At the Legion on the Drive on Wednesday, June 16

Ballet B.C. has spent the past season reinventing itself, but it has been saving its most dramatic make-over for last. The troupe—which normally performs on the expansive, tony stage of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre—is at Dances for a Small Stage this week, in the intimately lounge-y digs of the Legion on Commercial Drive.

The short works, by an impressive array of local and international choreographers, are a big departure too. They’re a world away from the sleek, sculpturally abstract ballet the company is known for. At one point, the dancers whoop each other on in a balletic B-boy–style battle. In another, three strangers pelvic-thrust to the cheesy Muzak in a pretend elevator. And then there’s the baroque babe in the powdered wig kicking up her hoop skirt to the sounds of the Violent Femmes. You have to see it to believe it—and I highly recommend you do. Who knows when you might get to watch the members of the troupe so fearlessly rip the bobby pins out of their buns and let their hair down, up close and personal, like this again?

As Ballet B.C. artistic director Emily Molnar told the audience before the opening show, the pieces the company chose to present were the sort of works they could never do on the QE stage. They allowed the troupe to “get rough and dirty and then hopefully bring a little bit of that to the Queen Elizabeth stage”.

One of the highlights of the night is Montreal choreographer Gioconda Barbuto’s Clique, a wildly energized piece of perpetual motion that finds the dancers in a breaker-style circle, taking turns showing off and partnering to the sounds of sampled music and electro beats. It’s a blur of flicking hands, scissoring legs, and windmilling arms; Makaila Wallace pulls Donald Sales up into a playful arabesque, while Gilbert Small lifts a leg straight up to his face then strikes a freeze.

But it’s New York–based choreographer Cherice Barton’s Temptation that seems custom-made for the venue’s old-style cocktail atmosphere. Set to Tom Waits’s booze-soaked “Temptation”, “The Piano Has Been Drinking”, and “Jockey Full of Bourbon”, it finds the troupe decked out in speakeasy-vintage fedoras, satin dresses, and garters, twisting and strutting in vignettes that cover the stage, with Léon Feizo Gas lurching around to the drunken opening number. It’s seedy and smoky, with Marianne Grobbelaar’s red-dressed vixen at one point laughing maniacally until she collapses in a crying jag. It could easily fill a much bigger stage, but it’s so much more fun watching it in the faded Legion hall.

Interspersed are works that cover almost every mood—and demonstrate the stunning versatility of the dancers. Farley Johansson’s pocket full of hoyle (named for the 18th-century card-game rule-maker) is a clever duet for Alexis Fletcher and Gilbert Small that finds them flicking an endless stream of playing cards out of their pockets, whirling them artfully around the stage. It’s sharp and contemporary, set to the indie sounds of Circlesquare and oozing rock ’n’ roll attitude. Lauri Stallings creates a strangely compelling and disturbing quartet in Zak, with convulsive, chest-heaving movement that makes it seem like the dancers are near death, while Maggie Forgeron swirls in a white gown like she’s silk caught in the wind in Moon on White Crow, by legend Margie Gillis.

And then there are the sillier pieces—Connor Gnam cavorting and preening in ridiculously tight stretchies as he woos Makaila Wallace in Donald Sales’s Oops Sorry LOL Sh^t, or Sales provocatively pulling out his pockets and fondling them in Edmond Kilpatrick’s goofy Love in an Elevator.

It’s in these outrageous sketches that the troupe perhaps takes its biggest risks—goofing off, acting horny, gyrating like mad fools, and bringing the house down. But then again, maybe Ballet B.C.’s finest subscribe to the notion that what happens on the East Side stays on the East Side.