Les Arts Sauts, Victoria Park, London

What goes up mustn't come down

Amazon, half angel, hocks-off, one leg skinner, penny roll, scoobydoo, mermaid, meathook, heel hang, suicide ... The technical terms alone give a flavour of the terrors and wonders that comprise the art of trapeze.

Ever since being immortalised in a music hall song in the 1860s, flying through the air with the greatest of ease has held a whiff of romance as well as dare-devilry.

The French company Les Arts Sauts, brought over by the Barbican's Bite festival as their first extra-mural event, coined a term for the lure of the thing. They call it l'esprit de l'air: an irresistible attraction for height, freedom, and a shared dream of flight. We've all been there, if only in our sleep.

The challenge to Kayassine, the company's current show, is finding a way to eke out that initial thrill for 75 minutes. The word kayassine means simply "circus" in Laos, a city where Les Arts Sauts has found inspiration. But this isn't circus in the sense of a mixed spectacle. It's 100 per cent aerial and at least 90 per cent trapeze.

Which is a lot to ask of spectators' appetite for l'esprit d'air, because, frankly, once you've seen a body hurl itself through thin air and be caught safely by the wrists or the heels two or three times, you no longer hold your breath fearing that he's about to dash out his brains, and by the 23rd time you are beginning to plan next week's menus.

Making the near-impossible look easy has always been the ultimate aim of technique. But if it looks too easy we fail to be properly impressed.

Les Arts Sauts fields 13 trapezists – 11 men, 2 women – and they are magnificent. Weight and power endow the male form with reckless speed in flight, legs and torso folding like hinges on a door. The women in similar manoeuvres are softer, more serene. One of them displays her control in a down-tempo rope act, writhing around an enormous loop of white sheeting. I'm sure it's fiendish to do – especially when she balances her entire prone body on a six-inch, scrunched-up strip of sheet, but no one felt the need to applaud.

It is all rather remote and unreal – a major drawback of this format, and the reason, of course, why circuses have clowns. Clowns earth the experience, they remind us of our hamfisted humanity, and that encourages a proper sense of awe.

There are other things to be impressed by. The live music, performed 100ft up, is an accomplished non-stop medley of a cappella singing and cello-playing, from Bulgarian-style vocal harmonies to baroque opera, scraps of Kodaly and Meredith Monk. There are enjoyable moments involving jaw harp and the entire cast of trapezists in a rugged call-and-response chant. An instrument billed as "singing trapeze" also features somewhere, but I didn't spot it.

German architect Hans-Walter Muller's inflatable big top is another plus – a kind of vast blow-up bubble with pneumatic door slits that you have to shut your eyes and barge through.

Another team of architects designed the performing rig: a great double arch of metalwork with a central bridge arranged so that one stationary trapezist can swing another between his legs. All 13 are in view most of the time, which means you don't identify with any as individuals.

Whooping each other on, they resemble sailors in the rigging of some costume drama galleon, though the costumes hint at nothing.

Looking skywards for an hour, you avoid a crick in the neck thanks to tipped-back seating thoughtfully provided with a squishy neck pad. This is just as well because the pace of the show is slow, the light-level varies between black and dim, and a quick snooze at times seems a good idea.

In a better light I could have completed the quick crossword between glimpses at feats worthy of Icarus.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk

Les Arts Sauts: Victoria Park, London E3 (020 7638 8891), to 11 August