A Grand Poney production, presented by plastic orchid factory. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Wednesday, June 17. Continues until June 20

Walk into a Grand Poney show with certain definitions about what dance is, and you may walk out disappointed. Embrace Montreal artist Jacques Poulin-Denis’s fearless, authentic-feeling hybridity, and you will find moments of sheer artistry.

Few creator-performers out there travel between forms with the fluidity of Poulin-Denis. At one point in this exploration of what we value in today’s world, a sardonic, standup-style monologue on the brain-busting implications of the penny’s eradication loops into a tortured movement sequence. There is also live music, a rap number, and hundreds of cardboard-box set pieces that work like installation art.

Those boxes sit high in a corner of the stage as audience members arrive at their seats and musician Francis d’Octobre sings songs on-stage. (He moves to a piano to provide live music for much of the production.) The show opens with a stark dance sequence, in which the always expressive James Gnam tries desperately to grasp a little red container that dangles just beyond his reach, hanging from a pole that sticks straight out from his helmet. It’s a taut little vision of our constant quest for more, as he frantically extends limbs, torso, neck, and fingers.

Those movement sequences mash together with Poulin-Denis’s monologues, on topics ranging from Adam Smith to the price of recycled paper—his speech often breaking down into looped voice-over as his body moves. The soundtrack is an effective mix of sampled commercials for everything from baldness cures to slim suits, the choreographer’s own pulsing electronic music, and even clips from that infamous Sun News interview with Margie Gillis. That last one raises one of the night’s themes, that art is increasingly measured in terms of monetary value.

But where Poulin-Denis has the most success is in digging into the pain that eats away at us in a consumerist culture. At one point, in their suit jackets, Poulin-Denis and Gnam are laughing and talking like two businessmen shooting the shit at a water cooler, when Poulin-Denis suddenly collapses into Gnam, clutching him around his waist and knees like a post in a tornado. Gnam then tries to subtly extract himself, uncaring, a bit embarrassed by such an emotional scene.

An even more haunting moment happens at the end of the rap number, when all the men don fur coats and satirize the “mo’ money” culture of hip-hop. When the music stops, Poulin-Denis’s brother Gilles gyrates on, dropping his pants and thrusting in his red gonch, eventually slowing down and retreating awkwardly into his own sad emptiness.

The crew puts the boxes to cool use, as well, from a sequence where the men move them into shapeshifting sculptures, with the focus of stockbrokers moving around investments, to moments when dancers disappear into holes in the mountain of cardboard.

Along with companies like Groupd’ArtGravelArtGroup, Poulin-Denis’s Grand Poney is part of a thriving, hip dance-theatre scene in Montreal that is as interested in pedestrian gesture, indie music, and intellectual ideas as it is in choreography.

Some of The Value of Things’ scenes go on too long, or take an idea too far; the flow could pick up its pace to match the pulsing rhythms of his electro-score. But Poulin-Denis has a real talent for accessing the vulnerable human in us: instead of just criticizing the world for its financial obsessions, he puts himself in the vicious money machine and shows the toll it can take.

These are not the kind of tough, real-world issues that dance often takes on. And there’s a lot of value in having voices like his.