Live To Win

Some years ago while shoplifting from a major hardware store I experienced a type of old fashioned security system – one that needs no technology, or cameras or electronic tags and yet has the possibility to be everywhere. I’m speaking of the undercover security guard, and I found the experience remarkable because it caused me to reflect on how systems of fascism and state control have always relied on the impulse that humans have to turn on one another. Much like the panopticon (a circular prison system designed around a central tower from which guards could, in theory, always be watching), centralised states with heavy surveillance – like the former German Democratic Republic, or the Stalinist USSR, keep their citizens in check by making sure that there could always be someone watching. Lets call this “someone”, Mr Invisible – because he is everywhere, yet only reveals himself at strategic moments. Mr Invisible is the shadow that walks just a step behind you, keep...

‘Are you sure this is it?’ he whispered as they crawled through the gap under the fence, dragging his shirt in the dirt and tearing the stitches at the edge of the patch clumsily sewn on to the pocket. It had been easy to spot the circus site with its sign picked out in lights in the corner of the old showgrounds, but harder to find an entry point between the rusty strands of barbed wire amongst the scrub in the dark. They’d been walking for almost 30 minutes now after leaving the car parked several blocks away in the suburban badlands of Townsville, itself wedged between the newly swollen river and the highway – which was their one route out of here and back to civilization. ‘Of course it bloody is Morgan! Look, the cage is right there’ came the reply from a few feet ahead of him. Clouds crowded the moon and left the two men feeling ahead with their feet for the level of the ground, searching for the next fence between them and their target. ‘Don’t call me that,’ he hissed b...

The air in Sydney is like a glass; clear and full of water it holds you in a crisp commercial embrace, primary colour opinions smiling inside marble television studios It’s dirty and rotten in glimpses As only a big city can be; gaps in construction facades like missing teeth puffs of smoke from the cracks in the concrete ciggie butts chucked under a bush. In Sydney, even the homeless are assertive not content to be swept into a corner they have made a camp on Martin place a free kitchen, library and beds for all who can brave the curious stares of uniformed school excursions. I’m in favour of the noise and the hustle Existentially wandering through the crowds I love people who don’t care Who you are or what you are doing there This of course is rare in small towns with the population of an extended family Christmas gathering there people notice you without looking an...

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...