Japanese butoh legend Akaji Maro admits it’s paradoxical, but it was hell on earth that turned him toward Paradise.

“I was inspired by unfortunate events in the world, like terrorism or war or environment destruction,” he tells the Straight, speaking through a translator from his headquarters in Tokyo’s Kichijoji neighbourhood before coming to the Vancouver International Dance Festival. “I couldn’t see any positive.”

Anyone who saw his 45-year-old troupe Dairakudakan’s last show at VIDF in 2015, Mushi no Hoshi, knows he creates otherworldly tableaux like no other. But they may also be surprised to find Maro turning to a more heavenly milieu. The previous nightmarish theatrical spectacle conjured a hellscape of human-insect hybrids.

But hell, Maro noticed, has been portrayed a lot in art over the centuries—especially in the dark, death-obsessed realm of butoh. Paradise, in all its many forms in different cultures, had not been as thoroughly explored. The septuagenarian choreographer, who’s also a well-known actor (and had a cool cameo in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 1), says he started to delve into portrayals of paradise in Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism, where hell is called Western Paradise (Gokuraku-jodo in Japanese).

“I was thinking, ‘What’s the definition of paradise?’ ” says Maro, who says he often collects his ideas in regular daydreaming sessions. “Adam and Eve had to leave paradise and I asked myself, ‘Why did they leave?’ Maybe it was because they gained knowledge, and that made me question why having knowledge is a good thing.

“So as I went over those ideas I started thinking paradise is a fiction built within us. And as I went through my creative process, my cynical point of view of this fiction started to evolve.”

As always, Maro was also inspired by other art forms. He drew heavily from the poem “L’Éternité” by Arthur Rimbaud—the lines “It has been found again. What? Eternity.”—and Henri Rousseau’s leafy paintings, which appear as projections in the show.

His signature wide research then took him into the etymology of the word paradise, which can be traced back to an old Persian word meaning “enclosed garden”. “Para means like a cover or block—like a parasol protects you from sun,” Maro explains. “So protecting yourself from bad things was also part of my creative process. Within this place we find something we experience for a moment where we find a happiness—it doesn’t matter whether it’s big or small.”

All of this study and brainstorming, along with ample input from his dancers about what paradise means to them, has resulted in a strange and dazzling show by the 18 performers coming here. The usual ghostly, white-caked, naked bodies of butoh are present, but so, too, are delirious images of brightly clothed roller skaters, bodies bound by chains, wild fright wigs, and scatterings of red hibiscus petals.

It’s a mix of both the heavily symbolic, and—at least in the case of roller-skating—his troupe’s ideas of pure utopia.

Maro tells us all this information so we can have a window onto his creation. But in the end, you can’t try too hard to decrypt the dream logic of his work; sometimes you miss the point by trying to entirely make sense of butoh. Expertise in the form, Maro stresses, is no prerequisite for enjoying the carnival of weird imagery and provocative ideas he conjures on-stage. You can hear his deep, resonant laugh over the phone line. “A sense of what butoh is: that’s a small measurement to see our work,” he says. “You should just apply your imagination and just enjoy it.”

The Vancouver International Dance Festival presents Dairakudakan’s Paradise at the Vancouver Playhouse on March 10 and 11.