Almost exactly 20 years ago, Wen Wei Wang came to Canada to find artistic freedom. The affable Vancouver choreographer had grown up amid the hardship of China’s Cultural Revolution, immersed in the rigours of regional dance companies and the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Art in Beijing. He wanted to experience the West, and when he got a taste of contemporary dance here during a summer intensive at SFU, he decided he had to stay.

In the ensuing years, he has found his freedom and more in Vancouver. He started by performing for Judith Marcuse and Ballet B.C., and has since gone on to create passionate, innovative works that draw on Chinese classical technique and history but also push boldly into new realms of contemporary movement. His own company, Wen Wei Dance, is now seven years old, and its striking pieces have found his performers strutting and coupling in the fetishistic lotus shoes of foot-binding (2006’s Unbound) or sporting the quivering phallic pheasant feathers of Chinese opera (2009’s Cock-Pit).

Now, to create his ambitious new Under the Skin, Wang has finally taken all that he’s learned here back to his home country. He’s created the work in a truly cross-cultural project with the Beijing Modern Dance Company that took his performers to China and brings the Chinese performers here.

“I think everybody right now wants to know what’s happening in China; it’s the most powerful country right now,” begins the wiry, animated artist, taking a rare break from rehearsal in the Scotiabank Dance Centre lounge. “It’s always in my mind since I came here—that I want to go back there to make a work—because it’s still my country, even though I left almost 20 years ago.

“But I felt, when I went about this creation, that I wanted to have not a western modern dance, but Chinese modern dance. Because China today is a modern culture. I wanted to go back there to work, and not just take back what I had learned, but also showcase to the world that the Chinese are human beings like the rest of us. Under the skin we have the same emotion, the same desire; our needs, our life, and our love are the same.”

The company he decided to work with tours internationally. “When they think about China, a lot of people think about tradition and our acrobats, but nobody knows China has contemporary companies,” Wang comments.

After a meeting in early 2009, he decided the only way to achieve his goal of cocreating a piece was for him to travel to Beijing and work with the Beijing troupe’s six dancers, and then for its choreographer, Gao Yanjinzi, to set a piece on his six dancers; then, in 2010, they would all come together in Banff to work on the two-part, 12-dancer evening as a whole.

On his first visit to Beijing to start the process with the Chinese dancers, Wang was struck by two things. On one hand, he said, they were much more attuned to the outside world than he had been as a young man living there. “They were young, they grew up in the ’80s, and they know what’s going on in America. Some speak English, too,” he says.

But he was also struck by how different their approach was from the more collaborative world of contemporary dance here.

“I couldn’t read them; they’re like students waiting for you to teach them,” he says of his initial challenges. “I wanted them to teach me who they are”¦.But by the end of the week their bodies were released and relaxed; they were able to be who they are, to speak their own voice.”

The resulting piece that Wang has choreographed for half of the evening, called In Transition and set to a new score by Giorgio Magnanensi, finds him spotlighting the identities of those dancers. The multimedia work has video projections of their faces. The piece also has a frantic, almost suffocating pace, which reflects Wang’s own culture shock at living back in the harried capital.

“Here we have a lot of space,” he says, gesturing out the dance centre’s floor-to-ceiling window. “Going to Beijing, there are so many people; it’s a huge country and you feel like you lose yourself. All these people are walking by you, and I felt jammed, like I had no space for myself, like I couldn’t breathe,” he says, grasping at his lungs.

It's later in the afternoon, and a dance-centre studio is full of overlapping English and Chinese as a rehearsal is about to begin for Gao’s half of the evening, called Journey to the East.

Suddenly everyone quiets down, as Gao and Wang watch intently from the side, and bodies begin roiling and rolling to the hypnotic sounds of waves. At one point, Tiffany Tregarthen twists and flails like she’s being tossed in surf. About the only overt hint the piece might have its roots in China is its traces of martial arts—Josh Martin whipsaws his stick-straight arms at one point.

To create this piece, the performers had to travel to Beijing for four weeks—not an everyday experience for members of this city’s independent arts scene. They crossed the ocean, and then found themselves submersed in a new culture—both themes that Gao has tapped for imagery in this piece.

“She wanted us to express how China felt to us,” dancer Scott Augustine says before the rehearsal starts. He describes the two halves of the evening this way: “Wei’s is more frantic and Gao’s is the calm side—but definitely the common thread is the personal experience of travelling to China.”

Augustine and his colleagues, who started the trip to Beijing with performances of Unbound, say coping in such a big, busy city was just part of the culture shock. There was a language barrier inside the studio as well as outside.

Throughout the rehearsal process in China, Wang found himself not just translating Gao’s words into English for his dancers, but jumping in to show them the kind of movement she was referring to.

“The beautiful thing was he’s from China, so he knows where she’s coming from. Basically, we were having a lot getting lost in translation at first,” Augustine relates. “The way she and her dancers move is very quick—when she dances it’s very quick and electric and powerful. For us it was about trying to pick up some of that emotion.”

Clearly, the process was a huge undertaking for Wang, juggling the multiple roles of translator, choreographer, and cultural ambassador. It was also a life-changing challenge for his dancers, and there’s a collective passion about the project that translates viscerally onstage. Wang has had many pieces on the go—next month he’s debuting a new work for Ballet B.C.—but Under the Skin seems to be the one that’s really, well, gotten under his skin.

“I am so glad we did it,” Wang enthuses. “We all achieved something where we brought these two cultures together. It’s been great, particularly for my dancers to go to China and see how life is, and then come back and see how lucky we are and to be artists who can travel the world.”

Under the Skin is at the Vancouver Playhouse next Friday and Saturday (March 11 and 12).