An ICKamsterdam production. A DanceHouse presentation. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday, April 4. Continues April 5

When Rocco really connects, it's like a vicious Jake LaMotta right hook.

Contemporary dance, the cinematic mythology around boxing, and the flying fists and fast footwork of the sport all come together in this surreal, gutsy little offering from ICKamsterdam.

In fact, what audience members see as they enter the theatre could be something right out of Requiem for a Heavyweight: two fighters in shiny boxing shorts sit in opposite corners of a classic, roped-off ring, chain-smoking herbal cigarettes and staring each other down. (Some of the crowd gets to go up on-stage and sit ringside with them.)

Things get considerably more strange when the show starts and two men in sinister mouse masks with giant ears join them in the ring, cavorting to carnival music, and introducing the two mood swings of the evening: from intense male bonding and conflict to theatre-of-the-bizarre circus.

Our half-naked men in boxer shorts meet for an extended duet at centre stage, squeezed into a pillar of spotlight in the dark, windmilling arms, lunging, and extending trembling, slippered feet. It's a loose, puzzling mix of posturing and pulling back, a show of masculinity and yet frailty.

Where the piece really starts to find its feet is when our mouse men, looking like a hallucinogenic mix of Mickey and Deadmau5, return, and slowly strip and transform. There's a striking sequence where they meld boxing moves with dance, falling into pushups, twirling their fists around each other, and hopping around the stage. Later, the duo gears down to sparkly tights, again meeting in the ring, pushing into the exhausting embraces that boxers often fall into—but then it becomes something else, something emotionally, or maybe erotically, charged. Preternaturally cut dancers Christian Guerematchi and Dereck Cayla are fiercely competitive one moment, cartoonlike the next, and then reduced to vulnerability in this brutal ballet.

There's also a fantastic scene at the end, where the dancers preen, pose, and plead to the audience, rotating fight-night-style, to each of the four sides of the ring, in one of the most fun plays on the curtain call that you've probably ever seen.

And fun is the word here, despite the dark themes collaborators Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten touch on, whether it's one androgynous performer tossing candy to the audience or the soundtrack's maniacal shifts between skittering electronic beats, beautiful baroque, a child's do re mi's, and garish French chansons—always punctuated by that ear-splitting ringing bell. Could it be better? Maybe if you saw it in a Harlem gym. Still, you've never seen anything quite like it, and props have to go to DanceHouse for not pulling any punches in bringing this audacious, genre-mashing show here from the more cutting-edge halls of Europe.