Directors and Choreographers: Patrick King & Johan King Silverhult
Trust, resilience, falling – it’d be hard to find any kind of artist who’d know more about these topics than acrobats, performers who embrace life or death exploits every night with a bravery few can muster. In centring these themes, and exhibiting plenty of fun thrills along the way, the Copenhagen Collective provides a heart-racing but slightly muddled night of spectacle.
The fun part is simple: the troupe is world-class and the routines they perform are immediately enthralling. There’s intelligent direction on display too, as each section of the performance has ideal pacing, with the gradual introduction of a new movement dynamics that build and build in complexity until a point of climax, where the most risky and daring version of the dynamic is attempted, usually to great success. The exploits are at some points so out there that the massive Peacock Theatre strains to contain them, especially as things become more and more vertical throughout the evening.
The muddled side of things comes in the form of the narrative, or more accurately, the show’s attempt at narrative. Starting with a loud cacophony of voices expressing self-doubt and uncertainty that return throughout the show, it often feels like a very incomplete story is being told. Throughout the first half of the runtime, these voiceovers dominate while certain acrobats take centre stage to act out what’s hinted at by the audio, but the trouble is that little of it comes together into something coherent, and we’re left with snatches of emotion rather than a story to get invested in.
This puts the first half strongly in the realm of interpretative dance, but what’s being displayed and what might be interpreted is weakly defined. Thankfully, around halfway through the show seems to realise its own pretensions and comes to a hard stop, breaking the fourth wall and making light of everything that’s come before. From this point on, acrobatic spectacle becomes the main focus of the show to great effect, the whole thing becoming unabashedly fun, and the remaining dance moments focus on that fun over any kind of pseudo-thematic depth.
It’s a show of two clear halves, then, and the second can be recommended without hesitation. It does still feel like it’s trying to have it both ways in this current form; to have a lot of the self-serious stuff without fully delivering on it, instead choosing to make light of its failure to find a solid story to guide the night. Doubling down one way or the other would make for an overall experience that lives up to the incredible physical talent on display.
Runs until 6 September 2025
