Black Milk at SkyCity Theatre

Black Milk is a dark and troubling work.

Douglas Wright's dance works have always been unique of vision, profoundly strange and performed with an extreme kind of passion.

Black Milk is no exception but is also quite different to everything that came before.

Douglas Wright is different, after his long depression and grief, attempted suicide and "rebirth" - against all odds. Not exactly contented. He hasn't sold out one iota in the unique, strange and passionate stakes, so Black Milk is still a dark and disturbing work that looks some of our most troubling evils directly in the eye.

Nor has he slipped into some ecstatic dreamland on the way to oblivion - "the arms of Morpheus" he describes via the little ventriloquist dummy Joey, an alter ego central to Black Milk's extraordinary cast.

He hasn't lost his anger: anger that explodes in the torture scene reminiscent of recent images from Abu Ghraib, where Wright is doubly incensed at man's inhumanity to man and at the use of homosexual acts of love as the most humiliating of all gestures to be forced upon its victims.

There is anger even more awful for its quiet totality in a soul-shocking portrayal of victory after such base inhuman behaviour, in Helaina Keeley's sad, sad solo to the blare of a triumphant military march.

There could be nothing more controversial than the dialogue, punctuated with grunts and orgiastic sighs, between paedophile and complicit child and the accompanying masturbatory voyeurism.

There is nakedness, an image of the Dark Mother of Death in scarlet shoes and Lady Godiva hair.

Death, its inevitability, its desirability, its unknowable mystery, is everywhere.

In the final scene the ventriloquist (Brian Carby) sits stunned and finally mute, in the lap of the Dark Mother and that is where Wright's new optimism seems to spring forth: in the acceptance of the final snuff and more importantly, the surrender to life with all its ugliness and fleeting joys.

Wright's surrender to this existential pain gives his work an unbearable new power. There is no argument, he says, this is exactly how it is and you have to believe him.

The art is also unbearably seductive: a magnificent soundscape by David Long incorporating music by Gyorgy Ligeti and Wright's voice and text; a swathed set and costumes the colour of subtle jewels by Michael Pearce; some transformative lighting by Robrecht Ghesquiere; and dancing to die for by Craig Bary, Sarah-Jayne Howard, Helaina Keeley, Alex Leonhartsberger, Claire O'Neil, Jessica Shipman and Taiaroa Royal.