To understand why Aszure Barton is one of the darlings of the dance world right now, you have to realize what a free spirit she is and how wide-open she makes herself to new experiences. Take a recent night in the Canadian-born Barton’s adopted hometown of New York City: she’d been hanging out with a group of circus-clown artists, and one of them phoned her up with a mysterious invitation.

“Last Friday, he said, ”˜Just show up at the Windmill Factory [an art space] at 9 p.m.,’ ” relates Barton, speaking from NYC while movers empty her apartment. “So I show up and there’s a harness. I’ve never flown before, and I get to try flying in it. I had been telling them how I was so intrigued by flight. That’s what I love about it here: people have no fear here to try things.”

That same fearlessness and unpredictability has helped Barton make a name for herself. She’s created pieces for companies like Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance, the Sydney Dance Company, the National Ballet of Canada, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. What sets her work apart is its boundary-bashing, passion, and complexity, not to mention a taste for the bizarre that has won comparisons to David Lynch movies and Alice in Wonderland. We’ll get to sample her style firsthand when she brings her own troupe, Aszure Barton & Artists, to the Chutzpah! Festival’s Norman Rothstein Theatre on Tuesday and Wednesday (March 16 and 17). There, she’ll present Blue Soup, a mosaic of past creations set to music from around the world, and then Busk—what she calls a “deeply personal” work that has explosive movement and plays with a wild array of street performance against a soundtrack of Gypsy-tinged strings by Russian violist Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin.

So what has allowed the celebrated young artist, who hails from Edmonton and studied as a teen at the National Ballet School, to absorb so many influences and distill them into choreography that manages to be both quirky and profound?

“I see myself—and hopefully I am true to it—as completely following my heart from moment to moment,” Barton says, reflecting on how, from a young age she used to create dance works with her two sisters. “It’s not just about the dance steps and body. Since the get-go, my work was an expression of who I was, and the way influences, the way anything, filters into that,” she explains with characteristic enthusiasm. “It goes back to my parents, too. They’re very different: my mom was quite strict but always super-encouraging, and her morals definitely affected me. My dad is a completely free spirit—he comes from more of a hippie background and is very connected with the Earth. So I’ve learned from both sides. And my sisters—they’re also people who on a whim will try anything,” she adds of her siblings, Cherice and Charissa, who are both dance artists.

Following her own whims is one of Barton’s defining skills, but she stresses that her choreography is also about collaborating with her dancers on a personal level. That’s why seeing her with her own company, a group she knows intimately—she calls it a family—is so special. “If you’re creating a really positive atmosphere and people can bring themselves to that, you’ll see the effect of this family and the magic it can create,” she says. “I am a highly sensitive person. I realize how simple yet complicated we are. I try to create an atmosphere where people can bring their ”˜stuff’ to the work. So there is a lot of emotion in it.”

With that, she must get back to moving out of her apartment. She’s about to embark on an extended tour of Europe, Canada, and the U.S., and for the first time, she won’t have a home—literally, anyway—to come back to. But it comes as little surprise to find she has no problem with being a bit of a nomad for a while: “I’m always going to keep a foot here because I love it so much. But it’s really freeing.”