It’s Nov. 11 when I interview Vancouver-based choreographer Crystal Pite: uncanny, since it was on this exact day in 2005 that she had the epiphany which defines her show Lost Action. She had just made her first piece at the Netherlands Dance Theatre, one with a focus on loss and disappearance. She wanted those themes to carry through to her next piece, a personal approach to work she calls “sourdough starter.” She was in Montreal — where she had previously been resident choreographer with Ballets Jazz from 2001 to 2004 —and an American tourist stopped her on the street and asked her why everyone was wearing red flowers. “As I described it to him,” she says, on the phone from Portland, “it just really hit me there may be a way to draw a parallel between the loss of our veterans — of their stories and their memories — and the loss of our bodies and our dancing.”

Loss of memory, often as a metaphor for loss of movement, is a concept that seems to possess certain dancers (such as Heidi Strauss in her recent piece Ohne). Pite elaborates: “You think, wow, I have nothing to show for a 20-year career, nothing that I can take out of a drawer and show somebody. That becomes interesting at a certain point, especially as your dancing days become numbered and you don’t know how many more opportunities you’re going to have. I’ve gotten to an age where a lot of my colleagues are retiring. People I’ve emulated are stopping and with them their dancing dies.”

In Lost Action, the show Pite and her company Kidd Pivot bring to Toronto this weekend for World Stage, the figurative connections between war and movement are expressed by dancers creating a form which appears to be continuously vanishing — slowly revealing the transitory nature of the body, yet the strength of the spirit. Pite describes war as “a very scary subject to tackle. Everyone, every artist, feels inferior to that subject, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give it a good try. Interestingly enough, some people don’t even see war or soldiers in the piece. They see violence, an event that has happened that everyone is trying to deal with repetitively and excessively, but they don’t necessarily relate it to war.”

Pite herself seems to work at a pace befitting combat, and though she choreographs for many prestigious international companies, she describes her own, Vancouver-based company, Kidd Pivot, as her “baby, really grassroots; I’m really in the thick of it onstage, very much fully integrated into every aspect of the organization.” As she notes, the name literally defines the company’s style, one that she hopes is approachable from many different levels. “I liked the word ‘pivot,’” she says. “[It] exemplified skill and rigour and specificity in movement, and also something that changed your point of view, changed your direction. I wanted to counter that with something that was more reckless. ‘Kidd’ is the outlaw, the pirate, the super hero. It definitely sounds like a code name or something. I like the fact that it’s kind of sneaky, that there’s an element of mischief there.”

“I don’t think accessibility requires dumbing down,” she says, reinforcing that sprightly militancy. “It requires mastery.”