A Ballet B.C. and Arts Umbrella presentation. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Saturday, November 14. No remaining performances

Ballet British Columbia could not have signalled it’s shaking things up more loudly and clearly. The final number in Surfacing, a new choreographic series, found the corps thrashing around the stage to crunching, hardcore-metal guitars.

The beleaguered organization clearly has to reinvent itself, but tossing away the pink slippers and gauzy getups for tank tops and jeans in choreographer Rob Kitsos’s audacious explosion of head-banging chaos? The angular, athletic movement was about as far from the flowing grace of contemporary ballet as you could get. The troupe’s more traditional fans may have wondered what had just hit them. To some, it might have even been something akin to sacrilege. But I say, “Bring it on.”

This is not to suggest our regional ballet company should now find its salvation in the sounds of Slipknot and Sepultura. But whatever it was doing before was not working anymore. This time last year, it looked like the financially strapped troupe was taking its last gasps. Interim artistic director Emily Molnar is on the right track with her new series: take the ballet corps, blend it with upstart dancers from Arts Umbrella, throw them into the hands of four fresh choreographers, then toss them into an intimate setting like the Scotiabank Dance Centre. She managed to pack the place and stir things up.

In the first two works—both en pointe—there was a wobble, a near-collision, and slight synchronization lapses. But those flaws were not as important as they might have been in a fully realized production on the Queen Elizabeth Theatre stage. Before the show, Molnar, whose ties to both the contemporary-dance scene here and Arts Umbrella run deep, explained that she’d given the choreographers just two weeks to make these 15-to-20-minute pieces. They were about experimentation—the adrenaline of a creative hothouse.

Surprisingly, Joe Laughlin’s On Wings was the most “traditional”, with dancers twirling on their toes in skintight black, zippered body suits. He played subtly with classical partnering, undercutting it with contemporary attitude, both in gesture and ideas about the fleeting torments of love. Makaila Wallace, who’s always striking, cut an even larger swath in a small space.

With Doppeling, Ballet B.C. veteran dancer and new “artist in residence” Simone Orlando got more subversive with the art form. Moving to the baroque sounds of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, the performers all sported skin-tone leotards and matching bobbed wigs of different hues—even the men. Cleverly mixed into the contrapuntal play and classical pointe-shoe vocabulary were touches of voguing and club dancing. A gender-bending vision of doppelgí¤nger ballerinas breaking loose, it was more fun than a drag queen’s dress-up trunk.

But the highlight of the program was former company dancer Donald Sales’s effervescent Long Story Short. Set to Amélie composer Yann Tiersen’s sweeping accordions, xylophones, strings, and keyboards, it was cinematic and rife with the nostalgia and romance of ’50s Paris. Sales conjured a dream world of swirling skirts and laughing girls, mixing balletic dance and quirky gesture. A boy might stop to haul on a handheld ventilator; guys would give their sweethearts necklaces. Moving as lightly as a petal in the wind, Maggie Forgeron hit just the right notes of naiveté and hidden melancholy.

Next to Long Story Short, Kitsos’s shocking Regression Line could have come off as crass overstatement. But fed by the aggro guitars of hardcore fusionists Dub Trio, the troupe nailed the complexly chaotic patterning, axed the air with their legs and arms, and committed to the piece’s tortured passions.

In all, Surfacing lived up to its name and gave Ballet B.C. new life. With 32 dancers in all hitting the stage, it took big risks, but—and this is the key—in a low-stakes environment. The performers connected with the audience in ways they might never be able to at the formal Q.E. (where we won’t see them again until April). Under former artistic director John Alleyne, the company members always had a polished, coolly elegant sophistication. These pieces were all about letting their hair down—or at least tucking it under an Anna Wintour–worthy pageboy.