Pushing herself and her dancers to do what has never been done in tap before is an impulse that has often characterized Michelle Dorrance’s career. But in the new creation she’s bringing to the DanceHouse stage here, she synthesizes all that energy, and the different ways she’s propelled the form, into a single piece.

Myelination, the title of the work, refers to the brain process in which fatty myelin builds around nerve fibres as you practise new skills, allowing you to excel faster. It’s a process Dorrance is actually activating in the work itself, which finds her and her honed team of hoofers engaging with live music.

“We were pushing ourselves to do what we could not yet do,” Dorrance, one of the foremost practitioners of her art form, explains to the Straight after a rehearsal in New York City. “This is choreography that we had to push ourselves to attain. There’s this athletic feeling of pushing ourselves to our limit. And you get into this zone where you’re literally building myelin.”

The result is a piece that pushes the form not just physically, but creatively and conceptually. While Myelination draws on elements of hip-hop, playing two break-dancers off the nine others’ rapid-fire footwork, it also stresses tap as a percussive form, with live music by Donovan Dorrance, Gregory Richardson, and vocalist Aaron Marcellus. Most interestingly, perhaps, it also shows how the dance form can take on larger themes—inevitably, the America Dorrance finds herself living in today.

“We’re trying to have the most integrity and be the best that we can be as technicians and as artists.…But there are also elements of destructive behavioural practices that build the same mye­lin,” the affable, articulate artist says of Myelination, which, in one sequence, features one of her dancers crashing repeatedly onto the floor. “Culturally and politically in our country, there’s a kind of dark awakening happening, under a dark administration. It calls to mind misogynistic behaviour, psychopathic behaviour. So you can see a duality or struggle in the work. But ideally we’re in a better place by the end.”

It’s this open, ambitious vision that has made the New York City–based Dorrance, who’s now 38, such a force in tap. It’s won her the 2012 Princess Grace Award for artistic excellence, it’s won her gigs from Japan to Brazil, and it’s won her company a rare-for-tap place on contemporary-dance stages, including the acclaimed Jacob’s Pillow fest in Massachusetts, and, of course, the DanceHouse roster here. Dorrance finds no limit to what she’s able to explore in a style some still associate with lighthearted song-and-dance musicals.

“It always really blows my mind to continue to discover,” she enthuses. “There’s a very narrow perspective of what’s possible in our art form. I’m just lucky and grateful to have the particular artists I get to explore with.

“I have this interesting relationship to running out of time to try what I want to try,” she adds. “My mom was a ballet dancer, my dad was a soccer player and then a coach, so maybe that’s why I’m always wanting to develop and hone my technical craft and edge while I’m capable of it.”

As much as Dorrance has been taking tap into the future—the New Yorker has called her “one of the most imaginative tap choreographers working today”—she’s always honoured its past. On the triple bill here, she’ll also present Jungle Blues, a more old-school celebration of tap set to jazzy New Orleans blues.

“It’s very important to introduce the audience to the tradition and then show them our most contemporary piece,” she says. “History: we don’t exist without it. We have such a strong relationship to it, because there’s been so much misinformation about tap. Some of it has been institutionalized racism and just larger cultural ignorance.

“This was a dance born in plantations after drums were taken away from the slaves because they were worried about uprisings,” she stresses. “I just think those origins are very powerful.…Tap is at the very root of what we call American art forms—not first peoples, but reflecting the immigrant experience and the possibilities of oppressed peoples.”

The third piece on the program, Three to One, set to music by Aphex Twin and Thom Yorke, finds Dorrance, in white tap shoes, rhythmically propelling and playing off of two barefoot hip-hop dancers. She says she feels a bond with B-boys and -girls because tap and breaking are American vernacular traditions that have a lot in common.

“I want to illustrate that we are speaking a very similar musical language,” she says of Three to One. “We are speaking it with sound, so there’s interplay between my very aural world and their rhythmic movement. And it’s a great counterpoint.”

In all, the DanceHouse evening should serve as an inspiring one-stop shop for all that is happening in the burgeoning world of tap. Just don’t ask Dorrance if she thinks there’s a tap “renaissance” going on right now, as so much of the media is ballyhooing. This leader in the art form heard similar buzz in the 1980s and ’90s, when Gregory Hines hit Hollywood and new tap musicals were booming on Broadway.

“This legacy existed before what we’re doing and there have been other renaissances in my lifetime,” she says, “but we never stopped, only because of the incredibly strong, close-knit tap community.…What we can only hope is that we sustain enough momentum to not feel another wall, to not ever have to feel that it’s another renaissance. And this reminds me of why we’re pushing so hard.”

DanceHouse presents Dorrance Dance at the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday and Saturday (April 13 and 14).