Talking about the new show Major Motion Picture, Out Innerspace’s Tiffany Tregarthen touches on influences as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Slavoj Žižek, Alice in Wonderland, The Matrix, and Polka Dot Door. Clearly, in conversation, she can draw liberally from popular culture—the same way she and partner David Raymond do in their dance.

The Vancouver duo’s breakout piece was their 2012 duet Me So You So Me, a fun mix of cartoon action, silent-movie physical comedy, and wild sound effects. Now, in Major Motion Picture, they explore everything from Big Brother surveillance to cinematic conventions. It’s that playing with pastiche that sets the troupe apart.

“David and I are avid movie watchers and news readers,” Tregarthen admits, speaking to the Straight over the phone from Vernon, where the couple is teaching workshops and presenting the piece. “David and I let as many things as possible influence us.”

The pair’s ambitious work started, she says, with them wanting to create characters for other dancers. Whereas Me So You So Me played on the dynamics of their own relationship as a couple, they wanted their new piece to ask the same questions of a larger group of people: what tears a relationship apart and what brings it together?

Almost instantly, she says, themes emerged: power and fear, and the good-versus-bad of movies like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. “It was almost like the piece had these legs and started running off,” she says.

But that was just the beginning. The company plays with devices on-stage here like never before—not just with dramatic cinematic lighting, but with infrared cameras whose projections reveal a backstage world to the audience.

When Raymond introduced the cameras one day in the studio, “it sort of brought us into the dark,” Tregarthen explains. “Being able to see in the dark was really exciting and really terrifying at the same time,” she adds. “It made us look at all the cameras around us differently. We started thinking about its [the camera’s] morality and thinking of it as a Cheshire Cat: it disappears but its smile remains.

“Also there’s something terrifying about the camera when you see it move: it’s really a living thing. It becomes a sort of portal.…We felt the most exciting change that’s coming from the world is coming from the dark corners, not coming from the centre stage. So we said we have to see what’s happening backstage.”

Masks also make their way into the work, as well as a menacing giant overcoat: three dancers bring it to life, sprouting six legs beneath it.

“The coat is that third [character] that allows us not to oversimplify the good and the bad,” Tregarthen says. “It’s also a symbol for the paternal master. The coat also creates a sense of the impossible body: while we see that it holds the shape of a body, inside it, a lot can happen. Maybe it’s a literally headless leader.” That disembodied leader seems to almost magically control everything in the world of the show, even its flickering lights.

“As a kid I watched Polka Dot Door,” Tregarthen adds, referring to the 1970s and ’80s educational TVOntario show, “and I realized when Polkaroo showed up at the door that one of the hosts would disappear. It’s kind of like Agent Smith from The Matrix—that he’s everywhere but nowhere at the same time. Not all of the performers could see him at the same time and that made him more dangerous.”

The resulting production, true to its title, is a vividly filmic work full of imagery both threatening and comic. Tregarthen says she and the team posed huge lists of questions about the strange world of the piece. “Can the lights see? Can we hear what the camera is thinking?

“That’s the beauty of cinema: there is this fantasy and suspended notion of reality. You have to create a logic to hold on to.”

The work comes at a time when the company is busier than ever: anyone who saw Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s stunning dance-theatre work Betroffenheit last February will remember Tregarthen and Raymond’s indelible roles as dark, carnivalesque characters who appear to the tormented protagonist. That Kidd Pivot/Electric Company Theatre show journeys through Europe next spring. At the same time, Pite, in fact, is acting as mentor to the Out Innerspace pair. All that, plus running Tregarthen and Raymond’s contemporary-dance training program Modus Operandi, keeps the pair moving as they prepare to mount their company’s most ambitious work.

But, as Tregarthen puts it, “David and I never feel like we’re on a break from Out Innerspace.” As we said, everything is fuel for their creation.

Out Innerspace presents Major Motion Picture at the Firehall Arts Centre from Wednesday to next Saturday (October 12 to 15).