A film by Henry Joost and Jody Lee Lipes. Unrated. Plays Monday to Friday, December 20 to 24, and Tuesday, December 28, at the Vancity Theatre

Dance is notorious as the most fleeting of art forms, a field where pieces often disappear as fast as they appear, with only the rare major work being passed down from generation to generation.

That’s why dance fans will find NY Export: Opus Jazz so enticing: it’s the chance to see a piece from 1958, acclaimed choreographer Jerome Robbins’s abstract riff on his West Side Story, made fresh, urban, and even hip again.

Looking like American Apparel models in their Ts and sneakers, the members of the New York City Ballet travel by cab, train, and bus, converging at Brooklyn’s abandoned McCarren Park Pool for the opening number. From there, the corps performs NY Export’s swinging, finger-snapping vignettes in the empty warehouses, school gyms, and derelict railroad tracks of the city it’s named for, all impeccably lensed by Jody Lee Lipes.

Set to Robert Prince’s groovy, abstract-jazz score—which today sounds almost like a David Lynch soundtrack, with its blasting saxes and swishy drums—the piece is a clever play on social dancing. But the dancers give it a new feel of laid-back cool, wearing their “ballet in sneakers” (as the work is best known) as comfortably as a pair of old Keds. The effect is that Robbins’s old-school ode to teen energy somehow expresses the youthfulness of today as well as it did in an entirely different generation. With its cool-cat snapping, dancerly turns, and elaborate patterning, it almost reads like a timeless set of surreal signals between young men and women.

Helpfully, the film has postscript interviews with its makers, plus archival footage of Robbins himself and the piece’s blockbuster tour of Europe in the late 1950s. But even without that context, the dance film could stand on its own. Far from being some ode to outdated jazz—a form that has waned in recent years—it’s still cool, daddy-o.