Noam Gagnon steps away from dance powerhouse the Holy Body Tattoo and focuses his own startling vision.

When the Pictures for the Sky multimedia collective made its debut last June, vocalist Viviane Houle forgot her texts backstage and sang a loose version of "My Favorite Things" to accompany dancer Noam Gagnon's pensive improvisations. It was a happy accident. Gagnon liked her take on the Sound of Music standard so much that he's brought both song and singer back for the initial offering from his own interdisciplinary troupe, Co. Vision Selective. But those expecting a cheerful dance about "raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens" may be disappointed.

"My kittens are really different," says Gagnon, reached by phone at his Vancouver studio. "They've been killed! They're in turmoil! They're struggling!"

He's cracking himself up and apologizes for that, but he needn't; he's cracking me up, too. This is a side of Gagnon that many dance viewers never get to see: both with the Holy Body Tattoo company he cofounded and in many collaborative projects, he's known for staging elaborate explorations of anger, conflict, and alienation. In his private life, however, he's one funny guy.

"I find comedy difficult," he says, "but I'm constantly joking."

That urge to laugh, to lighten up, is what's behind the second part of his new company's debut, which takes place at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre from Tuesday to next Saturday (October 2 to 6). After his own three-part The Vision Impure, audiences will be treated to When That I Was, in which Gagnon will turn his chiselled body over to English choreographer Nigel Charnock–a kindred spirit, but one who has the ability to go public with his personal and perverse sense of humour.

"When it comes down to the stage, I find it very difficult to be humorous," Gagnon repeats. "Working with Nigel, though, it's been really fantastic to go through this experience where I am laughing inside at times. I'm going, 'Oh my God, I can't believe this is so dark, but it's so funny.' And it takes the piss out of itself so bad that I'm going, 'This is so great! I'm loving it!' We're really different in some ways, but movementwise it was like being home, working with him. And we laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed all through the process."

Charnock's piece, Gagnon says, is a particularly good fit with his own trilogy, in which he's working with dancer Sonja Perreten to pursue some of the ideas he was playing with in the years before he and his Holy Body Tattoo partner Dana Gingras decided to take a break from their internationally acclaimed collaboration.

"It was like, 'What's next?'" he says. "We just felt that we needed a time of exploration for ourselves, where we could continue to grow as artists and as individuals, and so that when we're together we have something else that we bring to the table. So we both took a hiatus year to work on personal projects, and it's been good to do something separate, so that we could redefine our own identity and our own sense of creative juice."

Having Perreten as a foil, Gagnon says, allows him to explore areas that would have been taboo with Gingras. "Instead of being in conflict when they're together, which is really an HBT theme, these characters are in conflict when they're not together. That, for me, is just something that we hadn't done yet, so I was very curious to see what it would look like."

And he credits his new stage partner with giving him a mirror onto which he could project his own fascination with the body as canvas.

"I was curious to see how the material would look on a woman," he explains. "How could I expose someone's chest the way I expose mine? How can I really get people to see the space between each rib, and the location of the breath, and how the nervous system can affect the journey of a character? And how do you take the responsibility of working with a woman and ask her to be beautiful and gorgeous–and topless, basically–while making sure that it doesn't become gratuitous?"

The answer, Gagnon continues, is to be fearless–which is why, in preparing to mount The Vision Impure, he spent several weeks in Spain, researching the ancient art of bullfighting.

"With every pass, you risk your life," he says, and now he's not laughing. "Every pass, it's a dance with life and death. And that's what I find incredible. When I was first working on my solo, I wanted to call it I'm Not Pretending. Again, I was like, 'How far can I go in this research? How can I really expose myself, really expose the things that are invisible to the naked eye?'

"I'm really curious about what moves us," he continues, explaining that The Vision Impure is his attempt to go beyond the twisted interpersonal dramas that has animated much of the Holy Body Tattoo's repertoire. Now, he says, he wants to bare his soul, to examine the things he craves and why. "It's really not that far away from what I've done before," he admits. "But I just know that there's a transparency that I'm trying to seek and express that is slightly different. And it's really nice on that level, to use this metaphor: there's no right or wrong, you just have to take the bull by the horns."