Circus Oz marks 40 years with a giant-sized show

Circus Oz is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. That's almost twice as long as one of its creative collaborating artists, former Canberran Lachlan Sukroo, 23, has been alive. Sukroo, who joined Circus Oz in February last year after graduating from the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne, is performing in the Circus Oz production Model Citizens, which comes to Canberra next month.

Sukroo began classes with Canberra's Warehouse Circus when he was eight.

"The primary school I moved to at the time had a circus program but the year I moved there it got cancelled," Sukroo says.

"If you can take a circus program at school it's pretty interesting."

Despite the school program's cancellation, he joined Warehouse Circus and remained with it for 10 years. During that time he was also one of the founders of Poncho Circus in his late teens. It performed a lot in Canberra and also toured to Western Australia and Thailand.

On finishing school he decided to make circus his career and left Canberra to study at the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne.

"I specialised in Chinese pole, a vertical pole you climb up and down," he says. On it, he performs tricks such as the human flag, where he hangs straight out from the pole with his hands.

He also studied the teeter board, a big seesaw with people on each end who launch each other into the air to do somersaults, tumbling and other acrobatics.

These skills are put to good use in Model Citizens, a show set in a model kit world with props shaped like oversized household objects such as a safety pin, which Sukroo says "relates a lot to my Chinese pole work" and a clothes peg, modified so the cast members (in this show, nine circus artists, who are accompanied by two musicians) can perform their acts on them.

A punk-like outsider, Captain Ruin (Mitch Jones), enters the rule-bound, pattern-like world and disrupts it while trying to make sense of it.

And it's not surprising he might be taken aback, with giant-sized objects such as scissors and cotton reels and hammock-sized undies employed in everything from knife-dodging to acrobat-tossing and aerial acts. Performers contort through huge steaming irons, unzip giant zippers and tumble off a house of giant credit cards.

Laurel Frank was a founding member of Circus Oz in 1978, one of two to still be with the company along with Tim Coldwell. Frank says Coldwell "does everything" including designing and building the company's tents as well as still performing in his 60s.

"I was prehistory as well," she says, as she was part of the project at the Pram Factory theatre company in Melbourne from which it was created and incorporated four decades ago.

"Back then you could stick your hand up for anything," she says. Frank "had a go" at performing – chorus work, acrobatics, clowning – but says, "I realised I didn't have the skills there."

Nevertheless, she says, "It was a really useful thing to do."

It helped her understand her costume design work better: "Costumes serve the performer and don't hinder the performer."

It's important, she says, that they are made to suit the performer and the character.

"They're not just there to be spectacular and pretty."

Warehouse Circus, she says, was always intended to have a social and political dimension to its work as well as being entertaining ("It's part of our core DNA") and Model Citizens, which began last year, is no exception, starting with its punning title. The tiny "citizens" exist in an oversized environment like something out of a model kit and, she says, the show also raises questions such as what a model citizen is, what normal is and how people fit in with the expectations of society and the roles they play in life.

"We play with that – there's lots of humour."

For Model Citizens she created about 40 costumes as each of the performers wore two ("Everyone changes at interval") and because of the stresses placed on them and the necessity of frequent cleaning, there are double costumes for each person. Most of the performers range from 18 to mid-30s in age, she says and when new ones come she has to make costumes tailored to their bodies and acts.

For Jones, a performer from a sideshow background who came in with a mohawk haircut and was supposed to be a punkish outsider who challenges a lot of norms. she created  "a sort of Harlequin costume". She made it by taking T-shirts with patterns on them and stitching them together. Frank also  made the  tutu Jones wears while rollerskating at one point. Among Jones's other acts are knife-throwing and pratfalls from high places.

For the tall, slim Sukroo,  she created a basketball uniform – singlet and shorts – used for one trick and  then a stretchable business shirt and trousers for a more elegant look in the rest of his acts.

Frank has seen a lot of changes in Warehouse Circus over the past 40 years, from premises (after a number of location changes, they now have a spacious home base in Collingwood in a former TAFE which is also used by other circuses), to a doubling in staff numbers (it began with about 25 core people and now has nearly 50).

And performers who come in also bring their own specialities, like the tippy ring, a suspended steel circle used for aerial contortions. And even that's developed: "It used to hang from a single point, now it's suspended from two points on the side."

She says that circus acts are "a movable feast" but some core activities remain constant, like tumbling, somersaulting and balancing. And, she says, there's been a move towards more formal training in places like NICA, with its international staff of circus experts, and less reliance in learning on the job. With this steady injection of new blood and at least four shows currently touring or being planned, it looks as though Circus Oz will be around for a long time to come.