In this circus collaboration between the deaf and disabled-led company Graeae and Rio de Janeiro's Circo Crescer e Viver, two men face up to each other and fight. The difference is that this duel takes place with both of them swinging in hoops and with legs that are detachable. There's another terrific moment when a girl in a white dress leans backwards over a man sitting in a wheelchair, and it is as tender and erotic as any stage sex that you'll ever see.
Several of the performers here were involved in the London 2012 Paralympic Games opening ceremony, and the piece continues to explore the liberating possibilities of circus as previously seen in Graeae shows including Prometheus Awakes and Push Me.
This is a more intimate affair than those large-scale outdoor pieces as it uses hoops, silks, stilts and the trapeze to explore what it means to really belong through the stories of people returning to a soon-to-be demolished house.
It's very fragmentary – more a series of ideas strung together rather than something cohesive, developed and sustained. But there are some strong images: childhood is recaptured in a game of hide and seek where, interestingly, the blind girl is not seen even though she is fully visible; and there is a little love story played out on hoops.
It's a pity that the text isn't sharper and more directed, and the show falls slightly awkwardly into a no man's land between the fictional and the self-revelatory. But there is a terrific, often soulful, music and sound design from Lewis Gibson, and flashes of comedy.
If the show is in some ways relatively unsophisticated in its performance techniques, it is pioneering in the way its uses many different kinds of language – physical, spoken and sign – to create layers of meaning.
