Circa’s Duck Pond: Contemporary circus arts subverts your expectations

You don’t run away to join the circus, you run to it.

The enchantment that has drawn audiences holds the same allure for the artists captured by something akin to destiny.

“It’s a pretty brutal and intense way to lead your life, and it has a lot of challenges with it, so the idea that you want it to feel like a calling is pretty important, but we’re lucky we get to work with great people, so what makes it complex also makes it easy,” Yaron Lifshitz told The Nightly.

Lifschitz is the chief executive and artistic director of Circa, the Brisbane-based theatre company dedicated to contemporary circus arts.

Circa’s performers won’t squeeze your nose and squirt you with water from their flower lapel, but they will astound you with the athleticism of their movements on stage, dancing, tumbling and contorting their bodies in a way that continues to surprise with each act.

Circa’s shows often draws on classic works such as Dido and Aeneas or Orpheus and Eurydice but it is just as comfortable in something a little less high art, including its stage collaboration with Shaun the Sheep.

But don’t mistake it for global juggernaut Cirque du Soleil.

“Cirque du Soleil is massive and it helped open the ground for vaguely narrative-based, lycra-clad circus in the world,” Lifschitz said. “I view them as Starbucks. We’re a boutique barista, so we make coffee and it’s good, it’s pretty edgy, it’s delicious.

“At Starbucks you can buy a horrid venti macchiato thing, but at least there’s the idea that you might want to drink espresso, (especially) in places like America that just didn’t have it before. It’s the Starbucks of circus.

“I don’t think that’s how they would view themselves. But I reckon they’ve been really important, they helped change an ecosystem, they’ve helped break some ground.”

Lifschitz is not personally a fan of Cirque du Soleil, which he sees as “anodyne” and “fine”.

“If you believe that, as a species, we should be telling each other that the most powerful thing we can do is have imagination clad in lycra, then it’s a valid thing. Then they’re your go-to place for that kind of revelation.

“I think we should have more powerful, insightful conversations about ourselves.”

Circa is about to stage Duck Pond at the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne’s Princess Theatre next year, followed by dates on the Gold Coast, Auckland, Western Australia and the US.

The show has already played all over the world including in Spain, Canada, Ireland, Dubai, Sweden and the UK.

The show is a re-imagined amalgam of The Ugly Duckling and Swan Lake with acrobatics, aerials and dance. It may not be for purists - “There are 50,000 ballerinas who will think you’ve just murdered their birthright”, Lifschitz said – but for audiences who want to see something new and different, Duck Pond will satiate that need.

“We work on trying to make a show that has integrity and it does the right things,” he continued. “It should be beautiful and fun, but it should also have depth and move audiences. It should be a little bit transgressive.”

The Ugly Duckling and Swan Lake are both stories about identity and transformation, and that’s something that is carried through into Duck Pond, and specifically, how “identity is not destiny”.

That’s explicit in the storytelling but also the form, in the audience experience itself as expectations are subverted.

“You should come along and be enchanted by it, and then start to watch identities and performance conventions dissolve in front of you like any good spell,” he said. “You enter a world where the rules of logic, the rules of what happens in a ballet, the rules of what happens in a circus, all magnificently and magically dissolve.”

Along with that is also the charm, the un-replicable experience, of watching a theatre performance, giving your whole self over to someone else’s story?

“When was the last time you sat next to anyone for an hour and a half without a phone, without distractions, without anyone bringing you a drink or going to the loo? Just sitting there and be present,” Lifschitz said.

“That’s what happens in the theatre. It’s a great medium for powerfully enforcing togetherness and encouraging togetherness and presence.”

Duck Pond is at the Sydney Opera House January 9 to 12 and Melbourne’s Princess Theatre January 14 to 25