Chunky Move: Mortal Engines, Queen Elizabeth Hall, SE1

If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be abducted by aliens, this show is probably the closest you’ll get. We’re about 40 minutes in when the auditorium fills with dry ice and a vivid green laser beam shoots out over our heads, creating corridors of light with smoke marbling the beams. It’s like we’re sitting in a radioactive cloud. Then it all starts flashing like crazy, a cross between a Whirl-y-gig rave and a mass cult induction, leaving idiotic grins on everyone’s faces.

Chunky Move are an Australian company, founded in 1995 by choreographer Gideon Obarzanek. Surprisingly, this is the company’s first London performance, as part of the Southbank Centre’s Ether Festival, and Obarzanek’s 2008 piece Mortal Engine certainly fits the festival’s remit of music, technology and cross-arts exploration. It won’t win any prizes for its undeveloped choreography, but that’s not really the point.

The point is movement — and sound-sensitive projection technology developed by artist and tech expert Frieder Weiss, who worked on this show with laser and sound artist Robin Fox. The zeros and ones of the project will remain a mystery to most of us, but the effects are brain-frazzling.

The set is a steep tilted bank on which dancers writhe, roll and make insectoid jerks and contortions and which acts as a screen for the projections. Their movements trigger showers and swarms of monochrome shapes and shadows: a silhouette imprinted on the wall, a couple’s intertwined limbs tussling with squiggling lines, bodies swamped and drowned by digital lifeforms. Lots of dance artists have experimented with digital and multimedia technology in their shows but none have surrendered to it as fully as this.

The apocalyptic rumblings of the soundtrack come courtesy of electronic composer Ben Frost, an Australian now living in Iceland, and it’s very much the sound of a land that gets only four hours’ sunlight in winter. The atmosphere is intense but alienating. It’s bleak, even boring at times, but it gets four stars for those flashing lights alone — although it’s not impossible those flashing lights were just a sophisticated tool for brainwashing critics.