At the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday, November 8. No remaining performances

The tension between freedom and control provided the electricity and corporeal language for Wen Wei Dance’s thrilling production 7th Sense, traversing the performers’ lithe bodies with unsettling force. The work crackled with vitality through the constantly shifting patterns and relationships between the seven dancers—who included company director and choreographer Wen Wei Wang himself. In solo, duet, and all other possible configurations, they alternately attracted and repelled each other.

For Wang, the seventh sense is intuition. While most of his new creation is abstract, he did provide two points of reference with very personal resonance, at the start of each half of the evening.

The curtain rose on a stark, monochrome set—the floor completely white, the backdrop black. Paxton Ricketts, one of four male dancers, ran onstage and established the kinetic style, flailing and twisting his limbs, contracting and releasing his muscles, with a potent fusion of wildness and discipline. One by one, dressed in simple black pants and singlets, the rest of the dancers followed. Their convulsive, jaggedly elegant movements drew on elements of martial arts, tai chi, and Beijing Opera, as well as contemporary dance. The attract/repulse and control/abandon polarities were initially within the dancers’ own bodies, and remained there even after interactions began.

Soon the dancers gathered in a corner, all standing stiff and blank-faced, except for Wang, who was on the floor trying—and with anguish failing—to engage with them. The allusion, more subtly embodied than phrased, was clearly to Wang’s arrival here 20 years ago from China, a young man entering a culture he didn’t understand and whose language he couldn’t speak.

After the break, with the houselights still up, Wang came on cradling a white-haired toy dog, looking directly at audience members for understanding. It was a brilliantly humorous contrast to the abstractions that followed. He played with the faux fido in an affectionate way, adding a level of irony to the work while introducing motifs of communication with animals, and the human as animal, that the other performers explored with him.

The company created a tangibly special chemistry. A version of 7th Sense was presented earlier elsewhere in Canada, but for this premier of the full and largely revised work, four of the seven dancers were new. Though Alyson Fretz, João Pedro de Paula, Brett Taylor, and the 19-year-old Ricketts spent just three intense weeks on the work, they performed with freshness, disciplined fluency, and sensuous strength.

Giorgio Magnanensi’s score aptly and intelligently oscillated between electronic and acoustic sounds, on a spectrum from menacing synthesizer reverberations to delicate flamenco-like guitar. Similarly, James Proudfoot’s lighting ranged from the subtle and diffuse to the dramatic, such as the two lamps blazing through darkness to the audience at the end, like the eyes of some mythical beast.

7th Sense confirms the international calibre of Wen Wei Dance and its increasingly confident kinetic signature.