JUNE 2025

At Na Djinang Circus, we’re starting something new. A quarterly e-newsletter to share the ideas that are building and percolating in the room. 

And when I say “the room,” I don’t mean a studio or a rehearsal space. 

We’re too broke for that. 

Our “room” is rarely a room at all. It’s a shed, a patch of grass, a beach, a tour bus, a bar, or someone’s hijacked backyard. It’s not the place that defines the room, but the action that takes place within it.  
The physical attempts to become Blak circus. 

In that room, wherever it forms, we rub ideas together with enough passion that smoke emerges and usually everything disintegrates. The friction rarely creates fire, but it’s fun to argue.  

Since this is our first attempt at putting one of these together, I thought it made sense to start at the beginning: 

Circus and Culture—why they go together. 

There’s a natural synergy between the two. I think it’s because both hold knowledge in the same way. Not in texts or files or archives, but in bodies.  

Of course, we use tools to help us remember, to recall and retell, but real knowledge lives in practice. It’s held in our muscles, our breath, our reactions, our repetitions. Language rarely captures the complexity of either. 

I think about the sound of a flip. Not the action, but the noise it makes. An experienced acrobat doesn’t need to look; they can hear the shape of the trick. The sound of the impact, and the time between them, creates a sonic picture. Even that single element, the sound, carries technical information. The body processes it instantly, instinctively. 

The physical knowledge we carry is vast, delicate, and impossible to fully convert into text. 

We’re currently in the rehearsal room at Melbourne Uni devising a new work. Today we started with an exercise called The History of the Work, something shared with us by Nicci Wilks. The task was to physically improvise a 15-minute “history” of the project, using anything that’s happened in the room since day one as inspiration for movement, sound, and material. 

What came out was an embodied collage of our process, our decisions, and our short, shared memory. It didn’t result in anything extraordinary, if anything, it was awkward, abstract, and hard to decipher without context. But what struck me was how each of us found a way to compress the week’s worth of collective data into our bodies. And because of that, the rest of the day’s rehearsal was richer. 

In both these examples, the knowledge of the action is immense. It weaves together threads of data, processed by the body at rapid, instinctual, and subconscious speeds. 

Maybe what we’re circling around is this: 

That embodied knowledge—whether cultural, physical, or artistic—is sophisticated and deeply intricate. It lives in the doing, not just the saying. 

Even knowledge that begins in text—science, literature, craft—eventually returns to the body. Through trial and error, through repetition, through a scaffolded approach. It has to be lived to be fully understood. 

Both circus and culture carry a complexity that’s hidden deep in the body. A kind of physical mystery we spend our lives trying to decipher. 

And my wondering is this: 
How do we untangle that weave? 
Can we tug gently at a single thread without unravelling the whole? 

This newsletter won’t be about company updates or announcements. 

Well—maybe a few. Gotta plug a show here and there. 

But mostly, it’ll be about thinking in public. About putting our half-formed, smoky, tumbling ideas into words—and seeing what they grow into.