Choreographed by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar. A Carte Blanche production, presented by DanceHouse. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Saturday, March 23. No remaining performances

No matter how you choose to parse its punning title, there’s no denying that with Corps de Walk, the partners-in-life-and-art team of choreographer Sharon Eyal and designer Gai Behar have created an exciting, innovative, and visually impressive spectacle.

What it all means, however, is up for debate.

In a brief program note, Eyal said that she’s interested in what one might call pedestrian movement: the way the body works during everyday locomotion. “For me walks are the new dance,” she says, while indicating that she’s also curious about creating “a kind of hi-tech building” from her dancers’ human forms. As one might expect from the house choreographer for Israel’s acclaimed Batsheva Dance Company, she’s turned these twin obsessions into highly charged movement, crafting patterns that do seem to have some of the modular quality of postmodern architecture and that only rarely embody traditional forms of dance.

One brief pas de deux, early on in Corps de Walk’s hourlong running time, referenced the time-honoured balletic trope of the male prop and the female object, but perhaps mockingly: though momentarily thrilling in its incongruity, it was also rather pointedly awkward. Otherwise, in this work for Norway’s Carte Blanche company, Eyal drew from a diverse array of nontraditional sources, most often cunningly reconfigured so that no obvious inferences could be made.

Were the dancers inspired by traditional Indian dance or the preening arrogance of the catwalk when they faced the audience with their eyes wide open and flat, fixed semi-smiles? It was hard to tell, but the effect was startling. And was the opening sequence—in which the lights came slowly up on all 13 dancers, standing in a circle with their arms held high—a nod to that modernist icon The Rite of Spring? Again, I have no idea, but the image suggested that Eyal was intent on tapping into the primal and the ceremonial, while the soundscape (calling songbirds, peeping frogs, and a lone, buzzing fly) certainly invoked a vernal landscape.

For a moment, the performers—clad in flesh-tone, skintight body suits, with their faces and hair powdered as if for butoh—resembled pale alders seeking the sun. But this organic image was undercut by composer–DJ Ori Lichtik’s use of synthesized rather than sampled sound to represent the forest animals, a decision that immediately established that we were not, in fact, in some sacred grove, but rather in an indeterminate zone between the natural and the artificial.

It was a brilliant choice.

I can’t say the same about the music that underpinned the last half of the performance: a pounding, minimal techno score that assaulted the seated audience even as it provided unwavering support for Eyal’s intricate ensemble crossings.

Was there a message in this, too? Perhaps. At points, the choreography took on an almost military precision, with overtones of the parade ground and the combat zone—another unsettling thing to contemplate, given that the two creators hail from one of the most militarized regions on Earth. But there were also moments of considerable sweetness, as soloists literally skipped out of the group to display more personal moves. Ultimately, Corps de Walk came across as a comprehensive survey of human experience, and provoked similarly diverse responses, from bafflement to joy.