In the rehearsal room at the top of the Dundee Rep building beautiful boys in dresses and girls in leather trousers and spaghetti tops showing off their underarm hair are dancing in unison. Some 11 dancers, 22 feet banging hard on the floor in unison, the meaty thump of it momentarily overpowering the thumping music on the sound system.

It’s the end of the day, the end of rehearsals and, playing out in front of me, is the emphatic, thrilling ending of Scottish Dance Theatre’s show Velvet Petal.

Sitting to my left is Velvet Petal’s creator Fleur Darkin, artistic director of Scottish Dance Theatre, notebook in hand, scribbling fiercely. When we meet the show, or rather the latest version of the show, is a week away from opening. It’s nearly there, says Darkin once the dancers have departed and we have descended to Dundee Rep’s restaurant. “This piece took about three years to make. It’s had three iterations, one including a Mexican orchestra. It just keeps rearticulating itself, refinding itself.”

Described by the Observer as “one of the most overtly theatrical choreographers of the British new wave,” Darkin is fair-haired and as intense as the shows she creates. Earlier this year she choreographed the Royal Lyceum’s dance-theatre take on Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and Velvet Petal has some of the same heat to it.

The starting point of it goes back to Darkin reading Just Kids, Patti Smith’s sweet, tough memoir of her time with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 1970s in a broken-down New York in the days before she became a musician and punk poet and he became America’s most provocative visualiser of celebrities, flowers and gay S&M.

If you look for it you will find echoes of Just Kids in Velvet Petal (although Patti doesn’t make the playlist; LCD Soundsystem, Leonard Cohen, PJ Harvey and Four Tet are among those who do). But, really, Velvet Petal has gone beyond that.

So, don’t be expecting Patti and Robert, or facsimiles, to turn up on stage. “I didn’t cast someone to look like her,” Darkin says of Smith. “We started like that but it’s like: ‘Who gives a f***?’ The book is better and if it should be anything it should be a film.”

Instead, Velvet Petal is a show about metamorphosis, liminality, about being young and how we find ourselves and how difficult that can be. The book was merely a jumping off point.

“Just Kids is fantastic, isn’t it?” Darkin says when I bring it up. “I was totally inspired by it, but I knew I didn’t want to make a fan club piece. So, the feeling in the book is what I’m bringing. But it’s a newer present tense.

“It became less about their biographies, more about what metamorphosis is,” she continues. “It seems to me that in that book they [Smith and Mapplethorpe] create this little safe private dark space where they can transform themselves; whether that’s what their artform is, what their job is, what their sexuality is, what their relationship to each other is. They have this space where they can work out who they are.”

The show took some time to work out what it was too, Darkin admits. “Actually, the project really found its voice when I started at looking at Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. That was when it was like: ‘Ah, OK, this is my world now.’ It’s about being looked at and what we show and what we think is not worth showing. That’s what dancers can relate to.

“He is in the same trade. It’s bodies and it’s acceptance and it’s seduction and, for him, it’s a real pristine aesthetics. We’re brothers and sisters on that page.”

Darkin explains how she would sit with the dancers and look at Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. For hours sometimes. Hmm. All of the Polaroids, Fleur? They are not all pictures of flowers, after all.

“I was really fearful of them actually. I had a really long process trying to get to understand them. At one point, I felt like the project is cursed.”

Cursed? “Yeah. I couldn’t find it. I swear. I was looking at his picture in a book two years in just going: ‘Bless this project.’

“I think his freedom was obviously what I was looking for in myself. Obviously, we make work to move audiences, for it to be loved. But I had to just go through that.”

Darkin is the best kind of advocate for her profession. At 41, she clearly cares deeply about the work and the company. (“We’re not just here to sell merchandise, you know what I mean,” she tells me at one point.)

Dance was always part of her family story. Music and dance were all around her growing up. “My mother was a dancer. She danced in the seventies in Brixton in the Ram Jam Club. She was a passionate amateur.”

Darkin’s passion was channelled into the profession. She trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Bretton Hall College in West Riding and New York University before taking up a job at Union City Dance in 1998.

Before coming to Dundee she was associate artist at Bristol Old Vic and worked at Laban in London and the Royal Opera House.

Looking back, she was a tough girl, Darkin says. “Getting softer,” she smiles. “I was thrusting out into the world, very rapacious, very hungry, wanting to be an artist.”

But we all get older. Darkin is now the mother of three boys and of course no longer on stage but sitting to the side. Was the shift from dancer to choreographer a difficult one, I ask her? Did she feel she’d lost something? “Yeah. Dancing’s amazing. It makes you feel so happy. So, there is a kind of serotonin shift. You have to find other ways. I do sometimes feel like Gary Lineker or something. You could do it and now you want to give it to them.”

The “them” is the dancers she works with. The company is a young one. To see them up close is to be impressed by their dexterity and grace. It’s a full-on life being a dancer, Fleur.

“Martha Graham called dancers ‘athletes of God’ and it’s true. It’s super athletic. I think it’s quite a holy life because you have to stay true to the discipline. You have to go to bed early and you have to get up early and you have to warm up properly. It’s to do with a devotion and a belief in an ideal.

“I love to be around that because I think they’re the right values. I’m very sceptical of the values that the mainstream culture pushes – that we’re all living in a shopping mall and it’s all about exterior. Because, actually, what you need is your health and what you need is a connection to what’s real. On a philosophical level that’s why dance. They’re real role models, dancers.”

Darkin has been at Scottish Dance Theatre since 2012. It has been, she says, a great time in her l life. “Dundee has made my dreams come true. I was always pushing to have a company and when I walked in it was a bit like rehab. ‘Oh my God, do you mean there are dancers in the studio every day?’

“There are 25 people in the company, 15 people in the office. There was a kind of shock to it that you could have this means of production. That stability creates amazing artist and it creates a really amazing team.

“Then, we’ve got audiences here who are loyal and who love the company and you feel real warmth from them. You feel you could open anything here and they come with a trusting heart.

“And then you’ve got Scotland, which to me is just the promised land. It feels progressive. It feels like people have a sensibility towards art.

“Dundee has given me space. So, really, my dreams came true, is the short answer.”

Scottish Dance Theatre’s Velvet Petal is on at the Theatre Royal, Dumfries next Thursday and at the Hidden Door Festival in Leith on Friday