A Ballet B.C. production. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Thursday, February 20. Continues until February 22

With Grace Symmetry, Ballet B.C. took audience members on an aural and visual adventure into the unknown. The journey was sometimes haunting, often challenging, and never less than excellently executed.

The idea was ambitious: have three top choreographers create new works set to the live sounds of the new-music-based Turning Point Ensemble. The results found dancers flicking and whirling as if they were possessed by the crisp, avant-garde notes of the orchestra.

Vancouver choreographer Wen Wei Wang’s In Motion was perhaps the piece most directly driven by the music, in this case Turning Point co–artistic director and conductor Owen Underhill’s Geometry of Harmony. The ensemble was seated behind a transparent screen at the back of the stage. Sometimes, members would step into the foreground with the dancers: at one point, Ballet B.C.’s Gilbert Small held the oversize sheet music for flutist Brenda Fedoruk. The dance troupe fully embodied the blurping woods, fluttering percussion, and melancholy strings of the piece, twirling, kicking up their heels, and making calligraphy in the air with their arms and hands. Highlights included the men hoisting women who swung their stiff legs like pendulums. Wang excels at male partnering, and there was an innovative, intense pas de deux between Peter Smida and Small. It ranged from more sensual moments, such as Smida rolling his head down Small’s outstretched leg, to violent visions, with Smida clasping Small’s neck as he convulsed in deathlike throes.

French choreographer Medhi Walerski (whose Petite Céremonie was such a hit here a couple of years back) took his Prélude into conceptual territory. On one level, the music, by Lera Auerbach, was a sheer test of limits for its pianist (Jane Hayes) and violinist (Peter Krysa), with its echoey, racing runs and all-out smashing. On another, in Walerski’s hands, it was an eerie exploration of the passing of time, symbolized here most effectively by columns of dancers slowly passing and measuring a long, black rope in the shadowy light. Dressed in tight, skin-coloured tank tops and black pants, dancers would shift from chaotic movement into, say, the hypnotic, synchronized swing of arms like clock hands. It made you think about how minutes and hours rein in the anarchy of life.

Stripped to nude shorts, Rachel Meyer and Darren Devaney pulled off a physically punishing duet, but the highlight was his flailing, whirring solo in a spotlight at the end, every tiny muscle of his torso flexing and releasing as the curtain slowly closed downward on him. In one of Walerski’s beautifully surreal touches, Meyer had magically appeared, standing on a ladder stretching up from the orchestra pit, to watch him.

Before the third premiere, Ballet B.C. artistic director Emily Molnar took the stage to announce a “sudden illness” had toppled a dancer for both Walerski’s piece and the upcoming Here on End. But his absence didn’t show to outsiders’ eyes in either work, especially choreographer Kevin O’Day’s driving, dreamlike closer. Again, this was an artist making full use of the company, with his long-time collaborator, New York composer John King, also exploring the bounds of every musician of the Turning Point Ensemble for this commission. King’s time-vectors/still-points worked with blasts from the orchestra becoming oh-so-gradually more frequent, the music in between inhabited by clucking strings and fluttering harps, woodwinds, and percussion. Bodies rushed on- and off-stage, a whirl of duos turning into trios turning into quartets turning into duos. Its biggest appeal was its deliriumlike feel, with dancers sometimes running backward as if they were being pulled by an invisible force. Strong, strange images included Meyer, her body stiff and horizontal, being passed between partners, or Alexis Fletcher being hoisted high, her legs running in the air. When you weren’t marvelling at the complex, brain-teasing games of rhythm in the score, you were taking in a blizzard of movement on the dim stage. Call it a full-on experience for both sides of the brain—and maybe even some corners of that grey matter that you didn’t even know existed.

If there’s one criticism of Grace Symmetry, it’s that the pieces all had a similar darkness on a wide, empty stage, half lit (although atmospherically so, thanks to lighting designer James Proudfoot) and broody in sound. That makes it quite different from Ballet B.C.’s normally contrasting programming.

Yes, your mind, your ears, and your eyes had to work at this show, but for those up for a challenge, it was invigorating—even, at times, mind-altering. You could feel everyone—the dancers, the musicians, and the creators—committing in the fullest possible way to the double-black-diamond-difficult rhythms. And for that, Vancouver audiences have to be grateful. Turning Point co–artistic director Jeremy Berkman put it best when he addressed the audience at the beginning of the show: “All this work—and it’s a ton of work—is for you.”