A MOVE: the company production, presented by Dancing on the Edge. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Thursday, July 2. No remaining performances

Those of us who think of Joshua Beamish as primarily a body technician may have to recalibrate their opinions. Yes, the young dancer and choreographer has developed a singular style that combines balletic grace with B-boy immediacy, but what really drives his choreography, it seems, is narrative.

Welcoming the audience to his MOVE company’s 10th-anniversary celebration, he confessed that all of his works are about relationships of the interpersonal kind, rather than the more strictly mechanical linkages between feet and knees and hips and neck. As if to prove his point, all but one of the night’s dances were duets, highlighting both intimacy and the lengths we go to avoid entanglement.

The exception was also the introduction. A solo for Beamish himself, Adoration served as an introduction to his basic movement vocabulary, which builds outward from hunched, concentrated energy into sudden springing lunges. Perhaps the primary relationship here was Beamish’s rapport with the ground; he is a small, focused person and only once, in a showy pirouette, did he ever seem to be aspiring skyward.

That he also knows what to do with a more traditional dancer’s body was made clear by the ensuing work, Pierced, which was set on Josh Reynolds and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Jo-Ann Sundermeier. This added hints of futurism to the mix, thanks in part to the score—David Lang’s otherworldly How to Pray—but also due to the impossibly elongated Sundermeier’s robotically blank visage as she placed herself in ever more unlikely postures, with the support of her self-effacing yet invaluable partner.
This was a dance of delicious, if somewhat surreal, loveliness.

Less graceful expressions of the male-female dynamic were found in a pair of premieres: the Canadian debut of Stay, and the never-before-performed The Other People in Your Party, for MOVE mainstays Heather Dotto and Cai Glover.

The first was creepily wonderful, with Jedediah Duifhuis repeatedly seducing and rejecting Cristina Graziano; its formal, even courtly gestures also revealed how much Beamish has learned from his close study of historical dance forms. The second, in contrast, seemed undercooked, and a slightly downbeat way to end a celebratory event.

Before those two works, however, we were treated to burrow, featuring the Royal Ballet’s Matthew Ball and Nicol Edmonds. A pas de deux between a power bottom (Ball) and a peacock (Edmonds), it was so homoerotically charged and beautifully realized that it made even this straight guy swoon. Proof positive that great dance crosses gender boundaries—and that the kid from Kelowna fully deserves his fast rise to the choreographic top.