Amid all the spectacle in the culture-crossing new show Pearl, one audacious set piece has been the focus of most of the buzz: a real, flowing, six-foot-wide river, meant to represent the majestic Yangtze.

Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning American author Pearl S. Buck, the subject of the production, lived on the banks of the Yangtze during her years in China. But Canadian dance icon Margie Gillis, one of five performers who play Buck in the show, reveals she doesn’t get to splash around in the on-stage river herself.

“We do have these beautiful mermaid women that float through the water,” she tells the Straight over the phone during “a rare moment” at her home in Montreal before heading out to Vancouver with Pearl on its North American tour. “But I don’t wade in the river. I go over the bridges.”

Those bridges could not be a more fitting symbol for the show. Raised by missionaries in Zhenjiang, Buck built bridges between the East and West with best-selling novels like 1931’s The Good Earth, about peasant life in China.

Later, she moved back to the States and became a big advocate for Asian and mixed-race adoption and understanding between China and the U.S. (That work and her feminist views later made her the target of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his Communist hunt.)

“I was a voracious reader when I was a child and I read all of her books. I loved them, and a number of images are still with me,” Gillis says. “They stuck so strongly in the psyche. I didn’t know what she did later in life, I only knew her as a writer. And I was amazed at all the work she did later when I found out with this show.”

The production, too, is a study in East-West relations, a collaboration between Chinese producer Angela Xiaolei Tang, of Legend River Entertainment, and American choreographer Daniel Ezralow (a former Paul Taylor star who’s staged everything from Cirque du Soleil’s The Beatles LOVE to Broadway’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark). They bring together a cast of 26 Canadian, American, and Chinese dancers for the show.

It’s a cultural melding that speaks to Gillis, who has herself worked to build artistic connections around the globe. In 1979, Gillis was invited to teach and give lectures in Maoist China, becoming the first western artist to bring modern dance there post–Cultural Revolution.

“For me, as a young artist, I was thrilled with the opportunity to dance for a culture that hadn’t grown up with Mickey Mouse and didn’t have the cultural references my audiences did,” she recalls. “I wanted to see if I was teaching something basically human. It was just the depth and value of that communication and people feeling that life-changing experience.”

After she founded her own company, the Margie Gillis Dance Foundation, two years later, she toured around Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America.

And that outreach has continued with the international cast of Pearl: “I’ve been able to teach a lot of my work to the company as a warm-up,” she says.

For Gillis, as much as the show is known for its multimedia spectacle, complete with acrobatics, aerial performance, and calligraphic video projections, it celebrates Buck and her work. The show is divided into chapters titled “Spring”, “River”, “Flower”, “Moon”, and “Night”, based on an influential Chinese poem written centuries ago by Zhang Ruoxu, with “Spring” representing her youth and “Moon” and “Night” her later life and death.

“Danny is very discerning and has a strong critical mind, but he is a humanist at heart and very good at drawing people around a creative idea where the human being feels seen,” she says of Ezralow, whom she first met when he performed with her brother Chris at the Paul Taylor Dance Company and then worked with at companies like MOMIX and benefits for Amnesty International.

The dancer-activist adds Pearl’s messages of cultural understanding could not be coming at a better time, in these days of American election rhetoric and fearmongering about immigrants.

“When we’re looking at things in the States now, this is certainly heartening to see there are people who really care and are focused on humanitarian values,” she says. And she hopes those values will flow out like that river at centre stage.

Pearl is at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Thursday and Friday (October 27 and 28).