A Compagnie Marie Chouinard production. Presented by DanceHouse. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Saturday, February 28. No remaining performances

Canadian dance’s premier provocateur was in fine form in Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s latest Vancouver appearance. In fact, the double bill, inspired by two historic French-speaking artists, met with a standing O and is an early contender for dance show of the year.

Gymnopédies, set to the serene piano pieces by Erik Satie, and Henri Michaux: Mouvements show the veteran choreographer at her best.

Both have art-historical depth, sexual charge, and endless innovative vocabulary. But most of all, scores of works into the Montreal icon’s prolific career, they still hold the element of surprise—and perhaps shock, to those less accustomed to her fearless takes on the human animal.

Gymnopédies opens on a set that evokes an elegant 19th-century drawing room, with a heavy linenlike curtain along the back wall, and the same fabric mummifying a grand piano at the side of the stage. At the other side stand similar draped “artworks”: human bodies, fully covered like ghosts. One emerges from the fabric, fingers first, rippling her digits toward the piano keys in anticipation, then begins to play the familiar, looping melodies at the bench. From this pretty scene the other dancers, too, slowly doff their cloths, eventually baring themselves naked and then pairing off, disappearing into a crack in the curtain at the back of the stage.

It’s just the beginning of Chouinard’s playfulness, in a piece where duets lead almost inevitably to giggling, moaning, and thrusting—with one aroused couple even humping against a wall and in the aisle of the auditorium itself. And whenever the troupe intermittently dons red clown noses, the work takes on an even more absurdist tone—not to mention alluding to Satie’s own sense of humour and Dadaist connections.

Amid it all, there is some gorgeous pairing, most strikingly between the tall Valeria Galluccio and the relatively diminutive Sacha Ouelette-Deguire, she in black pointe shoes, writhing and squatting with her legs spread to the audience, his hands sometimes lifting her by the crotch—a strange vision of female power and lust.

The biggest surprise here was the way Chouinard toyed with the notion of a curtain call, encouraging the audience to clap for her bowing dancers and then spiralling the piece off again, in newer, even more absurdist directions.

Michaux, set to gestural 1951 India-ink drawings by the Belgian-born artist, has a completely different mood, yet Chouinard’s sharp wit and brilliant mind are still at work. The dancers embody 64 pages of Michaux’s drawings, abstracted black blots that sometimes resemble humans and animals. As those splotches get more elaborate on the big screen at the back of the stage, it becomes fascinating how a single dancer, then twos, then threes, then still more performers, can mirror them and bring them to life. They sometimes arch backward and emit a primal growl; at other moments, several hands emerge from behind a dancer to wiggle and turn her into a multilimbed insect. It’s all set to a relentless, electro-speed-metal score by Edward Freedman, building to a frenzy of light, sound, and imagery that pushes dancers as much as audience members to their limit. It crescendos with the performers, half-nude, enacting the movements in a strobe light, the drawings now flicking before us in negative—white on black.

Just as she’s done with the work of Satie, Chouinard’s managed to take art from the past and turn it into something mind-blowingly cutting-edge. Instead of adapting his works to her own needs, the Quebec innovator has given her audiences a new, deeply enrichened appreciation for Michaux’s gestural power. And for her own, of course.