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A dizzy­ing phys­ic­al poem of theatre, dance, and stage­craft, Red Leap’s Dust Pil­grim comes at you with intriguing imme­di­acy and lingers like an ingeni­ous, puzz­ling dream.

Devised by the com­pany and dir­ec­ted by found­ing mem­bers Kate Park­er and Julie Nolan, the show takes audi­ences on the jour­ney of Panuelo, a girl whose arrival fore­shad­owed the dis­ap­pear­ance of water and vital­ity from her world. Adrift in a sea of dust and yoked to mys­ter­i­ous machinery of dangling ropes and tick­ing clocks, she plots to escape a moth­er who hates her for driv­ing her fath­er away. But the fur­ther Panuelo gets from home, the more the past seems to echo back at her.

Play­ing out with a thirst for nov­elty and an ener­get­ic dis­reg­ard for still­ness, the show’s quest-nar­rat­ive neatly expands famili­al strife into a pil­grim’s pro­gress through the strata of a beguil­ing fantasy soci­ety. This plays out through sparse spoken seg­ments, ener­get­ic phys­ic­al set-pieces, and some ingeni­ous pup­petry and cos­tume-work.

With the story com­fort­ably rest­ing on Ella Bec­roft’s Panuelo, Alis­on Bruce and Thomas Eason look to have plenty of fun enliven­ing a series of tropey riffs on par­ent­al arche­types. Char­ac­ters don’t tend to out­stay their wel­come, and the kooky for­eign-ness of the fantasy world treads a keen bal­ance between cir­cus fas­cin­a­tion and car­nie com­edy.

Com­ing at the end of a suc­cess­ful North Island tour for the pro­duc­tion, Dust Pil­grim plays the Te Whaea theatre until the 9th of July.