A festival is a time to trial experimental approaches to theatre, dance and music. No One Gets Out of Here Alive by The Farm, the provocative performing arts company based on the Gold Coast, did just that.

Nothing unusual there, because this dance-theatre collective consistently wrestles with big topics. Tide examined climate change, Hold Me Closer Tony Danza interrogated information-overload culture, and Stunt Double dissected exploitation by the film industry.

Death is a brave focus even for this company’s iconoclastic theatricality, finger-prodding stance, rebellion and fondness for aesthetic confrontation.

The show, directed by Gavin Webber, The Farm’s co-artistic director, begins with a familiar funereal setting: guests gathering around a coffin crowned by a showy flower arrangement. There’s the controlling character absently tapping another’s shoulder in comfort, the inveterate hugger, the silent one, the sobber and the person in denial.

No One Gets Out of Here Alive by The Farm. Photo © Billie Wilson Coffey

The audience is put on notice from the moment a tall character close to the coffin violently lurches backwards and the others break out into extravagant parallel moves. Every emotion pertaining to grief – disbelief, anger, regret, negotiation and distraction – is toyed with, sliced and diced, hyped up and peeled open. There’s a reminder that loss can pertain to an infinite array of causes, including youth, friendships and dreams.

The choreography is a wild beast: a mix of circus, contemporary dance and disco journeying through celebration, playfulness and despair. At times, the highly skilled dancers, of varying heights and aged between 20 and 60, travel in synchronised groups, embodying angular, twisting gestures with miraculous coordination. The dance is athletic, playful, extreme, violent, at times courting danger and surprise.

Anna Whitaker’s sympathetic score pulses with distorted strains of high opera, abstract electronica, rave feels and ghostly elements from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, meshed with caricatured robotic gesturing. Stevie Wonder’s As, with its last-century disco grooves, lightens the mood of shadowy introspection while reinforcing death’s eternal finality. The sonic backcloth enhances the reflective circumspection around mortality.

No One Gets Out of Here Alive by The Farm. Photo © Billie Wilson Coffey

Visual design by Merinda Davies is distinctive and provides some extraordinarily effective moments. The stage becomes a mess of littered earth, plastic cups and lollies, but this disarray shifts in and out of order at dramatic junctures.

The final moments of the show are beautifully dramatic and involve audience participation, but to say more would spoil the surprise, were this production to be revived. Chloe Olgivie’s clever lighting design, playing with light and shadow, creates an inspiring illusion of spectral dancing spirits in one stunning segment.

Thought-provoking and a brain teaser, the show is as much a celebration of life as it is a contemplation of death. It unrolls like a collage of discordant film noir, with a few not-always-convincing passages, but overall it is an entertaining, ambitious and impressively immersive experience.

No One Gets Out of Here Alive played at the Talbot Theatre, Thomas Dixon Centre from 9–12 September, a Brisbane Festival event.