A Par B.L.eux production. An Vancouver International Dance Festival presentation. At the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre on Thursday, March 12. No remaining performances

Snakeskins is a trip: a giddy, transformational journey through darkness and physical extremity into the light.

This new offering from Montreal’s Par B.L.eux company opens slow, with dancer-choreographer Benoît Lachambre wafting around the stage, multi-instrumentalist Hahn Rowe fiddling with a harmonica, and secondary dancer Daniele Albanese doing… Well, I don’t exactly remember what Albanese was doing, except that he was wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the number 12 and a Mexican wrestling mask.

But Snakeskins also opens strong, mostly because of its set: 62 cables strung from scaffolding at the rear of the stage to stanchions hanging from the ceiling at the front. The effect is disorienting: the cables suggest a proscenium arch, focusing our attention on centre stage, but also the streaking lights of interstellar travel, a holding pen for animals, and an upside-down boxing ring.

And at first Snakeskins feels like it’s going to be all about perspective, as Lachambre buckles into a harness attached to the scaffolding, bends his knees, and launches his torso backward. Suddenly we’re looking at the dancer as if from above, staring down at the top of his head and shoulders as more images flood the mind: a bird in flight; Native American suspension rituals; the performance artist Stelarc, hooked through his skin and hanging over a New York City street.

It’s beautiful and threatening, especially once Lachambre clambers awkwardly into the cables and starts inching toward the audience. But the threat is diverted: after climbing down and donning his own markedly simian wrestling mask, the choreographer assaults the schlub-like Albanese before mugging him for 40 cents. Albanese then beds down beneath a drift of black pasteboard panels while Lachambre enacts an even more absurd transformation scene, cramming his masked head into the former’s abandoned moneybag and emerging as a toothy talking basketball, with a microphone for a nose.

Maybe you had to be there. On-stage, this was entrancing, frightful, and hilarious; on-page, it sounds merely silly.

The work ended, sort of, with Lachambre pushing the scaffolding to the front of the stage, collapsing the cables. Gathering them up, he began twirling skeins of them, lit so they initially looked like tongues of pale flame surrounding his body, then like white birds flying out of a dark sky. Two lovely images, especially the first.

Applause began, stopped when the performers failed to leave the stage, and then resumed, albeit intermittently. Rowe, whose atmospheric guitar, violin, and percussion were integral to this evening’s success, resumed toying with his harmonica. Albanese doffed his mask and hoodie and turned slow, graceful arabesques. Lachambre stripped down to his skivvies and did the same.

As stagehands began to disassemble the set and the last viewers filed out, they were still dancing—and for all we know they’re dancing still.