To the outside world, Ballet British Columbia has been in a long hibernation, recuperating from financial crisis. The troupe had to cut back its season and hasn’t performed since a November program on the small Scotiabank Dance Centre stage. But today, inside a studio at that same centre, the company looks alive and well, working up a sweat as it tackles the playful couplings of William Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman and even laughing and smiling as it gets tangled up in his challenging moves. The upbeat mood hints the company’s long winter is over, and spring has finally arrived.

Under the encouraging eye of artistic director Emily Molnar, Alexis Fletcher is practising one of the arduous yet playful pairings en pointe: it finds her hanging off partner Leon Feizo-Gas, leaning right back and looking like she could fall right over, until—snap!—he suddenly yanks her back up. It’s an image that makes you think of our regional ballet company’s recent trajectory, bending toward the breaking point under financial duress and then pulling upright again.

Molnar, who’s just been upgraded from interim artistic director to the company’s long-term head (she signed a three-year contract), admits the obvious afterward, on a brief rehearsal break at a nearby café: there’s a lot riding on the troupe’s first show since its self-imposed hiatus. When Re/Naissance debuts next Thursday to Saturday (April 15 to 17) at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the mixed program will feature Herman Schmerman along with local star Crystal Pite’s sculptural, emotion-charged Short works: 24 and Things I told nobody, by Batsheva Dance Company alumnus Itzik Galili. The production symbolizes nothing less than the turnaround of the company and the new direction in which Molnar wants to take it.

“It’s the first program on a big stage that we’ve done, and people are going to be very curious to see us do that. We’ve really had to start from scratch,” says the affable artistic director, displaying a tireless energy that belies the fact she was in Calgary for a big Alberta Ballet premiere of her opera-driven Songs of a Wayfarer just the evening before. “I want to show the dancers in a sophisticated manner in international work. These are all pieces that people have never seen.

“I feel strongly about giving our audience a taste of different choreographers. I see it as more of a testing ground,” she adds, referring to the soon-to-be-announced 2010-11 season, where she’s promised seven world and two national premieres. “It’s more like, ”˜This is what’s out there in the world,’ and what do you like?”

In a phone conversation with the Straight, Ballet B.C.’s executive director, former Toronto Dance Theatre managing director Jay Rankin, couches the approach in more strategic terms. “People are not as loyal as they used to be,” he says, referring to audiences. “They will look for things they want to sample, and I want them to choose Ballet B.C. as a place to be jazzed.”

Here’s the important point: although Molnar is an accomplished choreographer—her résumé includes New York Cedar Lake Ballet, Ballet Mannheim, and Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses—she doesn’t see Ballet B.C. as a vehicle for her own creations (although, of course, she will set pieces on it here and there). This is a marked departure from the 17-year reign of former artistic director John Alleyne, who brought in work by others but in his later years devoted himself to creating large-scale story ballets for the company. Molnar has spent a lot of time in Europe, in her influential Frankfurt Ballet years but also at Mannheim and Ballet Augsburg, and she looks to that model for inspiration: one where a company brings in and commissions new work by a wide range of names. And if her carefully chosen Re/Naissance program is any indication, she has the international connections to pull the vision off: Forsythe is a mentor from her days at the Frankfurt, and her relationship to Ballet B.C. alumna Pite helped get the rights, for the first time, for Short works: 24 to be performed outside of Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal.

“I’d love for Ballet B.C. to be a hotbed or hub where choreographers know they can come in and have a group of dancers that knows what it’s about,” she says, referring to the creative process. “We’ve got a group who knows how to improvise but who have classical training—and it’s not always that way! You might have a group that can improvise but they don’t have ballet training; a lot of contemporary companies are like that.”

Looking ahead, she sees that classical training as one of Ballet B.C.’s greatest assets. Audiences around the world are craving dance that shows off virtuosic technique in contemporary ways, she says. In fact, she sees that meld as the future of ballet. “That’s where ballet is going—the top choreographers are using that vernacular.”

Even more telling than her desire to look outward as an artistic director is the role Molnar is taking on the day the Straight visits the studio. She is actively coaching the dancers on Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman—a piece she performed herself for the National Ballet of Canada. With downsizing, she also serves as one of the company’s two rehearsal directors (the other is Sylvain Senez), and she says she loves the hands-on work with the dancers. At one point Connor Gnam and Makaila Wallace laugh as she demonstrates how he should ravenously grip her open thigh. (“Enjoy it!” Molnar encourages.)

They’re smiling, but clearly, everyone at Ballet B.C. is working hard—and this is neither the end, nor the beginning, of their struggles. The company may have been on an extended leave from the spotlight, but behind closed doors, it has been very busy. “Have we been working hard? Like, 24 hours, seven days a week,” says Molnar with a smile that allows the first tiny hint of fatigue. “Jay and I are working on a really lean machine.”

Both Rankin and Molnar are careful to stress that the troupe’s return to the Queen E stage will not mark the completion of Ballet B.C.’s turnaround, nor will it be an accurate measure of what it might look like in five or 10 years. But one thing is certain: it will allow curious audience members to take the pulse of a new Ballet B.C., and to judge for themselves whether it’s alive and well again.