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Although The Chosen Haram advertises itself as a story of confident transition - an individual’s journey from Islam to embracing queer sexual identity – it is far more ambivalent and intriguing than the synopsis suggests. Beginning with an elegant combination of Islamic prayer and Chinese pole acrobatics, it charts a relationship that begins in innocent flirtation and moves through chemical sex, clubbing towards an unsettling, exhausted conclusion. The gestures of ritual are slowly replaced by an untamed choreography that visits both the pleasures and dangers of queer culture. Lead performer Sadiq Ali offers a meditation on the conflict between religion and faith that is more provocative than rhetorical, allowing the dynamic choreography and a strong sense of spectacle to question rather than resolve.

Both Ali and co-performer Hauk Pattison exude charisma and virtuosity: describing the early stages of the characters’ relationship, they playful leap and slide across twin poles, before increasing the intensity with an imaginative display of drug excess. But it is in Ali’s early scenes that a strong aesthetic is established, using the pole with grace and fragility. In these scenes, the performer is most like a puppetry, not so much defying as working with gravity, swinging from the heights and revealing a precise physical control. The pole becomes an anchor, the human bodies connected tightly to it and allowing it to define their movements. The grace that Henrich von Kleist ascribes to the marionette (On the Marionette Theatre, 1812) is evident in their signature, dramatic movements, simultaneously fluid and dynamic.

But the human body remains fragile, and the falls and slides evoke a subtle terror: will the body strike the ground, will the sudden spin cut the human free and will gravity work against the performer? While discreet, the sense of danger is always present. And here, there is the element of soulfulness that von Kleist rejects (believing perfection can only be found in the inanimate, manipulated object). By the time that Ali’s character is exhausted – either sleeping or dead – at the end of the show, the emphasis is no longer on the spectacle but compassion.

While The Chosen Haram happily crosses genres – from circus, through physical theatre, through striking visual imagery – the association with puppetry, the questions which it raises about the human body as an object itself – are perhaps only relevant within the context of manipulate, curated by Puppet Animation Scotland: it is the story of a relationship, the pull of religious observance and the hedonistic pleasure of the club scene that drive the production. Poetic, elegiac and brutal by turns, The Chosen Haram is an expressive and challenging exploration of the tension between piety and desire, and a celebration of acrobatic bodies’ potential to express complex relationships through gesture.

Gareth K Vile