A Kokoro Dance production, as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival. At the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre on Tuesday, March 24. Continues until March 28

Kokoro Dance’s new multimedia spin on the Frankenstein story makes a stunning first impression: a Mary Shelley nightmare recast as an abstract-art installation.

In front of the brightly lit, white screen that production designer Peter Eastwood has stretched across the back of the stage hangs a gigantic, bright-red fabric sculpture by artist Judy Nakagawa. It’s intricately textured to look like ribbons of blood or perhaps a heart that’s been torn to shreds. In front of it sit three red and three white chairs. As the nine performers appear on-stage, caked in white makeup and wearing gauzy white sheaths that are part hospital gown, part gothic-novel costume, they become like moving sculptures in a stark painting. The musicians—cellist Peggy Lee, electric guitarist Tony Wilson, and trumpeter JP Carter—sit on one set of chairs, the actors on another, and the dancers—Deanna Peters, Barbara Bourget, and Jay Hirabayashi—twist and convulse in the space around them.

As if that weren’t enough to take in—the dark spoken poetry, the haunting electroacoustic music, the butoh-inflected writhing—three perfectly placed flat screens fire up and turn into a moving triptych of imagery. Paul Jason’s video and computer graphics are an arresting art installation all their own, echoing the themes on-stage: bloodied military bodies lying on operating tables, animated hearts beating in rib cages, fire, wars, and blinking eyes.

The multisensory effect is mesmerizing. Three characters emerge: the Creature (the being we know as Frankenstein), a Doctor, and a Cyborg—a person who has been destroyed and re-created through science. Each finds their alter ego in the dancers. Gardinar Millar is wonderfully creepy as the iconic Frankenstein monster, speaking of fires and pain, and letting out ungodly howls, while Hirabayashi, who has similar scars painted up around his body and face, plays out his agony in a slow, gnarled gait.

Elizabeth Dancoes’s Cyborg is a clear reference to Iraqi soldiers who come home missing limbs or trapped in comas. When she describes the doctors trying to reinsert her viscera, we see Peters and Hirabayashi poking their fingers at Bourget’s frozen figure. Kokoro’s roots in butoh, which is known for its eerie, grotesque forms, make it a natural for channelling the living dead. As for Dancoes, she paints some vivid imagery with words (“fingers crackling with the power of invention”; “I’m broken”¦snapped like a dry stick”) but the delivery sometimes becomes overly melodramatic. The central refrain—that we are making modern-day Frankensteins out of our soldiers—also begins to sound repetitive and circular.

None of this makes F?’s surreal tableau of battered bodies and howling half-men amid a stark sea of red and white any less fascinating to watch. Maybe it’s just a case of those first impressions setting unrealistically high expectations.