In 2019 Brisbane Festival artistic director Louise Bezzina, then new in her role, travelled the substantial width of Australia to attend the Perth Festival, as you do. There she met British chorographer and director Maxine Doyle, who was in Perth to work on a dance piece called Sunset with local choreographic centre STRUT Dance. And, as you do, Bezzina asked Doyle if she’d be interested in making something for Brisbane. (Doyle’s credentials include being part of the Punchdrunk team that 20 years ago created the immersive-theatre phenomenon Sleep No More. It’s still running.) 

The result of Bezzina and Doyle’s meeting is Salamander, a dance-theatre performance imagining how the end of the world might play out. Doyle directs and choreographs and the piece is designed by another Brit with a stellar international reputation, Es Devlin. On the ground in Brisbane Doyle collaborated with performers from Australasian Dance Collective. 

The show really is the epitome of a festival piece. Salamander is epic in scale yet astonishingly intimate for something so large in form and intent. Visual art, dance, light and sound join hands in a rich piece of communal theatre that nevertheless feels like a deeply personal experience. 

Part of the magic is that it’s an experience designed for only 200 people a night despite the vastness of the venue, a warehouse on the Brisbane River. It could contain 10 times that number with ease. For about 90 minutes – although time seems suspended – this small group observes dreamlike visions of the future.

Devlin has made two glorious installations for the cavernous space. Only one is visible when the audience enters; the second appears seemingly out of nowhere, a trick of Ben Hughes’s ravishing lighting.

For the first half the audience stands in a square around a maze of perspex surrounded by water. That’s where we are now at. Too much heat; too much water. Audience members can make the choice to stand at floor level or to look down on the sculpture, which from on high looks forbiddingly Escher-esque.

This section takes the wide-angled view of humankind’s extinction. The world is in extremis and the audience has a ringside seat from which to watch the obliteration. The ADC dancers are our proxies as  they appear and disappear at various levels of the maze until it’s clear survival isn’t possible. A man crouches in child pose, his back undulating as if in a state of deep terror. Anguished faces press against the perspex and look less human. People cling to one another desperately. 

The maze is perhaps a kind of refuge but one that won’t last, and outside the maze there is a hostile environment. The story of these people ends in a scream. Then comes the adaptation. A salamander crawls its way through the water to land. 

The audience is discreetly directed to a second, hitherto invisible, part of the warehouse and the atmosphere changes dramatically. Now the audience is seated almost in the round in just two rows. The dancers, strikingly clad by Bruce McKinven in red, are now friends, family and lovers who connect at a long table that swirls around a fixed central point. 

Water falls almost constantly on the performers, six dancers from ADC (Gabrielle Nankivell, Chase Clegg-Robinson, Harrison Elliott, Jack Lister, Jag Popham, Lilly King) and two independent artists (May Greenberg, Paul Zivkovich). All are extraordinary as they hang on to each other, slipping, sliding, running, standing defiantly or simply embracing or holding hands as the table turns and turns.

Their tenacity and ferocious commitment to life is unforgettable. It will be a long time before I lose the memory of Nankivell standing at the end of the whirling table, it speeding around, she so strong and resolute.  

The reference point for the first half is J.G. Ballard’s prescient 1962 novel The Drowned World. In the second half it’s the 2021 film Don’t Look Up, in which a family chooses to sit around the dinner table together as they face annihilation. A further inspiration is Joy Harjo’s poem from 1994, Perhaps the World Ends Here, partly quoted during Salamander. “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table,” she wrote, calling the table “a place to hide in the shadow of terror”.

Soaring over it all is an extraordinarily complex soundscape by Perth musician Rachael Dease that pits the natural world against the apocalyptic. Among much else there is a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the first half with Ligeti-like sonic clouds; in the second half we see Dease herself move among the dancers and sing. The human voice movingly reasserts itself.

Dressed in green, Dease is given Salamander’s final moments. They are of peace and light. Given the subject matter you might think this would be a pessimistic show but room is left for hope, as a final glimpse of the maze attests.

The salamander is the key. The amphibious creature can survive in the water and in mythology is associated with fire so at first blush it covers the bases when it comes to possible causes of extinction.  

But don’t forget the salamander is also a wondrous creature that has the ability to regenerate lost parts of itself. That’s its special power. The cycle continues, although possibly not with us.

Salamander is a rare gift. It would be a crime if other festivals were not to dive in.

Salamander is performed in L Shed Dock B, Northshore, Brisbane. It runs until September 24.

A version of this review appeared in The Australian on September 7.