Fiq!

With the Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger, acrobatics is obviously their thing – but you probably won’t have seen tumbling quite like this before. The show brings together 15 performers for a whirlwind of traditional and modern floor acrobatics, dance, and breakdancing, with a touch of taekwondo and freestyle football too that also involves a hundred coke bottle crates, a human trampoline, and one acrobatic motorbike. The pace and the choreography are breathtaking; there’s no danger that anyone in the audience will be dozing off (‘Fiq!’ translates as ‘wake up!’).

Fiq! also comes with a DJ – and a good one too: it’s not easy to match live scratching to the complex acrobatic routines, so props to DJ Dino. Along with the rapping it all contributes to the street-performance B-boy-plus feel, and so does the use of smartphones in the acts to live-stream close-up action.

Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger was set up in 2003 by Sanae El Kamouni. Her idea was to work with acrobats from Tangier and produce something new, something contemporary that would speak to audiences across the board with accessible shows that preserve and promote one of the great traditions of Moroccan popular culture. She invited European theatre makers to come to Tangiers to create contemporary productions, exponents of boundary-crossing and physical theatre like Aurélien Bory from Compagnie 111 in Toulouse (he’s done two shows with the Groupe) and the Swiss pair Zimmermann & de Perrot (Dimitri de Perrot and Martin Zimmermann).

The combination of traditional and contemporary creation is now being continued with Maroussia Diaz Verbèke, a rope acrobat, stage director and circus specialist who now terms her staging of circus arts ‘circography’. She originally directed Fiq! back in 2020, with Sanae El Kamouni assisting.

The show also mines the visual universe of contemporary artist, photographer and filmmaker Hassan Hajjaj. He’s been called “the Andy Warhol of Marrakesh” for a signature style that combines “elements of high fashion with trashy pop culture”, and he created the stage designs and costumes for Fiq! – a mix of explosive pop and kitsch with stylings from traditional culture. It’s visually exciting, clever and good fun – not unlike Fiq! itself.

“This is superb stuff, the right tone, the right length” said one reviewer. We’d second that; when we saw Fiq! in the UK a year ago, it had the audience on their feet shouting for more at the end.

There are shows at 7.30pm on 28 and 29 April, with one at 3pm on 30 April.