Giant tampon applicators, sexual experimentation by way of aerial acrobatics and simulated bondage. Yes we want to see it too. This year's Dublin Fringe includes several dance/performance pieces, including the aforementioned Acro-matic, that happen to be set well above terra firma. A group of the bungee-powered high-flyers talk to Peter Crawley

Look up. Way up. High above you a woman is dancing on the air. Her white dress flows angelically while she swoops around on wires. Cradled in her arms is a giant white tampon. Some time later, a startling golden creature with an elaborate face-mask wriggles free of his red cocoon, plummets from the ceiling head first and halts, mid-air, to deliver a polemical verse about the Iraq war. Well, quite.

By the time you encounter a bulimic on a bungee cord dangling above an outsized toilet bowl, or witness two ex-lovers trading body blows inside a boxing ring, or perhaps hurl a head of lettuce at a clown on a noose, you might even have detected a trend. The ESB Dublin Fringe Festival has returned, and this year it's severing all ties with gravity.

Across several different festival venues, a new style of performance is leaping into action. It's not quite contemporary dance, not exactly circus and hardly narrative theatre, but a combination of all three. At this fresh-minted stage, the style still seeks a name: Aerial Theatre, New Circus or Bungee-Assisted Dance may sound quite similar, but a new language carries interesting nuances.

"I tend to talk in boings now," says Wendy Hesketh, founder of Wired Aerial Theatre (see cover and above) and perhaps the world's authority on bungee-assisted dance. "So if I'm looking for a really dynamic dance, I want an effect like boink-boink-boink as opposed to booiiiiinnng do you understand what I'm talking about?"

Speaking from her home in St Helens, outside Liverpool, Hesketh has just been disturbed from her pelvic floor exercises. She doesn't mind. "It's not the most exciting thing, is it, pelvic floor exercises?" We debate the matter thoroughly. The natural elasticity of Hesketh's Merseyside accent coils tightly into brisk bounces, then dips long and low. I know exactly what she's talking about.

"People ask me where bungee-assisted dance came from," continues Hesketh. "It really just sprung out of nowhere. All of a sudden, I found myself with a harness on, making a bungee and thinking, Wow, this has great potential. It's taken me three years to develop it to where it is now."

A pun tends to be the gift that keeps on giving where lazy journalism is concerned, but a bungee-assisted dance that "sprung out of nowhere" - I mean, really. But Hesketh isn't trying to amuse. And neither is Chantal Daly, the marvellously energetic Co Donegal aerialist, when she tells me that, being artistic, "it's very hard to get grounded sometimes". Daly performs with Hesketh in Acro-matic, a performance of three solo pieces (the third is by Jym Darling, Daly's husband). There is undoubtedly huge joy in taking flight, but all three take their art tremendously seriously.

"People think straight away that if it's aerial, there's got to be a trapeze in there," says Hesketh. "But, in actual fact, the more you can regress from that, the more I think we're going to take aerial theatre forwards."

Indeed, Hesketh is using physical spectacle to advance an idea. So when she says that her piece, Stuffed, has been created specific to her weight, it's not clear whether she's referring to the bungee-technique or the theme.

"With Stuffed, the bungee was an amazing - and I very rarely call it this - tool, to emphasise and enhance the whole subject matter. It allows me to hover in the air above my wheelie-bin, which I've dressed up as a glorified toilet, and stay there kicking and screaming. It also allows me to hang there, almost dead from the whole exhausting experience of bulimia. It's a wonderful experience because it enhances and exaggerates in a really sympathetic way."

Chantal and Jym, an Irish couple who, as Chantal jokes, had to flee the country to become artists, formed their company (Fidget Feet) in London seven years ago. With a background in dance, Chantal's route into aerial theatre doesn't quite have that straight-line trajectory so beloved of a career-guidance officer. "Stilt-walking is quite a good thing to have for bread and butter money," she imparts, sensibly.

Following her dance training with the London Contemporary Dance School, Daly learned from circuses and graduated to performing aerial slots in nightclubs. "As soon as I did that, I was like, Right, this is for me. I love it. The excitement, the adrenaline, the physicality, being high above everybody. Because I'm very small - I'm only four feet 11-and-a-half inches - there's that excitement."

Daly can still recall the first time she flew. Running down a mountain as a child in Co Donegal, her father suddenly grabbed her wrist, anchored himself to a tree branch, and flew her in the air. "I carried that with me to adulthood, thinking that was probably my first sense of flight." Years later, her dad told her that he was trying to save her life.

Her show, I Can't Handle Me, a sort of physical Bildungsroman, traces her journey from childhood to adulthood, still laced through with elated freedom and dangerous transgression. "You feel like you're doing something that you shouldn't really be doing," she considers, "because if any mistake is made, your life is under threat."

Taking in giant tampon applicators and sexual experimentation by way of aerial acrobatics and simulated bondage Daly isn't quite sure who the show is aimed at. "We do use strong language and there are sexual references in it," she says, but then recalls one woman who brought her four-year-old daughter to a performance. At the end, the little girl toddled over to Chantal, fixed her with wide eyes, and said, "I want to do that when I grow up".

That's the thing about aerial theatre. It goes over your head. If the content of this apparently weightless art form tends to gravitate towards self-exploration and profound honesty, Australian Brendan Shelper can see the reason why.

"A lot of physical work is created from the floor. People aren't walking in with a script in their hands or interpreting something already written. The more successful work comes from people bringing their experiences to the floor and experimenting with representing them in a literal or non-literal sense."

Shelper should know. He and his co-performer, Tina McErvale, had been going out for nearly two years when they began work on Bumping Heads (see photograph left). Within four weeks they had broken up. "The piece basically evolved out of the disintegration of our relationship at that time," Shelper says almost wearily. "We were basically going into this very small square studio that reminded us of a boxing ring, because every time we were working there we were just fighting. The whole time. No matter how professional you can be, that affects you mentally."

There is one extraordinary moment in their acrobatic dance-theatre show in which McErvale walks away from Shelper each time they attempt a movement sequence. With the words, "I'm going," she leaps unexpectedly four feet into the air and performs a horizontal spin, expecting Shelper to leap forward and catch her. Would you put that level of trust into your ex?

"As soon as this person is in the air," says Shelper, "you make the decision whether to stop them from breaking themselves or to just let them go. The audience feels this. It's just a physical move for me, but yesterday a film director told me that he just can't get that image out of his head."

The artistic interests of international, vertically inclined performers sometimes sound so similar they could form an aesthetic union. Shelper wants physicality with a purpose.

"It's not like we're doing anything majorly new," he says, "but what we try and do is deconstruct [the elements] so they're not perceived as tricks, but as a metaphorical, emotional language. If you can put an audience on the edge of their seat and add those emotional and theatrical levels, you've got them in a vulnerable position - and that's where an audience needs to be."

Jym Darling, too, wants to rise above simple spectacle: "In circus, if you do something death-defying, you spread your arms out and go 'Ta-da!' We hope that the audience will follow the movement and start to believe that, as part of your self-expression, you can be flung backwards in the air." In other words, take away the drum roll, hold onto the awe, and you can swoop deep into the mind of an audience.

Wendy Hesketh agrees. "When you do take things off the floor, it immediately puts images into anybody's head. People love being surprised. Putting that out there it gives people the chance to kind of dream."

Dreams keep cropping up in this context and the potential for aerial theatre to play havoc with your sleeping hours is limitless. The first manifesto on aerial theatre might have been written in 1900, in Sigmund Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams.

"Where is the uncle who has never made a child fly by running with it across the room?" wrote the father of psychoanalysis. "At such moments children shout with joy and insatiably demand a repetition of the performance, especially if a little fright and dizziness are involved in it." Gliding the dreamer straight back into childhood, the dreams find pleasure in flight, anxiety in falling.

I have one more question for Wendy Hesketh before I let her back to her pelvic exercises. "I've been doing them while we've been speaking." Oh After much intellectual filibuster, I finally come out with it.

Wendy, what's it like to fly?

She thinks for a moment.

"It's so much more fun than standing on the ground."

Uplifting theatre

When Dubliner Ken Fanning speaks, his tone carries the tuned-out drag of a surfer's drawl. Maybe, like those crazy wave riders, anything less than extreme danger doesn't inspire urgency.

Fanning describes his free show, Knot Smart, as a "deeply superficial gawk at the tragic soul of man", incorporating clowning and new circus techniques. "But it's just stupidity. It's stupidity on a rope." High above Curved Street in Temple Bar, Ken hangs by his neck from a noose, inviting audience members to throw things at him. It's a family show.

Imagine a small army of Lee Evanses, capable of assuming a mannequin's rigidity or a rubber band's flexibility, passing life to each other like a relay baton. Now imagine them using puppetry to create a sensual seduction. OK, now picture them dancing on a wall to riotous drumming ... Oh, just buy a ticket for Gecko's extraordinary physical comedy, Taylor's Dummies, for heaven's sake.

Garvey and Superpant$, the existentialist amnesiac stars of the 2002 Dublin Fringe, return in The National Theater of the United States of America's sequel to Episode #32, Placebo Sunrise. Episode #17 (see picture below) may be chronologically wonky, but that's nothing compared with their urgently absurd Eugene Ionesco dialogue by way of Busby Berkely-style choreography.

Contemporary clowning features in Czech company Krepsko's show Rubbish, while Northern Ireland's Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company supply cinematic multimedia and physical theatre in the double bill Under Observation and TENDERISED. Welsh dance-acrobats Momentum find room for movement, music and ancient Greek hermaphrodites in Tmesis, which explores the origin of love. And why not?

The ESB Dublin Fringe Festival runs from September 20th to October 10th. The box office is at 43 Temple Bar, Dublin 2 (1850-374643, www.fringefest.com)