Grace is writing this one upside down.
Not literally (HR would have words), but emotionally — because Collaborator, the new show from Ockham’s Razor, is the kind of work that asks you to stop looking at outcomes and start looking at effort. Balance. Trust. The wobble before the catch.
Produced by Turtle Key Arts, Collaborator is an intimate aerial duet performed by Ockham’s Razor’s Co-Artistic Directors, Charlotte Mooney and Alex Harvey. After decades of large-scale ensemble productions and international touring, this show pares everything back. No crowd. No spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Just two people, a suspended metal frame, and twenty years of shared history hanging between them.
This is a piece about working with someone else — which sounds simple until you’ve tried it.
Mooney and Harvey describe a practice built on lifting, catching, carrying, stepping on and around each other. Sometimes being dropped. Sometimes doing the picking up. Collaborator lives in that space. It’s physical, irreverent, occasionally tender, and quietly honest about the negotiations that sit beneath any long-term partnership — creative or otherwise.
The choreography, by Nathan Johnson, and costume design by Tina Bicât keep the focus where it belongs: on the bodies, the apparatus, and the conversation between them. Performed on a suspended metal frame, the show becomes less about tricks and more about trust. Less “look what we can do” and more “look how we stay upright together”.
What makes Collaborator particularly poignant is that this will be the final time Charlotte Mooney and Alex Harvey perform as a duo. The piece acts as a distilled statement of their shared practice — the decisions made, the compromises struck, the moments of friction and flow that have shaped their work over two decades. It isn’t nostalgic, but it is reflective. And it lands with emotional weight because of that.
Although this is their story, it doesn’t feel exclusive. In fact, it’s hard not to recognise yourself in it. Anyone who has tried to make something with another person — a piece of art, a decision, a life — will recognise the balance between control and surrender, clarity and frustration.
Uniquely, Ockham’s Razor are also opening the doors to their rehearsal process across four days, inviting audiences, emerging performers, makers, producers and students of circus or physical theatre to witness the live devising of Collaborator. It’s a rare and generous opportunity to see how a piece like this is built — not fully formed, not polished, but becoming. And it’s free.
Ockham’s Razor have earned an international reputation for visually bold, sculptural aerial theatre that blends joy, wonder and storytelling — a quality The Guardian once described as full of delight. Collaborator doesn’t abandon that identity, but it does concentrate it. By returning to duo form, Mooney and Harvey allow trust itself to become the apparatus.
Grace’s take?
This isn’t a show about flying.
It’s a show about staying up there together.
And sometimes, that’s the harder trick.
29–31 January 2026
The Place, London
https://theplace.org.uk/events/spring-26-collaborator
5–7 February 2026
The Lowry, Salford Quays
Collaborator | Contemporary Season | Lowry
11 March 2026
The Corn Exchange, Newbury
https://cornexchangenew.com/events/collaborator
Official company website:
https://ockhamsrazor.co.uk/
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