Let's call it a premature climax, in the Hidden Cameras' spirit of single entendre: It arrives halfway through the show, but it's the conceptual peak and release.

One moment, the sculpted corps of the Toronto Dance Theatre is striding around in formation to the pulse of the live band. The next, they're trading places, the dancers taking over the instruments and the musicians the fancy footwork.

It's a very punk-rock move for a dance recital, and easier said than done. At one of the final rehearsals, dancers were still getting choked by guitar straps while trying to carry off the switch without losing the beat. The Hidden Cameras proceeded to twirl, hump and head-butt each other through space; at one point, leader Joel Gibb's glasses flew off and a full pocket of loose change went spewing across the room. Veteran TDT director Christopher House leaned back in his seat and laughed.

Purist patrons of the city's leading contemporary-dance company may chafe at the Freaky Friday nature of the collaboration, which runs tonight till Sunday. Followers of the Hidden Cameras, the global standard bearers of "gay church folk music," would be surprised only if there were no surprises.

Since its debut in a Toronto art gallery in December of 2000, Gibb's deviant orchestra has played living rooms, churches, porn cinemas, rock clubs and charity balls; it's toured Canada, the United States and Europe to ovations; and it has faced complications that happen when an anarchic community ensemble is signed by a serious label.

"The critics have understood and applauded their courage and their genius," says Geoff Travis, head of Rough Trade UK, best known for his discovery of the Smiths. His new find has sold about 10,000 copies of its first studio album, The Smell of Our Own, in Britain alone. With the next album, he says, "Our goal is to get them on Top of the Pops."

Any number can play the Hidden Cameras game, from Gibb alone in his bedroom (recording the 2001 demo disc Ecce Homo) to four or six on tour or a cast of dozens closer to home, including back-up choirs and male go-go dancers in ski masks and jock straps. With backgrounds in art, academia and activism as much as in music, they're known for suggestive stage props and for inspiring audience reaction from the chilliest Canadian crowds. The people have spoken: When the Hidden Cameras play, you dance.

The Rough Trade deal hit quite suddenly in October of 2002, after Travis was tipped off to the band by a Canadian agent. The Cameras joined such diverse recent Canadian-indie exports as the Constantines, Royal City, Manitoba and the New Pornographers in getting their "cred" passports stamped abroad.

But the upshot made for a challenging 2003: Band tensions (who's in? who's out?) rose as the stakes did. A Toronto weekly even snarked that the group verged on collapse due to the supposed ego of "the Divine Miss Gibb." But only a couple of eight or more long-term members moved on to other projects. The new disc is due in May under the title Mississauga Goddamn (pinching Nina Simone's protest anthem for Gibb's own wellspring).

At first blush, Hidden Cameras songs may sound like sunshine remnants from the girl-group and folk eras -- filmmaker Bruce LaBruce has nicknamed the band "Peter, Paul and Mary and Mary and Mary." But Gibb also draws on the Baptist folk choirs of his Mississauga, Ont., youth, including the tambourines, organs, clapping and singing along with the help of lyrics on an overhead projector.

Examine those lyrics and you'll find he borrows something more, a Christian iconography that he infuses with explicit gay sexuality. His lilting songs take "golden streams" of urine for shafts of light from heaven, recast Bible stories as AIDS metaphors, spot lovers groping on church grounds and sigh, "Solid is the rock of my man."

"It took me a while to unpack what was being said," Travis says. "I was hooked by the glorious pop music. Once I knew what was being said, I admired Joel's nerve, audacity and tenderness."

Gibb's intentions are palpably not blasphemous or satiric. They're closer poetic traditions around the world that address God as a beloved. (In North America, for instance, soul music got its start by fitting love-song lyrics to gospel tunes.) What sets Gibb apart isn't just sexual orientation but how he flips from dirt to divinity, the earthy to the ethereal, over and over in each song, in graphic anatomical detail. A recovering former semiotics student, he delights in superimposing one symbol system over another.

In this way, the Cameras explore an adoration of the body that juxtaposes the Corpus Christi with the physical culture of the gay community, heaping praise and blame on each. And beneath the shimmering surface, his songs ooze fluid and rot, the way real bodies do.

"I see the body and sex and religion as the essence of what you should be writing about," Gibb says. "I can see that becoming the subject of a whole career's worth of art. The danger is just running out of euphemisms for 'cock,' but I'm pretty good at that."

"Everything the band does is about reminding people that the body is there, and that you're in it, and it's you," agrees Cameras multi-instrumentalist Maggie MacDonald, who's been with the group since the start and specializes in rallying crowds with follow-the-leader dance moves. "When there's an anti-body ethic, when it's mind over matter and matter is on the bottom, it's easier to accept a culture that is violent or one that denies the body shelter or food through economics."

To celebrate the body's mess and imperfection, by contrast, is an egalitarian blow against the matrix of shame we all maintain with our internalized "hidden cameras."

Surprisingly, Gibb's cocktail of homilies and homosex hasn't drawn much of a backlash, even from the churches they book for concerts -- one in Ottawa before Christmas got nervous, but still went ahead. "When we're travelling across the prairies, getting to Saskatchewan," MacDonald says, "I always think, 'When is the moment when we get chased out of town by the people with burning sticks?' And it hasn't happened yet."

"They seemed like a perfect Rough Trade act," Travis says. "Outside the mainstream in terms of culture and concern, capable of turning the mainstream into a more palatable place, à la the Smiths."

"I'm not interested in maintaining the same shtick," Gibb says, "and hopefully this dance project is a testament to that."

This collaboration is of different stuff than the much-touted New York meeting last year of Merce Cunningham and Radiohead, in which each party essentially did its own thing. TDT's House had seen the Cameras in concert and at their notorious 40-strong performance at the Power Ball in 2002. Liking their physicality, he struck up a correspondence with Gibb, proposing that he "do a kind of intervention into their performance," integrating the dance troupe into the band's show rather than vice versa.

House has been at TDT 25 years. "He wants to shake up his dancers and his audience," Gibb says. It's a heavenly match by all accounts. House staged 14 songs, from delicate ensemble work to a mime with Gibb in a grotesque mask (for Gay Goth Scene) to efforts to rouse and provoke the audience (at one point, for instance, the dancers borrow the chairs of the entire front row).

Whether dance patrons will respond as vigorously as a typical Cameras crowd is anyone's guess -- will the professionals make it seem they're here to dance so you don't have to? House is hopeful, while Gibb says, "If it turns out to be just a recital, it'll be nice too, because we never get to play in that kind of context."

The title, You Are the Same, is an apt one for a piece that tries to close the gap between music and dance as well as Gibb's usual targets -- sex/the sacred, audience/ artist, pop/art, God/man (and man).

"It's important to me that people appear as real people who express themselves as individuals in the context of the work," House says. "There's a way in dance of really squeezing that out of people.

"When the Hidden Cameras come out and have their big dance moment, the energy that emanates from them is so beautiful. In my company, I want to be able to hold on to that, no matter how technically controlled the dancers can be, because that's the most important part for me -- just the miracle of what the human body can do."

You Are the Same runs through Sunday, 8 p.m., 80 Winchester St., Toronto (416-967-1365).