It looks like puckered plastic sheeting, and it bulges at the sides like the walls of an inflatable house. But when the lights go down, it does not rise. Instead it becomes a blurry scrim, and through it we see glowing orbs of light alive with movement — a miniature man inside each of them, descending.
It’s an illusion, dreamily romantic and set to music, and like much of what happens in this two-man work of physical theater from Recirquel Company Budapest, we’re not sure at first what we’re looking at. Then the curtain is ripped away and it billows like an enchanted wave of water, a sculptural form that becomes a dance partner for the muscular man revealed alone onstage.
Ending that aloneness is the whole point of “Non Solus” — or so it seemed to me. Created by the director-choreographer Bence Vagi, it is performed by an acrobat, Renato Illes, and a dancer, Gabor Zsiros. Mr. Vagi has said that the piece is about body and soul, but it can also be read as a birth-to-death narrative about two human beings, walking and flying and dancing through life together.
The flying, of course, is the most glamorous part, and Mr. Illes is a riveting aerialist. On his own with a rope to climb, he flips and spins and twines around it like a lover. On a trapeze with Mr. Zsiros — who if he were an element would be solid earth to Mr. Illes’s fire — Mr. Illes is thrilling, lithe and quick in feats of perfect equilibrium. Of course, much of that time he is balancing on, or suspended by, Mr. Zsiros.
If the two are evenly matched in talent, this show doesn’t give Mr. Zsiros the chance to prove it. His solo dance segments are less about the human body than about the movement of material in air (that filmy plastic, a fluttering silken skirt), which is sometimes beautiful but elsewhere underwhelming, even when dramatic music (by Gabor Terjek) insists otherwise.
Gradually we begin to understand how the show’s visual design works (the reflective panels that line Arpad Ivanyi’s set, lit by Attila Lenzser; the projections and animation by Andras Sass, Tamas Vaspori and Laszlo Czigany), and some of its mystery dissipates. But that’s a reasonable metaphor, too, for a deepening relationship — tricks of the light giving way to reality.
