As an arts writer, it’s an unspoken rule that you must familiarize yourself with every medium, every style that you can get your hot little hands on.  

However, you can open as many art history books, rent as many DVDs and download as much music as you like, but the difference between those arts and dance is that you can’t take dance home with you. Yes, no two concerts are alike and I prefer to see films and artwork in their theaters and galleries, respectively. But you can’t really record and get the sense of dance. I don’t know, it just sort of happening in a certain place and time, like a kind of art magic.

Enter Brian Brooks Moving Company, coming to the University’s own Stewart Theater Friday at 8 p.m.

“Technically we’re contemporary dance company that tours internationally,” Brian Brooks said. “I was very particular about calling the company the ‘Moving Company’…as my approach and interest in performance and dance is through a lens of movement. The focus isn’t strictly on technique and history, my interest lies in [things like] gymnastic sports… parkour is heavy influence; a lot of athleticism.”

It’s the mark of a creative genius who reaches outside his medium so far and, yet so successfully pulls it all back into creating a cohesive performance. At the very least he has a talent for multi-tasking, which was proven by his ability to answer the deceptively simple question “what’s your job title?”

He laughs, “Well I’m, hmm, artistic director, choreographer, performer, dancer, rehearsal coach, company manager, designer, editor and…I’ll probably remember some more,” said Brooks.

Instead of letting the work overload him, Brooks’ smile is evident over the phone, because this is, quite clearly, what he loves.

When asked about the origins of his work, he started, “Depends on how you look at it. I was born in 1974 and I do believe a lot of things started then.  I’ve been producing work under the name Brain Brooks Moving Co. in New York for 10 years,” Brooks said.

Speaking of history, Brooks’ mentor and a source of inspiration, Elizabeth Streb, a pioneer in modern dance going on decades, was notorious for making her dancers fly through plate glass windows at high speeds during performances.

“Yeah, I’ve been through a few myself,” he said, as if I had just asked whether or not he’d been through a stop light at some point in his life.  But there are no stop lights for Brooks, who though balking at putting his company in quite that much danger, is not one to shy away from action on the stage.

“Our performance will include two pieces, Piñata, and you’re [also] seeing the first few sections from a new work titled Happy Lucky Sun. …which is about getting truly airborne and horizontal,” Brooks said. “The film [Rapid Stills, which plays with the performance] enables us to delete the ground and you get the illusion that I’m airborne and [in that] space we’re trying to get airborne. But gravity’s there, dammit,” adds Brian with some playful annoyance.

It would seem that actually becoming airborne isn’t actually feasible. However, he asserted that he most certainly is.

“It’s beyond image, we actually are airborne and the dancers are really flying through the air a little bit and someone has to get under them before they hit the ground. We’re actually running full force and flying sideways and colliding with someone on the way down. The action is [dangerous], not forgiving, it doesn’t apologize,” Brooks said.

People being hurled through the air at each other sounds like an intriguing work to say the least. And if that doesn’t sound manic enough, Piñata sounds even harder to pin down.

” Piñata’s kinda crazy, [it’s a work] in movement and color and light, almost like a painter’s canvas has exploded into the side of the stage, and we use a couple hundred pounds of confetti. And when we dance it gets moved around in different patterns and swirls and finishes in black,” said Brooks.

Brooks offers something rare in, not just art, but rare anywhere. It’s a blend of the human body through a kaleidoscope of motion and music that toys with any preconceived notion you have about the art of dance. These are the kind of shows you catch because they can only happen in a certain time and place, once, and only once.