Cut the Sky opens with a scene that would not be out of place in Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah. There’s a makeshift camp of flimsy dome tents, characters wearing scraps of clothing made out of stripy hessian bags and grimey high-vis vests.

From this dystopia (there are echoes of Mad Max here too), members of Marrugeku – directed by Rachael Swain – perform a lament in poem, song, dance and drama. The lament is for their country, which has been poisoned by mining and the extraction of gas. The lament takes many forms.

There’s a woman in a garish blue plastic raincoat (Ngaire Pigram) singing Nick Cave’s Weeping Song in an almost flat, dirge-like way. She walks across the stage as scenes of environmental devastation are projected onto a screen behind her. It could be Cyclone Tracey, Fukushima or the Boxing Day tsunami – whatever it is, it sends a clear message to the audience: the catastrophes long predicted have arrived.

Later, a kangaroo in a high-vis vest will reel punch-drunk from the stage, and a man playing a violin will make his way through the phalanx of dancers as they fly and writhe in front of us.

In a pub (or is it a bordello?), a sex worker and various characters – including a geologist, a mining worker and a displaced traditional owner – move around the stage, in and out of embraces, singing Cave’s Red Right Hand. It’s confusing at times, and the mood discordant. From the choreography (and the sinister piano chords) we are to infer the natural way of things has been disrupted.

Marrugeku makes dance theatre from north-western Australia. The group (there are six performers on stage) is now based in Broome and tour remote and urban Australia, as well as Europe and Asia. Their latest work, Cut the Sky is being staged as part of the Sydney festival.

This work is through a Dreamtime darkly. Not only has the land been degraded, but the people with it. They swoon listlessly around a bar room, wear hessian scraps, sniff petrol and fling themselves desolately across the stage.

Poet Edwin Lee Mulligan tells the Dreamtime story of gas (in his words it’s a ‘poisonous lady’ we should not disturb), but it is more an elegy to a past that no longer exists. We have dredged up this mineral, along with others, and now the spirits are unhappy and the elders cannot “sing the rain”. In another segment we listen to Bill Grayden’s 1980 speech to the Aboriginal people of Noonkanbah; he’s chiding them for protesting about mining on their land, and promises the land will not be degraded. Of course we know now it will be – so many promises were broken and so many warnings about climate change went unheeded. It all makes for pretty bleak viewing.

The work is multi-layered and fast moving – maybe too fast moving. Just when you’ve got your head around one sequence – a poem perhaps, or piece of multi-media – Cut The Sky moves quickly onto the next. Running for around an hour, there’s a lot to take in. But the setting, a dirty and battered country, and the theme – climate change – unite the disparate elements, and the dancers are incredibly expressive and visceral, particularly when it comes to expressing pain. They dance not only with their bodies, but with their faces.

This is a sad and angry work, and rightly so. There’s no redemption to be found in the destruction of the land and the erosion of traditional Indigenous culture.

The piece ends with rain, which is soothing after an hour of parched landscapes. But it is a false ending. The audience is left with no allusions that something precious and irrevocable has been destroyed.

• Cut the Sky is at Sydney Opera House as part of the Sydney festival until 17 January