FORKLIFT Set for Sydney Festival, 16 Jan

It's the graveyard shift and three women find themselves in an industrial wasteland, willing to risk everything in their interplay with each other and a moving machine. Lyrical, intimate and dangerous, this breathtaking dance-circus performance work from the multi award-winning Australian company KAGE features contortion, aerial acrobatics, striking lighting effects and original music.

FORKLIFT has its World Premiere at the Sydney Festival on Thursday 16 January.

Re-imagining the possibilities of heavy machinery into a playful and dangerous sphere, FORKLIFTthrusts KAGE's vigorous physicality on, and around, a working 2.5 tonne forklift, examining both the connection and conflicting relationship between humankind and machinery.

Witness beauty - natural and constructed - as the women proceed to transform both the machine and themselves in a display of the equipment of the human body at its most impressive.

FORKLIFT has been devised in Australia following a development at Helsinki's CIRKO (Center for New Circus) - a space dedicated to training and the creation of new circus and performance works.

Featuring an extraordinary design concept by Bluebottle 3, this international collaboration merges indoor and outdoor worlds into a new realm ensuring you will never look at something familiar in quite the same way again.

Directed by Kate Denborough (one of Australia's 2013 Women of Influence), FORKLIFT is performed by Henna Kaikula (hand balancer and contortionist in Cantina, performed at Sydney Festival 2013 and Theatres Forecourt 2010), Amy Macpherson and Nicci Wilks (ex Circus Oz).

Founded by Kate Denborough and Gerard Van Dyck in 1997, KAGE is a multi-award-winning company that creates critically acclaimed work across dance, physical theatre and drama, which is technically rigorous, visually striking and emotionally resonant.