AERIAL theatre company Ockham's Razor hit the heights at York Theatre Royal for the first time tonight and tomorrow at 7.30pm.

The company of three aerial artists specialises in creating physical theatre around new pieces of aerial equipment in a combination of circus, dance and visual theatre.

Ockham Razor's first short piece, Memento Mori, was premièred at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, in Paris, where it won the Jeunes Talents Cirque award in 2004. This powerful duet, performed on a suspended metal frame, is based on Holbein's woodcuts of The Dance Of Death, where death is represented as a skeleton that dances each of us to our grave.

The second piece, 2005's light and charming Every Action, is a playful look at the bonds that form when people are thrown together, in this case four strangers who meet before 25 metres of suspended rope and discover a world where everything you do will affect someone, somewhere.

The new piece Arc examines the changing relationships between three people suspended on a scaffold, where the best and the worst of humanity are revealed.

"We founded the company in 2004, Tina Koch, Alex Harvey and myself," says Charlotte Mooney. "We started in Bristol at the CircoMedia - a combination of cirque and commedia dell'arte founded by Bim Mason - where the philosophy is it's a theatre school for circus people and a circus school for theatre people."

Should you be wondering, the name Ockham's Razor is derived from William of Ockham, from Ockham near Dorking. "He was a medieval philosopher and his philosophy was that if you have two plausible theories to solve something, you will always go for the simple one. So his razor is about cutting away complications and that matched our wish to use circus in the simplest way possible, using height and trust and lots or reliance on each other, so that there's a lot of real danger in what we do.

  • Tickets: £12, under 25s and students £5, on 01904 623568 or online at www.yorktheatre royal.co.uk