THE month-long Dance International Glasgow (DIG) festival opened at the Tramway venue last weekend. Its diverse programme includes works by Tim Etchells (of acclaimed English performance company Forced Entertainment), experimental Icelandic choreographer Margret Sara Gudjonsdottir and Scottish Dance Theatre. Once again we find a contemporary dance programme that blurs the old distinctions between art forms.

Out Of This World, the latest show from performance spectacle director Mark Murphy, is a case in point. The piece, which will play the DIG festival on May 19 and 20 (in addition to dates in Inverness and Edinburgh), is defined by Murphy's V-tol company as "genre-defying action-packed theatre."

Murphy (who directed the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014) has created a theatre piece built around the story a young, newly-wed couple, Ellen and Jonathan, who are admitted to hospital with serious injuries following a car crash. The drama, in which we experience the aftermath of the crash from within Ellen's mind, is slightly reminiscent of Anthony Neilson's great play The Wonderful World Of Dissocia.

There is quasi-surreal dialogue, Lecoq-style physical movement and aerial work on wires, all wrapped up in an extensive series of projected graphics, which shift continuously between representations of the hospital and abstract expressions of Ellen's thought processes. What there is not is anything one could really refer to as dance.

The combination of the projections with the aerial work is truly impressive at times. Murphy's script, on the other hand, is decidedly variable, not least in its sentimental conclusion. One need not be especially hard-hearted to find the denouement more than a little emotionally manipulative.

Which is a pity, as the production boasts some strong performances, not least from Sarah Swire, who is compelling and charismatic as Ellen. As so often with such multimedia performance works, V-tol's piece is stronger on spectacle than narrative.

Narrative is effectively dispensed with in Each Other, a new work by Netherlands-based choreographers Uri Ivgi and Johan Greben, which was presented by Scottish Ballet on the opening night of the DIG festival. A large cast of dancers dressed in ragged costumes descends on a set strewn with shoes.

At first there is a disquieting disconnect between the human figures and the sheer volume of the shoes, which appear like the aftermath of the liberation of a Nazi death camp or of the Cambodian killing fields. However, as the people collect and assemble the footwear, one is reminded of the untold numbers of our fellow human beings around the globe (the late, great John Berger wrote of them as the "rag pickers") who our "economic order" has reduced to scrabbling a living among garbage mounds.

There is particular poignancy in the image of the shoes being built into a partition separating one group of people from another; even though both groups are, to all intents and purposes, identical. It is hardly surprising, given the piece's quiet, abstract humanism, that the choreography is at its most transfixing in its dynamic ensemble moments.

Yet, while the work moves us with its focus on collective suffering and resilience, it also recognises the profound singularity of the human condition. The excellent, beat-driven electronic score and the clamour of the human mass give way, ultimately, to the vulnerability and fortitude of the individual human spirit.

For details of the Dance International Glasgow programme, visit: tramway.org

Tour details for Out Of This World can be found at: outofthisworldtour.co.uk