KOOZA’S CLOWNING GLORY

There is a particular kind of thrill that only live circus can deliver: the knowledge that the extraordinary thing happening metres in front of you is actually happening. There is no second take, no clever edit, and, at the most breathtaking moments, seemingly very little separating triumph from disaster.

Cirque du Soleil's KOOZA understands that thrill better than most.

Now playing under the Big Top in Brisbane, KOOZA is something of a return to Cirque du Soleil's roots, bringing together two of the oldest traditions of circus — astonishing acrobatics and clowning — and wrapping them in the company's characteristically sumptuous theatricality.

At the centre of the production is The Innocent, a melancholy outsider suddenly transported into a fantastical world when the mysterious Trickster emerges from a box. From there, KOOZA unfolds less as a conventional narrative than as a succession of encounters in a strange, colourful kingdom populated by acrobats, clowns, musicians, and wonderfully eccentric characters.

Alexander Yudintsev (Kazakhstan) brings an endearing vulnerability to The Innocent, but on this night it is Gold Coast performer Mitch Wynter as the Trickster who commands the world around him. Charismatic, mischievous, and seemingly omnipresent, Wynter is an electric presence, acting as both instigator and guide as The Innocent ventures further into KOOZA's peculiar universe. And what a universe it is.

Stéphane Roy's set centres around the towering Bataclan, an ornate structure housing the live musicians and providing a spectacular backdrop to the action. Marie-Chantale Vaillancourt's extraordinary costumes draw on an eclectic collection of influences, including India and Eastern Europe, while Jean-François Côté's original score combines everything from Indian music to funk and classic film-score influences.

Importantly, the music is performed live. The band, led by incredible drummer Eden Bahar (Israel), is not simply accompanying the action but responding to it, while singers Suzanne Perkins and Kathryn Holtkamp add another layer to the production's distinctive soundscape.

Yet all this visual and musical splendour ultimately exists to frame KOOZA's greatest asset: its performers.

The production repeatedly finds new ways to demonstrate what the human body is capable of doing. Three Mongolian contortionists — Sunderiya Jargalsaikhan, Ninjin Altankhuyag, and Sender Enkhtur — create shapes that appear anatomically impossible, moving with such control and synchronicity that the act becomes almost hypnotic. Mizuki Shinagawa's (Japan) aerial silk performance takes the action vertically, combining strength with an apparent weightlessness high above the stage.

Anastasiia Shkandybina and Dmytro Dudnyk's (Ukraine) duo unicycle act is another deceptively joyous highlight, transforming a familiar circus apparatus into an intricate display of balance, timing, and trust.

The high-wire act (Spain and Columbia) raises the stakes considerably. Vicente Quiros, Roberto Quiros Dominguez, Jhon Brahyan Sanchez, Flouber Sanchez, and William Rodriguez Munoz don't merely traverse the wire; they build increasingly improbable configurations upon it. Each new feat seems designed to make the previous one look sensible.

Then comes the Wheel of Death. Performed on this night by Jimmy Ibarra Zapata and William Torres Patino (Columbia), it is the point at which KOOZA most emphatically reminds the audience that circus remains an artform built around genuine physical risk. Two enormous counter-rotating wheels spin high above the stage as the performers run, leap, and eventually move to the outside of them. The apparatus gathers speed. Bodies leave its surface. For several minutes, the entire Big Top seems to collectively forget how to breathe.

There is something refreshingly analogue about the terror of it. In an entertainment landscape increasingly capable of manufacturing almost anything digitally, watching two human beings voluntarily climb onto the outside of a giant rotating wheel high above the ground remains extraordinarily effective theatre.

Sante D'amours Fortunato's (Portugal/Canada) hoop manipulation provides a different kind of virtuosity, while Victor Levoshuk's balancing-on-chairs act once again sends the performance upwards. Chair after chair is added beneath him until the apparently simple act of balancing becomes almost absurdly precarious.

The teeterboard (Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Belarus and Belgium) provides a suitably explosive final display of ensemble acrobatics, sending performers soaring through the air in a succession of increasingly ambitious launches, flips, catches, and landings.

What distinguishes KOOZA, however, is that these acts do not feel like unrelated demonstrations of technical ability. Of course, like any Cirque du Soleil show, the selected artists are at the highest level of skill for their apparatus/act. Writer and director David Shiner, himself a celebrated clown, created the production around the marriage of acrobatics and clowning, and that relationship gives the evening its rhythm. The clowns — Mark Gindick as The King (USA), alongside Miguel Berlanga Madrono (Spain) and Duncan Cameron (Canada) — puncture the grandeur at precisely the moments it threatens to become too serious. Their sequences embrace broad physical comedy, audience interaction, silliness, and a gleeful disregard for dignity.

Their presence is essential. Without them, KOOZA might become an unrelenting parade of superhuman achievement. The comedy restores humanity to proceedings — and gives the audience a much-needed opportunity to unclench between acts. That contrast is at the heart of the production, and they are the major highlight of the show.

KOOZA moves constantly between beauty and absurdity, precision and chaos, elegance and danger. Even its title, inspired by the Sanskrit word koza, meaning box, chest, or treasure, reflects the idea of a "circus in a box": open it, and an entire world spills out.

Almost two decades after KOOZA premiered in 2007, there is nothing tired about what emerges. Cirque du Soleil may be renowned for its scale, design, costumes, and theatrical sophistication, but KOOZA ultimately succeeds because beneath all of that polish lies something wonderfully old-fashioned: extraordinarily skilled people doing extraordinarily difficult things in front of a live audience. And best of all, the director didn’t overthink it.

Cirque du Soleil’s KOOZA is under the big top in Brisbane until 4 October 2026.