Red Lines review: meaning lost among beautiful balletic aerial rope tricks

Red Lines

The Lir Academy, Studio 1

★★☆☆☆

Red Lines, developed by Scene+Heard, is a show categorised under the Dublin Fringe Festival’s own description of “Bodyscapes; thrilling feats of dance, circus and physical performance that you have to see to believe.”

This two-hander, with aerialists Monika Palova and Sean McIlraith, opens promisingly. A woman cloaked entirely in black (Palova), motionless and eerie as a troubled ghost, stands tethered by her hair to a rope overhead.

Hiding behind her is a woman in a camisole set (McIlraith). Gradually, McIlraith’s arms and legs emerge to wrap themselves tightly around the visible woman: is she parasite, personification of soul, or an alter ego?

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We never learn who these two women are, their relationship to each other, or what their story is, during this entirely wordless performance of 50 minutes duration. Instead, we watch as both aerialists break free of each other’s bodies, and then spend most of the rest of the time in the air, doing rope work.

At one point, Palova swings, seemingly suspended just by her hair, in a distracting sequence where this audience member at least worried we were about to witness a live scalping.

[ Dublin Fringe Festival: full coverage ]

The considerable physical skills of Palova and McIlraith are never in doubt: McIlraith in particular is both beautifully poetic and balletic in the air, a kind of sprite in human form.

The difficulty is the theatrical lacuna at the centre of Red Lines: the complete absence of anything that elevates a series of striking and complicated rope routines into something transformative; like a string of beautiful sentences that collectively simply don’t mean anything.

Continues at the Lir Academy, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Saturday, 23 September