Full marks to Manchester International Festival for discovering the Mayfield Depot and arranging for it to be used as a venue during the festival.

It’s a huge cavernous space with big sliding doors and big rooms off the central hall. At the far end is a blocked off room which the stewards ask you to go into. It’s pitch black in there save for the tiniest sliver of light filtering through the black-out. Cross-disciplinary artist Tino Sehgal – best known for his 2012 Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern ‘These Assocations’, for which he has been shortlisted for this year’s Turner prize – has put these unique qualities of the space to profound and unsettling use. Your first steps are cautious as you know that other people have gone into the room in front of you. As you tread carefully there’s the sound of singing accompanied by an electronic beat. It sounds recorded but you then start to discover that the singers – sampling various styles and musical quotations – are moving around the space giving the singing a shifting quality as different vocal parts come nearer or recede away from you.

After a while your eyes adjust to the light and you can see all the people who are in the room. The question now is who is a performer/singer and who is a member of the public? The role and experience of audience/participant is blurred. This combination of uncertainty with the experience of your eyes adjusting to be able to see in the dark was a strong, well realised moment.

After a while the singing stops and the performers start to speak or rather confess (reminiscent of the confessional form in a public space employed in ‘These Associations’), but for me the experience turns into something far less interesting and allusive.

The less said about Dan Graham’s Past Future Split Attention (which was on show in another space) the better. Was this really made in response to the space? Really? A small screen with a bench in front where you can sit and watch a video of two blokes having a banal conversation in front of a black curtain. The sound coming out the speakers was of poor quality and it was a massive waste of a fabulous opportunity.

For more from Manchester International Festival see Total Theatre’s reviews of Inne Goris’ double-bill  for children Once Upon a Story / Long Grass, Maxine Peake / Sarah Frankcom’s Shelleyan poetry protest The Masque of Anarchy, and Robert Del Naja and Adam Curtis’ sweeping, potentially radical Massive Attack v Adam Curtis.