Is there a more damning accolade than enfant terrible — and in the context of contemporary dance no less, in which it evokes think-y, easily parodied musings on sex and relationships?

Yet here’s Quebec choreographer Dave St-Pierre, saddled with the title and still able to hold forth almost matter-of-factly about his work and the world. One of the only qualities that merits this reputation is a self-confessed loathing for doing interviews, which he reveals in a way so as to not to be deliberately insolent. Dancers are often not easy talkers: German choreographer Pina Bausch once said she loved to dance because she was afraid to speak and that moving was the thing that made her feel. St-Pierre feels the same way. He stuttered terribly from early childhood to his mid-teens. “When I discovered dance at five I found the way to express myself,” he says. “Dance was very serious for me. It wasn’t just a pleasure; it was a way of life. It was my way of being truly present in something.”

In its original translation, the piece St-Pierre brings to Toronto (as part of World Stage’s ambitious, dance-heavy 08-09 season) seems itself excessively titled — La Pornographie des âmes — but he agrees when interviewed in French that the English translation selected, Bare Naked Souls, does not cut it. “I’m going to keep it in French from now on,” he says. Soul Pornography is a more direct, apt translation because, he claims, “it [suggests] all those things that we don’t want to show people day-to-day because they’re obscene, vulgar. I accept pornography, but what do we do with it generally? We put it on the bottom of the bookshelf or hide it in a drawer. Why? It’s a societal more that is stronger than us. It’s a protocol. For me, La Pornographie des âmes is about exposing things that everyone hides and won’t admit to — things we keep for ourselves, for our souls.”

Performers in Pornographie act out social cruelties, rape and prejudices often completely naked, and many of the stories are personal, stories the cast brought to the process and which St-Pierre mined. He was only 30 the first time the company mounted the production. Was he prepared to deal with what he was pulling out of people? He speaks of a scene in which a fat woman dances a ballet: “afterwards she is called every awful name imaginable.” (Like so many people in industries that abet eating disorders, St-Pierre seems to think that putting a fat person onstage naked is unbelievably radical; here, the enfant rears his head again.)

“Society has indoctrinated us so strongly that if you’re fat you eat poorly,” says St-Pierre, confessing to his own lingering fat prejudices. “This performer gave as an example that it doesn’t matter if she’s eating a cheeseburger at McDonald’s or a salad in a nice restaurant. Either way people look at her with contempt. Either it’s ‘that’s right, you big pig, stuff your face’ or ‘that’s right, you’re better off eating salad to lose weight.’”

Still, unlike those in the fashion industry, who throw a voluptuous model on the catwalk every decade or so and then spend three seasons in a fit of self-congratulation, St-Pierre shows us not what we would like to think we are, but what we really are. “It’s been four years since we’ve been putting on Pornographie and I still receive emails from people saying they couldn’t get an image out of their head,” he says. “When you are able to put an image in someone’s head for so long, it really touches something essential.”