WITHIN days of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival programme being announced, a buzz of “could it be?” expectation was stirring memories among a certain clan of dance fans. The ones who – back in the mid-1990’s – had piled into Glasgow’s CCA during what was then the New Moves festival to watch a Canadian company rip up the floor and the rule book with awe-inspiring, unrelentingly physical, blitzkrieg dance. The company? Holy Body Tattoo. Now on-stage again after lying dormant for a decade, and coming to Edinburgh’s Playhouse with a welcome revival of monumental – seen briefly in 2006, albeit not in the UK, and now with added visceral power thanks to the backing of live band Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

If those of us still wistfully holding on to our old Holy Body Tattoo programmes were surprised to see them in the EIF lists, the fact that monumental is happening at all is something its co-creator Dana Gingras hadn’t anticipated either. “I don’t know if it ever would have happened if David Sefton hadn’t pushed, and planned, so hard,” she says. “Looking back, I can hardly believe it happened first time round either. We were such a small, small, company: we had no support infra-structure, let alone the financial resources to do a piece of its size – nine dancers, a set, lighting... We’d bitten off more than we could likely chew – and I still don’t know if we were courageous, or naive!”

Sefton, already a huge Godspeed You! Black Emperor fan, was director of UCLA Live when he brought the original monumental to Los Angeles in 2006 – its last tour stop and, in fact, its only staging outside of Canada. Back then, because the band was in a self-determined hiatus, Holy Body Tattoo (HBT) had settled for recorded music, drawn from the band’s 1997 debut album. Clearly, once he’d seen monumental, Sefton harboured a pipe dream of something beyond that compromise solution. In 2011, just as he was moving into post as artistic director of Australia’s Adelaide Festival, he heard that Godspeed You! Black Emperor was touring again. To say that he sprang into action is to belie the time it has taken for his hopes to become a reality.

“The logistics have been beyond complicated,” says Gingras, and her laugh suggests a kind of joy and lingering disbelief at Sefton’s obdurate pursuit of all parties. Neither Gingras, nor HBT’s co-founder and co-creator of monumental, Noam Gagnon, had ever envisaged sharing a stage with the band in real time. Moreover, post-monumental, she and Gagnon had gone their separate ways, set up their own individual projects. “I mean, after monumental, what was there for us to do? Repeat what we’d already done with Holy Body Tattoo? That was never who we were, or are,” she says. It took Sefton five years to get the new monumental into the studio and then out in front of Adelaide audiences earlier this year.

“Why did it take so long?” Gingras’s laughter is irrepressible as she adds “because Godspeed You! is kind of famous for saying ‘no’. But David just wasn’t going to let go. Every six months or so, he’d start poking at us again, approach the band again, they’d say ‘no’ again and then, last year they said ‘yes’. And now, I’m just so glad and grateful that David held out for all those years. When Fergus (Linehan) started talking about bringing monumental to Edinburgh, I told him ‘this is a show that should never really have happened, you know. It’s by a dance company that doesn’t exist anymore, with a band that says no all the time!’ But actually, when I’m watching monumental now, it feels as if its true time has come round. That somehow, over that lapsed decade, the piece has ripened, been fermenting to a point where the tensions, the stresses, the sense of isolation, have become a mirror of where we are now. In 2005 there was this optimistic sense that we were looking at the near future and something could be done. It’s disheartening to think we’ve been overtaken by the realities of global dysfunction in politics, in economics and in society.”

Her words conjure up a flashback to the full-on force of what she and Gagnon explored – exploded, more like – with their mid-90’s choreographies, Poetry and Apocalypse and Our Brief Eternity. The pair first met in 1987 at an audition for the Vancouver dance troupe EDAM, or Experimental Dance and Music, which specialized in contact improvisation.They immediately became branded as the terrible twins because, as Gingras remembers, “we were naughty and cheeky and full of ourselves." In truth, they were kindred spirits in wanting to push against, and through, boundaries. Hungry to test the nature of endurance, the fallout – positive as well as negative – from life experience. The very name of the company, The Holy Body Tattoo, reflected that with its suggestion of how time imprints more than surface changes, it leaves its mark on your innermost self.

"The body doesn't lie,” muses Gingras. “Who you are, your dreams, your perception of the world – that's in your body. Those marks are saved. You can't really erase them." She has been experiencing the ingrained truth of that during the re-staging of monumental. “I was nervous – maybe even conflicted – about coming back into our previous universe,” she admits. “There was that concern of ‘oh no! is this really a regression?’ but in actual fact it became a beautiful way of moving forward. A way of re-claiming some of yourself, acknowledging your DNA – this is who you are, as an artist – while letting you reflect, prune away those parts of past history that you don’t need or want to carry forward. I hadn’t expected it to be this remarkably stimulating journey.”

As for the new generation of dancers who take to the on-stage pedestals in monumental – did they know what to expect? “I’m not sure everyone realised the full extent of the demands on bodies, minds, stamina,” says Gingras. A small chuckle escapes her. “There is still a kind of mythology about how intense HBT performances were, but I suspect when the dancers were watching the video it looked easier than it is. On-screen, there’s no true sense of what it takes to sustain those obsessive cycles of building the little details, then falling through into a destruction, falling apart and then re-building over. And they’re on those isolating pedestals for maybe half the piece, driven and anxious – probably with frustrations mounting for everyone, dancers and audiences alike. This piece makes you want to have, to see, flesh and blood contact. And when that does come, its such a relief. We really do need connections beyond what our technologies offer. We need for bodies to come together. That’s where the energy, the power, generates.”

Generating power and energy – ah, yes. Welcome on-stage Godspeed you! Black Emperor. “You know, I felt scared for the dancers the first time we had the live music in rehearsals. It just went through them, like an electric current, and you could actually see it. See it coursing through their bodies, and I worried: would they be able to handle it, along with all the other risks and challenges, in performance. But our dancers have brought a heightened sense of concentration to the work, an integrity of purpose and focus, a fulfilment of what is precise and exact within the choreography, that allows them to walk the tightrope that is monumental.” Balancing on that tightrope with them is a barrage-interplay of visuals, text and what has been described as ‘deafening sonic tsunamis’ from the band. “I don’t breathe properly until we’re at least 45 minutes into the piece,” laughs Gingras. “But then I get this moment when I realise how all these bodies are pushing through, and how having the band live has taken it all to another level. And the piece is re-invigorated, and more truly powerful than it was...”

monumental is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh today and tomorrow. www.eif.co.uk