Deep, clanking echoes. Undercurrents of powerfully reverberating music. A sense of apprehension fills the theater as the Wheel of Death emerges from a shrouded landscape of rusted, vaulting industrial structures and ominous shadows. As it slides toward the audience, this complex steel machine reveals its form, if not the full extent of its mysterious function.

Interlocking steel cages start to rotate, powered by two muscular performers. Gathering momentum, the Alegria Brothers defy centrifugal force and the pull of the earth’s gravity as they leap, run, tumble and double back on themselves, at times seeming to walk in effortless slow motion through the air above a sheer drop into nothingness.

British architect Mark Fisher says he designed the stage set and the auditorium as an integrated concept, not as separate components. “The narrative starts at the transition between the casino and the theater, and then opens out as the audience comes into the theater, and continues to open out more when they get the show.”