Some marriages are made in heaven, and others are born in a back room at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. Such is the case with We Were Here, which the Cultch will present at the Firehall Arts Centre from Tuesday to next Saturday (April 7 to 11). The union of spoken-word artist Shane Koyczan and composer Jordan Nobles was hatched in the fertile brain of the heritage venue’s executive director, Heather Redfern, and only then presented to its principals—who, it seems, were not entirely enthusiastic about it, at first.

“I didn’t know anything about Jordan, and he didn’t know anything about me,” admits the Penticton-based Koyczan, reached on his cellphone during a visit to Vancouver. “I mean, I’d heard some of what Jordan had done in the past, and I was like, ”˜Wow, this is really busy, and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to read on top of it because there’s so much happening.’ ”

Nobles was suffering similar anxieties. “At first I was like, ”˜What the heck am I going to do?’ And the stress and the worry continued for a long time,” he says, in a separate telephone interview. “It was actually a little nerve-wracking, but it’s finally come together, and I’m really pleased.”

So is Koyczan, who now calls his project partner’s music “staggeringly beautiful”. And that these two very dissimilar artists were able to find common ground is also a tribute to We Were Here’s theme. The work, it seems, is all about connection.

“It’s such an awkward time,” says Koyczan, who adds that one of his chief sources of creative inspiration is talking to complete strangers. “Even riding the SkyTrain yesterday, everybody just kind of sits there and does nothing and nobody says anything to one another. We’re so unwilling to engage with a stranger about anything at all.”

And yet, he contends, the way out of the current gloom is to reach out and tell someone something real—as he’ll do in We Were Here’s poignantly autobiographical narratives. “It’ll be funny and dark, but basically I want people to leave with a sense of, like, ”˜Okay, I can engage with a stranger and it will be okay,’ ” he says. “And even if that experience fails, it shouldn’t close us off from making that effort in the future.”

The creative process behind the new piece offers proof that Koyczan’s philosophy works—at least according to Nobles, who says that by engaging with an unfamiliar artist and art form, his own imagination has grown.

“I write things in an academic way, as if someone was going to write a paper on it,” he explains. “But for this I had to write something that was immediately accessible underneath the poem, and that follows the same sort of dynamic or theme as the poem. And you can’t do that in retrograde counterpoint; you have to write something that you feel. It took me months to learn to do that—and once I’d done it, I was like, ”˜Hey, this is great! There’s a whole other element here in my compositions, a whole other path I can draw from.’ ”

If Nobles sounds liberated by his new collaboration, that might be just what Koyczan had in mind. “This is really about human potential,” says the poet. “It’s about the potential to get new friends, to meet new people, to have new experiences, to try something you’ve never tried before—to live. Most of us go about our lives feeling justified in our ”˜what if’ excuses, but we have so much potential to just live.”