A Ballet B.C. production. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Thursday, February 17. Continues until February 19

Forget hockey players; there is no harder-working team in Vancouver right now than Ballet British Columbia.

In the exhilarating, cutting-edge new program Volo, dancers have to move at the speed of static, pull off virtuosic leaps and arabesques, and switch moods as quickly as they jump from pointe shoes to bare feet.

The lineup is so fresh and so full of surprises that it’s almost impossible to believe this is the same troupe that, only a couple years ago, was mounting story ballets and safe crowd-pleasers like Company B and Sinatra Songs.

For this reason, you can’t really say the company’s “back”; what it’s doing—with a lot of help from the Netherlands (more on that later)—is boldly pushing its way into new territory.

The work is so virtuosic, so pummelling and whimsical, that it holds big appeal to audiences. Even neophytes can instantly “get” the intense physical challenges and clever moments in this stuff. This is the second mixed program of Ballet B.C.’s season to meet with a standing O—cue the whooping. Now if only more people would come check it out”¦

It’s difficult to know where to start with a program this packed and this varied, bookended by two full-scale works that cover the stage with more than a dozen twisting, leaping figures.

For pure choreographic wow, ultra-hot Finn Jorma Elo’s 1st Flash is the virtuosic mind-blower, but Medhi Walerski’s unpredictable, dreamlike Petite Cérémonie is the talk of the night. Both talents honed their skills at Netherlands Dance Theatre (although Elo is now with the Boston Ballet).

1st Flash begins with dancers moving in meaningful silence. From there, the yearning strings of Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D Minor Op. 47 start up, and the piece whirls at a fast clip, with barefoot dancers entering and exiting, coupling in strife and sensuality. You can feel Elo sculpting and resculpting their forms, whether it’s Dario Dinuzzi holding Makaila Wallace, her limbs languorously outstretched, and spinning; or rows of dancers wiggling their arms and fluttering their fingers in some weird sign language gone awry. By the time it ends in silence again, and a flash of blinding light, you can hear the dancers panting: the piece is a physical feat, athletic but mesmerizing.

Walerski’s Petite Cérémonie sets its off-kilter tone perfectly with its opening: as audience members flood back into the theatre from intermission, they see the stage opened up right to its flies, with exposed wires, concrete, and light racks, and Gilbert Small shuffling at the centre of this abyss. The dancers—with the men in black suits and the women in late-’50s-style black dresses—stream in from the aisles as the lights go down and join him in his methodical little kicks. Screens lower to “box” the dancers in and the piece spirals into a funny exploration of conformity and chaos. Rows of little white cubes line both sides of the stage, and the dancers sometimes slide or sit on them. It’s an inspired bit of madness, with a soundtrack that spans everything from big-band swing to Antonio Vivaldi to metallic clanging.

The vocabulary flits between balletic and ballroom to spastic flailing and earthbound lunging. Delphine Leroux throws Leon Feizo-Gas down on the floor, pushing her hands onto his chest till he blurts out “Agggh”, or she executes a perfect chassé and then breaks down like a busted doll. In one of the more bizarre sequences, Dinuzzi (a former busker) appears juggling, speaking into a suspended microphone. In another, the entire troupe lines up sitting with legs straight out, shifting from butt cheek to butt cheek, staring us down in deadpan.

The strange highlight is Donald Sales and Small coupling in a square of light at centre stage to metronomic clanging, pushing at each other, bending over one another—even popping and locking. It’s odd, sensual, aggressive—a delirious mix of everything, like the piece itself.

The multitalented Walerski is also an explosive, expressive dancer, flicking and flailing his arms in a special appearance for an excerpt from Jí­rí­ Kylián’s Toss of a Dice. Walerski performs the Netherlands Dance Theatre piece with Lesley Telford, a former member of that company. Set to discombobulating clicking and dripping, as well as French poetry, the pas de deux is a study in slow, steamy turns punctuated by eruptions of movement.

Elsewhere on the program, Canadian choreographer Shawn Hounsell’s sweet is a busy chain reaction en pointe, where dancers run on and off the stage in mad flurries of twos, threes, and fours. If all this sounds mathematical, it isn’t. There’s a studied irrationality and haphazardness to the flow here. The movement is dazzling, if a bit unrelenting: women whipsaw their legs around during lifts, hands and feet flex at odd angles, and arms scoop, carve, and arc through space.

There’s a lot going on on-stage—perhaps too much—but the overall look is lushly captivating: dancers in pinks and raspberries scatter in perpetual motion in front of video projections of amorphous forms in the same hues, all set against gorgeous, angular strings and piano composed by Njo Kong Kie.

The bottom line is that you can feel it when a company really commits, and has the chops to take on pieces this demanding. In each of these works, Ballet B.C. throws itself into the deep end without hesitation—and apparently takes the audience willingly along with it.