Taking Flight

Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Ugly Duckling” was published in 1843. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky began composing “Swan Lake” in 1875. What it might portend that the two fairy tales arose out of the waning of Romanticism and waxing of modernism would likely intrigue Yaron Lifschitz, artistic director of Circa. After all, those fables meet cute and clever in the circus-inflected company’s rousingly inventive “Duck Pond” which opens the Artist Series Oct. 5. 

In an essay Lifschitz wrote for an Australian arts industry site about the hard if illuminating lessons of the pandemic, he namechecks philosophers Paul Virilio and Martin Buber as well as German abstract painter Gerhard Richter. For a circus dude, Lifschitz is wonderfully brainy.

For an artistic company, Circa is splendidly acrobatic. “They bend; they lift, they fly through the air, they land,” Lifschitz once said, distilling the essence of the artistry. With “Duck Pond,” Circa has created a piece that takes on identity—mistaken and doubled—with gravity-courting and gravity-rebuffing skill. And quite a few winks. 

Thanks in part to decades of Cirque du Soleil spectacles, audiences are evermore conversant with the lures of circus artistry. Circa, founded in 2004 in Brisbane, recalibrates that wow factor back in favor of the very bodies creating it. There’s an intimacy and artistic ambition to its performances that invites awe at the tensile strength of bone and sinew but also trepidation at the without-a-net feats. 

That pas de deux of apprehension and delight is part of the point, not just of Circa’s performances, but perhaps of art, too. “Circus is a particularly dangerous business,” Lifschitz wrote in that 2021 essay. “Pretty much anything in the arts offers the potential for disaster. Doing anything means being in motion, and in motion you can fall.” But also soar.

In “Duck Pond,” the circus accoutrements—the Cyr wheels, aerial silks and ropes—are all in play as the ensemble of 10 dives into Odette and Odile’s story with winking aplomb. (Circa was here last with “Sacre,” a reimagining of “Rite of Spring,” in 2022.) There is the sorcerer, the famous swan and her vexing doppelganger, the pining prince. But hold on. There is also a raft of performers wearing bright yellow waders and just as sunny flippers wielding red-headed mops. And to throw a stone into the pond, comes a winsome Ugly Duckling in a light golden leotard and wearing a pleated collar.  

For a swift 70 minutes, feathers will be ruffled; swans will take flight; and, if all goes as designed, audiences will fall … for “Duck Pond.”  

Circa performs on the Artist Series at Macky Auditorium on Oct. 5, 2024.