A DanStaBat production. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Thursday, December 7. No remaining performances

2The power struggles in Chick Snipper’s Drushka’s Reign are so visceral and so brutal, you almost feel like retreating to a quiet corner after the show. The one-named Daelik rolls and wrestles with Kathleen McDonagh on the floor, finally holding her there, on her back, as she flails. In another tyrannical duet, Andrea Gunnlaugson pushes forehead to forehead with Daelik, finally clasping his ears and heaving him away.

The choreography suggests marching, shooting off guns, or bowing and scurrying around in submission. In one of the show’s cleverest effects, the corps often moves below giant, Big Brother–like screen projections of Gunnlaugson, Daelik, or McDonagh dressed in Maoist uniforms. In other sequences, the power plays are purely intimate: in Daelik’s heated, violent couplings with the two strong female leads, the pairs frequently seem more like lovers than political rivals. (Laura Hicks and Barbara Murray dance smaller roles.)

So what is Snipper trying to say in this last, fiery work for her 21-year-old DanStaBat company? She seems to be showing that the personal translates into the political; that we can be just as tyrannical in our intimate relationships as we can be on the world stage, with destructive results.

It’s less clear who the Drushka character is. A vague narrative appears to run through the multilayered work, and Gunnlaugson’s iron lady certainly rises to the top through her brutality. And there is an unforgettable scene of a struggle for domination between her and McDonagh, with Daelik caught in the middle, their bodies pushing and pulling each other across the stage. Still, to look for anything overly literal in Drushka’s Reign seems like a mistake. Generally, it comes across as a fierce warning about the barbarity of dictatorship in all its forms.

The messages are heightened by Owen Belton’s potently atmospheric score, which evokes galloping hooves and crackling gunfire, softened by plucked strings. Stephanie Butler’s haunting videos, like a house of mirrors, often multiply the dancers on-stage to infinity. And Bobby Clark’s costumes, though they make subtle historical references, root the work in the contemporary.

Preceding Drushka’s Reign was a brief taste of the vision to come from the company’s new artistic director, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg. Character Study #2 is a work in progress, but if its whacked-out portrayal of a sort of deranged, Hispanic Sandra Dee in a pink prom dress is any indication, the troupe is ready to take a wild, theatrical new direction. As for Snipper, her work is still powerful and relevant enough to hope that, though she’s leaving the company itself, her reign as a choreographer is still far from over.