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Vancouver Symphony Orchestra Conducted by Evan Mitchell Kokoro Dance

Roundhouse Community & Arts Recreation Centre

In Vancouver on Friday

The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra's new music series at the Roundhouse attracts audiences of respectable size but they are hardly standing-room-only events. Pair new music with new dance, however, as the VSO did when it teamed up with Kokoro Dance and the Vancouver International Dance Festival on Friday, and the space was packed.

Viewed as a concert, and from the perspective of a music rather than dance critic, the programming was odd: The primal, pounding rhythms of New Zealand composer Gareth Farr's Pagan Prayer for four trombones, four percussionists, and soprano (the excellent Viviane Houle, singing a text by Baudelaire), followed by Scott Good's jazzy, virtuosoBabbitt-Concerto for Saxophone(s), made for an extremely high-energy first half, but the slow-moving minimalism of Arvo Part's Tabula Rasa appeals to such a different sensibility that the program risked going out on a (long) whimper. Add dance, though, and the dynamic changes.

The sense of collaboration, of a balance between dance and music where neither obviously dominated the other, was the most exuberant in Pagan Prayer, choreographed by Barbara Bourget and the four men of Now or Never, a group that specializes in a form of break-dancing called B-boy (watch for them busking to a boombox on Robson Street or at international competitions). The pulsing, violent beat and guttural sounds of the piece's opening - Farr's influences include Balinese gamelan and Rarotongan log drum ensembles - had apocalyptic intensity. We expected similar speed and force from the dancers, but we got, initially, only slow, suspended gestures, movement an inch at a time. All the more shocking, then, when these muscled dancers rose up, in running shoes and black singlets, arms bare, faces ghoulish in the pasty white body makeup associated with Japanese butoh, and exploded into dizzying, break-dance spins and power moves, pivoting like mechanical spiders on the floor at dervish speeds that trick the eye into believing the bodies are not in contact with the ground. Not a normal night at the symphony.

Good's Babbitt concerto was also off the main track. Inspired by the novel of the same name by Sinclair Lewis, and composed for the phenomenal young saxophonist Wallace Halladay, Babbitt is a farrago of different styles, from lush, romantic impressionism to Big Band swing, a separate style for each of the four saxophones - soprano, alto, tenor and baritone - that Halladay plays, each one corresponding to a different aspect of the title character's chameleon-like personality.

Jay Hirabayashi's choreography seemed less collaboration than commentary: It ran in parallel to the music, a visual gloss that cemented the music's allusion to the novel. That's not to say that the dance wasn't evocative in the underwater slowness of the movements, or touching in its eventual angst and in the awkward disconnect between the two dancers, Holly Holt and Hirabayashi. But Halladay's saxophone playing is so riveting on its own that not much can compete against it.

On the other hand, almost the opposite applies to Barbara Bourget's choreography, for nine (female) dancers, to Part's Tabula Rasa ("blank slate"). Part's music can be mesmerizing, but, like meditation, it generally requests our single-minded concentration. The score for Tabula Rasa, which might be likened to Vivaldi stuck on a single harmony, is not an exception. However, it was exactly the right music for this dance, and it was the dance that mattered.

The opening movements were strong, sculptural, discrete and active, an elegant calligraphy of white arms, red tunics, arcs and angles. But the dance became more fluid, or gently supple, as the piece progressed, and occasionally a dancer would melt into another's arms for support. There were disturbing spurts of near-spastic activity. Even more disturbing was the final gesture, of negation or, perhaps, disbelief - a head shaking, as fast as is physically possible, "No, no and no again."