Creators and Directors: Alex Harvey and Charlotte Mooney
Alex Harvey and Charlotte Mooney met and fell in love 24 years ago at circus school, specifically Bristol’s Circomedia. They vowed never to work together – “circus couples are the worst,” Mooney tells us in her opening monologue, “filling rehearsal space with their silent fury.”
They soon changed their minds when they realised how attuned they were in their ideas about the shows they wanted to make. They formed Ockham’s Razor and created 20 years’ worth of circus shows. After having a child and taking her on the road for a few years, they decided to settle down more, focusing on directing – until recently, someone asked them if they had retired from performing.
Rather than that retirement coming by default, Harvey and Mooney decided to create and perform in one final show. The result is Collaborator, a duo performance in which each relies upon the other as a testament to their partnership on stage and in life.
Mooney handles most of the talking while Harvey sets up the stage – a great division of labour, she notes; her partner ties himself in knots when speaking, but he is better than she at setting up the rigging for their aerial work.
And when that aerial work commences, the trust of, and reliance upon, each other really starts to show. A U-shaped metal construction serves as the basis for some slow trapeze and balance work. The couple uses each other first as scaffolding, then as ballast to engineer themselves into and around the frame. There is strength, intimacy, and a sense of fun that could only come from a true partnership of souls.
That continues on the ground, with a part-mime routine that features variations on the couple running on the spot. One may fall back for a while; sometimes directions change, and it takes a while for the other to come back shoulder to shoulder. There are breaks for ballroom dancing, too. It feels as if this section is a celebration of a couple’s lifetime together, ultimately heading in the same direction but sometimes at different speeds, and with always time for a dance.
Mechanics also features large. A collection of pendulums of varying lengths drops in, their varying speeds producing waves of motion. Waves of other sorts also intrude: Mooney talks of how two waves at sea are either destructive, their energies cancelling each other out, or constructive, where the alignments of their peaks and troughs are in synchrony. Ropes and pendulums reinforce that notion, showing different ways in which two sources can transfer kinetic energy between them.
Holly Khan’s compositions complement the pair’s work without ever becoming overpowering. Instead, we are allowed to just wallow in the joy of two circus practitioners whose quest for simplicity – their company name rooted in the notion that of two options, the simplest will be the best – produces the highest quality entertainment.
The hour sees the couple return to the U-shaped metal bars for a final time. In this second sequence, their work together is more confident, with bolder movements, compared to their show’s opening moments: a sign, perhaps, that in a show symbolising their circus life together, they are a stronger partnership now than ever.
After deciding to return to performance one last time, it took Harvey and Mooney a year to get fit enough to perform Collaborator. This may be their last formal work as circus performers before they retire, this time by choice rather than by default. But they are going out on a (literal) high.
Runs until 31 January 2026 and continues to tour
