Around 2006 and 2007, a new style of sushi eatery was popping up all over Vienna, the kind that sends little dishes around on conveyor belts where customers can pick them up at their whim.

It was called the Running Sushi restaurant, and Austrian choreographer Chris Haring took that name for the title, and inspiration, of his new dance work.

The resulting two-person show, which finally makes its way to Vancouver’s Scotiabank Dance Centre this week, plays out on a giant sushi plate and invites the audience to choose pieces from the dance “menu”, dictating the order of the vignettes each night. But the references to Japanese culture don’t stop there: the idiomatic style is inspired by artist Takashi Murakami’s superflat style, with the dancers often looking like two-dimensional manga characters moving in space to cartoon sound effects.

Just don’t assume the piece is directly about Japan, however. “It’s more about how pervasive it is in our western culture,” explains dancer Stephanie Cumming, speaking to the Straight via video phone from the company’s tour stop in Alberta—her home province before she headed to Europe and helped found Liquid Loft with Haring in 2005. She performs the piece with Belgian dancer Johnny Schoofs, creating a warped couple that’s on the verge of a breakdown. “It’s about things we see in our own culture: chopsticks, feng shui—things we’ve appropriated in our western understanding. It says more about our western civilization than it does about Japanese culture.”

“It plays with humour and sarcasm, but the sarcasm also plays with how we in Europe receive Japanese culture,” adds Haring himself, speaking to the Straight in a separate Skype interview from Alberta, and talking about what a melting pot of foreigners Vienna has become. “We did a show in Japan: they received it very well and saw that it’s full of sarcasm and see that it doesn’t reflect so much Japanese culture but more the superficiality with which we receive that culture.”

Superficiality and consumerism are just a few of the themes the cheeky work explores in its ever-changing running order. “So in the end you get sort of this Pulp Fiction effect; maybe it’s not resolved,” the charismatic, shaven-headed Haring explains. “It’s like pictures in an exhibition: you choose the order of how you go through it. It plays a lot with that artificiality and this world we’re living in at the moment—with social media on all the computer games and commercials on the computer.

“I also think it’s a statement on how we perceive performance these days,” he adds. “When you Google or go on the Internet, you read the stories with a lot of hyperlinks instead of reading them chronologically.”

The piece has been a crowd-pleaser worldwide, the most performed work in the repertoire of a hit Viennese company that’s working in what Cumming says is a hotbed of contemporary dance and arts, despite the city being better known here for its rich classical history. Running Sushi, then, is a rare chance to see a European company that’s made a big name for pushing the boundaries of dance and theatre.

“It’s not what one would expect from a conventional dance piece,” Cumming says. “On one hand it’s a dance piece, on the other it’s a sound piece, and then it leans in the direction of contemporary art and installation. There are a couple scenes of nudity, but the nudity is very absurd and self-reflective. It’s very funny, very dynamic, and abstract, as well—there’s a lot of space for the audience to create their own narrative.”