Ockham’s Razor: Arc and Every Action…

Some performances are so vivid they have a taste and smell all of their own. Aerial theatre company Ockham's Razor might deal in ropes and high swings and the sweat of climbing and tumbling performers, but it's scented with the sweet aroma of sugared almonds, tough and celebratory at once.

For the first piece, Arc, costume designer Tina Bicat dresses Tina Kock and Charlotte Mooney in pastel pink and green as they recline with surprising comfort on a scaffolding square that pitches and trembles in mid air. At first, they try to evict Alex Harvey from their perch, then all three play a razor-sharp game of shifting balance, underscored with increasingly precarious catches. Derek Nisbet's gorgeous minimalist soundtrack is vital to the careful footing of this piece, echoing the pitching of a wooden ship and the meditative calm of staring out to sea.

There's a livelier mood of slapstick and fun to their second piece, Every Action. It's an ingenious game in the vein of Beckett's Act Without Words I, where a man stranded in the desert is tormented by luxuries that jerk just out of reach on dangled ropes. The strutting leader of a group dressed like they're on a corporate team-building exercise tries to hoist himself to the top of the stage, and his dissenting team leave him strung upside-down by the ankles.

Both works were first devised nearly a decade ago but there's nothing complacent about their wit and bittersweet delicacy: an essential breath of fresh air from these accomplished aerialists.