Becoming Blak Circus

In 2025 we actively took a break. A deliberate pause. 

When I say “a break”, I mean from premieres and public eyes. The year was by no means empty. The preparations have been relentless. 

We devised an ambitious five year program of future works, all with a single purpose: to discover what Blak Circus is.

A daunting and potentially pointless task. 

With only days left in 2025, the starting line is approaching. Quiet preparation is becoming fact. Budgets are locking down. Contracts are being drafted.  The question is primed to be defined. And we have already begun crafting the first three new works. 

Within each, we are testing a new variable. One draws from traditional stories. One demolishes the fourth wall. The last centres new leadership and directors. 

Across all of them, one idea has stood out. Something that carries the characteristics of spiritual dramaturgy. The belief that when the story is ready, or when you have matured enough, it will reveal itself. 

I hate this idea. Its passivity sends me up the wall. I like things finished. I like answers. And yet I am reluctant to abandon it. I resent it. And still feel it must be obeyed. 

Circus does not reward certainty. You repeat the same action over and over, often with no visible change, hoping something will shift. I accept this is deranged but do not think it is insanity so much as a belief that the body can become more. Meaning is not produced on demand. It turns up when it is ready, or it doesn’t. 

Clearly as this is my fourth attempt at this newsletter. 

In a year that actively avoided the new, this became impossible to ignore. Touring existing repertoire. Returning to old shows and repeating them night after night. One evening it was charged and alive, the next completely flat. Same material. Same performers. Same cues. Entirely different result.  

This is not a new problem. Directors have been asking why forever. And in asking why, we try to name it. To define it. To fix it.  

But some things resist completion. You know you have struck one when the only honest answer left is, “because it just is.” 

Deeply unsatisfying. And maybe the point. 

I’m coming to think that maybe the works that stay unfinished, stay responsive. Stay alive. 

A costly paradox. 

Which brings us back to our seemingly pointless task of discovering Blak circus. 

Blak circus is probably not something to be resolved, only practised. Like many First Nations knowledges, its aliveness is the point. Stories have lasted in the landscape for thousands of years not because they were protected, but because they were allowed to change. 

Shakespeare survives despite countless adaptations because people keep picking the work up, embodying it, studying it and despising it. 

My hunch is Blak circus will become something like that.  
Not a finished form, but a practice we return to again and again.