Last year in Galway, Ireland, a group of audience members stayed behind after watching an Australian contemporary-circus show called Humans. Rife with contortions and acrobatics, the show is groovy, weird, unexpected and funny. At one point, one of the actors tries – and fails – to lick his own elbow. It’s designed to be more than just a comic scene – it’s meant to resonate with the audience, to connect with them.
And it does. “I love the number of people who come out and try and lick their own elbows,” says Yaron Lifschitz, the show’s creator and the artistic director of Circa Contemporary Circus. Almost nobody he sees can lick their own elbow – except for one small boy in the front row of this post-show Q-and-A in Galway. When the subject of elbow-licking arose, the boy asked, “You mean like this?” and touched his tongue to his elbow.
“We just threw our arms in the air and said, ‘Well, there’s no point in us doing anything, that was incredible,’ ” Lifschitz says.
That kind of personal connection – when his shows challenge and inspire audiences – is what drives Lifschitz forward. He hopes for a similar reaction from the audience in Toronto, where the show will mark its Canadian debut on Nov. 9.
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Lifschitz, the South African-born son of a Jewish-school headmaster, has been in charge of Circa since 1999. Then the youngest graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (an Australian arts university whose alumni include Cate Blanchett, Baz Luhrmann and Mel Gibson), Lifschitz joined the company during its nascent years as a rugged, financially unstable troupe called the Rock & Roll Circus. Over the subsequent decade, Lifschitz remodelled it into a professional company that has earned dozens of international awards and rebranded itself as Circa.
He created Humans in 2017, wanting to develop something deft, dynamic and dangerous. “That creates this sense of jeopardy and extreme skill,” he says. “I can create this thrilling texture.”
While he knew he wanted to create an exciting show, the plot was decidedly brushed aside. “I don’t really do story very much or very well,” he says. “My mind doesn’t see the world that way. I see it much more as a piece of music or a poetry cycle or something.”
Nor does he know exactly where the idea for the show came from. “Shows come from a thousand different places,” he says.
This is partly by design. “All your ideas get destroyed when faced with other artists,” he explains. “We have a kind of a working methodology – almost an algorithm – of different languages, physical things. We can twist them, shifting, grooving, connecting, transferring energy.”
In other words, even if you have a clear idea of something going into their rehearsal space, you’re guaranteed to come out with something else. The process is innately collaborative: performers bring different qualities and surprises.
Even if the plot and process sound a bit hazy, the reviews and audience reactions have been stellar so far.
“It’s funny, terrifying and captivating,” wrote Ellen Parsons in Time Out Sydney. “You’ll want to look away – but you won’t be able to.”
That’s exactly the reaction Lifschitz was hoping for. On the surface, his goal was to wow “a kind of jaded, have-seen-everything audience,” he says.
But he also had a second, deeper mission. “I was really interested in the idea of what makes us human,” he says. He believes the show “connects us deeply with who we are as a species.… The test of a great show is that you look into the eyes of the performers and you feel like you’ve come close to them as human beings.”
And if audiences walk out of the theatre pretty confident they can lick their own elbows, so much the better.
Humans will play in Toronto one night only on Nov. 9, at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts.