The battlefield is about as far from the dance stage as you can travel, and it was a place that American choreographer Jessica Lang was hesitant to go at first.

But when a former marine on the board of her New York–based company Jessica Lang Dance encouraged her to take on the idea of war and posttraumatic stress disorder, she decided to wade in, eventually creating a work that broke new emotional ground for her. In retrospect, she says, “I think I was most surprised about how much I didn’t think about it before.”

Lang is best known for pieces that are like moving artworks. There’s even a geometric and primary-coloured ode to Piet Mondrian on her company’s Vancouver program. But her journey in creating Thousand Yard Stare took her into the dark and unknown.

“I accepted the challenge and then I said to myself, ‘The only way I want to explore this is through the human experience,’ ” Lang says, speaking to the Straight over the phone from her home on Long Island, where her company will soon move into new headquarters. “I wanted to connect to veterans and make it for them and with them.”

Lang spent weeks interviewing those who have fought wars, listening to their posttraumatic struggles. Those still too damaged to open up to her were asked to create drawings while listening to the sombre music she uses in the piece: Ludwig van Beethoven’s haunting String Quartet No. 15, Op. 132.

The experience took a huge toll on her, she admits. “Oh my God… It was super emotional, to the point where I had to actually just stop and go into the studio,” she says of her research. “I had a very visceral response and attachment to it. It’s important to know, but I also wish I didn’t know. You can’t unlearn it.”

Perhaps most personally moving was the fact the stories gave her a new perspective on what her own father, who was drafted during the Vietnam War, might have gone through. “He never talked about it,” she recalls. “It was really downplayed in my life growing up.”

The research led to a studio process that contrasted with her usual approach. Lang says she usually goes into creation with a set idea for her meticulously sculpted, visually evocative dance—dance that draws on both her ballet and modern training dating back to her days at the Juilliard School. But this time, she says, was the first when she didn’t have her ideas fully formed.

After she shared what she’d learned with her small, tightly knit group of nine honed dancers, they started improvising and creating imagery to bring to life the pain and camaraderie of war. The piece’s title comes from a phrase used to describe the blank gaze of a battle-weary soldier.

The drawings made their way into the work too: costume designer Bradon McDonald was able to integrate some of the more striking ones onto the backs of the dancers’ green-camouflage outfits. “When everyone looks forward, they’re all the same; when they turn their backs, they’re all different,” Lang explains.

Though the stage is bare to keep the subject matter raw, she’s bathed it all in a military-green light, punctuated by the odd bomblike white flash that sends the dancers into body-twisting leaps.

Thousand Yard Stare has turned out to be a piece that speaks to new audiences, says Lang, whose company tours the globe. 

“What I love is it’s a lot of people who are not dance aficionados coming up to me to talk about it [after the show],” she says. “They are saying, ‘I didn’t know I liked dance.’ And that’s how you introduce new audiences. We have one time to get people back: what they see when they’re in that theatre the first time determines whether they come back. I always keep that in mind.”

Lang says she has stumbled on a topic that’s “awful and timely”—and that can, unfortunately, be understood around the world. For his part, DanceHouse producer Jim Smith tells the Straight he’s interested to see the reaction here, in Canada, which likes to think of itself as a pacifist nation.

“One of the things we try to do as an organization is show how the Canadian experience is contrasted to other nations through artworks,” he explains of bringing the American dance troupe here for the first time. “It’s like travel: we become more aware of where we live, of what it is to be Canadian, when we see work that is not Canadian.

“Are people going to appreciate it as poetic? I’m curious to see if Vancouver audiences are going to go there.”

He adds the mixed program here, which draws from her work over the last 10 years with her company, highlights Lang’s—and her dancers’—enormous range. Amid the offerings, there’s a dreamlike film called White and a hallucinogenic live piece with a woman engulfed in her flowing, parachutelike white gown, named The Calling.

All of them, Thousand Yard Stare included, have a strong look and mood. As Smith puts it: “I’ve heard Jessica Lang talk about herself as a visual artist for whom dance is her medium.”

DanceHouse presents Jessica Lang Dance at the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday and Saturday (October 28 and 29).