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By DCist contributor Allie Goldstein

Reminds us of: Cirque du Soleil meets 50 Shades of Grey

Flop, Fine or Fringe-tastic? Fringe-tastic.

Somehow, it all starts at a dinner party. But the trapeze hanging from the ceiling serves as some rather obvious foreshadowing. Soon, two dancers have stripped their dinner garb and are hanging from it, slipping across the bars and through each other’s bodies in a seductive gymnastics routine. And it only gets better from there. Performed by six dancer-acrobats, members of the self-described “disruptive” circus troupe Steal a Step, Kick Before You Drown seems to have literally reinvented the wheel when Eliana Dunlap gets inside of a human-sized one and uses its built-in handlebars to roll, flip, and glide mesmerizingly across the stage. Then things start to drop from the ceiling: hoop, rope, ribbon. You can imagine what happens next, except you can’t. This you haven’t seen in yoga: legs split impossibly wide, stomachs as strong as backs, props used as effortlessly as if they were another appendage. The anticipation builds whenever a new one is hauled or rolled out.

Daniel Patrick performs two spellbinding solos—one in which he contorts his body while wrapping and unwrapping himself from a hanging ribbon and another that involves balancing on a trembling quintuplet of palm-sized pegs, though he’ll be damned if he uses all five of them. Between the jaw-dropping acrobatics, there are snippets of an absurdist plot line. This involves chairs and masks and lingerie—and some high-heeled strutting with a Starbucks cup. The dancers couple and decouple, sometimes looking at each other or the audience with a hungry, sexy intensity. Kick Before You Drown is full of the angst that its name implies; it’s a lash of legs and arms just below the surface.

Kick Before You Drown is playing at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on July 12 at 6:30 p.m. and July 14 at 9 p.m.

See here for more of DCist’s Capital Fringe 2016 reviews.