A Co.ERASGA production in partnership with the W2 Community Media Arts Society. At W2 Storyeum on Thursday, October 21. Continues October 22, 23, and 27 to 30

For a project that integrates so many artists and ideas, Shadow Machine is a buzzing, well-oiled little contraption.

Co.ERASGA’s ode to Vancouver’s industrial history whirs along at a fast clip, blending imaginative choreography and artful imagery into a fully realized multimedia production. Choreographer and dancer Alvin Erasga Tolentino is revisiting his collaborative work with media artists Peter Courtemanche, Ken Gregory, and Carol Sawyer 10 years after the first mounting, and Shadow Machine feels well honed and cleverly retooled.

The earlier edition of the piece debuted at the atmospheric Ironworks Studios, but it is just as well suited to the gaping, cement-floored warehouse space of W2 Storyeum, where metal ducts and pipes snake exposed across the ceiling. Media artists stand at tool benches, working computers and, in Sawyer’s case, rattling toolboxes and vocalizing with eerie intonations and frenzied breath. Five dancers move in front of archival footage of sawmills, steam engines, factories, and shipyards, layered with machine-part blueprints and all projected onto a big back wall and two hanging white curtains.

In the first section, the dancers wear the standard factory uniforms of the past: button-up work shirts and belted chinos. They move like the cogs and wheels of industrial machinery to the cacophonic roar of a production line. Dancers scurry mechanically in and out of huddles, spin like drills, and swing their arms like levers. It’s absolutely hypnotic and too kinetic to read as mime. Later, Tolentino makes a fluid ballet out of the dancers gathering and throwing ropes to the sounds of the port. The performers—Tolentino, along with Billy Marchenski, Molly McDermott, Jane Osborne, and Bevin Poole—are like automatons, but bits of human emotion break through: they might stop to look longingly out to “sea”, or suddenly halt their machinery to curiously inspect their hand.

For the second half of the show, we switch from lumberyards to the world of social dance, with projections of couples from the early part of the last century waltzing across the wall. In a clever bit of choreography, the performers start to mimic the people on film, and as they dance solo (with “ghost” partners) they resemble the spinning, moving machinery parts of the earlier section of the show. Later, they hoist old shovels as their partners, lifting, twirling them, then stopping to scrape their metal blades earsplittingly along the cement floor.

In the work’s stunning finale, those shovels get put to more imaginative use, but I won’t give it away here. Suffice it to say you’ll see portraits of the workers of Vancouver’s early days projected onto a substance that disappears like sand in an hourglass.

In all, Shadow Machine is one of Tolentino’s most focused and well edited works to date. And have no fear: there are still some welcome moments of warped, Co.ERASGA–style eccentricity. At one point, the dancers leave the floor and one of the media artists’ tool benches rolls out on its own power and circles the stage in a bizarre dance of its own, hardware lights flashing and a small Skilsaw blade rotating.

Shadow Machine is one of those little gems worth seeking out on a rainy Vancouver night. And the best possible preparation is walking to the show through the history-drenched, cobblestone streets of Gastown, where it all began. Call this show a labour of love.