Crystal Pite jokes that her son Nico has already spent more than half his life on the road—and he’s only four months old. Since her first baby’s birth, the well-known Vancouver choreographer and Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM artistic director has travelled from Seattle to Los Angeles, over to Germany—where her company is a sensation—and throughout France, all with her infant in tow. And, aside from the seemingly impossible packing challenges and sleep deprivation, she couldn’t be happier.

“It was the first time that Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM was on a tour bus and it was hilarious because it reminded me of my Ballet B.C. days, where we used to tour the province,” the upbeat artist tells the Straight of her recent sojourn throughout France. “I had Nico on the bus with me, and it was fun passing him from one person to the next and looking at the French countryside and then back to his face.”

Visiting with the Straight at the East Side headquarters of her management agency, Eponymous, she admits it was hard, at first, to get her head around touring with her baby. “About a month after he was born I remember sitting in my house thinking there is no way, no way. I couldn’t even imagine packing a suitcase, let alone getting out of the house and getting on a plane,” she says, stressing it’s a huge help that her partner, set designer and former Ballet B.C. dancer Jay Gower Taylor, is able to accompany her almost everywhere she goes.

“A lot is just how I decide to handle it,” she adds. “If I look at Nico and he’s happy and he’s smiling, then he’s okay.”¦I think my attitude is going to go a long way, because at the end of the day I want to enjoy it all—my child and my company. I’m lucky to be able to do what I do.”

Local audiences will get a chance to check in with Pite in her company’s first big production here since its hit 2010 Olympiad showing of Dark Matters—her wildly theatrical mixture of puppets, chaos, and kung-fu fighters. She’s spent much of the ensuing time in Frankfurt, where Kidd Pivot secured a two-year contract and funding as resident company at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, starting in January 2010.

What she’s bringing here, to the Cultch, is one byproduct of her extensive work in Frankfurt, the company’s second home and a godsend of support when arts funding here has not kept up to Kidd Pivot’s growth. The You Show is a program of four pieces, and in many ways it celebrates her other family—the troupe’s dancers, as well as her audience.

The idea had its germination when Pite created the first duet on the program, “A Picture of You Falling”, set to a voice-over that’s all in the second person. A story of falling in and out of love for dancers Peter Chu and Anne Plamondon, it features lines like: “This is a picture of you as a young woman; this is your hand; this is your back; this is you reaching back; this is your back as you do it.”

“When people watch dance, if they get involved, they really do have a visceral experience,” Pite explains. “They feel themselves moving and flying around in the body of the dancer. That’s when dance is really at its best—when you experience the movement through the body of the dancer.

“My favourite proverb is, ”˜Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.’ And I thought that was the key to theatre-making—that if the viewer feels himself really represented and feels that the theme or the story is completely about him, then he’ll feel compelled.”

Each of the three subsequent duets, created in Germany, inhabits different worlds: “The Other You”, featuring Eric Beauchesne and Jirí­ Pokorný as dual sides of the self, plays with the idea of man and beast against a soundtrack that travels from city noises to the wilderness; “Das Glashaus”, with Cindy Salgado and Yannick Matthon, pushes its explosive dancers to the limit, setting a dangerous, destructive relationship against the sounds of breaking glass; and the finale, “A Picture of You Flying”, is rife with Pite’s quirky humour, spotlighting Sandra Marí­n Garcia and Jermaine Maurice Spivey. Each piece is meant to showcase the talents of her beloved dancers—the ones she could never have afforded to hire on a full-time basis without heading to Germany, she says.

“The beauty of having your own company is to be able to work so deeply with the performers and to know what they need sometimes—what they need to do on their artistic journey,” she says. “Sometimes when dancers are really, really good it can be hard to deliver their talent to the fullest—sometimes I can’t even understand it. I never want to hold them back because I haven’t thought of something they can do.”

Pite will be here to witness the local debut of these pieces, but she’s learned to let go of travelling with her dancers to every opening. Amazingly, though, in two weeks she’ll head to New York to set a new work on Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet; then she’ll join Kidd Pivot on the road, first in Montreal and maybe later for openings in Germany, at Jacob’s Pillow in Massachusetts, and in Prague. After a break back in Vancouver, she’ll spend the rest of the summer in Frankfurt, a place she says now feels like a second home, especially because she spent 1996 to 2001 as a dancer with William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt.

In that German city, she takes on an even bigger project: creating her first new Kidd Pivot work since she had her baby, set to premiere there in the fall. Expectations, as always, will run high. With the company’s two-year contract at the Frankfurt theatre ready to expire at the end of the year, and no clarity as to whether it will be renewed, the as-yet-untitled work may be her final big work there. Pite is all too aware it’s one of several more momentous tasks, in a momentous year, that she’ll face before her son reaches his first birthday.

“It’s one thing to go on tour with an existing show and taking care of something that already exists—an existing show. The different reality will be what I’m about to do next, which is create a whole new show,” she says. “And these days I’m so sleep-deprived that there’s sort of this fog over everything.”

Then again, she had the same kinds of doubts after her baby was born—and she’s traversed several countries and oceans since then. So far, she’s been able to enjoy it all.

The You Show is at the Cultch from Tuesday to next Saturday (May 10 to 14).