Warning: seeing a performance by Brisbane circus company Circa may cause feelings of inadequacy, fear and awe.
Take their 2019 show Humans, where Circa artistic director Yaron Lifschitz and his ensemble asked: "How much can we take as humans? How much weight can we carry? Who can we trust to support our load?"
The acrobats' bodies provided many contradictory and humorous answers — whether they were tumbling at the last possible moment, ascending to great heights balanced only on each other's heads, or simply making fantastical, unexpected shapes with their bodies.
The performers were pushing the limits of what human bodies and circus could do; instead of elaborate costumes, apparatus and sets, this is something closer to contemporary dance.
And it is playful, probing work like this that has seen Circa grow from a tiny, edgy, Brisbane circus troupe to become one of Australia's major performing arts companies, with a hefty reputation on the global stage.
The slightly wayward sibling
Circa first emerged as a collective in 1987, with members coming from Brisbane's Street Arts Community Theatre Company and The Popular Theatre Troupe.
Co-founded by Derek Ives and Antonella Casella, it was then known as Rock N Roll Circus.
Lifschitz told Michael Cathcart on The Stage Show that Rock N Roll Circus saw itself as "the slightly wayward, tougher sibling to Circus Oz — it was smaller, grittier, a bit more glamorous, and edgier".
"It was a pioneering company, it brought some chaotic energy into Australian circus — or helped it [get there]," says Lifschitz.
While Rock N Roll Circus was making its name with works like Body Slam (1992), Circus Under the Tin Top (1993) and The Dark (1995), Lifschitz was cutting his teeth as an emerging theatre director.
"[After graduating NIDA in 1991] I found myself directing plays that stank ... what came out on stage was just excruciatingly boring," he recalls.
"[But] I knew that working in a form of pre-existing, limited [performance] vocabulary was probably where I'd find my strength."
While Lifschitz had experience in leadership, having founded the Australian Museum's Theatre Unit, he had zero circus experience before taking on the role of Rock N Roll Circus's artistic director in 1999.
"For some reason that is only known to them, they [Rock N Roll Circus] chose me — I think because I was the least threatening and was the easiest [person] to push around."
'Some spark'
By the time Lifschitz arrived at Rock N Roll Circus, many of the original collective members had departed.
"I knew nothing about circus and maybe that was a good thing," he says, with the benefit of hindsight.
"Over time you develop taste, but also you make a lot of mistakes. And I think that the key to making anything good is to make a lot of bad things, and then remain open and curious."
By 2003, the company was making groundbreaking work (including, that year, the shows Anyway I'm Not Alone and Naked) — but still failing to find an audience.
"We spent a long time doing shows that people hated ... but we knew there was some spark, something very authentic and fresh [in our work]," says Lifschitz.
In 2004, the company renamed itself Circa, and premiered their three-person show The Space Between — but it wasn't until the following year that they had a breakthrough, when Lifschitz recast that show with performers David Carberry, Darcy Grant and Chelsea McGuffin.
These acrobats would all go on to have successful careers as creators and directors in their own right (including at Company 2, which McGuffin created, and at Gravity & Other Myths).
"So I happened to have a room full of very creative and skillful people, and they did extraordinary work," Lifschitz says.
The 2005 Melbourne season of The Space Between received a glowing review in The Age that described it as "a circus act like no other ... an hour-long showcase of balance, strength and flexibility that remains tight and expressively choreographed throughout".
The rest of the season sold out.
"People came and finally had permission to like this different thing ... it connected with people," says Lifschitz.
Circa were invited to take the show to Romania, and to Cinars, a performing arts market in Montreal in 2006. It was effectively their international 'debut' — and the company has been touring ever since.
Collaboration and invitation
Across his tenure with the company, Lifschitz embraced and was led by a wide array of music — but was particularly, and increasingly, drawn to opera and classical.
Take 2013's Opus, where a blindfolded string quartet performed music by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, written in the depths of Stalinist Soviet Union.
"Around them, acrobats are tumbling and moving in complex patterns and walking in lines, as this piece of music ... is enacted physically and musically in front of you," Lifschitz explains.
"It brings the music kind of crashing to life in a fresh way."
Opus was the first Circa show to be commissioned (by French festival Les Nuits de Fourviere) rather than self-generated and funded through company revenue and government grants. It was also the first Circa show to receive major Australian festival funding (from the Brisbane, Perth and Melbourne Festivals).
Circa began building a reputation for unusual collaborations and locations — from a work performed in cemeteries across the UK in 2016/2017 (Depart) to taking on creative leadership of the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games arts and cultural program.
Stages that had never welcomed circus before, welcomed Circa — including a 3,000-seat ancient Roman amphitheatre, and The Grande salle Pierre Boulez at the Philharmonie de Paris.
French newspaper Les Echos described Circa as "a revolution in the spectacle of circus".
Entering the majors
It hasn't always been smooth-sailing, with demanding hours, failed funding applications, and the inevitable injuries and setbacks that go with an artform premised on physical challenges and breath-taking risks. (Lifschitz recalls a 2011 season of the company's self-titled show CIRCA in Belfast, where the ensemble lost an acrobat each night to injury or illness).
But slowly and steadily, Lifschitz has grown Circa from a handful of paid staff to a company of around 70 artists and arts workers.
In 2019, in recognition of the company's achievements, Circa was invited to join the Major Performing Arts (MPA) Framework, a group of large performing arts companies who draw from a separate pool of federal funding from the Australia Council for the Arts.
"[Being part of the MPA] has meant we have a bit more resources floating around the system ... we can take a bit more of a punt [on work]," says Lifschitz.
Lifschitz had in fact been an outspoken critic of the MPA, saying in a 2016 speech that "it's not a funding program, it's a government entrenched oligarchy of privilege".
Speaking to ABC Arts in 2020 he said: "I tried to burn the place down — and they invited me in."
Since that 2016 speech, the MPA has been replaced by the National Performing Arts Partnership (NPAP) Framework, which Lifschitz says provides more transparent avenues for high-achieving companies to enter or underperforming companies to exit the program.
"There is now open, contestable funding — but I'd like it to be more open," he says.
"This culture of entitlement is still there and it's going to shift, but I definitely played a small role in helping that shift."
The Circa way
Lifschitz is adamant that there is nothing exceptional about Circa; rather, he says, "timing, luck and curiosity" have been key to the company flourishing.
"[But] there is a Circa way of doing things: it's fast, it's hard and it's not afraid of tough work."
Many of the company's ensemble trained at Melbourne's National Institute of Circus Arts, (NICA), including Marty Evans, who first saw a Circa performance in his final year at NICA.
"I had a background in team sport, and seeing Circa perform on stage ... It was like watching a team work together for a common goal, which really resonated with me," Evans recalls.
Circa also runs classes for adults and young people, which is how ensemble member Kimberley O'Brien came to join the company.
In the decade O'Brien has been with the company, "it's become more ensemble-based and willing to push ideas," she says.
Evans says it's this collaborative approach and Lifschitz's outsider background that set Circa apart.
Lifschitz says: "What really interested me was treating circus as a coherent set of languages and learning to fillet them — apply pressure, attention, restriction of ideas, philosophy, to those core elements ... It might be the idea of lifting, or a turn, or the moment of encounter."
Over the years, a distinct 'Circa aesthetic' emerged, driven by both practical limitations of their small company as well as Lifshitz's own taste — including stripped-back costume design and pared-back scenography.
But the aesthetic "was never really the point," says Lifschitz.
"The point was: can you take this medium and ask fresh questions about it, create some sort of contemporary artform from itself?"
Deep politics
"I find most work that I see, particularly in circus and dance, too obvious for my taste. I'm not saying it's bad ... I just want to work in the space where paradoxical states coexist," Lifschitz says.
He holds up 2019's Leviathan as an example: a show that asks questions about freedom and oppression.
"I think shows are poetic ciphers that you experience and then lodge deep inside your soul, your psyche, and provoke a response you can't explain — that, for me, is the power of art."
And while he says the politics of each show is never explicit, he is adamant that there is still an inherent politics in all of Circa's work.
"In life we give our weight to beds and sofas and car seats very easily, but we give it very tentatively to each other — but in circus we give it generously."
"If you think about carrying the weight of another person as a radical affirmation of how our species can exist in the world. I think there's a very deep politics behind the work ... in the experience of encounter and sharing," says the artistic director.
'Great art'
Lifschitz and part of his ensemble were in Paris, performing Humans at La Scala Opera House, when COVID-19 hit. They quickly headed back to Brisbane.
Initially, they worked on a new show called Sacre, in isolation, using Zoom.
But by the time they were ready to start work on Humans 2.0 — a follow-up to their 2019 show — they had been granted a special exemption by the Queensland Government to rehearse together, albeit under strict COVID-safe arrangements.
That exemption made Circa the first professional performing arts company in the country to return to in-person rehearsals.
When developing Humans 2.0, the performers and Lifschitz were considering how "touching is always an ethical and a political act, but it's much more politicised now, and much more kind of fraught and interesting".
Circa also used 2020 "to radically revamp the things that will allow us to engage, employ, and connect with much more diverse audiences and participants," says Lifschitz.
"We have the feeling that we are definitely too white and we're definitely too upper-middle class," he says.
The cast of Humans 2.0 — which premiered recently at Sydney Festival — and Sacre includes Circa's first-ever First Nations ensemble member (Harley Mann, a Waka Waka man who specialises in aerial rope and diabolo).
Circa is currently developing both a Reconciliation Action Plan and a disability, access and inclusion plan.
"The point is to end up with a better, more interesting world where everybody has access to opportunities in a deep and profound way," says Lifschitz.
He says Circa's priorities right now are both survival and making "great art".
"What was great art — as in white people on stage doing 'high, Western culture' — is not going to be that, and isn't that anymore, probably never was."
After 21 years at the helm of Circa, directing over 30 productions, Lifschitz says he's terrified of repeating himself.
"And yet I'm conscious that I think we've only scratched the surface," he says.
Circa will be performing Sacre at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre (Jan 28-30) and Peepshow at the Sydney Opera House (Feb 2-14).