It wouldn’t be the Chutzpah! Jewish Performing Arts Festival without a stacked contemporary dance calendar, and this year’s lineup doesn’t disappoint.

Coming right up, dance fans have their choice of Rome’s enchanting Spellbound Contemporary Ballet (Feb. 27-29); New York’s athletic MADBOOTS, doubled up with a world premier by Chutzpah! resident company Shay Kuebler Radical System Art (Feb. 20-22); or the return of the multimedia fury that is Israel’s Maria Kong (March 5-7). There’s also Chutzpah! PLUS in May, offering works by Kelowna Ballet artistic director Simone Orlando and more, backed by compositions by some of Canada’s finest composers.

But if we’re indulging our unabashed curiosity, it leads us straight to Wonderland – a rumbling, tumbling interpretation of animalism by New York choreographer Andrea Miller and her company, Gallim Dance (March 10-13).

According to Miller, Wonderland was initially inspired by Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s stunning 2006 installation, Head On, which depicts a pack of wolves charging blindly through the air into a glass panel representing the physical barrier that was the Berlin Wall.

“He has this gorgeous installation of these 99 wolves charging into a glass wall, and crashing into it, and then coming back to basically just do the same thing,” Miller recalls, speaking with Westender by phone. “And he was trying to show that there still are walls that we’re sort of blind to, that are invisible […] like fear, for example.”

The Juilliard graduate adds that, when she created Wonderland in 2010, it was also in response to her feelings about the Iraq war.

“At the time, we were in a war with Iraq that I felt very uncomfortable about,” says the former Batsheva dancer. “I had been originally a supporter of it, because I was here in New York on Sept. 11, and it just felt like this is what had to happen,” she explains. “To see how it unfolded, though […] I had just signed the cheques to this war by agreeing to all these fear statements that they threw out. And then I felt tremendously guilty,” she admits.

In Wonderland, eight dancers investigate the pros and cons of that pack-like mentality. The characters – the Fool, Death, the Lovers, and “Cassandra” – play out their roles throughout the 44-minute piece to a score ranging from Chopin to circus music to the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. Fluorescent green lighting, euphoric and grotesque facial expressions, and revealing flesh-coloured costumes add to the manic effect.

The 33-year-old choreographer is no stranger to Vancouver, having worked previously as a teacher at Arts Umbrella, but Wonderland is her company’s first Chutzpah! performance since 2010, and one of its most critically successful works to-date.

As a festival experience, however, Chutzpah! doesn’t simply coast on the strength of its dance programming. Artistic director Mary-Louise Albert augments the 25-day event with comedy, world music, and though-provoking theatre, which this year includes a world premiere by Israeli-Canadian playwright Itai Erdal.

Erdal burst onto the Chutzpah! stage in 2011 with the debut of How to Disappear Completely. Prior to that, Erdal, who immigrated to Vancouver in 1999, had been enjoying an illustrious career behind the scenes as a theatrical lighting designer. The play, the first theatre piece he wrote and performed in, told the true story of his mother Mery’s battle with cancer, and was an emotional and unequivocal hit.

Now, Erdal returns with A Very Narrow Bridge (March 5-13) – a complex tale of love, family, religion and immigration that begins, somewhat humorously, with Erdal’s divorce.

Set in the stark, site-specific confines of a boardroom at the Jewish Community Centre, A Very Narrow Bridge reenacts (in surreal fashion) the trial that Erdal the atheist endured in order to obtain a get – the divorce document required under Jewish law – for his Israeli ex-wife.

“Even though she was the Canadian one, she moved back to Israel and we broke up,” he explains, of the backstory. “And then, a few years later, when she wanted to get married in Israel, she asked me to come and divorce her in the Rabbinical Institute.”

Produced by the Elbow Theatre Society and created in collaboration with Maiko Yamamoto of Theatre Replacement and Anita Rochon of Chop, A Very Narrow Bridge puts the audience in the witness seat for the somewhat eyebrow-raising experience.

“When the audience comes in, the three rabbis [played by Patti Allan, Tom Pickett and Anton Lipovetsky] are interrogating me,” he begins. “And that divorce was unbelievable – like a ceremony that you can never imagine,” Erdal exclaims. “A woman asks for a get in Judaism, and the man gives it,” he continues, with emphasis. “And so in all those hours we were there, they never talked to her once, they only talked to me. And they constantly asked me, ‘Are you sure you want to divorce this woman? Was she unfaithful to you? Is she not pretty?’”

As with any divorce, there’s more to the story than just a parting of the ways, and Erdal has family and a fairly large secret to add to the drama. But A Very Narrow Bridge is, at its core, a story of identity.

“Even though I’m a very successful immigration story, I still feel that immigrating is a very hard thing to do and I’m somewhat torn between two cultures,” says Erdal. “I will always be a little bit of an Israeli in Canada and a Canadian in Israel. And so I wanted to write a play about my relationship with Israel, about immigration, about Judaism […] and about the lingering doubt in the back of every immigrant’s mind: whether or not they did the right thing.”