Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza has landed at Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne and will run until July 19, bringing a swaggering mix of clowning, danger and spectacle back to a city that once saw the company’s plans cut short by the first COVID lockdown. The new show is a full-throttle return: pageantry and costume, eclectic world music, sky-high production values and world-class acrobatics all in one place.
Cameron Woodhead gave Kooza five stars, and the praise is easy to understand. The show draws on the archetypes of commedia dell’arte to deliver a clownish odyssey, with Shane Jacobson pulled from the audience on opening night for a clown coup that set the tone for the evening. Elsewhere, Mizuki Shinagawa’s dizzying aerial tissue routine hangs in the air like a dare, while a teeterboard ensemble adds backflipping on stilts to the churn of constant motion. The highwire act is so loaded with risk that riding a bicycle across a tightrope feels like only the beginning.
The spectacle does not ease off. Two performers drive the Wheel of Death, the Mongolian contortionist trio of Sunderiya Jargalsaikhan, Ninjin Altankhuyag and Sender Enkhtur bend the body into improbable shapes, and the Ukrainian unicycle duo Anastasiia Shkandybina and Dmytro Dudnyk keep the pace sharp. Woodhead called the acrobats astonishing, said the production has all the qualities audiences associate with Cirque du Soleil, and described it as magical circus apt to leave all but the most jaded eye sparkling with delight.
That enthusiasm lands against a harder backdrop. Cirque du Soleil’s Kurios – Cabinet of Curiosities was shuttered in Melbourne mere days into the season during the first COVID lockdown, and the company filed for bankruptcy protection not long after. By the time Luzia toured Australia in 2024, the company was already reasserting itself on the road. Kooza fits that pattern now: a show built on precision and volume, and a reminder that the company’s international touring machine is not just back, but operating in full flight again.
Woodhead put it plainly: “Precarity is a fact of life in the performing arts, even for household names like Cirque du Soleil, and it’s great to see them in full flight again.” For Melbourne audiences, Kooza is not just a return engagement. It is proof that the company that was knocked off course here is once again able to put on a night of pure, persuasive excess.
