Eroticism in the air

These days, every dance theatre company worth their salt likes to throw in a bit of aerial acrobatics to show off their circus skills - even Billy Elliot: The Musical has a dance routine that involves flying through the air.

There's a danger that the conceit is becoming a bit of a clichè, but if you do like your theatre airborne then you really shouldn't miss Company FZ's revival of their award-winning one-man show, Throat, which dates from 1999.

In it, John-Paul Zaccarini spends most of the time suspended above the stage dangling from a rope, by turns pelted with water and flour and performing perilous-looking acrobatics clearly designed to raise the hair on the back of your neck.

Yes, the allusion to the circus is deliberate but Throat is also a deadly serious, poetic and ultimately redemptive piece about constructions of masculinity, be they poseur, lover or the myriad, messy identities in between.

Exploring ideas of what it means to be a bloke by blending choreographed movement with theatre is, of course, nothing new: Frantic Assembly and DV8 are just two dance theatre companies that have been ploughing a similar territory for years.

But Company FZ, founded by Zaccarini and the director Flick Ferdinando in 1998, were hailed for the pioneering way in which they synthesized dance with traditional circus skills in Throat, their first piece, to explore the further shores of sex, desire and love.

Since then the company has continued to push at received notions of the circus as a popular lowbrow artform of interest only to children, rehabilitating the genre from its rather desolate, down-at-heel image by re-establishing it as a vibrant and emotive genre in its own right.

Other shows - 2004's Loser, about grief, and Night And Day, inspired by obsessive compulsive disorder - have cemented the company's profile, but they are still remembered most of all for Throat, and this mini revival of that elegant, profoundly thoughtful show is worth catching if you can.

Monday until Thu, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, 15 Gordon Street WC1, 8pm, £15, £12.50 concs. Tel: 020 7388 8822. www.thebloomsbury.com Tube: Goodge Street