DUSK and the drift of pungent wood smoke. Common sense says we're clustered on the back lot at Tramway, but our other senses whisper differently. Sporadic flames and the overhead moon reveal six other-world figures: ancient, ghost-like.

Or perhaps foreshadowing some future tribe of post-holocaust survivors.

Androgynous in layers of cast-off frocks, faces chalked white, they slowly advance, dipping and weaving, towards a line of huge, earth-filled baskets.

There are shouts and mutters - ''I want, doesn't get . . . doesn't get''. Each clambers on top of a basket: this will, at times, act like a relentless grave, a seed bed, a point of rebirth. And all the while, these rich, unaccompanied choral harmonies - Cappella Nova, in a new work by William Sweeney - are rising from a nook behind us, catching us between two visions of life, resurrection, struggle, and

aspiration.

This is Chapter One of Alex Rigg's A Language of Others, a hauntingly symbolic pilgrimage that is a superb large-scale spectacular and yet is touched throughout with details that invoke our questing humanity and the oppositions that shape our actions and our dreams.

Chapter Two sees Rigg himself - bare-torsoed, fighting

free of a wire-mesh train - rising and juddering the length of a narrow corridor towards the wild, sonorous, shifting textures of Macnaughton's Vale of Atholl Pipe Band venting the exuberant music of Dick Lee. Everywhere there's a sense of physical energy pushing through - breath through pipes, Rigg's body through space and time.

Chapter Three sets all eight performers against glass mountains without crampons. Androgynous in dusty business suits they strive to scale huge wedges that tilt at the moment of apparent triumph. Again there's this powerful sense of yearning - even the baying, free-form jazz of Junk Culture has a raw hunger as it leaps and yelps and growls.

And again there's no pat conclusion: when each couple finally enters into a supportive embrace - as much a spiritual reconciliation of inner selves as an image of shared weariness - it's as if this brief respite is merely a springboard towards the next, inevitable challenge. Truly astounding, uplifting work, performed with great intensity by dancers and musicians alike.

I can remember, on several occasions, when I've left Tramway after watching some foreign company perform some massive excursion into epic, poetic work. And I've wished we could have some home-grown equivalent to match it. A Language of Others makes that wish come true.