A DanceHouse presentation. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday, February 24. No remaining performances

Top-flight contemporary dance has a strong audience in Vancouver: witness the two wildly appreciative soldout audiences for BJM—aka Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal—this weekend.

In its 45th season, BJM continues to wow the world. It also continues to break new ground, pushing into edgy new territory, on this program dishing out some work that's dramatically avant-garde, yet still offering the physical spectacle its fans show up for.

Kosmos, the evening closer by Greek choreographer Andonis Foniadakis, is a perfect example of the company's fearless ambitions. It showcases an exciting new voice and an innovative vocabulary that pushes the dancers into extremes far removed from their rigorous balletic backgrounds. In a preshow talk, artistic director Louis Robitaille spoke about how Foniadakis's origins in Crete and its African influences drive his movement. In the frenzy that dominates the first half of Kosmos, dancers shake and twist their torsos, spin like Sufis gone mad, and kick their legs out with the force of pile drivers. The blur is meant to capture the frantic urban rush, but as the electro-guitar soundtrack by Julien Tarride continues, Foniadakis takes the work to an entirely different place of meaning. First he zeroes in on the human level, and then, through the magic of pixelated, star-like projections, the cosmic one. It's a bit like shifting from the stress-inducing, relentless roar of a busy street to the infinite calm of outer space. And the effect is surprisingly moving.

Beyond the big themes, there is also the sheer thrill of watching dancers push themselves so far past their physical limits. You can almost feel BJM's insanely honed dancers--including Arts Umbrella grads Kiera Hill and Kennedy Kraeling--reaching into those hidden stores of adrenaline to go ever further in the piece.

French star Celine Cassone stands out here, with her flailing fuchsia hair, as she does in the pumped-up pas de deux Mono Lisa, by Israeli-born choreographer Itzik Galili—who has a warped flair for male-female duets. Cassone teases and battles with Alexander Hille, him pulling her legs into increasingly impossible splits and exaggerated arabesques and hoisting her into backward and upside-down lifts. Set amid lighting that suggests an industrial setting and a similarly mechanical, typewriter-tinged soundscape, the piece mixes comedy and a current of vulnerability beneath the swagger. Cassone shows an otherworldly ability to flex and extend, or fall limp and doll-like, yet also has the muscular strength to pull off these acrobatics.

The only misstep on the program is Rouge, a piece that, though it's gamely executed, raises questions about appropriation—especially in this time and this place. The piece is meant to be a tribute to indigenous people and their "resilience", according to the program. The Grand Brothers turn tribal beats, throat singing, and sounds from nature into a compelling electro-driven score.

If Rouge had remained abstracted, like the soundscape, it might have remained on safe ground. But do the dancers really have to wear war paint and fringed costumes? Brazilian choreographer Rodrigo Pederneiras, of Grupo Corpo, enacts an abstracted history of the Americas' indigenous peoples through his explosive dance style, with a driving hop-hop-stamp rhythm and whiplash-inducing head snapping.

But the midsection focuses on repeated images of men taking women from behind—not too subtly, the rape of a culture. The imagery verges on insensitive, given what indigenous women have endured over the centuries and still do in Vancouver streets. We're sensitized to these issues now, thanks to a growing wave of new indigenous artists and choreographers reclaiming their voice, and to works that take pains to use cultural signifiers with the utmost sensitivity and input from First Nations. It's a case, quite possibly, of good intentions gone awry.

Still, leaving the theatre, the overriding feeling was of just having watched a troupe of superhumans pummel the stage floor, defy gravity, and push themselves past their limits. One of the most memorable moments was not during the bombast, but during a brief pause in Kosmos: a rare, revelatory second where you could hear the dancers heaving and trying to catch their breath. With everything moving so fast, it was a reminder of the true physical feats they were pulling off here.