Walk My World has been the talk of Europe since it debuted in Budapest last year. A next level theatre experience performed by circus artists and dancers, it is more like an epic adventure you have to undertake, exploding any traditional notions of a show.
Taking place inside a huge former industrial space in Budapest – around 6,000 square metres in total – is has been transformed into an immersive world made up of interconnected rooms, staircases, bars, corridors, balconies and performance spaces. It is a dystopian environment, a cross between Brazil and Mad Max, although its origins are more classical than that.
The story draws loosely on Virgil’s Aeneid, telling the tragic love story of Aeneas and Dido, which makes up a crucial episode by the ancient Roman poet. Aeneas was the half-human, half-god (his mother was Aphrodite) hero who landed in Carthage where he met Queen Dido - the pair fell passionately in love but well, it didn’t work out...
Walk My World takes this story and puts it into a strange new mechanised future world, where gods, mortals, and strange creatures from mythology surround you, including fearsome demigods from the underworld. In this world woven with power games of gods, intrigue, deceit, and love, anything can happen, but the crucial thing is it’s entirely up to you to decide where to go, what to discover, whom to follow, whose secret room you peep into and whether you take a sip of the potion left on the table in one of the steamy rooms.
You have to surrender your phone before entering the space and are given a dark mask to wear. You enter down dark corridors and industrial stairwells - think Dune, and indeed the production shares the same set designers of Denis Villeneuve’s films - before suddenly emerging into this vast, cinematic world, comprised partly of the ruins of Troy, the new city of Carthage, and the labyrinth between them; the gods watch from above as humans interact in a neon bar or are picked off and dragged to their doom by monsters.
For the visitor, the experience is completely free-roaming. There is no fixed route and no single “correct” version of the show. Audience members follow whichever performers or storylines catch their attention, often abandoning one scene halfway through because something else is unfolding elsewhere. It’s a clever idea, where you are fuelled by FOMO but given even time and space to eventually see everything. Often, you find yourself pursuing characters as they run off into other areas.
What else can you see? Well aerialists flying overhead, dancers weaving through crowds, acrobats appearing suddenly in side rooms or on staircases. A huge amount of the experience comes from the contrast between intimate moments and enormous spectacle. Some scenes take place in tiny shadowy corners with only a handful of people watching, while others suddenly open into giant performance spaces filled with dozens of performers moving simultaneously.
One particularly striking element is a huge robotic mechanical arm used as a reinterpretation of the Trojan Horse. Another scene features a suspended aerial sequence over water, the performer hanging by her hair. The climax comes with the use of an apparatus that is a twist on The Russian Swing (first invented by Russian circus performers about a hundred years ago), a huge swing that here has steel bars instead of ropes and turns 360 degrees; performers build momentum before launching flyers high into the air to perform flips and aerial tricks.
Yet the real genius of this show is in the way it blends the spectacular with the subtle, contrasting the huge scale with emotional, quieter moments centred around Dido and Aeneas, who play out their tragedy throughout the mayhem, ending in an aerial dance that takes your breath away.
All of it dovetails together beautifully, despite the complexity of the technical logistics. Apparently, performers wear concealed smartwatches under their costumes in order to coordinate timing and movement across the building, making sure they hit cues and, yknow, are there to catch their fellow cast members flying through the air.
All of this is the brainchild of Bence Vági, a choreographer and director, who formed Recirquel as a contemporary circus company, making a stir with a variety of productions prior to Walk My World. He was born in communist Hungary during the final years of the Cold War - when he was a young child, his family left the country after his father – an athlete who had permission to travel internationally – crossed the border with the family and chose not to return. Vági later spoke about the family effectively having to present the journey to the authorities as temporary before settling in West Germany for several years. The family eventually returned to Hungary after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism.
Vági began dance training while living in Germany and continued studying intensively after returning to Hungary, reportedly taking multiple dance classes a day alongside normal school. He later moved to the UK to study dance and choreography at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the performing arts school co-founded by Paul McCartney.
While in the UK, Vági became increasingly interested in productions that blurred the line between circus, dance and immersive performance. He has spoken about being particularly inspired by companies like NoFit State Circus at the Edinburgh Fringe, where audiences were surrounded by performers rather than separated from them in a traditional theatre format. That combination of influences eventually led to the creation of Recirquel and Vági’s own “cirque danse” style – combining contemporary dance, physical theatre and high-level circus technique into something more narrative and emotionally driven than traditional circus spectacle alone.
Walk My World is the ultimate expression of this, one which is drawing crowds from around Europe to Budapest. The hope in the future is that Recirquel will produce something in London but for now, culture-lovers looking for a weekend trip away should look no further than a trip to Hungary to check out this incredible show.
Visit here for more information on Walk My World and to book tickets
