"Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost." So said that sage savant of dance, the late, great Pina Bausch. It's perhaps revealing that Alain Platel should choose to paraphrase her in En Avant Marche! "Play, Play, or we are lost," is muttered as a brass band muddle their way onto the stage, jostling chairs and music stands as they go. This misquote, much like Platel's production, is similar to Bausch, but not quite as good.

At its heart, this discipline-defying combination of music, theatre and dance examines the bittersweet curse of humanity: we are beings of emotional, intelligent memory, capable of vivid nostalgia and abstract thought extending far beyond the boundaries of our frame. And yet, we are trapped in a body that ages, decays and eventually dies. We are a species fated to look back with longing and forward with fear.

That may sound like a crushingly heavy existential crisis to put on stage, but this potentially odious audience experience is scooped up by the ever so humble micro-universe of a community brass band's rehearsal room. All life is here: the young, the old, those in the prime of their lives and those distinctly past it. At the far end of this spectrum is a dying former trombonist, forced to give up his instrument by the mouth cancer that now threatens to kill him. He is superficially extroverted and yet distinctly introspective. His terminal ailment seems to be an echo of a past spent living life to its hedonistic fullest, a fact seemingly mirrored in the two middle-aged women who transform into baton-twirling, sexually rapacious majorettes in gold sequined hotpants.

These obvious narrative clues are a departure point for something altogether more inscrutable, albeit in a wonderfully whimsical way. Our dying hero gibbers in multiple languages. The skittish dialogue sweeps from high-brow to low, evoking Nobel laureates in one breath and Abba in the next. But for all its post-modern surrealism and indecipherable quirks, En Avant Marche! is irresistibly moving and, ultimately, uplifting. There's a cute, warming hokiness to the action; it's a display with the scruffy, dog-eared edges of a treasured book.

The locally sourced Brisbane Excelsior Band are the emotional compass of the piece, reorganising the often rambling thoughts on stage under one cohesive, musical impetus. In the closing moments of work, as the rousing harmonies of Holst's Jupiter swell, the music crescendos to an interrupted cadence. We're left without a clear resolution, although we can imagine what might come next; there could hardly be a more poetic metaphor for the ineffable mystery of what comes after life.

Les Ballet C de la B present En Avant Marche! to 7 Sep, part of the Brisbane Festival