When Marie Chouinard’s dancers first heard the Quebec icon was creating a work set to Erik Satie’s atmospheric piano solos, Gymnopédies, they likely didn’t know what they were in for.

“It was like a vision I had in the night,” Chouinard says of the epiphany she had during the process, speaking to the Straight from her headquarters in Mon­treal. “ ‘Well, you know, we should learn to play the Gymnopédies.’ None of them had ever studied piano. So we hired a piano teacher who worked with us for a year or so and each one of them learned it. And it’s just beautiful—just what the work is calling for.”

In the resulting piece, the dancers move in fluid, sensual duets around the stage, taking turns playing one of the French composer’s three- to four-minute pieces at a grand piano cocooned in white fabric—their time at the keys becoming part of the choreography.

“In that music there is a lot of space, giving you so much freedom,” says Chouinard, who in her prolific career has only rarely made a piece by starting with a score. “When you listen to that music, you find yourself in a place where you have a landscape for thinking, dancing, feeling.”

The playfully erotic work, which DanceHouse is bringing here in a double bill with Henri Michaux: Mouvements, is a striking example of how far Chouinard will go to fully realize a creation, and the way that inspiration comes to her, often like a bolt of lightning.

A similar brain wave hit her for the other piece on the program, as she looked at a book that had sat on her packed shelves for almost 20 years. Michaux was a Belgian-born French poet and artist whose 1951 Mouvements included a series of expressive, abstract ink drawings that suggest moving figures in silhouette. Chouinard’s copy just happened to be a special original edition that had been given to her as a gift. But suddenly she saw the expressive figure drawings in the book in a new way.

“I thought, ‘This is really like a choreographic score!’ ” Chouinard recalls. “Page after page!” She started to draft a solo for well-known troupe member Carol Prieur, and then, five years later, finished the work for 10 dancers. As ever, it was a rigorous exercise in bringing her vision to life. “I took the 64 drawings as if it was an exact representation of a body in space. I looked at what position it would be, what the movement would be,” she says with characteristic spark. “It was fun! It was a game, like a ground for…discovering.”

Adding to the effect of the final work are projections of Michaux’s drawings, appearing as shadows behind the dancers bringing them to life, as well as recitation of some of his poetry.

As long as Chouinard continues to surround herself with books, poetry, and art, it’s unlikely her creative output will slow down anytime soon.

But, she stresses, “The work does not come from the library. The inspiration is the daily work in the dance studio.”

DanceHouse presents Compagnie Marie Chouinard on Friday and Saturday (February 27 and 28) at the Vancouver Playhouse.