pointe shoes and pirouettes seemed like a different universe from the work he was doing with Mophatong’s tribal-influenced contemporary dance, and yet Laughlin feels an affinity for both extremes. “I can be in both worlds equally comfortably,” he says. “We all have the same impulses as dancers.”

The trip back to the baroque era and ballet has taken him 10 years from L’Etiquette, but this time around he hasn’t opted for a straight-up rendition of costumes and sets. TIMBER/Timbre’s most striking visual element is the shape-shifting soft sculptures that the dancers wear. They transform into everything from set pieces to props. Artist Alice Mansell has created a military-style coat out of metal mesh for the male dancer, and its detachable upper torso becomes a sort of chess piece on the stage’s grid. A bustled skirt unravels into long, gauzy ribbons, while a white pannier skirt is folded to evoke the sails of a boat.

In other words, Laughlin’s TIMBER/Timbre may have some of the expected elements of a ballet—a formal structure, rigorous technique, and a score that includes the classical likes of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederick Handel. But, like so much of his other work, it’s also full of surprises.