A mythical creature and human misbehaviour are at the heart of Guillaume Côté’s ‘Crypto’

In case you were thinking you might get some pointers on how to win big in the digital currency racket, dancer/ choreographer Guillaume Côté wants to make absolutely clear that his latest work, “Crypto,” has nothing to do with money — other than that it took quite a lot to make the show happen.

Côté describes “Crypto” as a modern fairy tale, a multimedia meeting of music, contemporary and classical dance, poetic spoken word and visual effects, all deployed to tell the story of a couple who do bad things in an attempt to recharge an exhausted relationship.

The 75-minute work draws inspiration from cryptozoology — think of legendary creatures like the chupacabra, Loch Ness monster and sasquatch — from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” and from Côté’s personal desire to make a smaller-scale (only four dancers) multimedia fictional narrative work that is at once accessible to a broad audience but also thought-provoking.

The 40-year-old National Ballet of Canada star is no rookie dancemaker. He’s been one of the company’s choreographic associates since 2013 with such large-scale productions to his credit as “Le Petit Prince” (2016) and “Frame by Frame” (2018). The latter was made in partnership with Quebec stage maverick Robert Lepage, an experience Côté says reinforced his belief in the value of artistic collaboration and the potential of combining different media for innovative ways of conveying meaning in dance-theatre.

“Crypto” began as an undefined idea. Côté discussed it over a meal with Atom Egoyan. The multi-award-winning stage and screen director steered Côté toward another, much younger Canadian artist, Alberta-born, Brooklyn-based Royce Vavrek.

As a librettist, Vavrek is in the vanguard of the new opera movement. Among many notable accomplishments, in 2015 Vavrek wrote the libretto for Du Yun’s opera “Angel’s Bone.” Two years later, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Vavrek, 39, is currently working on an adaptation of Egoyan’s 2008 film “Adoration.”

When the two men met in New York, Vavrek told Côté about “Angel’s Bone.” It’s a dark tale in which a brace of angels come to Earth, are captured by a nasty human couple, and forced into spiritual and sexual slavery.

Côté knew he’d found his man. Vavrek readily embraced writing the story and poetic spoken text for a new movement-based work. He also helped Côté persuade Swedish-American composer Mikael Karlsson to join the project. Karlsson, a good friend of Vavrek’s, has extensive experience composing for dance; in his early career also for video games.

Ducks lined up, the real work began in earnest with a creative residency at Alberta’s Banff Centre in January 2019. Vavrek had been rereading “The Little Mermaid.” It’s the story of a mermaid who forsakes her underwater habitat and fishy parts in return for acquiring human form and even the chance of a human soul.

“Crypto” does not follow the plots of either “Angel’s Bone” or “The Little Mermaid,” but they both pointed the way in terms of theme and tone.

It’s not giving too much away to explain that “Crypto” is the story of a couple in search of something that could refuel their desiccated relationship. The woman, danced by retired National ballerina Greta Hodgkinson, urges her man, Côté, to go in search of a mythical creature: a cryptid in the pseudo-scientific parlance of cryptozoology.

Here’s where it gets a bit icky. With the help of a plastic surgeon, Natasha Poon Woo, they modify the creature, Casia Vengoechea, to control and use it for their own purposes.

“As humans,” said Vavrek, “we always seem to look for shortcuts, whether romantic or financial, instead of putting in the hard work.”

It’s definitely not your garden-variety fairy story although, to be fair, there’s plenty of gruesome stuff, including dismemberment, in the tales of the Brothers Grimm.

“Let’s say it’s an adult fairy tale,” offered Côté.

Said Vavrek, the most cheery and amiable of interlocutors: “I find my most successful work tends to deal with sex and death. I guess I’m drawn to the dark stuff.”

Everything progressed to the point where “Crypto” was ready for an “avant premiere” showing in the summer of 2019 at Quebec’s Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur, of which Côté serves as artistic director.

“Saint-Sauveur turned out to be a trial run,” said Côté. “It gave us an opportunity to dive into the narrative more and to refine it.”

Côté was looking forward to officially unveiling “Crypto” in April 2020 as part of the Canadian Stage season. Then the pandemic hit. Canadian Stage was willing to postpone rather than outright cancel. The show was rescheduled three times. It proved a challenge to keep “Crypto” on a low simmer for two years.

“We’d invested quite a bit of our own money in this,” said Côté. “It was nerve-racking. One more cancellation and we’d have had to abandon it.”

He credits his long-time friend and producer, Etienne Lavigne, with keeping it alive.

“Crypto” has already been seen over the past month by audiences in Ottawa and several smaller centres in Quebec. Côté hopes there will be further touring possibilities after Toronto.

Meanwhile, he and Vavrek are already cooking up another project.

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