Brisbane Powerhouse, November 9.

This year’s Bespoke triple bill could hardly be more diverse. It starts with neo-classicism and finishes with emotions, memories and personalities to the fore. In between the two is a work that insists dancers and audiences go well beyond their comfort zone and deliberately defies easy analysis.

That work in the centre of the program, Lucy Guerin’s pointNONpoint, could also perhaps be described as being central to Bespoke’s mission. Each year (this is the third iteration of Bespoke) Queensland Ballet leaves Queensland Performing Arts Centre and heads to Brisbane’s home of contemporary culture, the Powerhouse.

There’s a clue right there about the intent. We are not in tutu-land any more. Boundaries will be stretched. Maybe. This year only Guerin’s piece really extends performers and observers. It’s also the most interesting by far.

Loughlan Prior’s opener, The Appearance of Colour (it takes its name from its music of the same name by John Metcalfe), is a smart-looking work impelled by the forces of changing colours and patterns in light. Prior was inspired by the change from black and white to colour of television transmissions and the idea is translated elegantly into animations projected on to the floor. Prior also has the cast of 12 make patterns in the air with small cubes glowing with colour, which is fun, and the group of mostly Young Artists looks polished, if rather anonymous.

I do however wish that choreographers would leave off having people run around the space for no apparent reason (Prior is far from being alone in this). Ultimately The Appearance of Colour is super sleek but fails to quicken the pulse.

Amy Hollingsworth, formerly with QB but now artistic director of Expressions Dance Company, clearly has huge affection for the dancers she once worked with so closely. From Within celebrates what Hollingsworth calls “gloriously messy human selves”. In truth the structure is a bit messy itself as duos, small groups and the full complement of 12 interacts energetically in a variety of moods. It’s all thoroughly engaging though, with a wonderful section featuring company artist Vanessa Morelli, whose glamour is matched by her apparent bonelessness; a bracing duo for Jack Lister and Rian Thompson; and the always eye-catching Lucy Green in everything she did.

The music includes bits of Lennon and McCartney’s Blackbird, Joby Talbot’s String Quartetand Björk’s It’s Oh So Quiet, all great choices individually but the mix contributed to the slight bagginess of the piece.

Guerin’s pointNONpoint challenges the usual idea of focus, in which an audience expects the eye to be directed in certain ways and for recognisable patterns to emerge. She starts with a solo performer, Sophie Zoricic, and builds to a group of 23, all dressed alike in short translucent tops. Some have bare feet while others wear pointe shoes, including a few of the men. There are occasional visual references to ballet vocabulary but no hierarchy and those pointe shoes are wielded more like hammers than aids to transcendence.

Dancers sometimes echo one another or move in unison but in the main follow their own interior paths to the electronic sounds of Scanner and dense, mysterious, numinous textures of Gyorgy Ligeti. Sections of his Requiem and Lux Aeterna, the latter used in the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey, greatly add to the otherworldliness of pointNONpoint. There is the suggestion of a blasted, apocalyptic environment as dancers sometimes lie and crawl, huddle together and then splinter, or are every now and again almost obliterated by a challenging red light darkening the stage. Not to mention the reddened fingers. There are touches of humanity – held hands here, a waltz step there – but Guerin’s work is not a pretty one. It does, however, have its own challenging beauty.

The dancers test the space, their capabilities and each other with intense concentration, although with a shortage of the weightiness and strongly individual, personal allure contemporary dancers would fruitfully bring to the piece. It was, nevertheless, utterly absorbing to see them in such a knotty, strange, memorable work. Morelli and Green were the standouts, as they also were in the vastly different From Within after the second interval.

Ends November 16.