‘No failure in circus, just feedback’: South Australia’s ‘social circus’ clears 40-year milestone
As the SA Circus Centre celebrates four decades, artistic director Joshua Hoare reflects on its mission to help young people redefine failure, challenge themselves and re-engage with the physical world.
When Joshua Hoare talks about his work as Artistic Director of SA Circus Centre, it’s clear that he considers the job to be about far more than teaching rolls, lifts and human pyramids – it’s also a means of social change.
This has always been part of Cirkidz and the SA Circus Centre’s DNA, ever since it was originally founded in 1985 by Tony Hannon and Michael Lester with the primary goal of teaching circus to children “at risk of disengaging.”
Hannon and Lester were participants in the seminal Nanjing Projects; circus training events in the 1980s that brought the Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe to Albury-Wodonga for a first-of-its-kind exchange of cultural perspectives, approaches, and techniques in circus.
Much of what contemporary Australian circus institutions are today – and their emphasis on ‘social circus’ – originated at the Nanjing Projects. Hoare notes that the Australian style stands out from other national traditions of circus in its emphasis on improving personal wellbeing, social inclusivity and outreach, and building the capacity for self-challenge and exploration.
Today, the SA Circus Centre offers three streams of circus: their recreational school, which includes youth training (Cirkidz) and classes for teens and adults; their rigorous, by-selection Artistic Development Program, geared towards training the next generation of professional circus artists; and their development of new works of contemporary circus, which collaborates with local, national, and international circus performers, and often draws on performers from both streams. Many professional circus performers and other performing artists have trained with the company – the creators of internationally renowned company Gravity and Other Myths “grew up at Cirkidz”.
The company’s “social circus” mission also includes specialised community outreach programs catering to a diverse range of young people, linking circus training to other social programs including youth support, counselling, and keeping connection to culture and language. A compelling example is their Yara Circus program, working with Yara Family Connections and Kuma Kaaru, to incorporate and reclaim Kaurna language alongside developing circus skills.
You might like
"Circus is a perfect place to experience success. We can be very clear when we’ve succeeded at a trick and failed; that becomes very addictive."
For Hoare, the enduring appeal of the Circus Centre’s programs are their emphasis on creativity, inclusivity, and empowering students to build strength, skills and confidence in a supportive environment. In an era when young people’s attention is often captured by endless scrolling and physical detachment, students are able to reach achievable goals through the development of purposeful technique, and instant, physical feedback.
“Circus is a perfect place to experience success,” Hoare says. “We can be very clear when we’ve succeeded at a trick and failed; that becomes very addictive.”
He notes that circus training often attracts children and young people who may not feel at home in competitive team sports.
“The biggest thing participants feel is, ‘I’ve finally found a place to be me and express myself. My strengths and weaknesses are celebrated, rather than corrected’,” Hoare explains. In this way, teaching is led by students’ interests, whether it be for solo performance such as aerial work, tumbling, or juggling, or in partner acrobatics and more collaborative approaches.
SA Circus Centre, through their Cirkidz program in particular, believes in empowering young people with confidence and comfort with risk in a way that they may not experience in education settings, whilst within a supportive and safety-conscious environment. “There’s no failure in circus; there’s just feedback”, Hoare says, explaining that circus training provides direct, quantitative feedback to a trainee in a way they can respond to.
“You can choose what kind of superhero you’re becoming… circus is powerful because circus is what you make it, and can be shaped to what your individual strengths and weaknesses are.”
Subscribe for updates
"There’s no failure in circus; there’s just feedback."
Hoare says it also allows young people to explore their own physicality and self-expression while pushing back against stereotypical and gendered ideas of beauty, strength, and grace.
One of the challenges SA Circus Centre faces in its 40th year is a gendered decline in new participants. Hoare says the ratio of girls to boys from Cirkids to the teen programs is often as high as 8:1.
Though Hoare puts it down partly to the screen and social media, he observes that the students of today are far more stressed and anxious than even those of his a few years ago.
“As families and communities we have to work out how to support them and try to rectify it,” Hoare says. “Creative, embodied play is an excellent way to do that.”
It has led the company to experiment with new paths to reaching young men, like classes that blend parkour and circus called ‘Cirkour’.
The company’s ongoing interest evolution has led to some fascinating international collaborations; Hoare and the company have for the past few years been quietly building international connections, from the Czirkidz school in Czechia — founded by Cirkidz and Libor Kasík of the UFFO Trutnov cultural centre to bring Australian circus instructors to Czech students — to Hong Kong-based dance and physical theatre company TS Crew, who recently performed at OzAsia, and their nascent relationship with contemporary circus group FOCASA in Taiwan. Hoare and his team are proud of these international connections even as their Australian profile stays relatively small.
Hoare says Cirkidz’s core values – particularly those of “anti-fragility and resilience”, “adaptivity” and “creative expression – make them stand out as building confidence in young people to reframe risk into something that, in the right doses, can build strength.
“Natural systems are anti-fragile because they need the right kind of stress,” he says. “If we fire-stick the country in the right way it will become more abundant… if you stress your muscles in the right way, they will get stronger; if not, they will atrophy.”
Find out more at SA Circus Centre