Reviews

ANGELS Aerials: How Not to Forget How to Fly

Mareike Lyssy

02 Feb 2026 • 3 min read

ANGELS Aerials proves to children and adults with When Dreams Fly – Peter Pan that gravity can be overcome. A visit to the CCCC during the Zeit für Zirkus festival in Cologne.

When I was a child, I didn’t like it when adults played children on stage or anywhere else. It wasn’t so much that they tried to take us for fools. We could recognise an adult standing in front of us, even if they were wearing short dungarees or some other prop meant to turn them into a child. But you could tell that adults simply couldn’t do it – be children. They usually didn’t even play it well. They pretended, but with little imagination. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Peter Pan never wanted to grow up – this desolation of imagination-less adulthood.

A web of ropes across the firmament

That it doesn’t have to be this way is proven by the aerial theatre company ANGELS Aerials, with the story of this ever-young boy’s adaptation. Since 2022, the aerial acrobats have been swirling adults and children through the air in When Dreams Fly – Peter Pan at the 2025 Zeit für Zirkus festival in Cologne; they are doing it again. Hundreds of metres of rope help them do so. Looking up at the ceiling of the CCCC, you see so many ropes hanging over and seemingly through each other that it looks as if the largest spiders of all fairy tales had joined forces under this roof to weave together. Just after being instructed to make sure you look up before sneaking off to the toilet or elsewhere, children are already zooming above your head from all directions. The Darling siblings who follow Peter to Neverland, the bloodthirsty pirates around Captain Hook, and even the mermaids from the lagoon swap “diving through deep waters” for “gliding through the air” this afternoon.

Permission to play along

Adults are allowed to play: as Captain Hook, who must, of course, be played by an adult, because only adults can behave in such barbaric ways. As the ticking crocodile, which has to be big enough to swallow an entire Hook. And as Tinkerbell, because children find grown men in fairy costumes funny, and the adults perhaps didn’t want to decide which child would have to fill that role cliché, instead. But – and I would have liked this as a child – the fully grown members of ANGELS Aerials mostly remain behind the scenes as the pullers of strings. When Peter dodges a blow from Hook and leaps lightly into the air, someone at the side grabs the ropes with confidence. When the Darling siblings fly across the night sky one after another, their counterweights climb down the rungs of a frame in the dark, moving them forward.

ANGELS Aerials members have clearly preserved their imagination since the children of the aerial theatre have taught them to imagine again. Because the children hurl themselves off scaffolding into the depths and across the space with such force as if fear of heights simply didn’t exist – and as if you only had to push off hard enough for flying to start all by itself. As a child, after the first flights above my head, I would have wanted to fly through the old factory hall on one of those ropes myself. As an adult, too.

This article is part of the German project ZirkusBlog, which took place during the Zeit für Zirkus 2025 edition in Cologne. The coverage of Zeit für Zirkus - Zeit zum Reden, organised by the BUZZ - Federal Association of Contemporary Circus, is sponsored by the Performing Arts Fund and the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne. The original German texts were published on ZirkusPlus and on the festival website.

ANGELS Aerials: How Not to Forget How to Fly

Mareike Lyssy

A web of ropes across the firmament

Permission to play along

Read more on Zeit für Zirkus 2025 in Cologne

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