Yaron ‘didn’t like circus very much’. Now, his Aussie troupe is adored in Europe

This story is part of the March 8 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

It’s an oppressively humid Brisbane summer’s morning and we’re bunkered down inside the Judith Wright Arts Centre, where it is mercifully cool. It’s day one in the creation of a new work for contemporary Australian circus company, Circa, a fresh production of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloë that will come together under the watchful eye of artistic ­director Yaron Lifschitz.

Lifschitz hasn’t been getting much sleep of late, and it has nothing to do with the humidity. He’s feeling overwhelmed at the weight of the creative task before him. Indeed, the stakes are high: the world ­premiere is also the opening event of a new two-week music ­festival, Multitudes, at London’s Southbank Centre, where Circa will perform with the 96-member London Philharmonic Orchestra, plus a choir. It’s an undeniably high-profile gig.

But this is Circa, the Brisbane-based circus so in demand that it now has three separate touring arms – one tours Australia, another Europe and a third the US and Canada – along with its own training academy in Brisbane and a First Nations offshoot in Cairns. It was described by French daily Les Echos as “a revolution in the spectacle of circus”, and is Australia’s most globally active performing arts company, one that last year delivered 361 performances across 97 cities and towns in 20 countries.

The reason Lifschitz has been losing sleep has ­nothing to do with the capabilities of his 30-strong ­ensemble, then. No, the stress of creating this 70-­minute work, performed to French composer Maurice Ravel’s 1912 choreographic symphony, comes from the fact that most ballet and physical-theatre productions of Daphnis and Chloë have been, well, a bit of a dog.

“I’m literally at the start of a creative process for a development that is absolutely terrifying me,” Lifschitz says as his performers stretch out on the rehearsal floor. “My level of stress went up last night when I read a review of a New York City Ballet production that said something like, ‘This slight and trivial performance may be as good as it gets with this piece.’ As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a successful choreography of this music. It’s been done by Benjamin Millepied when he came to Paris Opera Ballet – he failed; I think Graeme Murphy did one for Sydney Dance Company.”

Lifschitz at the “terrifying” start of a new work. He wants people to leave a Circa show “with strong, powerful emotions and big, rich thoughts in your head and heart”.Credit: Paul Harris

So why did he take it on? “It’s stunning, stunning music and I can hear the choreographic energy behind it … But now I actually have to do the thing.”

He turns to the two performers who will, over the next 90 minutes, work with him to develop a template of movement “languages” that he’ll use to create the ­gravity-defying lifts, holds, rolls, pyramids and other dizzying physical sequences for which Circa is ­renowned. “OK guys, what I want to do is play a bit of music and try a bunch of things … to get a sense of it. Show me something and I’ll tell you what I mean,” Lifschitz says. “The music is kind of famous for being the greatest score that’s never made a great piece of physical performance. So the bar is pretty high.”

No pressure, then.

---

It’s impossible to ­understand Circa without knowing a bit about its 54-year-old founding artistic director and CEO because, quite ­simply, Lifschitz is Circa. Perhaps surprisingly, though, he doesn’t see himself as an especially creative person. “I think the people who spend a lot of time talking about creativity generally aren’t very,” he says, with characteristic candour. “You don’t need a lot of creativity to make art, you just need a bit of it in the right spot at the right time.”

Born in South Africa and of Eastern European ­heritage – his grandparents, Jewish on both sides, fled Europe in the lead-up to World War II – Lifschitz ­emigrated with his parents and older sister Ronni to Australia in 1980, when he was nine, after his head­master father Stan was invited to set up Masada College, a Jewish co-educational high school on Sydney’s north shore.

Lifschitz was in the founding ­intake, while Ronni attended the local high school (Masada was yet to have Ronni’s year – year 12). Lifschitz credits his sister with his ultimate move into the arts. “She was very smart and very good at things,” he says. “I was much less smart and much less good at things, so I had to find a ground not to compete on.”

With his “very smart” sister Ronni, who died at age 40; a loss he describes as “so crazy overwhelming I just can’t unpack it”.Credit: Courtesy of Yaron Lifschitz

The family were high achievers. Ronni would go on to become a human rights lawyer and an associate to Mary Gaudron when the latter was on the High Court, while their mother Abirah finished practising as a GP on Sydney’s north shore just two years ago. They were rocked by Ronni’s diagnosis and ultimate death from ovarian cancer in 2007, aged just 40.

“She passed away on the seventh of January. [My son] Oscar’s birthday was the fifth of January, so I was literally at his birthday party at [Brisbane’s] Yeronga Pool when I got a call from the hospital saying, ‘It’s hours’,” says Lifschitz. “So I jumped on a plane, came down to Sydney and it was the last bit.”

‘The thing that most struck me about grief was how deeply non-linear it is.’

Yaron Lifschitz

It was only two months before the world premiere of Lifschitz’s new work By the light of stars that are no ­longer, his second production with the company. While not created for Ronni explicitly, Lifschitz says it was infused with his sense of what she’d been through. “I’d watched her hang on for a long time. She had a daughter and a husband and that sense of the dogged holding-on to things very much influenced me.” The work ­featured an achingly raw solo performed to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, Ronni’s favourite song and the last piece of music Lifschitz played her before she died.

A tough show, it challenged the performers to go somewhere emotionally that wasn’t typical for acrobats. While it divided audiences, critics hailed it for taking circus to a whole new, cerebral level.

“[Losing your sister] is so crazy overwhelming I can’t unpack it,” Lifschitz reflects now, 18 years on. “We just got through the stuff we needed to get through. Having a young child keeps you fairly grounded. Having a busy company is like having lots of children, there’s lots of needy things to feed, so I just stayed busy and got on with it. The thing that most struck me about the experience of grief was how deeply non-linear it is, and I was completely not expecting that. But I come from fairly practical stock, [so] we mostly just got on with it.”

Lifschitz with partner Libby, eldest son Oscar and baby Gabriel (in background) in 2021.Credit: Courtesy of Yaron Lifschitz

While Lifschitz says his family “wasn’t particularly arty”, his parents regularly attended classical concerts – “the kind of cultural life expected of the bourgeoisie” – and his father was forever listening to classical music in the car and at home. His father had a degree in literature and taught English and maths, so books were a huge part of Lifschitz’s upbringing, and he developed an ­insatiable appetite for reading that is ongoing. He ­typically has three or four books on the go: a novel, “because I need to inspire the imaginative side of my brain” (when we speak it’s Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium); something on history and philosophy ­(currently Louis Menand’s The Free World); a book ­involving management/psychology “to help with the CEO part of my job”; sometimes some poetry; and often a non-fiction related to the production he is working on (right now, a biography of Ravel).

His interest in theatre was sparked at high school and, noticing this, his teacher, Wendy Michaels, took him to the library, handed him some books and told him to read them. They included JL Styan’s Modern Drama in Theory and Practice: Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd, which covered everything from Wagner and Nietzsche to the plays of Ibsen and ­director Peter Brook. “I devoured those,” Lifschitz says. Michaels ­offered to help organise year 10 work experience for him at the Sydney Theatre Company, where he was invited to observe rehearsals for the world premiere of David Williamson’s Emerald City. He was captivated. “I loved it. I loved the world. As soon as I walked in, I felt at home.”

A bachelor of arts at the University of NSW majoring in English, history and maths was quickly followed by a graduate diploma in directing at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA); at 20 he was the youngest student to be ­accepted into that course. It proved seminal. “Cate Blanchett was there, Toni Collette was there, it was an interesting time,” he says. “I loved its rigour, its intensity, it was full-on – assistant directing, reading plays – I was constantly exhausted but knew I didn’t want to do anything else with my life.”

“There’ll be people who want to go to the circus to see people juggle and do tricks,” says Lifschitz, “and that’s great, we have some of those shows, but not so many.” Credit: Paul Harris

His first official directing gig – three short plays of Samuel Beckett’s for the UNSW dramatic society – confirmed the matter. “I remember my first day in a rehearsal room thinking, ‘I do not know how to do this and am not very good at this’ – which was true – but I just used everything I had: psychology, maths, structure, logic, poetry, literature. Every cupboard I had, every skill I had, was opened. And I thought, ‘That’s got to be an amazing thing to do with your life.’ ”

His entrée into the world of ­circus followed a stint as a freelance ­theatre director “with no great ­distinction”, directing for companies ranging from Griffin Theatre to Belvoir Downstairs, working with then-newbies, now great mates and artistic directors themselves, Patrick Nolan (Opera Queensland) and Mitchell Butel (Sydney Theatre Company).

A formative, first full-time job establishing a theatre unit for the Australian Museum in Sydney, in order to explore “live interpretations” of the collection (a trend at the time), exposed him to everything from multi­media projects to curating exhibitions and directing outdoor productions, getting a handle on procurement, resolving conflict and budgeting. “The first few years were insane: seven days a week putting on anything required, there was no theatre, no infrastructure, ­nothing. So that was super-interesting.”

He stayed for five years, and when he saw an ad for the job of artistic director for Brisbane’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, he figured it was time for a new challenge. A collective that began in 1987, Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus was central to a new wave of contemporary Australian ­circuses that flourished in the 1980s and ’90s, alongside the likes of Circus Oz, the Flying Fruit Fly Circus and Acrobat, in which animals were ditched and a more physical, raw aesthetic that celebrated the strength and versatility of the human body emerged. “I told them I didn’t like circus very much,” Lifschitz says of his application for the job, chuckling. “I think they thought I wouldn’t bother them, and I got the job.”

And so on January 6, 1999, the newly engaged (“a complex relationship that did not end well”) 28-year-old packed his belongings into his Kingswood and drove up the Pacific Highway to Brisbane and the organisation he would go on to rebrand and reshape. “The first few years were really about rethinking the style of the work, and what made me very unpopular for a long time was that we were going to do a different kind of work,” he says. “At the end of 2001, we moved to the Judith Wright Centre, that took us until 2004, when we changed the name to Circa. Well, I say ‘we’ but at that stage it was pretty much me. I had three performers.”

---

“There’s always been a very rich culture of innovation in circus in Australia, of experimentation and collaboration.” They’re the words of Richard Hull, CEO since 2012 of the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, the NSW Albury-based national youth circus and training organisation. If rock ′n’ roll was part of the new circus movement, the Melbourne-based Circus Oz was that movement’s flag-bearer, taking its raw, raucous and very Aussie brand of circus to the world to great ­acclaim throughout the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s. It was joined – and overtaken – on the international stage by Canada’s Cirque du Soleil, which took the gloss and level of acrobatics, costuming and staging up several notches, becoming a global juggernaut with an estimated 180 million audience members since 1984.

Both Circus Oz and Cirque du Soleil have had a tougher time recently, however, with the former suffering from internal disputes, a reduction in scale, global ­touring circuit changes and dwindling income, albeit still operating out of a multimillion-dollar, state government-owned home in Melbourne. Quebec’s Cirque hit the wall during the COVID-19 pandemic but is slowly rebuilding, most recently touring its latest show Luzia to Australia.

Circa sits in a different space to both of these; under Lifschitz’s guidance, it has developed a signature style that’s more intellectual and pared-back. With minimal staging and simpler costumes, the focus is on acrobatic intensity and daring physical feats that celebrate the strength of the human body. It’s also made a hallmark of collaborating with other performing arts companies, including with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra on Bach’s The Art of Fugue and with Opera Queensland on Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas and Orpheus & Eurydice.

Circa performing in Opera Queensland’s Orpheus & Eurydice.Credit: Keith Saunders

“The thing that makes Circa stand out is their desire to use their physical circus skills in a way that is ­dramatic and has emotional value beyond, ‘Ooh aah, wasn’t that amazing?’,” says Deborah Jones, a performing arts critic. “They are storytellers but using the art of contemporary circus to do it.”

Europe was a natural place for such a company to thrive, and indeed it has. “Circa is the largest exporter of performing arts in the public-funded space out of all the performing arts companies – not just circus or physical theatre, but all of them, based on the amount of touring weeks they’re doing internationally,” says Penny Miles, a strategic arts consultant who was Circa’s executive producer from 2015-16. “You can walk down the street in Paris and say you’re from Circa and they love you, it’s like celebrity status.”

The company has recently completed its seventh, five-month season at the Chamäleon, Berlin’s dedicated contemporary circus theatre and production house, where Circa has been resident. Founding artistic ­director of the Chamäleon, Anke Politz, says Circa’s first show there, Wunderkammer in 2011, was groundbreaking. “In many ways our audience wasn’t prepared, they didn’t understand ­contemporary circus is an art form, not ‘just’ entertainment,” she says.

Politz attributes much of the company’s ­success to Lifschitz. “Everyone who met him agrees he’s a genius, and relentless. There’s nothing he can’t imagine and he has a constant hunger to learn. He has tremendous ­artistic knowledge and moves easily between artistic genres.”

Anke Politz says Circa’s 2011 show Wunderkammer was groundbreaking. “In many ways our audience wasn’t prepared.”Credit: Andy Phillipson

Politz isn’t alone in thinking this. In January, the International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA) named Lifschitz the recipient of its 2025 Distinguished Artist Award. One of ­performing arts’ most prestigious ­prizes, it recognises artists who have made an outstanding contribution of ­talent, artistry, dedication and service to the performing arts. The award puts him in the company of Peter Brook, Leonard Bernstein and Joan Sutherland, among others. A spokesperson for IPSA describes Lifschitz as “a visionary and arguably one of the leading artistic ­entrepreneurs of the day”.

But here’s the rub: many Australians are still unfamiliar with Circa, or indeed don’t understand what contemporary circus is. Nor do they seem to care. Why? “It’s a question we ask ourselves,” Lifschitz says. “Circus as a whole has a bit of an image problem. I don’t think people know how to take it.” In part, he believes it’s connected to the often cerebral nature of the work Circa does – a production like Urlicht, set to the songs of Gustav Mahler, was about death and the end of civilisation. Embraced in Salzburg where it premiered, it wouldn’t be to ­everyone’s taste back home.

“For a lot of people who just want to come and see great circus, we’re way too pretentious, dealing with classical music and big ideas,” he says bluntly. All of that creates “a certain dissonance with the art form”, he continues, “but I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing”.

Urlicht, set to the songs of Gustav Mahler, was about death and the end of civilisation. Credit: Edwin Husic

“There’ll be people who want to go to the circus to see people juggle and do tricks and that’s great, we have some of those shows, but not so many.”

Penny Miles thinks there’s a broader issue at play – a lack of understanding among audiences of shows that sit outside the mainstream. “We see it particularly with dance companies and physical theatre. [In Australia] we’re not as nuanced as an audience around these art forms,” she says. “We have a much more traditional lens on what we feel comfortable seeing, where overseas they’re hungry for it.”

Part of the problem at home is the lack of a national touring circuit for contemporary circus – Australia’s small population and vast continent makes the cost of touring a challenge – which means it often ends up ­pigeonholed as festival fare, and therefore on the fringe. Add to that the relatively low government ­funding compared with European outfits, and it was always going to be tough.

“I don’t know why anyone thinks people can make a dollar being an artist in Australia,” says Deborah Jones. “Our artists are as good as anyone else’s, that’s the truth of it, but the market is not big enough for most companies and individuals to be able to make a cracking career. Of course, anyone who is good is going to explore international opportunities. How else do they make a living, and if Circa are in demand in Berlin, for example, why wouldn’t they go?”

Circa has an annual turn­over of about $8 million, about 20 per cent of which comprises state and federal funding. On top of this are special grants, travel ­funding and other initiatives. The government funding is “low for a company like us”, Lifschitz says. “Sydney Dance Company is one-third government-funded; Opera Queensland about half. We did shows in 100 ­cities in 2023, had four new creations, ran a circus academy for kids and Circa Cairns, and we do that with 1.2 people doing marketing. So you’ve got to be a bit of a superhero to be here.”

That said, the company is ­putting renewed effort into growing its presence at home. “Our ­national sales are building solidly so we have a much bigger presence locally than we did four or five years ago, but it’s a slow-build strategy,” Lifschitz says. Last year’s local audience was 59 per cent greater than that in 2023, which was more focused on smaller regional and remote venues. This year will be Circa’s largest in Australia, with a three-city national tour of The Art of Fugue, its fifth collaboration with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra.

Athleticism on show in Humans 2.0.Credit: Yaya Stempler

“Circus that moves the mind, body and soul.” It used to be Circa’s motto, but today it’s the loftier “Circus that moves the world”. Occasionally it may just come close. Circa’s associate director and an ensemble member since early 2020, Georgia Webb recalls an ­audience Q&A session she took part in following a production in Montreal of Humans 2.0, a non-narrative work that ­explores what it means to be human. An audience member stood up in tears, surrounded by family. He explained he was an asylum seeker and that, while he didn’t have a question, he wanted to express his deep gratitude for a show that somehow captured his experience. “He said it was incredible to see humans working together and showing how strong they can be, it gave him faith in humanity,” Webb recalls. “They’d left such a dangerous place, and it was so touching to see we can make people feel something with the art we’re doing. That’s the reason I do it.”

It’s stories like this that remind Lifschitz, too, why he does it, given the personal sacrifices involved in fulfilling his dual roles as CEO and artistic director. He travels overseas at least monthly, for 10 days a stretch, meaning time spent with wife Libby McDonnell, Circa’s head of design and a former Circa performer, and their young children Gabriel (almost 4) and Noa (2) is precious. He remains close to his first child, Oscar, who is now 23, but ­concedes there is never enough time.

‘If I’m going to ask these performers to give some of the best physical years of their life, (potentially) putting them in danger, I want to ask, “Why?”.’

Yaron Lifschitz

“I’m probably not a father who is present in the way a truly spectacular father is present,” he muses. “Some people are great at spending hours on the floor playing with the kids. I consider myself an OK father, I keep them fed and generally intact and I can play games and show love, but at some level there’s definitely a trade-off. I ­travel and I’m definitely not there as much as I’d like to be, but I think that’s just part of who I am.”

Balancing that with his Circa family means his time is spread thin. “We work with great people [but at times] they need love and energy and empathy and care and that can be super-exhausting. I have tour directors for the touring companies, but am essentially the supervisor, so I have 35 direct reports, which any CEO will tell you is nuts. At the end of the day, everyone has my number, and I’ve been through births, deaths, marriages and incarcerations.”

That connection with his performers and other staff is in his mind’s eye when creating a new work. “If I’m going to ask these young men and women to give us some of the best physical years of their life, and I’m [potentially] putting them in danger, I want to ask, ‘Why?’. It doesn’t have to be a life-changing answer, it might be to delight a roomful of young people and get them to care a bit more about Mozart and the environment, but I need to have some reason for doing it,” he says. “So very often in a project I’m searching for its purpose, which is exactly what I’m doing with Daphnis and Chloë. I can fill 70 minutes with choreography but can I fill it with 70 minutes of purpose? I want you to leave with strong, ­powerful emotions and big, rich thoughts in your head and heart.”

Back in the Daphnis and Chloë ­rehearsal room, eight weeks after Good Weekend’s initial visit, Lifschitz is feeling more at ease with the work. Kind of. “It’s complicated ... it’s good ... I’m really happy with where the physical work is now at, I feel we’ve found a really good way of storytelling and creating enough of the energy of the piece to work in the bodies of the acrobats. Some theatrical questions – how we frame the experience – needs some work. I’m trepidatious, respectfully nervous, whereas before I was very terrified.”

You get the feeling this polymath, this deep thinker, this constantly questioning, boundary-pushing artist will never sit back and declare 100 per cent satisfaction. And that’s OK. “I’m not planning on going anywhere, except being on a plane for most of the year,” he chuckles. “I’m here. As long as Circa’s here, and it will have me, I’m here.”

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.