A scene from Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, directed by Kim Collier and produced by Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre. (Bruce Zinger/Electric Company Theatre/Canadian Stage)

Kim Collier has piercing blue eyes – you’re tempted to describe them as electric blue. After all, she’s one of the driving forces behind Electric Company Theatre, the breathtakingly creative Vancouver troupe that could give even Robert Lepage a run for his money.

Based on the life of Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer of the moving image, Studies in Motion is a seamless fabric of text, physical theatre, dance, music, still photos and video.

Sipping coffee in the lobby of Toronto’s Bluma Appel Theatre, those eyes accented by a navy blue sweater, the small, wiry Collier apologizes for seeming only semi-articulate. It’s the day after the opening night of Electric Company’s touring show Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, and she’s nursing a post-party hangover.

She’s had plenty to celebrate lately. Not just the successful Toronto premiere of Studies in Motion at the 875-seat Bluma as part of Canadian Stage's main season – a coup for a little indie company – but also winning Canada's richest theatre award, the Siminovitch Prize, last month. She’s still reeling from the honour.

“It’s incredible,” says the 45-year-old director with a toothy smile. “I can’t quite process it. How is it that you just get handed $75,000? In the theatre, it’s such a foreign thought.”

There’s no question that she deserves it. For evidence of her directing skills, you don’t have to look any further than Studies in Motion itself, an entrancing work with all the hallmarks of Electric Company’s multimedia prowess. A drama based on the life and work of Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian-era photographer and pioneer of the moving image, it’s a seamless fabric of text, physical theatre, dance, music, still photos and video. Not only does it tell the tale of the brilliant but tempestuous Muybridge – who was, among other things, exonerated for killing his wife’s lover – but recreates his photographic celebrations of human activity with wit and lyricism.

Director Kim Collier. (Electric Company Theatre)

The production made its debut in 2006 at Vancouver’s PuSh performing arts festival and was then reworked for a Canadian tour in 2009. So far, Vancouver and Toronto aside, it’s been seen in Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal and Whitehorse. Like all Electric Company works, it’s a collaborative creation that involved a script by the troupe’s Governor General’s Award-winning playwright, Kevin Kerr; décor, lighting and video design by University of British Columbia professor Robert Gardiner; and choreography by ballet dynamo Crystal Pite.

The physical staging is so graceful that, in a glowing review in the Globe and Mail, critic J. Kelly Nestruck said of Pite and Collier “it’s difficult to tell where one's work ends and the other’s begins.”

Collier takes that as a compliment, and not just because she’s a fan of Pite. “I’m very highly choreographic in my work,” she says. “I’m really interested in composition.” The physical aspect of her directing reflects her background in mime and some early influences. In the late 1980s, while studying at Toronto’s Mime Unlimited, the kid from Kamloops, B.C., was exposed to the avant-garde work of Robert Lepage, choreographer Danny Grossman and Montreal’s Carbone 14 – all inventively kinetic artists.

“I was too young and inexperienced to know a lot about the craft [of theatre],” she says, “but I just knew that when I went to those shows I felt good. I was excited by it.”

They inspired her with thoughts of founding her own company and creating her own work. Later, as an acting student at Studio 58, the theatre conservatory at Vancouver’s Langara College, Collier found likeminded classmates in Kerr, Jonathon Young (now her husband) and David Hudgins.

“We always say the Electric Company members were the ones at school that were there till two in the morning working on projects,” she says. “We had a collective desire to work really hard and we were very passionate. That’s when Kevin and I talked about this idea of starting a company.”

Electric Company’s first show, Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla, premiered at the Vancouver International Fringe Festival in 1996 and was a hit. A play about the eccentric Serbian inventor who developed alternating current electricity, it anticipated the troupe’s ongoing fascination with science as well as its determination to constantly develop and tour its work. Revised versions of Brilliant! ended up playing throughout Canada, in the U.S. and at the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland.

Subsequent productions by the company have included The Score, a play about ethical issues in the field of genetics, which was later adapted into a 90-minute film for CBC’s Opening Night program; The One That Got Away, an exuberant fantasy staged entirely in and around a swimming pool; and, most recently, No Exit, a bold live/video interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s grim classic refashioned for the voyeuristic Big Brother era.

These and the company’s other shows were directed or co-directed by Collier, who finally realized that being the ringmaster was her true calling.

“I just kept discovering when I was an actor on projects that I couldn’t help but think as a director,” she says. “It was really hard to clamp down on my impulses to direct. I guess I’d had this idea that directors were these pontificating intellectuals and I thought, Oh, I could never be that. And then I discovered directing is so many things. It’s the most incredibly wide-ranging skill set. So maybe I’m not like the big brainiac sitting at the front of the room talking about the work, but that’s just a tiny part of the whole job.”

In recent years, Collier has emerged as one of Canada's most exciting theatre directors, based primarily on her Electric Company work. That work has also received increased mainstream exposure. The country's big regional theatres have found the little troupe’s ambitious productions suit their large venues – even if, Canadian Stage apart, they often present them outside their main subscription season.

“I think their audiences were aging – and also shrinking," Collier speculates, "and they started to look at what was going on in the indie scene, that we were getting really great audiences and there was a real life to it." And the fear that Electric Company might be too edgy for conservative theatregoers has so far proved unfounded. Studies in Motion, for example, offers plenty of elegant and playful nudity – Muybridge’s subjects were almost always photographed naked to reveal their musculature – but Collier says they’ve never received a complaint.

In the new year, Electric Company will tour No Exit to San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre and pitch their latest show, Tear the Curtain, to New York producers. Collier, meanwhile, will take a much-deserved break. Although we didn’t discuss it, the last year and a half has been hard on her and Young. Their 14-year-old daughter, Azra North Young, died in a cabin fire at B.C.’s Shuswap Lake in 2009. The current tour of Studies in Motion is dedicated to her.

Collier does say the Siminovich Prize will make that break less financially stressful. Beyond that, she says it won’t change her as an artist. “When you choose a life in the theatre, money is not a factor in your decision-making,” she says. “You’re driven by your love of the medium. So I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, but now there’s this extra bit of money in the bank.”

Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge runs at Toronto’s Canadian Stage to Dec. 18.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.