Somewhere on the scale from the Bauhaus ballet to Ariana Grande, Niels Erling works as a stage director, curator, and performance maker. His performances are characterized by a conceptual, post-dramatic, and expressive quality, visually captivating, and often physically demanding for their performers. Niels Erling’s artistic signature is easy to recognize across his works, where the pieces seamlessly intertwine humor, brutality, fragility, and emotional resonance.

Sketching a pscyhocartography of our times, Niels Erling's creations explore anxiety, grief, exhaustion, vulnerability, powerlessness, self-loathing, sexuality, and a fragile hope for a better future in an utterly confused present. Climate change, love, pop culture, and resistance against a heteronormative world are meticulously examined and sublimated through his stage art.

Inspired by mass and pop culture, Niels Erling subverts familiar ideas to explore uncharted territories of the present beyond repetitive narratives. His shows intentionally manipulate the audience through seductive twists and turns, provoking a deliberate sense of confusion in a dreamlike aesthetic. While drawing unabashedly on recognizable tropes, as an audience member, you never know what’s going to happen next: Genres converge, meanings fluctuate, and the boundaries between fiction and reality blur.

Niels Erling's career includes a tenure as the artistic director of Theatre Momentum during the 2019-2020 season, where he crafted "The Downfall," a trilogy exploring contemporary apocalypticism through teen movie musicals, violent dance rituals, and biblical texts.

Concurrently, in 2013, Niels Erling founded the production company AKT1. Since its inception, AKT1 has been a platform for Niels Erling's artistic pursuits between theatre, sound, and new text. Notably, he has produced over 120 radio plays with contemporary authors and composers and produced and directed eight theatre productions under the AKT1 banner with theatres in Copenhagen. One such production is the acclaimed "Work Bitch," an exploration of emancipation, exhaustion, and self-hatred through the pop cultural prism of the #FreeBritney movement.

Born in 1988, Niels Erling studied at the Malmoe Theatre Academy, graduating in 2018 with an MFA in Theatre. Currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark, he occasionally dreams of owning a dog. For inquiries, Niels Erling can be reached via email at niels.erling@gmail.com.