You'd think that more than three decades of revealing her deepest torments and triumphs alone on-stage would have taken it out of Margie Gillis. Her solo works have unflinchingly explored everything from her grief over her brother's death to her own search for love. But as the Canadian modern-dance icon enters her 50s, she's found that rather than wearing her out, baring her soul has re-energized her.

"It's exhausting, but that's the joy as well," the artist says from her home in Montreal, her voice percolating with an enthusiasm you'd associate with a youthful dance upstart. "Yes, you go there and you get into these states of ecstasy and despair and you come out the other side. But something so magical and intimate can happen with the audience-and does-so why would I hold back?"

Of the few negative reviews her solos have received over her career, it's telling that most have a similar complaint: that Gillis dances as if she's in her own room. "This is my biggest criticism," she admits. "But that's something that I love, because how intimate, how vulnerable, how close to the bone is that when you peek into someone's room and see them unveiled and not masking what it is they are feeling?"

When Gillis returns to town next Thursday and Friday (July 7 and 8) for the first time in eight years, kicking off the Dancing on the Edge festival with a Vancouver Playhouse performance, she'll peel back more layers of herself. The program, called Voyages to Interior Landscapes, brings together five solos created over the past 15 years; only one of them, 1989's Bloom, has been seen in Vancouver before. All the pieces are linked, Gillis says: "They are all an unveiling; they are a revealing; they all have an intimacy."

Proof that Gillis isn't afraid to plumb her own life for her artistic inspiration, Loon, a 1999 piece set to the haunting calls of its title bird, was prompted by someone questioning her sanity.

"I did have a nervous breakdown when I was very much younger, lost all my hair and all of that stuff....So when this person called me crazy, it just kind of stuck," the artist recounts. "Then after about a week of searching I realized at the bottom of my soul that I was in fact not crazy enough. So I set about the task of remaining in silence until I heard the need to move from my belly and I would go where I didn't know I was going. So Loon is this opening up from the dark side and finding it's not so bad."

She's equally candid about the roots of the newest work on the bill, 2003's A Complex Simplicity of Love. Looming large in the piece is her older brother, the accomplished Paul Taylor Dance Company member Christopher Gillis, who died 12 years ago of AIDS but continues to influence her work. "Like many people, I want love in my life, I need love, and I was going through a period where there was just very little to be found," she begins. "The piece became a dialogue, and part of it had to do with my brother: he had made me feel utterly seen, known, and loved for who I was. He saw my flaws and loved me anyway."

Christopher was her first dance partner, at three years old, when the two were growing up in a household run by parents who were Olympic skiers. Gillis began with ballet lessons, and later trained with Martha Graham alumnus May O'Donnell before developing her own style, making the groundbreaking move into contemporary solo dance in the mid-'70s. "I started doing the solo work because I didn't think I could get anyone else to do what I wanted," she says. "It does require courage, and I thought I could ask that of myself but not really of anybody else. It was completely off-the-wall at the time; there was nobody else doing it."

Since then, Gillis has created 80 solos, and their influence has resonated across the country, including this city's arts scene. Former Ballet B.C. dancer Emily Molnar is perhaps her best-known protégée; having plunged into choreography, Molnar debuted her first full-length solo show, SubSilence, last month. Other dancers whose styles are vastly different from Gillis's raw, emotional movement-from Cori Caulfield to Crystal Pite-arguably wouldn't have been able to imagine selling a full evening of lone work if there had not been a Margie Gillis.

"Margie truly has been a pioneer in solo dance internationally, and the way funding is going, more and more Canadian dancers are doing solos instead of expensive group work," explains Dancing on the Edge producer Donna Spencer on the line from the Firehall Arts Centre. "We have created a tremendous appetite for young people who want to create dance instead of just performing it, but the actual funding support is fairly minimal. So often they're creating work on themselves."

Spencer sees Gillis's approach to art as fitting kickoff to Dancing on the Edge (which runs July 7 to 16, centred at the Firehall). "At this year's festival we do have a lot of artists working independently-not necessarily meaning they're doing solo work, but without the support of an ongoing company. Independent also means they're pushing the envelope of what contemporary dance is. This is a festival that celebrates independent creators, independent ideas, and certainly independent-minded people, and Margie Gillis has been a leader in that area."

These days, Gillis is busy influencing dance around the planet. She just finished her annual teaching stint for New York's Juilliard School, regularly tours Europe, and holds workshops at home and abroad.

The Canadian legend is working harder than ever, and has no intention of slowing down. Far from draining the senior artist, opening her soul up to her audiences has given Gillis the strength to continue long past the point where most dancers hang up their leotards. "There's a healing quality to it. So that-along with some excellent genes and these huge, dense bones of mine-means I'm lucky enough to continue doing my work in a way that gives me a great deal of pleasure and allows me to continue touching other people's lives."

Margie Gillis performs at the Vancouver Playhouse next Thursday and Friday (July 7 and 8). For more Dancing on the Edge Shows, see www.dancingontheedge.org/.