Dancing on the Edge artistic producer Donna Spencer thought it would be a straightforward task: gather all the programs and archival binders from 25 years of the festival and build a grid that would document which artists performed when.

It speaks to the almost immeasurable amount of work that she and her event have done for the dance community here that she may not complete this task before the Edge opens for its silver anniversary next Thursday (July 4) at the Firehall Arts Centre.

“I probably should have given the job to interns,” the arts veteran says with a laugh, sitting in a high-ceilinged old room at Firehall, surrounded by boxes of programs, scripts, and show posters. “I’m somewhere at over 330 choreographers at this point—and I’m only at 2003.”

She pauses to note that this just happened to be a year when Emily Molnar and Crystal Pite each had a piece in the festival. The former would go on to become the artistic director of Ballet B.C.; the latter is now an international choreographic star who’s worked with everyone from Nederlands Dans Theater to Robert Lepage.

They’re just two particularly high-profile examples of the city’s dance talents who can trace their careers back to Dancing on the Edge. Ask almost anyone of any stature where they either debuted or developed their work, and they’ll likely point to the little summer festival in the Downtown Eastside: names like Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras, Serge Bennathan, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, Alvin Erasga Tolentino, the 605 Collective, Amber Funk Barton, and Wen Wei Wang all honed their craft here. “A lot of the people that have been at Dancing on the Edge are still creating dance in this city and country,” Spencer marvels. “It really is a 25-year snapshot of dance in Vancouver.”

Spencer couldn’t have imagined the festival would have such an effect; in fact, given her tighter financial years, she might never have predicted it would last so long, either.

True to its name, the fest had its beginnings on the margins. The Firehall had been programming dance here and there on its stage since 1982. “It became evident that dance didn’t have a space to be presented in,” Spencer recalls.

Spencer’s own background was in theatre, but she loved to watch dance and wanted to support the scene. “I’m not really the expert on it; I said, ‘I like this form; it connects with me.’ ”

Her first step was launching a dance series with Barbara Clausen (who decades later colaunched DanceHouse). “Once we started to show this interest in dance, the dance community started to come out of the woodwork,” she says, explaining that there were only a few contemporary-dance companies at the time and a handful of artists working in isolation in studios around the city. “They started to see the Firehall as their place to dance. Until that point, there was hardly anywhere for them: the Cultch was presenting a small bit of dance, and the Western Front was really the only other space.”

After the festival launched in 1988, it immediately became known as a place to push the form into new directions. Spencer recalls the second year, when EDAM’s Peter Bingham helped create a piece where dancers hung from the Firehall’s outside wall. “I think that was before they knew it was aerial dance; people hadn’t thought about those kinds of things,” Spencer says. “I was working on the festival with [former coproducer] Esther Rausenberg at that time and we said, ‘Why can’t you do this? Why not put it outside? Why can’t you do dance outside the theatre?’ ”

Since then, the fest has committed to doing shows in nontraditional venues every year. At the 2013 fest, look for a series of Dusk Dances, hosted by Friedenberg, to take place at sunset in Crab Park, and for Sandra Botnen’s Wobble Tops to perform high atop standing poles in the SFU Woodward’s Atrium.

In a tribute to the festival and its risk-taking, Alvin Erasga Tolentino has even choreographed an outdoor work called 25 Gestures for Dancing on the Edge. For 10 consecutive days, when the Gastown Steam Clock strikes noon, Tolentino and dancer Alison Denham will perform 25 sequences drawn from his memories of the festival over 25 minutes. “The idea is that every minute is a legacy; it’s passing and it’s never repeated. I really wanted to honour that idea,” says Tolentino, speaking with the Straight over the phone.

Tolentino has had a long association with the fest, performing his first piece as an independent choreographer on its stage back in 1991, after training at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and then continuing on at all the fests but three or four, by his count.

“Back then, there weren’t any other festivals in Western Canada, so it was quite an opportunity to promote your work and understand how the contemporary scene operates,” he says. “It’s a platform for young artists, but the fest has managed to include both emerging and established artists, so you do really see the array.”

The experience helped Tolentino develop into an artist and start his own company: at one important point in the early ’90s, the short BATO/Stone he debuted at the fest led to a full-length piece presented in the Firehall season.

The overwhelming impression he’s gotten at the festival is of resilience, and that’s something he wants to physically portray in his outdoor piece this year—one that he and Denham will have to perform amid tourist hordes, rain or shine.

“We’re looking at how to make that work for us, dancing on the brick and really adapting to the situation if it’s wet. It could be very different every day,” Tolentino says. “It’s to see if we are really going to be able to dance for 25 minutes for 10 days. It’s going to be quite something.”

If Tolentino’s Work speaks to the past, Wen Wei Wang’s work in progress, Made in China, speaks to the future. At this year’s fest, it will provide an early glimpse of an ambitious, years-long project that will debut as a full-length work in the Firehall’s 2014-15 season—another example of how pieces evolve out of the fest to take on larger lives of their own.

For Made in China, Wang has brought together Beijing Modern Dance Company cofounder Gao Yanjinzi and Silk Road Music member Qiu Xia He. Through discussions in the studio, they’ve found they share stories from their backgrounds—growing up during China’s Cultural Revolution, getting training abroad—that they want to portray through music and dance on-stage, performing themselves. He says the chance to put some of the preliminary ideas on-stage in front of an audience at Edge is invaluable. “It’s an important first step to try it out and see how the audience reacts,” he says. “It’s so important for us to learn to go through that journey that’s all about our own life.”

It’s important to note that Wang, who has created celebrated works like Unbound for his own company, Wen Wei Dance, as well as for Ballet B.C., BJM Danse (Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal), and others, showed his first choreography as an independent artist at the fest in the late 1990s. His short work, set to Chinese opera and melding contemporary dance and traditional eastern movement, so caught the eye of Spencer that she then commissioned a full-length work for the fest and helped set his choreographic career in motion.

And so the Edge continues to nourish its artists, grow the seeds of new work, and send it out to audiences. That said, the dance ecology in this city has changed a lot since Spencer opened her festival to a handful of small companies and solo artists in the late 1980s. We now have the Scotiabank Dance Centre as a downtown hub for dance, a steady crop of strong new companies, and a thriving scene of senior artists. Spencer hints that it may be time, after 25 years, to reassess Dancing on the Edge’s role and format. She plans to survey artists about what they’d like to see. The fest, she says, still has a strong role to play in developing and commissioning new work.

But for now, it’s time to look back on her accomplishments—not so quantifiable in those binders and programs. “Dance is still a marginalized art form, but there certainly is more respect for it now,” she says. ‘In the early days, a lot of companies and artists didn’t know each other. The festival was the only time that they could be together to talk about dance. They actually found a home at Dancing on the Edge.”

Dancing on the Edge is at the Firehall Arts Centre and venues around town from next Thursday (July 4) to July 13.