When Matilda Leyser was little she had a recurring nightmare. Not uncommonly, it concerned flying and falling but it didn't involve the usual stuff of tumbling off cliff edges or plunging to Earth in an out-of-control plane.

Instead Leyser dreamt gravity would one day fail and we'd all float off into space. "I was scared," she says, "of falling upwards, not down."

Now the leader of a new breed of aerialists who are combining dramatic and circus techniques to create powerful contemporary productions, Leyser has ensured this insecurity remains at the core of her work.

"It's about the paradox of human strength and vulnerability," she says.

"I'd like people to have a sense of my potential both to fly and to fall."

Having spent most of her childhood "off the ground", whether dangling from trees or skipping over rooftops, Leyser actually trained as a dancer before turning to aerial work in the hope of creating something more accessible and dramatically potent.

"What interested me about circus was that it is inherently dramatic," she explains. "Aerial appealed to me in particular because of its poetic potential - it literalises a lot of the metaphors through which we describe our everyday dramatic experience, like the 'ups and downs' of life or 'up in the air'.

I wanted to take those figures of speech and make them figures of movement."

Following collaborations with Volcano Theatre, Glyndebourne and the National, Line, Point, Plane is Leyser's new full-length solo piece.

Involving her in collaborations with the likes of Complicite founder Annabel Arden and playwright Bryony Lavery, it combines circus skills with physical theatre and original writing and music.

Divided into three parts, the first of which was a hit at 2005's Edinburgh Festival, it sees Leyser perform on three pieces of equipment - a vertical rope known as the Corde Lisse, a Cloud Swing and her own invention, something like "an enourmous curtain with folds which I climb".

"I'm very interested in the form of the equipment proposing the story," she says of Line, Point, Plane. "The Corde Lisse is a single line in space, which suggested to me a timeline. So that piece shows the seven ages of woman as I travel along the rope. The swing proposed a different kind of narrative.

"The technical name for the weightless moment at the top of the swing is called the dead point, so that piece is about a moment, a split second, in time.

"For the last piece I wanted to suggest a plane of time, something more infinite, so I created a vast expanse which I could climb across. I don't want to just perform tricks - I want to tell a story."

Monday, January 30, 2005