When it comes to performing outside, the magic moments usually make up for the drawbacks. Dancer and choreographer Sylvie Bouchard should know: for the past 14 years, she’s overseen Dusk Dances, an Ontario-based program that brings the art form to parks in the summer—and which has been a popular fixture at our own Dancing on the Edge festival over the years.

“We had a dog run onto the site while someone was dancing, and there are always kids wandering into the performing area in places that are sometimes difficult and actually sometimes quite funny,” says Bouchard, speaking from her company CORPUS’s offices in Toronto before bringing Dusk Dances back to Stanley Park from July 9 to 12 at 7 p.m. “But we’ve had some beautiful rainbows appear, and that’s a backdrop you could never buy with money. And then there have been times where you get this beautiful light, light rain.”

Still, there are other, more important advantages to site-specific dance, a form that Dancing on the Edge festival producer Donna Spencer has seen grow over the 20-year history of the event. This year, when the fest runs July 3 to 12, Edge will see its biggest array of outdoor pieces yet. Aside from Dusk Dances, veteran local troupe Kokoro Dance will perform Ghosts, a resurrection of the spirits of Powell Street’s past, including its once-vibrant Japantown, at the Sunrise market (July 3 to 5 at 7 p.m.). Karen Jamieson Dance’s Stand Your Ground—Act II takes audiences on a journey from the Firehall Arts Centre courtyard through the streets of the Downtown Eastside, in the culmination of a multiyear project that uses dancers from the community (July 8 to 12 at 5 p.m.). And for Cumulus, Vancouver’s gravity-defying Aeriosa will dance on ropes along the walls of the B.C. Hydro building at sunset (July 11 at 5:30 and 8 p.m. and July 12 at 6:30 and 8 p.m.).

“More and more people are creating works for nontraditional venues, and it just also happens to be an exciting way to take dance out to communities that don’t traditionally go to dance,” Spencer says.

Bouchard says the same idea was the motivation behind Dusk Dances in the first place.

“I really believe in trying to reach an audience that might not come to a theatre, and to entice people and educate them about how many styles of dance we have and how many artists we have in Canada. It’s basically to make dance a little more of a part of people’s everyday lives,” she says.

On the program for Dusk Dance’s return to the Edge, five out of the six pieces are by companies who hail from Ontario, with one artist—Sara Coffin—from the local community. The event will take place this time at Lumberman’s Arch.

Bouchard’s own company presents two works. One, called La gigue en souvenirs, is a riff on the French version of the jig. The other is the whimsical, comical Les moutons (“The Sheep”), for which she and cocreator David Danzon tirelessly studied the creatures’ movements and habits.

“We were travelling in Europe and there were a lot of sheep farms, so we kept stopping to look at them,” she explains. “It’s interactive, so people can come and feed us, and the kids love that. We don’t wink and it’s not ha-ha, though: it’s a real research of the real animal—how they sit and walk and get sheared.”

Elsewhere on the program, Zata Omm Dance Projects’ Tenterhooks takes a threesome on a camping trip set to soundtracks from Alfred Hitchcock movies. In Automaton Theatre, soloist Kate Franklin plays both a mechanical creature and its creator. And Nova Bhattacharya and Louis Laberge-Côté’s cross-cultural Romeo and Juliet before parting… is billed as an anti-duet. Bouchard explains: “Louis comes from a contemporary background, and Nova does classical Indian bharata natyam, and they’ve been working together to bridge their two styles.” As for Coffin, the emerging innovator sets Shirts and Skirts’ improvisation within a reality-TV-like survival game.

Just how these works will be transformed by the Stanley Park setting is anyone’s guess. Rainbows aren’t guaranteed, but you can definitely expect a surprise or two.