“Fault Lines”, inspired by the earthquakes in Christchurch in 2011 and Sichuan, China in 2008, had its world premiere at the Melbourne Festival in 2012, followed by a season at the Christchurch Arts Festival and will enjoy a reprise season in Sydney and Canberra.

NZ choreographer Sara Brodie is looking forward to meeting the dancers from Sichuan province-based Leshan Song and Dance Troupe again after more than a year apart.

“The earthquake was still fresh in my memory when I created this work,” Brodie tells me by phone from Wellington.

“It was still very present.”

Brodie was in Christchurch with her parents when the quake struck.

“All sorts of little things happen to you physically and emotionally… you lose your balance because the after-shock takes away your equilibrium,” she says.

“After the Christchurch earthquake I was just stumbling around in the street.”

Flashback to 2011; the then-director of the Melbourne Arts Festival, Brett Sheehy, was touring China checking out potential work, when he spotted a seven-minute dance work about the Sichuan earthquake.

Improbably, most of the company’s work was done in variety style, with a lot of tinsel and glitter, but their facility in reflecting the culture of Sichuan got Sheehy wondering how they might go with a Western choreographer working on the earthquake theme.

He put in a call to Brodie, who was on a plane to Sichuan by November 2011 with fellow-choreographer Ross McCormack.

“I’d been to Hong Kong before, but never to mainland China”, Brodie tells me. She threw herself into workshops with the dancers in Sichuan province, looking at their work and their training.

“I was really interested in how to put these two countries’ dance language together, how to choreograph their intrinsic movements,” she says.

But what emerged was the sharing of stories about their respective earthquakes in tears and laughter.

“Everyone in the company had experienced the quake and some had lost family, so they were all affected by it,” Brodie says, so much so that they performed a work about that at the precinct of the quake.

While there are no dancers from NZ, the score was created especially for the work by NZ composer Gareth Farr, who went to Sichuan, wrote 10 pieces of music in nine days, then rushed home to record it with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra.

Farr had already written a celebrated piece Brodie wanted to use, “Nor’West Arch” in response to Christchurch’s quake and she also wanted “Questioning the Mountain” written in response to the Sichuan earthquake, by Prof Gao Ping, who was teaching in Christchurch at the time of its quake.

Brodie and McCormack found that most of the dancers had been trained in Chinese classical dance, but their dance about the earthquake was done in an unfamiliar, strident style.

“It was all so different… putting together the dance styles in the choreography, which ended up with some very strong Chinese influences, was a journey for both of us.”

“Fault Lines” is “a theatrical experience rather than pure contemporary dance”, Brodie insists. Its story is set in a world where people are not connected with each other. Then, as we see, catastrophe hits them and all that changes.

“I interviewed the dancers about the positive things resulting from the earthquake and the loss of so many loved ones – the way it brought people much closer together in a sort of camaraderie of thought and experience,” she says.

“Fault Lines”, The Playhouse, June 15-16, bookings to canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.