Imagine a cabaret show inside a nightclub, but then throw in a series of jaw-dropping skills you'd expect at a circus.
Acrobats using aerial silks to spin high above the stage, hula hoop routines and juggling combined with remarkable displays of strength pieced together with an alluring and seductive edge - Circa's Peepshow Club Remix event has it all.
The showcase is ensemble-based which means a group conquering big acrobatic sequences with high energy and loud, fast-paced musical numbers. The tempo eases up for softer moments and more delicate acts.
Through humour, apprehension and awe, viewers are taken into a new world as the immense talent of each performer is tested to its limit.
Ensemble member and Peepshow's associate director Billie Wilson-Coffey describes the feeling of being on stage as exhilarating and elating.
She says it brings "an adrenaline buzz all the way to your fingertips".
"That sense of control sometimes and particularly working with a team, you're all onboard together, so when you all freeze together or hold a moment, it's very powerful," she told 1News.
Circa performers are from all around the world, but a fair chunk who star in Peepshow hail from Australia.
Each year, the ensemble performs around 300 shows in up to around 50 a year, including New Zealand.
Wilson-Coffey got her start in youth circus in her small, country hometown.
She then moved to Melbourne to study at the National Institute of Circus Arts where she learned aerial and group acrobatics.
"It wasn't really until I joined Circa that that started to bloom," she says.
"Every live performance is different so that's why it's so beautiful, you just have to be along for the ride."
From up on the stage, she says there's a few hints as to whether the audience are entertained by what they see.
"You hear a gasp, particularly if someone goes high in the air and gets caught. It's our job as performers to either hold back or control the claps, to take the audience on a bit of a journey, sometimes that is successful and sometimes it's just impossible," she said.
The show involves a lot of trust. Some performers are thrust high into the air, others thrown, turned, twisted and balanced on others, creating maximum suspense for the audience but also a need for the close-knit group to work together in time as one.
Before the show, the artists will have a group huddle to make sure they're on the same rhythm and in the same mindset.
"It's a passion we all share, to trust and work with each other. It's about moving on when we're stuck and slowing down if we need to and giving the room the support and guidance it needs for people to make the best work they can."
If something doesn't quite go to plan, she says it's about recovering quickly and making sure that everything is okay to move forward.
"I think there's a moment on stage when if something doesn't go right, you have to just let it go," she explains.
"Sometimes it's harder to do that, but you have to be so present and so focused for the next thing, it's like 'everyone's good? moving on'."
Acrobat Samuel Letch started his circus career when he was 18, which is a little bit later than many of his performance counterparts.
He was an active kid, who loved sport, but couldn't figure out what he might want to compete professionally in.
As a teenager, Letch saw someone doing a back tuck and asked him what he was doing. When he found out about acrobatics, he started learning all he could before training at the National Centre for Circus Art in London.
Eventually, after a stint of being self-employed, he joined Circa following years of aspiring to make the group.
His training focuses around teeterboard, a discipline which requires two or more people.
"When I started circus, I had a passion for relationships with people and how to connect with each other and what that means.
"Being in an ensemble for me just seemed natural, to just come into a space and feel the vibe of everyone in the room. It's always exciting."
Yaron Lifschitz is the artistic director of the company responsible for coordinating the artistic vision, finding the team, creating the ideas for the shows, but also the CEO and the director of the show.
He's proud of the work he and the artists have created.
As the creative brains behind the showcase, Lifschitz can't pinpoint exactly where the inspiration for these performances comes from.
"I'm a great fan of the William Butler Yeats saying 'out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry', I try and make a kind of poetry, I think the quarrels and the questions come from place inside, I'm not really sure.
"I feel like each show is trying to articulate or express an emotion that I don't really have any other name for."
To create the most ideal Circa world, he says performers don't just need athletic ability but other qualities which make them stand out.
"There is a skill level you need, an entrance requirement that you are a very good acrobat with one or more disciplines and that's where you start from.
"But Circa acrobats are known for two other things, one is that they work in an ensemble, they work really well together and they gel as a group, that's human qualities, interpersonal qualities, and the second is they bring a lot of creative energy and fire and spirit to what they do.
"There's plenty of really great acrobats who don't engage me or move me and Circa acrobats, the ones I look for are quite different to that."
The hope is together they can create the same rush people feel when venturing into new frontiers without actually leaving their seats.
"I have a very low boredom threshold, I don't like sitting in the theatre watching people talk to each other, it strikes me as being not what theatre comes from for me, it comes from ecstasy, it comes from catharsis, it comes from ritual and release, exactly the same place a nightclub comes from."
Circa will perform from June 29 - July 1 at the Civic Theatre in Auckland.
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