Heart of the Nation: Redcliffe 4020

CIRCUS troupe Circa perform an homage to the “beachobatics” documented by 1930s photographer George Caddy.

Bravo: the Circa troupe at Suttons Beach. Picture: Jessica Connell

LOCALS at Suttons Beach in Redcliffe are used to seeing skydivers swoop down and land on the sand – it’s a popular dropzone.

But they were treated to an entirely new kind of spectacle when Jessica Connell and her colleagues from circus troupe Circa turned up and started creating pyramids, towers and other elaborate shapes – using their own bodies as the building blocks.

Connell, 22, has been a full-time performer with the Brisbane-based company for three years but she’s doing an arts degree on the side, through the Open University, with a view to one day becoming a photojournalist. She was shooting their antics that day for a uni project – an homage to George Caddy, who in the 1930s documented a group of amateur gymnasts performing feats of “beachobatics” at Sydney’s Bondi. Caddy’s remarkable body of work – a collection of 290 negatives – lay undiscovered in a shoebox until 2007, years after his death.

Connell sourced vintage swimwear for the shoot (the blokes appear to have got a rough deal there) and brought a bunch of Caddy’s prints to the beach to work from. Most of the old beachobatics was bread-and-butter stuff to these super-fit acrobats, but not all. “A couple of things took about 50 attempts to get right,” she says. “And there was this one photo where a man was sitting on the sand with his feet up by his ears, on which another man was performing a handstand. The boys just looked at it and scratched their heads, and said, ‘Sorry, there’s no way our bodies will do that’.”

One of seven siblings, Connell grew up in Albury-Wodonga and started out in youth circus. She’s toured the world with Circa, and she’s having a ball. As a result, those uni studies are going slowly – very slowly. “I’m just dabbling in it every now and then,” she says. “I might finish in about 10 years at this rate.”