In front of Vancouver choreographer Sara Coffin sits an unassuming little book that, in its own simple way, is revolutionizing the dance world. Called Schreibstí¼ck and created by Germany’s Thomas Lehmen, the thin paperback is the typewritten outline for a dance work—but one quite unlike anything you have ever seen.

Designed for three different companies of three performers to interpret separately and then present together on-stage, it sets out themes rather than specific movements. But it’s carefully structured into 29 one-minute segments. Sitting at a downtown outdoor patio between rehearsals, Coffin pages through to one choice set of instructions to the dancers: they’re to enact “being, breathing, crying, dying, eating, feeling, fighting, fucking, laughing, perceiving, sleeping”—in that order, it stipulates—over the course of one segment.

“The only way it can be performed is in three trios, and they overlap in canon,” Coffin, who undertook the project as artist in residence at the Dance Centre over the past year, says with enthusiasm. “There’s one instruction that’s called ”˜Do movements related to dying,’ so it starts with three people dying on-stage, then six, then there are nine people dying on-stage.

“Some of the themes are waiting and watching, thinking, and doing nothing, so there’s a question: how do you make those three things different from each other?” Coffin says. “It also asks the audience, what do they consider performance?”

Just what it will look like when Schreibstí¼ck hits this year’s Dancing on the Edge festival, which runs from next Thursday (July 8) to July 18, will be almost as much of a surprise to the performers as to the audience. Coffin herself has directed one set of dancers, the local trio of Daelik, Jennifer Clarke, and James Gnam, but the artist, who hails from the Maritimes, will also perform in the interpretation by Halifax-based SINS dance (led by Cory Bowles). The third group taking part is New York City’s Witness Relocation, whose director, Dan Safer, offers up some vivid descriptions of how Schreibstí¼ck might play out during its shows July 10 and 11 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre, based on other renditions his theatrical troupe has collaborated on in Bangkok and Atlanta.

“It’s like looking at the day room of an asylum, or maybe a bunch of things put together in a terrarium, and it’s fascinating to watch things happen in front of you,” Safer says over the phone from New York, adding it’s one of his favourite pieces to perform.

Another way of putting it is that Schreibstí¼ck (Written Piece) can be chaotic, comical, and filled with fleeting emotions and moods. In other words, it is a lot like the messiness of life flashing before your eyes. For Coffin, it’s also about artists from different regions working together on a single piece: “The most important thing for me is the exchange of communities, bringing many people to one stage and sharing real experiences.”

Coffin got her hands on the coveted little book back in 2005, when she attended Vienna’s ImPulsTanz festival and a composition workshop led by Mí¥rten Spí¥ngberg, a colleague of Lehmen’s. When she showed interest in the score after the class, he immediately offered her the 72-page manual. Later, after she secured her residency at the Dance Centre in 2008, she contacted Lehmen to seek rights to produce the work. (Lehmen himself has said he will never create his own version of Schreibstí¼ck; he prefers to leave it open to interpretation.) When she got the okay, an integral part of the project arrived: everyone who creates a piece for Schreibstí¼ck receives a box in the mail from Lehmen. Inside is gaffer’s tape and a measuring tape to plot out the stage, a stopwatch to time each segment, and a felt fabric pen for the dancers to use to scrawl their own names on their costumes.

Though it’s been produced two dozen times around the globe, this is the first time Schreibstí¼ck will be done in Canada, and Lehmen—an icon in the contemporary-dance scene internationally—is even flying to Vancouver to attend the performances. That’s creating more than a little anxiety on Coffin’s part, she admits.

Not so for Halifax’s Bowles: “I’m jacked about that, and also seeing what the other groups have done,” he enthuses from Nova Scotia. The SINS (which stands for Sometimes in Nova Scotia) group, along with Witness Relocation, will fly out with only a few days to meld the pieces into their contrapuntal pastiche. “There’ll be some envy and it’ll be really exciting, and then we may find things that are identical—that’ll be a little freaky. I hope we do it well for him [Lehmen]. It’s such an honour that he’s even coming, and it’s exciting we’re doing this in Canada.”

Coffin says the work, despite its rigorous (and oh-so-Germanic) structure, is “very casual”, with no music, a lot of spoken text, and a constant breaking down of the fourth wall. Viewers who enjoyed Jérí´me Bel’s The Show Must Go On or the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: a ballet brut during the winter’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival should find this right up their alley: a new kind of dance that’s starting to take hold, one that pushes the artists to reach into themselves and reveal who they are to an audience, instead of taking on a persona or putting on a dramatic faí§ade.

Witness Relocation is very much a part of that movement, which Safer summarizes this way: “It’s as much about the act of performance as it is about what’s being performed. It’s as much about the people performing as what they’re doing.”

“That’s why I wanted to do this: it’s not about skill,” explains Coffin, who stoked some of her nontraditional impulses while studying at SFU’s boundary-busting School for the Contemporary Arts. “For me, live theatre brings us back to being grounded and back to our own place of being and the idea of being a community. If we want to see great skill without risk, then we can go to classical ballet. This is being vulnerable. You’re not being someone else; you’re being yourself, and there’s a vulnerability in sharing that with the community.”

As for Bowles, he feels all dance should aspire to show the dancers as themselves. “I guess I’ve only come to that because of my background as an actor,” says Bowles, who is well-known in Halifax’s theatre world (not to mention for a stint as Cory on The Trailer Park Boys) and runs his own dance company, Verve Mwendo, there. “In dance we bring ourselves to any role we do; dancers are used to going on and putting themselves out there as far as improvising. But here it’s even more so: you start to realize you’re speaking to an audience, and you realize, ”˜This is what I sound like.’ ”

If all this makes Schreibstí¼ck seem overly conceptual, just go back to that little book and look at the down-to-earth simplicity of directions like “being, breathing, crying, dying, eating, feeling, fighting, fucking, laughing”. You may see three completely different takes on those actions in the show, but they don’t get more basic. Schreibstí¼ck’s magic seems to be in the emotional honesty that underlies its rigorous canon structure.

“I don’t feel you need to have any background in dance or theatre to totally enjoy this,” Safer stresses. “It does work on a theoretical and philosophical level, but what’s so great about it is it makes it immediately available to someone no matter what your background. So you can have a PhD in fine arts or you just got dragged in off the street to your first dance performance, and you’ll enjoy it just the same.”