It’s unlikely if anyone imagined ballet as a backdrop when David Bowie sang “Let’s Dance” in 1983, but Bowie’s music will definitively serve as the accompaniment for ballet, performed by classically trained and superbly conditioned dancers, on Saturday as Complexions Contemporary Ballet brings “Star Dust: A Tribute to David Bowie” to Honolulu.

“It’s about the love of the music; the narrative is within the music,” said Complexions co-founder/co-artistic director Desmond Richardson. Richardson stopped by the newsroom last week in advance of Complexions’ performances throughout the islands. The troupe performed on Hawaii island and Maui earlier this week.

Richardson and master choreographer Dwight Rhoden founded Complexions in 1994 for the purpose of reinventing dance by creating new combinations of methods, styles and cultures. Since then, they have created dance that goes beyond boundaries of culture, period, style and venue, with the goal of using movement to show the world as an interrelated whole.

If Bowie had lived a few months longer he could have seen it — perhaps even attended the premiere. The show was in development while Bowie was working on his final album, “Lazarus,” in 2015, but he died in Jan. 2016, a few days before “Star Dust” rehearsals started in 2016. It was premiered four months later.

“Dwight was listening to the Bowie catalog. … I was listening and he was listening, and it finally just came together,” Richardson said by way of describing the process through which nearly 50 years of Bowie recordings were distilled down to less than a dozen songs. “We knew a few people in tandem that knew Mr. Bowie and they said we should go for it, it’s time, it’s relevant — and we’ve taken it around the world and it’s just popped.”

“STAR DUST” is being presented here by Ballet Hawaii as the second half of a show that opens with the Complexions dancers performing to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The emphasis is on the physicality of the dancers’ movements, consistently impressive whether ballet-based or drawn from other styles of dance.

“The company is steeped in classicism for sure, but classicism helps the dancers move outside and helps them to explore other genres,” Richardson said. “We’re steeped in classicism, but there’s also hip hop and also other urban movements and modern movements. … It’s also to provoke thought, and that’s where everything lands.”

It’s important to Complexions that the audience respond to their dances, Richardson explained.

“The purity of line that comes from classicism is what we’re known for, and also for the athleticism of the dancers; but it’s necessary for the dance to ‘speak’ so that the audience can have an experience,” he said.

“I feel that ‘Star Dust’ provokes thought and is very entertaining. You feel it. For sure,” he said. “We have a particular narrative that’s going on within the movement, but it’s not like a story ballet.”

Looking back to his own beginnings as a dancer, Richardson said he would not have envisioned ballet dancers doing something like “Star Dust” in the early 1980s, when he successfully auditioned to study ballet at New York’s High School of Performing Arts.

“I was coming from a more hip hop and urban street dance background, and they really trained me,” Richardson said. “I had Russian teachers just training me in classical ballet. The first time I’d seen (Rudolf) Nureyev I was like, “Whoa! I want to do that!”

It was the start of a career that included seven years as a principal dancer of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and — after several unsuccessful auditions — being invited to become a principal dancer of the American Ballet Theatre in 1997; Richardson danced the lead role in that group’s world premiere production of “Othello.”

Richardson also played the principal character of Tony in Twyla Tharp’s Broadway production of “Movin’ Out,” sang in the Broadway production of “The Look of Love,” received a Tony Award nomination for his work in the original Broadway cast of “Fosse,” and performed in the Tony Award-winning Broadway production of “After Midnight.”

He met Rhoden when they were working together in the Alvin Ailey company.

“Dwight had been choreographing other dancers. I approached him and asked him if we could work together. The moment we did it just clicked,” Richardson said. “We share an innate understanding of the material.”

COMPLEXIONS WILL celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2019, and the dance company is still growing. In fact, the company is holding auditions in New York on April 14.

The requirements for new dancers illustrate Complexions’ longstanding values: classical mastery, and unbound creativity.

“We always tell our young dancers that the better your classicism, it just frees you up to do whatever you want,” Richardson explained. “It liberates, it doesn’t impede you. You can do so many things, and you’re open to it because you’re clear.”

“You also have to bring something that we’ve not seen before,” he said. “When you do that, that’s when it’s really special and the audience is having a beautiful time with you – you’re sharing at that point, you’re not trying to prove anything.”

“Dwight is really considered a dancer’s choreographer,” Richardson said. “If your instrument is really sound, then he can help you shape it to this brilliant way.”

“There’s a kinetic understanding to body placement, movement, spatial awareness, sound. All those things — musicality is super important, because Dwight’s phrasing is steeped in musicality and mathematics, for sure. We really try to train our younger dancers to think like that.”