While it might feel as though each change in direction is leading you further away from a resolution, though, it is true that there is a solution hidden somewhere within the logic of the puzzle. You can take comfort in that much.

From this premise Michael Burke crafts an endearing analogy: life too has the character of a Rubik’s cube. You can think you’ve got the hang of it, only to zoom out and find you’ve missed something integral. You took a wrong turn. It’s time to start over.

It is at this juncture that we meet Cubehead, an extra-terrestrial hominid form with a Rubik’s cube for a head. Cubehead is dealing with a thoroughly existential crisis, wrestling with a form of anxiety Sartre termed as “bad faith”. It seems that the pressure to conform comes at the cost of one’s innate freedom, and before he is stultified into submission Cubehead must depart. He hopes, like many before him, that by leaving home he will find himself.

If the metaphor seems wafer thin – Burke himself was wrenched from a promising job as a lawyer by an interior, peripatetic impulse – then it is because it is supposed to be. A charming and effusive guide through his own personal crisis, Burke is self-reflexive without ever seeming overly contrived. He effortlessly combines his stand-up repertoire with character skits and oddball theatrics, a one-man comedy styling that he more or less accurately describes as “Dada Surrealism”.

The show reaches its conclusion with a surprising gust of pathos, Burke and Cubehead’s anxieties reconciled and resolved in a bittersweet revelation. As if recoiling from his own sentimentality, Burke quickly ushers an audience member on stage to help him smash a pinata. If it is a moment supposed to distract us from the message of the show, though, on this score Burke has failed. The sweet treats of the burst pinata spilling over the stage and into the audience, it seems that Burke might have accidentally stumbled upon another potent metaphor for his personal philosophy.

Five short films, volume dulled, are shown against a blank white wall. Beside the projected images sit the alternating forms of five sets of musicians.

It is the task of the musicians to bring to life, through their craft, a new interpretation of their assigned film. A program that highlights foremost the power of music to guide our interpretation of the visual, The Cinematic Scores is a tour-de-force of ecstatic ekphrasis.

Accordionist David Sergio Kaloczy and clarinet aficionado Philip Everal begin proceedings, pitting their smoky melodies against Man Ray’s The Starfish. The duo do well to cultivate an atmosphere of 1920s Parisian bohemian chic, extending an invitation to the audience to join them in the moment of the film.

After the audience have recovered from the temporal-lag of their Midnight in Paris experience, it is Mark Cain’s turn to breathe life into early 20th century ethnographic documentary Nanook of the North.

Cain fashions a quirky soundtrack befitting the lighthearted tone of the film, even stealing the show at points with his range of exotic woodwind instruments.

Here the program shifts in tone, with volume taking precedence over melody. Chris Kotchie and Sam Gillies, equipped with guitar and laptop, supply a soundscape awash with feedback and recursive drum loops to match the vertiginous visual forms of Marcel Duschamp’s Anemic Cinema.

The score provides a perfect counterweight to the industrial fetishism of the Dada avant-garde’s short film, a performance that retains Duschamps’ gift for simultaneously entrancing and alienating his audience.

A similar feat is achieved by the three noise merchants of TheIntensoBand. To George Melies turn of the century cinematic triumph Journey to the Moon they provide a stochastic assemblage of jazz drums and abrupt synthesised wheezes. It’s a sound which seems, at times, asphyxiated by its own pace. Not entirely unlike the frenetic action of Melies film, of course.

Necks sufficiently wrung by TheIntesoBand, it’s time again for a change of pace. Paired with an edited version of Sergei Eisenstein’s landmark piece of Soviet propaganda, Battleship Potemkin, is all-male choir Voicemale.

There’s a certain dramatic irony to Voicemale’s song choice, one made possible by the fact of historical retrospect. As the subordinate seamen of the Potemkin oust their captain and hoist gaily the flag of freedom, for example, the choir belt out, con brio, the chorus of Tears for Fears’ Mad World.

The result is a mournful repackaging of Eisenstein’s revolutionary zeal as a remnant of an expired utopia.

By the end of the night, we have come full circle. From the rose-tinted romanticism that accompanied Man Ray through to Voicemale’s sanguineous soundtrack to socialist upheaval, curators Alex Courtin and Tom Muller have compiled a program that runs the full gamut of historical interpretation.

The Cinematic Scores is an event that renders splendidly the power of music to shift our interpretive faculties, a challenging but rewarding experience for performers and audience alike.

Though well travelled, he’s a raconteur more likely to regale you with tales of cheeky Moroccan hotel receptionists running imaginary prostitution rings than extol the virtues of the Saharan sublime. Though a bleeding-heart liberal to the core, he can’t bring himself to offer up the necessary B-Pay details to properly monetise his commitment to the cause.

Erhard’s inertia is, of course, a familiar one. Our inability to correlate personal action with global consequence is no laughing matter, and it is perhaps for this reason that the comedian draws as many rounds of applause as he does laughs. This is comedy with its finger on the pulse of the myriad contradictions which constitute the contemporary worldview. That it’s structured like an episode of How I Met Your Mother is pleasantly unnerving.

The big laughs of the night come when Erhard occupies his most familiar territory: Germany. Like any traveller who has ever returned home from a long stint overseas, he shares an ambivalent relationship with his country of origin. Erhard has a gift for exposing the contingency which lies at the centre of the familiar, and to make us laugh while doing so.

The set is not short of local flavour, and Erhard’s research into Australia must be commended. He does well to render faithfully the tautological nature of patriotism, an attitude which posits “being Australian” as the reason for being proud to be Australian. Again the audience laugh and applaud in equal measure, and there’s a sense that Erhard will be sending us home with more to think about than a few witty punchlines.

While the son to whom Paco addresses his concerns is still a figment of the man’s febrile imagination, we should be grateful. If it means that he must continue to transmit his bizarre posterity within the arena of stand-up comedy, then it’s best for all of us that his biological clock keeps on ticking. Ex-German is a show which skilfully houses serious questions within an unserious format, a Trojan horse designed to put paid to all scared cows.

Ex-German runs until February 12 and is part of Fringe World 2013. Tickets are available from fringeworld.com.au.

Lauren Holmwood, visual artist and one third of tonight’s cast, is making a note of your presence.

All seated, she scatters the sketches like confetti around a hunched, hooded figure (Emma Fishwick).

The audience for a moment settle, dividing their attention between the eerily anonymous character ambling around the paper scrap detritus and a projected film depicting a third player (Nicole Ward) approaching the theatre. Through the door she eventually sprints, completing the surrealist tableau.

This is only the beginning of Tracing HUman.

The show, comprised of contemporary dance, theatrical riffing and visual art, invites you to think about the potential that lies dormant at the juncture of every decision. How did one choice change a day, a week, a life? How are we all, like the memories which constitute a being, connected to one another?

With so much going on you would excuse the show for seeming at times a little confused.

The cast handle the glut of ruminative subtexts triumphantly, though, using the arsenal of assorted media to tie together disparate strands of introspective musing.

We see the transience of our passage through life hypostatised with chalk, enjoy solo and synchronised dance pieces choreographed and performed by Fishwick and Ward, and watch wax crayons melted onto a canvas by a hairdryer (a Rorschach test, I’m sure).

Remarkably for a performance concerned with big, brooding questions, the show is not without a sense of humour. Mercifully, this isn’t the matte black or densely satirical wit you might have come to expect as a bribe for going on a bleak existential journey (think about those moments of levity housed within France’s most crushing cinematic experiences). It is rather a playful, almost impish dalliance with the absurdity of our situation. It’s a big hug, and one you’re grateful for.

Tracing HUman is a poetics of the banal illuminated by the electric currents of our own being’s potential.

It’s required viewing for a world currently obsessed with reminding itself that it only lives once – a timely reminder that there are, and in many extraordinary senses, lives other to our own.

Tracing HUman runs until Wednesday, February 6 and is part of Fringe World 2013. Tickets are available from www.fringeworld.com.au.

Twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger is famous for two reasons. The first is Being and Time, his 500-page exploration of the word “being” (the major argument of which runs that in order to understand anything properly, one must first understand who is doing the understanding).

The second thing is his nazism. While history forgave Heidegger his political snafu (if only because it was still trying to get its head around his tome on being), comedian Paco Erhard is afraid that it has yet to be so kind to him.

It is for this reason that Erhard commits so much of his Fringe World show on being German to dealing with the awkward questions of World War II. He’s worried that it’s unfashionable to be German, that their vaunted “stern efficiency” is merely a polite way of saying “prone to genocide”.

It is a brave choice of conundrum on which to hinge a stand-up set, and Erhard handles it with such charisma and introspective honesty that you’re laughing from start to finish. Somehow.

When Erhard isn’t offering insight into the psyche of his countrymen, he’s delving gloriously into the minutiae of a world which, while everywhere still divided by questions of regional, ethnic and cultural identity, is nonetheless purchasing the same brand of yoghurt at the local supermarket.

Erhard’s is a welcome, fresh approach to that hackneyed branch of comedy which finds in dog-eared stereotypes a crutch for lazy humour. It is fitting that it’s a German who is reinvigorating the form, for it was his kin who came up with a word for that kind of comedy in the first place: Schadenfreude.

There are no five simple steps to becoming German, and for misleading you Paco Erhard is not a bit sorry. Neither is his audience, who alternately gasp and delight at his incisive, often jarring wit.

If we need stereotypes to make sense of the world, avows Erhard, then we need to learn to laugh at them before we can change the world for the better.

5-Step Guide to Being German runs until February 8 and is part of Fringe World 2013. Tickets are available from www.fringeworld.com.au