Brisbane-based Circa tours to Heath Ledger Theatre with Swan Lake-inspired circus production Duck Pond

Hearing an entire audience collectively gasp from the sheer exhilaration of a Circa production never gets any less magical for the Brisbane-based company’s artistic director Yaron Lifschitz.

Just do not ever expect to see him on stage performing amongst his talented cast.

“I remember seeing circus when I was a kid and absolutely falling in love with it,” Cape Town-born, Sydney-raised Lifschitz recounts.

“But being completely physically inept at anything from tying my shoelaces to opening a car door, I very wisely stayed away. It would have been a short and disastrous circus career.

“I then fell in love with theatre during my last years of school and decided to train as a theatre director. It took me some years to realise that I just found plays boring, and that’s kind of awkward. It’s like being a doctor and going, ‘I don’t like bodies or helping people’.”

Searching for a different way of making theatre, Lifschitz fell back under the circus spell, recalling how much he had loved the experience of sheer wonder and brilliance of people flying through the air or standing on each other and juggling.

“What a glorious thing to do with your life,” he adds.

“I’ve kind of been there ever since.”

Lifschitz was the first artistic director of Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus in 1999, which he transformed into Circa in 2004 with the vision to go beyond the original company’s limitations and provide greater scope to reach its audiences in more breathtaking and profound ways.

“Circa, by itself, means ‘around’ or ‘about’ and it comes from the same root as circle, which is the same root word that circus comes from as well,” 56-year-old Lifschitz explains.

“I liked that we were around and about circus, but we weren’t necessarily always going to do circus that looked or felt just like circus.”

Lifschitz has since made more than 80 productions of various sizes — many defying easy categorisation — that have won numerous awards and toured across six continents, from spiegeltents and concert halls to theatres, opera houses, major festivals, cathedrals, and even cemeteries.

His production Duck Pond, created with the Circa ensemble, premiered in July 2023 and is currently touring WA, contributing to the 400, or so, performances Circa presents each year on the company’s significant worldwide touring schedule.

Taking inspiration from ballet’s beloved Swan Lake, which in turn made Lifschitz look at other 19th century fairytale birds including The Ugly Duckling, resulted in one of the world’s most romantic ballets reimagined with Circa’s signature physicality and humour, full of contemporary aerials and acrobatics.

“If I’m not naturally a circus person, I’m even less a ballet person because I can barely see my toes, much less point them,” laughs the father of three.

“My wife (Circa costume designer Libby McDonnell) is an ex-ballet dancer and director, and I thought ‘That’s kind of interesting, I’m curious about this medium’ and had her explain some things to me.

“I liked the fact that ballet people look shiny and have nice things. Like when you go to the ballet, everything’s kind of sweet and their hair is all slicked back. . . Why shouldn’t we (Circa) be able to be pretty, occasionally, and shiny and have slick hair and make-p too? So I was like, ‘Well, let’s play in that space.’”

He describes Duck Pond as a contemporary riff on Swan Lake, incorporating themes of identity from The Ugly Duckling, while also referencing ballet tropes in respectful and intelligent ways, as the 10-acrobat cast perform multiple parts.

“It was a show that needed more structure than I’d usually have at the start because there was a lot of material that had to be dealt with,” Lifschitz says.

“How do you actually tell these stories? How much story do you tell? How much do you just leave as a set of impressions and flavours? I think we’ve got that pretty right in the piece because it certainly seems to land with audiences.

“On one hand, I think it’s a really great show for those people who love sophisticated yet contemporary, progressive art, and on the other hand, I think it’s a great show for the whole family . . . It’s got a lot of heart.”

The 70-minute production features composition and sound design by Jethro Woodward, lighting design by Alexander Berlage and McDonnell on costume design, the latter rising to the challenge of creating Duck Pond’s costumes that are both beautiful and can withstand the necessary demands of acrobatic performance.

“Libby did such a great job making the costumes practical yet alluring and pretty shiny too, which is not a quality we’re particularly used to having,” Lifschitz chuckles.

“We got our shiny.”

Duck Pond is at Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre of WA, April 12 to 18, tickets at artsculturetrust.wa.gov.au.