“You can’t blast it out from the beginning or you will have nothing left at the end,” choreographer Aszure Barton is advising the Ballet BC dancers in a Scotiabank Dance Centre studio. But it may be too late—for this rehearsal, at least. They’re collapsed around the room catching their breath, some flapping their T-shirts to cool off, others slumped on the barres.

The group has just finished a run-through of Busk, Barton’s hyperenergetic, densely choreographed work that sends the dancers flying around to the sounds of frenzied klezmer violas, accordions, and folk choirs. All of Barton’s signature touches—the humour, the vulnerability, the defiance—are there: amid the piece’s surging bodies, you glimpse dancers doing handstands, sticking out their tongues, blowing raspberries, and, yes, that was Scott Fowler laughing maniacally and Miriam Gittens breaking into a killer back flip.

“Going back to BUSK, I’m reminded that the physicality and the form speak better than any kind of theatrical intention,” Barton, who’s reviving and tweaking the work she created for her own company around a decade ago, says after rehearsal. “There’s so much multitasking in this piece—the head is doing one thing, the arms are doing another, the feet are doing another—and if it’s danced properly, it exposes the humanity in the body.”

“One of the fundamental themes of it was exhaustion,” her long-time rehearsal director Jonathan Alsberry adds with a smile. “It’s good to give them something that seems beyond their reach.”

Barton, the Alberta-born choreographic star who’s long been based in New York City but now calls Los Angeles home, was pleased to find Ballet BC in the top form the piece requires.

She had crossed paths with American dance icon William Forsythe last season, when he praised the company and told her he was staging his seminal Enemy in the Figure with it. Barton decided to get a ticket to fly up for that opening.

“I’m such a proud Canadian, and just to hear that they’re one of the hot companies right now, not just from him but others too, I wanted to go,” she says. “When I saw it, I thought, ‘Wow, those dancers are killing it.’ ”

Witnessing the Vancouver troupe nail Forsythe’s intricate work, she knew it could handle BUSK.

“The fire was lit,” continues Barton, whose Vetrale was staged by Ballet BC seven years ago. “There are a lot of companies that wouldn’t have that creative endurance.…Seeing Bill’s [Forsythe’s] work showed me that they had the chops, but also that they had the focus.”

Knowing the “meticulous” approach of artistic director Emily Molnar, who is spending her last season with Ballet BC before heading to the renowned Nederlands Dans Theater, helped seal the deal. “The strength comes from the top,” Barton observes. “She’s a workhorse; she’s a disciplined artist, and I have a lot of respect for Emily and what she does. Her commitment to dance is incredibly inspiring and important.”

In Ballet BC’s season-opening program, Barton’s work will join a remount of the equally adventurous B.R.I.S.A., by Swedish sensation Johan Inger. Later, BUSK will become part of an all-female bill with Sharon Eyal’s Bedroom Folk and Crystal Pite’s Solo Echo, as Ballet BC tours to Texas and then through Europe next year.

A spot on an all-female roster sparks a feeling of pride in Barton, who danced at the National Ballet of Canada, and has also been a pioneer in a small but strong group of women choreographers at the world’s big companies. She’s in demand everywhere from American Ballet Theatre and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago to Nederlands Dans Theater and Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal. At the same time, she has her own Aszure Barton & Artists (which has come here in the past as part of the Chutzpah Festival). Along with Pite and Eyal, she’s helped put a more female face on international dance creation, where, in both classical-ballet and contemporary worlds, men have, until recently, been more prominent.

“I think it’s really important to talk about,” Barton says. “For years I chose not to acknowledge that. I thought for years, ‘I don’t want to have this discussion,’ but I do now.…But I’m curious to see if it changes. Choreographers need space to get better, and there are so many female choreographers.”

Barton seems to be in a comfortable place these days, both careerwise and personally. She retreated to the West Coast, where fellow dance-artist sisters Cherice and Charissa-Lee live, to be closer to family. She’s artist in residence at the University of Southern California’s dance program, and she’s enjoyed escaping the New York rush for the West Coast state of mind—even if the work takes her regularly across and out of the U.S.

“It’s been so so wonderful for actual clarity, and for the anxiety—I still have all that, but it’s diffused a lot,” she says with a smile. “It’s useful and important to look back at the work you’ve made, to refuel.”

It feels like Barton is taking the same advice she gives the dancers: she’s learned to pace herself, while still retaining all her creative energy.

Ballet BC presents Program 1 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from Thursday to Saturday (October 31 to November 2).