Recently after seeing a circus show, I was talking to a friend in the forecourt of the Victorian Arts Centre. It had been a warm day and as the chill of the night approached, the warm concrete exhaled a last breath for the shiny jacketed arts patrons clutching glasses of white wine. My friend is a respected sound designer who works for many of Melbourne’s foremost contemporary dance companies. Speaking about the show we’d just seen, he said to me with a look of slight concern ‘I just don’t understand circus. Like, what am I looking at? How do I read it?’ I answered with a joke, but I was struck by the simplicity of his question and the significance of why he was asking it. It speaks to the deeper issue of an identity crisis for Australian circus, which is aching to be taken seriously as an art form, yet struggles to define or justify itself before the self-appointed ‘gatekeepers’ of culture on funding boards, festivals and awards panels. I think that this crisis can be viewed and...
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