Matilda Leyser/Line, Point, Plane, The Junction, Cambridge

Call me unimaginative, but I've always found circus aerial acts a bit of a bore - all that posturing as superhuman, while it's obvious that physical possibilities can only be limited by hanging upside down. Enter Matilda Leyser, a literature graduate turned aerialist who has turned her mind to the poetic potential of being suspended high in the air. Her show Line, Point, Plane takes its title from an essay about art by the painter Kandinsky, but each of its three parts is also about the human condition, particularly the apparent paradox that the same physical experiences can make us feel both vulnerable and exhilarated.

"Night-Plane" - choreographed by Rosemary Lee - takes the form of a journey across a vast black curtain, an uncertain and shifting landscape of thick dark folds that occasionally threaten to swallow Leyser's dark-clad form. Hand- and foot-holds are cunningly stitched into the curtain, allowing her sometimes to recline as if in some invisible chair, wrestle invisible demons, or swim through empty black space. At one point she pops through an aperture with the drape gathered from her waist, like some full-skirted Victorian maid leaning out of a window to shake a duster. At another she explores her environment with the sensuality of an animal, passing folds of fabric inch by inch between her toes or gripping it gently between her teeth. Jonathan Lever's music drops single pitches of clarinet or piano into a still pool of white noise.

"Life-Line", performed on a rope, tells a more obvious story, as Leyser acts out a life, from birth to old age. Once, she reminds us, we were all attached by a rope - the umbilical cord. In a few deft moves she has knotted herself a womb and curled up in it, snug and tight, until a slip-knot slowly lowers her to the floor to be born. She straightens out, learns to sit, to crawl, to stand, to walk, then re-discovers the rope and learns to climb it. A looped rope proves surprisingly versatile, serving as mirror, lover's face, pregnant belly, child, and thus the narrative returns to the point where it began. On a loop, as it were.

The third piece, "Dead Point", is performed on a rope swing, with spoken text written by Bryony Lavery. At last we are invited to share the whooshing thrill of flight, as Leyser muscles up the momentum for an almighty swing, then supplies a running commentary on the physics of it. She speaks lyrically (between panting breaths) of the sensation of displaced air, reclining full-length and turning languidly on her thin cradle of rope to feel the rush of it. It's moments like this that impress on you the extent of this young woman's strength and skill. Generally she makes it look easy.

The text also carries a hint of confession. Junkie-like, we learn, the aerialist craves particular sensations - "the twist, the turn, the drop" - and must have them again and again. Most of all she relishes "the dead point ... the still, quiet moment at the top of the pendulum swing when I weigh what feels like nothing". It's at this juncture that the previous 60 minutes' activity suddenly snaps into focus as a dreamy death-wish, an act of imaginative nihilism. "This is the point," she informs spectators darkly as she lurches out over their heads, "when I have most potential to jump".

jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk

Gardner Arts Centre, Brighton (01273 685861) Tues; Oxford Playhouse (01865 305305) Thurs & Fri