Victor Quijada’s Rubberbandance Group is known for its street-smart mashup of hip-hop and ballet. But rather than cutting and pasting together moves from each style, his renegade company has spent the past six years aiming for perfect fusion. Asking him to separate out the influences in his choreography, Quijada says, is like asking the Los Angeles–born Mexican-American which parts of him are from which culture.

“My parents are Mexican. I was born in the U.S. I don’t choose one step to be like a Mexican and one like an American,” the dancer-choreographer says from Victoria, where his Montreal-based troupe is performing the mixed program Elastic Perspective before bringing it to the Vancouver East Cultural Centre from Tuesday to Saturday (April 15 to 19). “And further along that idea, how are you even identifying what is one and what is the other? Because when you’re trying to identify one, you’re looking for the cliché of what is American and what is Mexican—or what is ballet and what is hip-hop. And I’m trying to do away with that and get to a more truthful essence.”

In Quijada’s own career, the divergent dance styles have fused seamlessly, and improbably, in his own life. The 31-year-old started break dancing on the streets of South Central at the age of eight, eventually earning the nickname “Rubberband” for his elastic moves. By his teens, he was discovering formal theatre and dance at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and, soon after graduation, was invited to join legendary Twyla Tharp’s Twyla! company. While with her in New York, he honed his ballet technique, and in 2000 joined Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal. Two years later, yearning to bring together his far-flung influences, he launched his own troupe, recruiting several performers from both the ballet/contemporary and hip-hop worlds.

“When I first started creating work, I had put a mandate out that it wasn’t going to be about glorious costumes or firework lighting….It was going to be about dancing, about this new vocabulary that I felt was coming uniquely and specifically from the experience I had,” says the contemplative artist.

Speaking of the repertoire in Elastic Perspective, he explains: “They were the first experiments, the first explorations where I was finding these recipes. The pieces were made specifically to show that the B-boys could learn to move in a different way—for example, in one piece, when I’m asking them to be long and graceful and soft and delicate. In the next, the classical and contemporary dancers are doing a downrock where they’re on all fours….I’m going from different extremes in my palette, and dipping them in the palette at the far end of the spectrum.”

Elastic Perspective’s suite of works, he says, now serves as an excellent introduction to the company. Pieces range from Secret Service, a hip-hop spin on Sergei Prokofiev’s balletic Romeo and Juliet score, to The Traviattle, a B-boy-style battle between the sexes set to the music of Giuseppe Verdi. From these early studies, Quijada has moved on to such larger creations as the multimedia duet between him and coartistic director Anne Plamondon, AV Input/Output, which debuted in Montreal last month. But even as his upstart company gets more ambitious, he aims to maintain the essential spirit of his hip-hop roots.

“The main thing for me is I’m engaging the audience—that it’s not watching this as a passive experience. So often you go and sit down and watch dance like it’s on a big TV screen. That goes back to the way I came to understand what dance was: it wasn’t something you came to watch; it was something you were always ready to do….Like you’d walk into a club and you wouldn’t even have time to take off your jacket and you’d be part of the circle, part of the crew.”

On this western tour, Quijada will be able to take Rubberbandance back home to where it all started. In early May, his troupe presents Elastic Perspective in an L.A. theatre for the first time.

That has the artist thinking about how much the world of hip-hop has changed since he left there at 20. Hip-hop, after all, is a young, ever-changing art form. Quijada still tries to get out to the odd battle, and ends every one of his company’s warm-ups with an improvised hip-hop circle set to the now-old-school likes of KRS-One and A Tribe Called Quest. He recognizes he lived the life during a golden age of the art form.

“In ’94 or ’96, when I was a hip-hopper, deep into it, it was a subculture. Now it’s the culture—it’s mass culture. So a lot of the generation of dancers who have learned this have learned it in the studio. There’s been this big effort to legitimize and categorize and make the history as legitimate as possible. But as soon as you start trying to categorize what is what, the tendency is for it to become static, a museum piece. For me, as hip-hop culture evolves, it’s important to stay connected to my experiences in hip-hop.”

Vancouver audiences looking for recognizable B-boy bits in his work are well advised, then, to stop trying to spot the pops and the locks but rather watch the way the dancers present themselves. “So often in the formal dance world we’re at best posing and at worst hiding behind our dancing,” Quijada says, letting loose a little of the rebellious homeboy who still lurks behind the serious artist. “I want to get back to where dancing is you and you lay what you are on the floor.”