Opera singer Heidi Mundel admits to being a bit scared when she heard that the Tomorrow Collective had matched her up with hip-hop dancer Shay Kuebler to come up with a new work. For its Brief Encounters shows, the group pairs 12 people from disparate art forms and gives them just two weeks to create short performances. To the classically trained soprano, she might as well have been assigned to someone from another planet. “Hip-hop is so accessible and streetwise, and then opera is this grand world that a lot of people don't know about,” the affable Mundel says, sitting in the atmospheric Gastown studio called the Office, where Brief Encounters will take place on Friday and Saturday nights (June 16 and 17). “I was actually thinking, like, 'How the hell are we going to do it?'?”

It's only a few days into the creation process, and all her fears have been assuaged. The laid-back Kuebler, who's joined her for the interview, reports that coming up with their 10-minute piece has gone surprisingly smoothly. Music is music, he says with a smile and a shrug: “I found it challenging, but it came naturally too. I'm going to be dancing to her voice, and following the ups and downs of her voice. She holds a note and she'll put a...what do you call it again?” he says, turning to her for guidance. “A trill. An ornamentation,” she fills in. “And I'll find the rhythm in that,” he finishes.

Mundel will be singing an aria from the famed La Traviata””a cappella. “The biggest thing for me was not having accompaniment. It's something we almost never do in opera, and never with an aria like that,” she says.

That sense of risk, of leaping into the unknown and seeing what happens when two worlds collide, gives the Brief Encounters events their energy. And Mundel and Kuebler's collaboration isn't the only unusual pairing on the program this weekend at 500–68 Water Street: just wait to see what happens when welder Xaaq Embree and contemporary dancer Jennifer Clarke, or filmmaker Sebnem Ozpeta and fashion designer Lindsay Keegan, fuse their talents.

A year ago, around the time close friends and contemporary dancers Mara Branscombe, Katy Harris-McLeod, and Jennifer McLeish-Lewis formed the Tomorrow Collective, they came up with Brief Encounters as a way of meeting several needs. First, says Branscombe, who's gathered with her two partners in the Office, they wanted to bring new viewers to dance. “Often you go to a show and you're seeing a lot of the same faces. Often the general public doesn't have a good idea of what contemporary dance is,” Harris-McLeod explains. “We wanted to show them it can be cool,” adds McLeish-Lewis. The idea was that, by bringing in performers from other disciplines, they'd tap those audiences as well.

But Brief Encounters was also a way to break down the walls that isolate art forms from one another in this city. “It was to build community, to fuse genres, and have different cultures overlap,” Branscombe says.

The trio knew it wanted to stage such events in intimate studio spaces that would capture the raw energy of the short pieces. After-show “lounges” with DJs would give Brief Encounters an informal, clubby atmosphere. And they also pledged to pay each of the professional artists who took part: with no government grants, the Tomorrow Collective holds fundraising parties and searches out other private donations to hold the event, and then gives all fees from the door ($12 per ticket) to its performers.

Branscombe recalls the opening night of the first Brief Encounters, last November, as she sat nervously in the audience waiting to see what kind of work would emerge from the experiment. “I remember seeing the first piece and sitting back,” she says, demonstratively easing into her chair with a sigh. “It was just so emotional. These people commit and put this out in just two weeks.”

The three speak fondly of the more original fusions from the past two events: a lighting designer dressed in black shining flashlights over and around a hip-hop dancer, or a graffiti artist projecting layered images onto a contemporary dancer. Harris-McLeod says the potential combinations are endless: “There are so many professions that aren't considered artistic, when they really are. What about a hairdresser? What about a chef?”

Harris-McLeod recently won the Holy Body Tattoo's $2,000 British Columbia Emerging Dance Artist Award, which she'll invest in a venue for Brief Encounters' next show in the fall; whether it will be a traditional theatre or retain the shows' underground feel is yet to be determined. But these three busy dancers, who are volunteering their time for the project even as they create a major new work for the upcoming Dancing on the Edge festival, also hope to someday access public funding to give Brief Encounters long-term life.

For their part, Kuebler and Mundel seem grateful for an opportunity, and a friendship, that might never have happened otherwise. Dancer Kuebler says performing with an opera singer and taking part in the Brief Encounters show reveals to audiences the artistry in hip-hop, a form often put down for being too commercial. For Mundel, it's a welcome change from the world of opera. “You can have a little too much of one genre,” she admits with a laugh. “Some of what you hear about opera””that there are big egos””is true. It's so nice to be with someone so down-to-earth like Shay.” With their creative process so far ahead of schedule, she's hoping to learn a few dance moves, too.