For 10 years, Toronto choreographers Roberto Campanella and Robert Glumbek have been creating a work set to Ludwig van Beethoven’s famous Symphony No. 9 in D Minor—“the Ninth”. And at this point they’re more aware than ever of how monumental the undertaking is.

“It was frightening then and it’s even more frightening now,” former National Ballet of Canada dancer Campanella says, laughing, on a break from rehearsals at his company ProArteDanza’s Toronto headquarters. “It’s big. It’s epic.

“It’s had such a political and social impact over the centuries. It’s in the consciousness of a lot of people on the planet,” adds the affable artist. “It’s a masterpiece, to say the least, and here we are, trying to do it justice. That was the motto for Robert and I, to at least do it justice—and we are humbly saying this.”

The pair of long-time collaborators created a piece set to the iconic symphony’s first movement a decade ago, and from there, movement by movement, they have worked their way up to The 9th!, the full-evening piece for the entire symphony that will make its world premiere at the Chutzpah Festival here. “Robert and I ask dancers to take risks all the time, but Robert and I are also on the hot seat,” says Campanella, who choreographed for the Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water.

What Campanella and Glumbek have been working against, in part, is the famous work’s long reputation as a piece that’s impossible to dance to. That’s largely because of its daunting musical structures.

“There are fugues all the time, and you either swim through the music or you are a part of the score, and in that case there’s a great deal of details and it becomes tedious,” Campanella says.

Instead, the key for this creative team has been making the pulsing, athletic work for eight dancers an emotional journey, and drawing on the ways it has been associated with political and social action through history. One epic event the choreographers refer to specifically is the fall of the Berlin Wall. Years ago, while working in the German capital, Campanella was struck by an image he saw during a tour of the wall’s remnants. In the photo, taken during the barrier’s earliest stages as barbed wire, a family looks through the fence from the East German side to another on the West side.

“And the body language was so different,” he explains. “The family in the East had a weight to their body language.”

He and Glumbek decided to weave the idea of the Berlin Wall coming down, as well as metaphors about our own internal walls, into the piece. This was before they found out Beethoven’s Ninth had been played throughout by Leonard Bernstein in honour of the wall’s razing in 1989.

Audiences will be able to read history and emotion into the work, but one thing Campanella hopes they won’t dwell upon is another wall that’s being touted south of the border.

“Our next-door neighbour is putting up walls, while our work is actually celebrating the fall of walls,” he says, stressing: “We’re only celebrating this freedom and unity. Many walls are coming down, and this is about having unity and diversity.”

ProArteDanza presents The 9th! from October 26 to 28 at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre as part of the Chutzpah Festival.