CAMBRIDGE - Choreographer Jody Weber was already contemplating the concept of synchronicity when she had an “aha’’ moment in a bookstore. After browsing separately, she and her husband each had the same book in hand when they met at the checkout: scientist-adventurer Jon Turk’s “The Raven’s Gift.’’ This planted the seed for “Synchronicity and the Sacred Space,’’ a piece that combines movement with live storytelling by Turk. It had its world premiere Thursday night at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center.

It’s a charming, 45-minute work that juxtaposes Turk’s stories with lyrical yet muscular dancing by Weber Dance company members Shannon Humphreys, Kristy Kuhn, and Sarah Style. Turk’s Arctic photography provides the visual backdrop.

Personable and animated, Turk opens the show with a vignette about his work as a chemist, setting off a humorous romp by the trio in lab coats and safety glasses. Their weighted falls, crawls, and rolls are complemented with gestures of pondering, discovery, secrecy.

When chemistry didn’t really suit Turk’s temperament, he became a long-distance sea kayaker. He vividly, wittily describes confronting ice pack in the Bering Strait and skiing down a slope called Man With Fast Shoes. Recalling a healing, he says he was naked, balancing on one foot with a hand behind his back, when he was instructed to “believe’’ or the ritual would not work. It did.

In the evening’s highlight, he recounts a kayaking mishap in which he was surprised by a storm and unable to reach shore through the choppy water. He suddenly found himself amid a quartet of dolphins breaching and diving. He realized that if he paddled in cadence with the dolphins, he would be in cadence with the sea.

Here the dancers’ movement - swirling spins and loops, arms arcing overhead - subtly evokes the waves’ cresting. One woman sinks down, another balanced on her back as if riding the surf. A dancer slides repeatedly across the floor, only to be pulled back gently each time, echoing the ebb and flow of waves. Curiously, it is movement we have seen earlier in the piece, but now it takes on a new context, reinforcing Turk’s impassioned plea for living in accordance with the world around us.

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