TWO years ago the young Belgian-Moroccan dancerchoreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui scored a deserved international hit with Rien de Rien, a production sponsored by the innovative company Les Ballets C de la B. Set in a mosque, the piece was an unforgettable cultural crossroads for a motley cast of seven, including Cherkaoui himself and one live musician.

Cherkaoui is back with a bigger, thematically deeper and artistically riskier 90-minute performance entitled Foi (French for “belief”). Using the wide-open genre of dance-theatre, he and 11 performers — plus the seven members of the Flemish vocal/instrumental consort Capilla Flamenca, specialists in medieval music — question collective spiritual mythology, individual belief systems and human survival, particularly in the wake of September 11. Foi conjures a strange yet familiar stage world. The performance area is a wide wedge enclosed by high grey walls and strewn with upturned office chairs — and bodies gently stirred back into life. Although Cherkaoui doesn’t confine them there, one of the walls has a gallery from which the observant musicians sing and play.

Setting, actions and text (mainly in English) suggest that we are witnessing fairly immediately the aftermath of a World Trade Centre-style disaster. The performers embody either angels or obliviously self-absorbed humans. The former generally shun speech, communicating more often via Cherkaoui’s trademark soft, flexible movement vocabulary of arching twists, entwinements and much sliding, spiralling floor work.

The humans consist of four women, including a black man portraying a maternal, Jesus-loving matron, and a lone, male intermediary figure whose sole sound is a brief braying rage.

These fleshly beings are sometimes prodded, pulled, tickled and generally manipulated by their more divine counterparts.

Foi has been performed fewer than a dozen times since its premiere last month. Much like its cast, I suspect, the viewer requires time to discover the show’s internal rhythm. It could be trimmed and tightened. There are some awkward transitions, and passages that still felt insufficiently digested. For all that, its cumulative impact is enormous.

Propelled by personal and topical notions of self-punishment, victimisation and redemption, Foi is likely to touch nerves and generate debate. There are moments of beauty, hilarity and stylised horror, and references to environmental issues, HIV and Aids, disability, cultural tourism, religious complacency, classical painting, pop music and Adam and Eve. The music is beautifully rendered. It is like being given a hugely complicated, damaged and generous gift.