Israel Galván had no choice about being a dancer. Both his father, José Galván, and his mother, Eugenia de los Reyes, were flamenco dancers, and he felt the rhythms of the art form in his body even before he was born.

“My mother danced while she was pregnant, and already I was dancing in the womb,” says the Seville-born flamenco star and choreographer, reached on tour in Philadelphia. “So it is that I always remember dancing, whether with my father or my mother, but it wasn’t a game for me. Later, when I wanted to be a dancer, well, my father took me to [flamenco company director] Mario Maya, and then there was a time when classical ballet attracted me a lot. And so I came to a time when to be happy dancing I had to, let’s say, reinvent, revolutionize myself.”

That synopsis of his training appears typical of the 40-year-old Galván, whose only predictability as an artist and performer is his unpredictability. Asked about possible influences beyond flamenco, Galván turns to the movies.

“I’m very inspired by the cinema—in the gestures,” he says, speaking in Spanish that’s regularly interspersed with “pues” (“so” or “well”), as if to give logic to his shifts of focus. “For example, the films of [Italian director Pier Paolo] Pasolini influenced me—working on gesture, which is all about talking. And afterward, well, I became very interested in movements of the camera, such as [director Stanley] Kubrick uses. I like to try to have the spectator’s eye and, as if they were camera shots, draw it to different parts of the body.”

In 1994 Galván joined Maya’s prestigious Compañia Andaluza de Danza, and he created his own company four years later, winning almost every flamenco prize available. For 2002’s Galvánicas, he worked with one of the greatest flamenco guitarists, Gerardo Núñez. In 2004’s Arena, Galván’s focus was on bullfighting. The following year, his La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age)—the show Galván brings to Vancouver—returned the art of flamenco to its basics.

“I wanted to do a work dedicated to flamenco itself that would be a guitar, a singer, and me dancing—just three people on the stage. It was a very classic thing. In recent times we have had flamenco with several singers, many dancers, different musicians and instruments like the cajón and the violin. I just wanted it really simple, in order to draw the maximum out of a singer, a guitarist, and a dancer.”

For the performance here, Galván is joined by guitarist Alfredo Lagos and cantaor David Lagos, from Jerez de la Frontera. “They are two brothers who are great artists and great survivors. In these times, it’s very important that we have the root of the tradition, but also we have to be current.”

According to the cinematically savvy Galván, the title is not an allusion to La Edad de Oro by legendary Spanish surrealist film director Luis Buñuel, but something that’s both more personal and universal. “I believe that all of us have a golden age. It’s how, with every work, every day, every time that we dance and sing and play, it has to be our golden age—to the maximum.”

The subject of Galván’s most recent work, Lo Real (The Real), is starkly different: the holocaust of the Roma people under the Nazis, when vast numbers of gitanos (Roma) across Europe were murdered. “It must never be forgotten, but I did not want it to be a tragic thing,” he says. “One sentence from the work is that from the dead grow flowers. I wanted to take something joyous and positive from catastrophe.”

In this, as in his other works, Galván is flamenco’s master of the unexpected.