This performance was dedicated to the asylum seekers currently kept in camps in Australia. The show began with Eastern European music. The audience stood in the road looking up at the flat featureless wall of the 25 storey Premier Lodge Hotel. A lone figure appeared at the top, a man standing on the vertical plane of the wall, facing down to the ground bellow.
In slow motion he ran towards the street, attached to a rope that negated the effect of gravity. His shadow danced in his wake, stretching, elongating, spinning and twisting as the man zig-zagged across the vertical plane. And then he flew. Effortlessly he launched himself into space, to fly in great arcs across the wall.
Another figure made her way down to join the dance. She too flew in arcs across the building. A man and a woman working together to create a dance drama that was turned through an orientation of 90 degrees, onto a vertical plane. This inversion gave a poetic irony of translated aspirations. The couple's aim was to gain the city. But their journey was a descent from impossible heights to the grime of the urban street.
Images of refugees seen through windows and doors were projected onto the surface of the wall. Another couple ascended from the street, climbing over these images. Pulled apart, they struggled to find each other. But at last all four were united in joyous reunion.
This was a breathtaking performance that achieved a poetry of motion unrestrained by gravity. Manchester International Arts deserve credit for having identified this location and bringing Legs On The Wall halfway across the world to exploit its potential.