When you create a dance that features eight performers jumping in difficult rhythmic patterns for 70 gruelling minutes straight, you’re bound to get some pretty strong reactions.

Belgian dance maverick Jan Martens reports the most vociferous response to his The Dog Days Are Over has come from the famously vocal audiences of France. “In Paris we had a woman screaming in the middle of the show, ‘This is torture!’ ” he reports to the Straight over the phone from Montreal, where his work is touring before heading out to Vancouver’s Scotiabank Dance Centre. “And at the end, ‘Bravo for the dancers but not for the choreographer!’

“The reactions in the audience are very divided,” he continues. “One side feels this is too much and ‘Oh my God, they are going too far!’ And the others are laughing and being entertained. This is what I am going for: it makes you question who is right.”

Don’t worry, though. Martens assures that he put all kinds of research into how long the dancers could sustain the experiment without hurting themselves. And, through that process, he discovered an unexpected effect—one that reviews say is clearly visible, and highly metaphorical, on-stage. “What was a surprise to me was they [the dancers] said, ‘I could never do this on my own.’ Not because they could lose the count but just the fact that people doing this with you also makes it easier for you,” Martens explains. “You build energy as a group.”

Martens was inspired to make The Dog Days Are Over by the photos of Philippe Halsman, the artist best known for his LIFE magazine portraits in the 1950s. He would shoot stars like Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe jumping, but it wasn’t so much the images as what Halsman said about the photos that struck Martens. “He said, ‘I ask them to jump because they’re not busy with the act of posing,’ ” he relates. “When you jump you can’t control your facial expression. And he said in this way he could capture the real human being.”

Capturing the real human being has been Martens’s goal ever since he discovered contemporary dance at 17. He went off to train in the Netherlands, where he was put off by the emphasis on virtuosity of the neoclassical style. “That was a very limited view of what beauty could be,” the Flemish artist recounts. “I guess I had kind of a reaction to all these beautiful bodies and beautiful lines.

“There is beauty in an old body, in a child’s body, in a big body,” he adds, basically describing the subjects of his early solos.

Far from creating conceptual work that sits on a pedestal, he seeks to connect with the audience by showing the fragility of the people on-stage. So it’s accessible, but with a work like Dog Days, he wants to challenge you, too.

“The performance is about getting too much information to be able to digest it,” he says. “And how do we do that as human beings when, today, our world is going faster and faster?”

Of course, that brings us back to the dancers, who must also commit to memory the almost impossibly complex symphony of tasks that Dog Days sets out—making the show as much a physical feat as a mental one. “It’s really a hard-core show,” he admits. “We had to look at what is healthy and what is not.

“Of course,” he adds wryly, “if you did this show for 10 years, that would not be a good idea.”

The Dog Days Are Over is at the Scotiabank Dance Centre next Thursday to Saturday (October 29 to 31).