Never bend down to tie your shoelace when there's a plank flying above you.” It might seem like a peculiar piece of advice for a dancer to dispense, but then Lindsey Butcher is no ordinary dancer. For the past two decades this compact and agile performer has been honing her skills as both aerial artist and a more conventional floor-bound mover.

“It took me quite a while to try and merge the two,” Butcher says during a break from rehearsing Shift, the new production by her company Gravity & Levity. “Whenever I would be doing the one, I was missing the other.”

Since graduating from the London Contemporary Dance School in 1984, Butcher has enjoyed an unorthodox career, dancing alongside Lloyd (DV8) Newson in the now-defunct but influential Extemporary Dance Theatre and learning juggling, acrobatics and aerial work as a member of Ra-Ra Zoo Circus Theatre. Last year she made two brief but spectacular aerial-based appearances at Wembley Stadium, one unfurling flags from a hot-air balloon at the FA Cup Final and the other dangling 20m above the ground in support of the new-prog band Muse.

Whether it's a sporting event, a concert or a wedding on a lake in India, these aerialist-for-hire gigs boost Butcher's bank balance while providing her with some “genuinely extraordinary experiences”.

Now approaching her mid-forties, she founded Gravity & Levity in 2003 partly as a way to enable her to have the best of both of her creative worlds. “I guess I wanted to up-end the notion of where a dancefloor can be,” Butcher says, “and to explore and expand as much as I could the movement vocabulary for aerial dance.”

Premiered in 2005, G&L's first show was an ambitious evening of live performance and film called Taking Flight. Now comes Shift, an artful and entertaining triple bill that begins a national tour in Newbury on April 3.

Shift was conceived as a project between Butcher and the fine artist Michele Weaver. The latter has devised a versatile set of steel and wood that functions as a shifting sculptural landscape for three varied pieces of aerial dance by the British choreographers Charlotte Vincent, Charles Linehan and, as a grand finale, Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, the co-creators of the percussive smash-hit Stomp. In that, Weaver's cunning set will be rearranged into a huge musical instrument “played” by the five-strong cast.

Their plan has placed large demands on all of the choreographers. “They've had to deal with performers in harnesses who are shifting about on unusual planes, not to mention a set that keeps changing.” Circumstances have scarcely been easier for the performers, including Butcher. “There are so many negotiations going on all the time,” she says, referring to the challenges of space, time and weight that being in harness and suspended on a rope entail. Instead of the flat, stationary surfaces with which dancers typically contend, aerial artists must learn to be comfortable and physically expressive while passing through bowl-shaped curves of air.

“You become very light,” says Butcher, “with very little control of your movement.”

Rehearsing Vincent's dance at the Circus Space in London, Butcher floats about in a state of carefully considered grace. She has to take care, given that her partner in the central duet is a 8x2 plank of wood that is also hanging by a rope. It was this little baby that knocked her on the noggin after she had attended to a shoelace.

Butcher knows better than to allow such mishaps to occur during performance. “Once a piece of equipment is on its trajectory, if you try to resist you are fighting a losing battle. At the same time, magical things can happen when you just respond to what it's giving you.”

There is no aggression in Butcher's give-and-take with the plank. On the contrary, her interaction is mesmerisingly tender. She strokes it with her fingertips and grasps it with her limbs, turns her back on it and uses it to balance and swing. Woman and wood revolve and rotate round each other in reverse orbits.

Of course this is only one small slice of a 70-minute performance that Butcher claims will offer spectators an intimacy rarely attempted in aerial work. All of the action occurs within an area of only 8 sq m. Rather than planting themselves in seats, spectators are free to move about and shift perspectives on at least three sides of this performance space. The whole point, says Butcher, “is for all of us to acknowledge the verticality of the performance space, and of where and in how many ways a dancer can be seen”.

Shift, Corn Exchange, Newbury (01635 522733), Thur-Sat (www.gravity-levity.net)

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