A slow-motion pile-on is happening in the middle of a studio floor, with dancer Josh Martin flattened at the bottom of a mountain of protruding limbs, feet, butts, and heads.

It’s like a moving, carefully balanced sculpture of six bodies—one that audiences, if they so choose, will be able to view in extreme closeup.

For its new show, The Sensationalists, 605 Collective is inviting viewers right on to the Cultch’s Historic Stage. And the company known for intricately crafted physical spectacles like AUDIBLE and Inheritor Album (which the troupe is taking to Europe this fall) is getting used to the fact the shifting crowd will be an unknown element of each show, as audience members draw near to or away from each scene of action.

“There’s definitely a letting go,” admits Martin, stretching with fellow 605 cofounder and performer Lisa Gelley in a separate studio. “Sometimes it’s not going to exist in the way you have it in your mind.…I don’t think there’s an opportunity for anything to go terribly wrong, but there will be things you where you won’t know what will happen.”

“One thing we noticed with the test audience we did is they really will trust us and let us get really close to them in a way that we thought that they wouldn’t,” Gelley adds.

The bold young collective has collaborated with everyone from animators to filmmakers, but for this new piece it’s worked for the first time with a theatre artist: Theatre Replacement’s Maiko Yamamoto. It was inspired by Yamamoto’s reading on autonomous sensory meridian response, a physiological reaction said to happen with triggers of sound, sights, and touch—one that causes tingling around the head and neck, but that has to date been anecdotally, not scientifically, proven. Sensations from whispers to tapping to hair-brushing are supposed to evoke the response—and the team set about trying to provoke the same sort of frisson in themselves and the audience.

“We always capture sensation, but this was about turning that process to exist on the outside,” Martin explains.

With a theatre artist involved in the process, there was bound to be spoken text in The Sensationalists, but it sounds like it was a relatively easy task for 605 Collective, even though the company has hardly ever used words in its works.

“The use of text was based in the way Theatre Replacement uses it: we try to remove the pretense of having to act through text and that felt really natural with the dancers,” Yamamoto says, joining Martin and Gelley in the studio. “It was a way of letting the text be another language in which they could communicate—language as a way to accentuate the movement.”

The dance is accompanied by a score of new music and found sounds by composer and experimental musician Gabriel Saloman that uses frequencies and tones aimed at bringing out sensations in the body. And, fitting with the immersive theme, lighting designer James Proudfoot has the dancers themselves operate the lights.

It’s been a game-changing process for the collaborators—one that has them rethinking their very relationships to the viewer and the sensations that pass between them.

“It’s opened up that idea of the viewer experience being at the core of the piece,” Martin says. “It has opened us up to a whole new discussion in our work. We really want people to connect with the dance we’re making—to make people feel what we are feeling.”

For Yamamoto, the process of working on a dance piece has “reawakened” her too, in ways she’ll take back to Theatre Replacement. “You realize your community isn’t just other theatre companies.” 

The Sensationalists is at the Cultch’s Historic Theatre until Saturday (May 16).