Long before hip-hop battles—as in millennia before—there was Ukrainian dance, an adrenaline-fuelled, acrobatic form with backward flips, kicking spins, and a sense of one-upmanship to rival any breaker circle.

Productions of the art form, an explosion of colourful embroidered costumes that’s as emblematic of Ukraine as elaborate Easter eggs, don’t make it to Vancouver very often. And the city has definitely never seen the likes of the 50-dancer Virsky troupe before.

No one in the troupe speaks English, and they’re so busy on the road that the Straight had to turn to a fan familiar with Ukrainian dance for the lowdown on the Kiev-based ensemble, which hits the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on Thursday night (October 7).

“We all look up to Virsky because they are the top in the world. There is no one better. They’ve travelled all over the world and to see them is like seeing Riverdance,” raves Ken Kaskmar, a Canadian-Ukrainian who’s performed the dance of his heritage for 30 years, has studied with Virsky artistic director Myroslav Vantukh, and has seen the troupe many times. He’s speaking to the Straight from his home in Edmonton, sharing a speakerphone with Bogdan Tkachishyn, who comes from Ukraine and has also trained with Vantukh. “Who knows when they’ll be back? This might be a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

In Edmonton, where Kaskmar and Tkachishyn both run troupes, there’s a sizable Ukrainian population that’s eager to keep in touch with its national roots. Virsky is a national folk-dance troupe that has become a legend in its home country, persevering since its original founder, Pavlo Virsky, founded it in 1937. But both men insist its appeal goes far beyond ethnic pride.

For Kaskmar, it’s all about the extremely honed technique that makes Virsky a rival to any world-class ballet company—albeit with red boots instead of pink slippers.

“Near the beginning, there’s this one man that comes out and he does his first leap and your mouth just drops—the height he gets!” he says. “The strength of Virsky is that technical precision, because you’re looking not at 50 dancers but one dancer. You see more than the colour and the costumes.”

As Tkachishyn points out: “They are touring Japan every year and there’s no Ukrainians there! This is world-culture dance.”

Part of Virsky’s appeal is that, although it journeys through the age-old folk dances of different Ukrainian regions, it also employs more modern choreographic and physical techniques. “Some people would like to present the dance just like it was 40 or 50 years ago,” Tkachishyn says. “I think they’re [Virsky is] on the right route—trying to preserve what has been created before, but on a much, much higher technical and professional level.”

In the end, Virsky’s dance may have contemporary appeal, but there’s also something atavistically thrilling about all the gaiety it brings to the stage—all those smiling, beautiful maidens and virile men in red sashes and billowy pants. And there’s also that underlying sense of challenge. So you think you can dance? Check out the split jump called the roznizhka, in which the dancer touches both his feet. Or let’s see you do a pidsichka, where the performer squatting and circling his legs, not entirely unlike a breaker.

“In the show there is a men’s competition,” recalls Tkachishyn of the Virsky production. “They are continually doing the dance squatted down, and if they stand up they’ll be out of the competition and have to leave.” Now that’s what I call a battle.