Veteran choreographer Judith Garay and her dancers had to spend a lot of time hanging out on street corners for her ambitious new work—and that was just the beginning of one of the biggest adventures in her two-decade career in this city.

Called 20.20.20, the piece celebrates Garay’s 20 years of living here with 20 dancers interpreting and expressing the buzzing life at 20 specific Vancouver intersections. The corners Garay chose are as diverse as historic Water and Carrall streets in Gastown, the upscale district of 41st Avenue and West Boulevard, unassuming Kingsway and Fraser, and the roaring transit hub of Granville and Broadway.

That last corner, when she observed it closely, captured some of the reasons she’s chosen to stay so long in this city—the most years she’s ever settled anywhere, after growing up in different Canadian centres due to her father’s naval postings, and then touring as a dancer, most notably with the legendary Martha Graham.

“You’ve got the 99 bus that carries more people than any other bus line on the continent and yet you can see the mountains right there, and there are these buildings that are impenetrable but it still has that glory,” the artistic director of the company known simply as Dancers Dancing remarks of Granville and Broadway, sitting in the sunlit lounge of the Scotiabank Dance Centre on a break from rehearsals.

“I was really surprised that even in the most gritty intersections you can see green—you can often see the mountains and almost always green space, or there’s cars and there’s this waft of flowers,” she says with enthusiasm. “This whole urban-versus-nature thing is so present here, and I think that’s what makes Vancouver Vancouver. It’s why people live here. It’s why I live here.”

Her dancers, an exciting spectrum of emerging and established local talent (including Bevin Poole, Meredith Kalaman, Vanessa Goodman, Jane Osborne, Thoenn Glover, and Michelle Lui), also spent hours observing the intersections, and the people passing by there, early in the process. They brought back a range of pedestrian, everyday gestural movement that has worked its way into 20.20.20.

Don’t expect the resulting piece to break up into specific blocks directly linked to each corner; instead, as a peek at rehearsal at the Scotiabank Dance Centre reveals, it’s a flowing ode to all the gathered impressions of the city, with pedestrian movement melding into more dancerly expressions of both the environment and the human relationships here. Crowds of bodies often enter from the four corners of the stage, striding to the middle like they’re at a downtown intersection at rush hour, then pulling out into more dancerly movement, sometimes turning and rolling like the waves that lap Vancouver’s shores, or the winds that sway its trees.

“You start with the images and the food for the piece, and then it starts to tell you what to do after that,” says Garay of putting together weeks of observed material. “There are some gestural phrases that are still in there, and I expanded those into full-body movement to take them to a whole new level of physicality.”

Working with so many dancers, she says she approached 20.20.20 more like a painter than she has with past pieces, stepping back from her “canvas” rather than stepping in to identify with individual dancers.

Stefan Smulovitz’s soundtrack is an equal mix of the contrasts found in her choreography: natural sounds like birds and wind against the beeping of a crosswalk signal or the industrial, urban roar. There is also singing and spoken word by Viviane Houle, drawn from texts written by her and four poets—Lisa Robertson, Colin Browne, Michael Rosen, and Jacques Prévert.

It’s a piece that weaves together multiple voices and impressions—from the busy to the serene, and the urban to the natural—much like Vancouver itself. Its creation has been a complex process, but Garay hopes she has somehow captured the vibrant city she calls home.

“It’s endlessly fascinating and you could spend the rest of your life exploring it,” she says before heading back into the studio packed with the 20 dancers. “I really hope that the audience will maybe perceive Vancouver differently after they’ve seen it, and say, ‘That reminds me of that person or that place.’ It’s an amazing city.”

Dancers Dancing performs 20.20.20 at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at SFU Woodward’s from next Wednesday to Saturday (September 24 to 27).