Is this the most surprising show you’ll ever see?

Inside a cavernous warehouse along a desolate stretch of the Brisbane River is this show: part dance performance, part concert, part art exhibit.

Australasian Dance Collective dancers inside the Salamander set for Brisbane Festival. Picture: Tara Croser.

It’s captivating, inventive, at times extraordinary – inside a cavernous warehouse at Hamilton along a desolate stretch of the Brisbane River, the centrepiece of this year’s Brisbane Festival plays out each night.

The work, Salamander, unfurls on a dramatic set, which to start, centres on a clear, perspex maze surrounded by water created by international superstar of art and design Es Devlin and later, revealed by a dramatic lighting shift, an enormous table, where six dancers from Brisbane’s Australasian Dance Collective and two guests give life to JG Ballard’s 1962 climate fiction novel The Drowned World.

A scene from Salamander. Brisbane Festival 2023. Picture: Justin Nicholas

It’s 2145 and temperatures and sea levels have risen and the planet has been transformed into a swampland, where remaining humans who go outside to cool face morphing back to their reptilian origins.

Later, the table, which operates like a giant human-conveying lazy Susan, is deployed for multiple uses including a last supper, and it’s a device perfectly suited to a work both huge in physical scale and in its thematic reach.

A scene from Salamander. Brisbane Festival 2023. Picture: Justin Nicholas

To begin, patrons are invited into the darkened space, to stand around a mezzanine looking down at the cube, or they can choose to go to the lower level and watch more closely, before later being asked to walk over and sit in an arc surrounding the top of the table.

The sound, in the early stages an urgent pulse and finally Rachael Dease performing her eerie composition, is almost a physical presence.

A scene from Salamander. Brisbane Festival 2023. Picture: Justin Nicholas

Acclaimed London-based director and choreographer Maxine Doyle’s vision is realised by the dancers at first wearing little and constricted to tight movements in the compartmentalised cube before eventually evolving to a red-clad, unforgettable, urgent, freewheeling sequence at the table, all of the dancers drenched by rain.

It’s a complex work, but with only 200 tickets sold each night, there’s an intimacy to what is an experience beyond any traditional performance.

The dystopian subject matter of Salamander might be a confronting, an urgent wakeup call to a planet in distress, but as patrons turn to leave they’re left with a green glimmer of hope after 80 minutes of sensory shock.

At Northshore, Hamilton, until September 24

brisbanefestival.com.au