Twenty-five years ago in Los Angeles, long before his watershed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the architect Frank Gehry designed an asymmetrical two-level stage for a performance by the Lucinda Childs Dance Company that inaugurated his Temporary Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art's interim quarters. Built on standard scaffolding and illuminated indirectly through skylights, this double-decker platform gave the dancers in Available Light the appearance of floating through the gallery space.

Now, many undulating rooftops later, no wonder the architect grasped the challenge presented to him by New York-based, site-specific choreographer Noémie Lafrance, who wished to compose dance performances atop nine of Gehry's dangerously sloping buildings in the US, Canada and Europe, including Bilbao. He gave the project his blessing by writing to the owners praising the integration of architecture and dance.

After a year in preparation, the kick-off performance, entitled Rapture, happened at the end of last month at the Richard B Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a venue that opened in 2003 at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Bard's president, Leon Botstein, who also conducts the American Symphony Orchestra, is a leading promoter of the avant-garde. But when the company Sens/Noémie Lafrance was invited to perform in the building, no one expected that they would perform on it. Having choreographed in public spaces since her school days in Ottawa, the 34-year-old artist was drawn to the kinetic possibilities of what she calls "the metallic dunes and hills of Frank Gehry's organic landscapes".

Taking advantage of the rural site, Lafrance choreographed a curtain-raiser called Manorfield, "a study of topography and time" performed by 19 students on the gradual inclines of a grassy mound behind the stately Ward Manor House. Bundled against the chill, the audience sat on the steps, and in the distance, beyond the Hudson River, the rolling landscape of the Catskill Mountains was silhouetted against a deep red autumnal sunset. Seated at a concert piano in the field, a lone pianist improvised haunting melodies as students in twos and threes, coming and going from every direction, walked, ran, skipped and turned cartwheels and handstands with a studied nonchalance. Their movements were raked by light from the headlights of a few well-placed cars.

As the audience walked to the main event at the Fisher Center, the clashing, storm-like rumble of electronic music by London-based composer Janek Schaefer set the stage as attention focused on a single dancer standing motionless at the crest of the highest vertical wave of brushed stainless steel that serves as a canopy over the main theatre entrance. Suddenly, with the steel panels shimmering magically with light, the dancer began his descent, arms swinging in repetitive, arc-like motions. He was supported by custom rigging permitting lateral as well as vertical or abseiling movements. There were five rigging points over as many undulating surfaces, and six dancers in harnesses, four men and two women, all possessing the stamina of experienced aerialists, who comprehended the physics as well as the exhilaration of the complex choreography.

Below, under the canopy, a string octet played intermittently in counterpoint to the recorded electronic score, which sounded most often like a train rattling along. As lights dimmed on the first dancer's routine, another section of draped metal glimmered in the distance, drawing the standing audience around the building to watch two dancers profiting from pendulum force: rising to the top to gain momentum for release, running or skipping all the while, even twirling and completing somersaults.

The routine in Manorfield was translated into the aerial choreography of Rapture, though on a more rigorous, sophisticated level. Lafrance was served well by her classes in Martha Graham dance technique; its contractions and releases figured prominently in the gravity-defying movements that defined the contours of Gehry's building.

Eventually, five dancers performed at once within the folds of the wide, vertical, bulging panels. Dressed in silvery reflective costumes designed for flexibility, with vests in diaphanous nylon and running shoes, the dancers glowed like the building, occasionally in a warm red light like the earlier sunset, only now under a starlit sky. As a black curtain was drawn at the top to retract one dancer, there was a glimpse of the rigger, the partner who serves as the counterbalance to the dancer, performing similar movements, though out of sight. Japanese Bunraku puppetry came immediately to mind, where the black-clad puppeteer disappears behind the colourful puppet he manipulates.

Although Lafrance's choreography emphasises the downbeat of modern dance rather than the lift of ballet, in the end, she says, "flying is the fantasy of dancing". And like birds soaring into the night, her dancers were in flight.

Sens/Noémie Lafrance is planning to perform on Gehry's Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 2010