Innovative cultural fusions and a whole lot of hopping highlight the Dance Centre's just-announced 2015-16 season.

Kicking off the facility's central Global Dance Connections series at the Scotiabank Dance Centre is Unwrapping Culture, a collaboration by Filipino-Canadian Alvin Erasga Tolentino and Pichet Klunchun, a renowned expert in the Thai classical dance style of Khon. Expect theatricality, humour, and contemporary spins on the ancient in a piece that tackles today's materialism and the corruption of authentic Thai culture by the forces of commercialization.

From October 29 to 31, Belgian Jan Martens brings his provocative The Dog Days Are Over—a piece where eight dancers perform 70 exhausting minutes of complex hopping, leaping, and jumping. It's an act of endurance that asks questions about the definitions of contemporary dance and the complicity of the audience in watching artists perform such extreme acts of physicality.  

Next up is Raven Spirit Dance's Earth Song, from November 26 to 28, featuring two contemporary aboriginal dance works: Michelle Olson’s Northern Journey, inspired by the inner landscape we carry inside of us, and Starr Muranko’s Spine of the Mother, bringing together Indigenous artists from Canada and Peru tracing the inner terrain of women's bodies.

In the only show in the series to be held at the Vancouver Playhouse, the Dance Centre presents British dance star Aakash Odedra's Murmur + Inked from January 19 to 20, 2016. Presented with the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, the show features two works by the artist, who is trained in traditional classical Indian styles of kathak and bharata natyam but who has found a cutting-edge-contemporary voice. Murmur is a multimedia collaboration with Australian choreographer Lewis Major that explores the warped perceptions experienced by dyslexics, while Inked, created by French/Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet, is inspired by Odedra’s grandmother’s tattoos and looks at themes of identity and belonging. 

Elsewhere during the PuSh festival, look for French-Algerian choreographer Nacera Belaza, whose Le Temps scellé is said to be mesmerizing, from January 27 to 29, 2016. From February 4 to 6, Liz Santoro and pierre Godard's Relative Collider draws on neuroscience, math, and linguistics.

In a copresentation with the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, Words in Motion, at that venue, brings together three writers and three choreographers to work in pairs to create new works. Choreographers include  Olivia C. Davies, Anusha Fernando, and Paraskevas Terezakis working with writers Carmen Aguirre, Aislinn Hunter, and Nancy Lee, respectively. The show happens March 18 and 19, 2016.

And finally, back at the Scotiabank Dance Centre, Euro dance star Thierry Smits and his Compagnie THor present the edgily intense ReVoLt May 5 to 7—a stripped-down solo for Nivola Leahey that riffs on citizen protests.

Elsewhere, the Dance Centre holds its annual open house September 18, and has brought together names like battery opera, Ziyian Kwan, MACHiNENOiSY, Marta Marta Productions, and Shay Kuebler for its Dance in Vancouver showcase from November 18 to 22.

See more details at thedancecentre.ca.