Matilda Leyser likes to scare people. As she hovered effortlessly on the edge of a makeshift rope swing 20ft above the stage, the audience held its collective breath.

One false move and she'd have been a gonner.

She swooped through the space as if it was her natural habitat.

The moment when the swing reaches its highest point and stops for a split second in mid-air is called, Leyser told us, the dead point.

"I like this", she exclaimed as she swung higher and higher, testing her body's balance and control.

Wriggling uncomfortably, the audience must have prayed she didn't drop out of the sky.

At times she refused to hold on, silently proclaiming "no hands" like a child who has discovered a new trick.

Dead Point was the third and final piece of the evening and it was a shame there were noticeable gaps in the audience after the interval.

In the first half we were let into a shadowy world where Leyser clawed her way across great swathes of black fabric holding onto hidden loops and ropes.

This piece, Night Plane, was more challenging. Human body parts - faces, toes, hands - appeared from a gap high up in the curtain and explored the eerie darkness before Leyser's face, dishevelled and darkeyed, peered out. She emerged from the hole like a butterfly out of a cocoon and folded the fabric around her like giant black wings.

She made her way across the backdrop, twisting, turning and manipulating the curtain, before exiting towards a shaft of light.

In Lifeline, the second piece, Leyser greeted the audience by rolling down a rope in a basket-like structure created from the slack.

A journey from infancy to old age followed, with the rope Leyser's companion and life-force. She scaled the empty space like a mountaineer, using her toes like ice picks.

Far from circus tricks and acrobatics, this was an artist pushing her body and imagination to the limit, the result a thoughtprovoking, darkly comic, display of athleticism and talent.