Tumbling, balancing and soaring together: creating circus in the time of Covid
This Sunday 36 acrobatic performers and dancers will come together for the first time at the Circa Contemporary Circus’s rehearsal studio in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. They will tumble, balance and soar together in testament to the communal human spirit’s power to overcome adversity as part of Brisbane festival’s biggest in-theatre show this September.
Leviathan, to be presented over seven performances at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, will take on a piquant flavour in the age of Covid-19, when humans are being dissuaded by governments from touching one another. Socially distanced audiences, likely to be occupying up to half of the Playhouse’s 850-seat capacity, will have the chance to live vicariously through Circa’s famed sensual body contact.
Brisbane festival features more than 700 Brisbane-based artists this year, including those performing in Leviathan, as international travel bans force big-city Australian festivals to scrap programs featuring overseas talent.
Circa premiered Leviathan at Perth festival in February, joining West Australian-based circus companies on stage a month before Australian theatres were forced to close. The pandemic destroyed Circa’s international touring schedule, alongside those of all touring Australian arts companies.
But Circa has since been granted a physical distancing exemption by Queensland health authorities to continue its rehearsal and performances within the state, because community transmission of the novel coronavirus has since proved substantially lower in Queensland than in Victoria and New South Wales.
Last weekend Circa was already performing a bespoke program, Lights On, for small, physically distanced audiences at the Brisbane Powerhouse.
In June the 18-member ensemble, as well as members of its youth performance arm, Circa Zoo, and Queensland University of Technology performance program dancers began rehearsing the remounted Leviathan production in three separate Brisbane studios.
These rehearsal rooms “look a bit like field hospitals in an Ebola outbreak”, says the Circa founder and artistic director, Yaron Lifschitz.
“There’s tables covered in plastic tarps, there’s hand sanitiser on every surface,” he says. “Every time a group uses the space it gets washed, they mop it afterwards. We clean the toilets. We’re absolutely committed to doing everything we can to avoid being the centre of anything hideous happening.
“We check our temperature at the beginning and the end of each day. We log all the data. Let’s be really on to this because the first time anybody gets, god forbid, tested positive, the whole thing shuts down for a couple of weeks. And that’s disastrous, right?
“The simplest protocol is that everybody behaves as though they, and everybody else, has [the virus] … Basically, you’re careful. It’s interesting that the [US] Centers for Disease Control does not list sweat as a communicable part of Covid-19. So it’s not a sweat-transferred disease.”
Brisbane festival’s new artistic director, Louise Bezzina, says most in-theatre programming could not proceed this year because of venue unpredictability. While Bezzina had to cancel planned international acts, the festival has striven for social equity with a series of free “pop-up” concerts, Street Serenades, with 190 contemporary music, DJs, jazz, cabaret, folk, world and circus performances on the streets of 190 Brisbane suburbs.
Most of the overall festival program is free, Bezzina says. “It was just too unpredictable to be banking on box offices. Who knows what’s coming? [But] we made 28 new works, the biggest number of commissions we’ve ever had.”
For his final Sydney festival this January, the artistic director, Wesley Enoch, will also be pursuing an all-Australian program, again including Vigil at Barangaroo on 25 January, as well as shows shelved during the pandemic from Sydney Dance Company, the Brandenburg Orchestra, Sydney Theatre Company and Ensemble Theatre.
An all-Australian festival is “purely practical, with borders unlikely to be open for the next 12 months”, Enoch says: “We also need to support our artists more, and our communities need to hear what our artists have to say. Six months from now, people will want a recovery narrative to take hold because of the psychological pressure.”
One-third of Sydney festival in 2021 will be free and held outdoors, Enoch says. Theatre and venue physical distancing might mean “fewer shows running for longer at lower capacities”. He’s talking to circus companies about rehearsing and performing in physically distanced “bubbles” away from other people for the festival’s duration.
But at Circa, Lifshitz says “you can’t really create a bubble” for the 36 performers recreating Leviathan for Brisbane audiences. The company is in conversation with Sydney festival about bringing a smaller show interstate in January.
Circa is also scheduled to bring the 10-performer work Sacre to Wollongong this October, followed by performances in Western Australia – travel restrictions permitting.
Such touring “may or may not happen”, Lifschitz says. “At the moment, the best approach is to plan for every available contingency, and expect to still be taken by surprise.”
• Brisbane festival runs from 4 to 26 September
