A Brisbane Circus Show Asks Who Carries the Load

Who carries the load when everyone else is too busy to notice?

That is the question at the heart of Cashless & Care-Free, a new circus and theatre work opening at the Vulcana Circus Arts Hub in Morningside on Friday 20 November. It is about care: the unseen, unpaid and underpaid work of looking after other people, and who is expected to do it.

Audiences will not sit and watch from a row of seats. The show is a promenade performance, so they walk through it, moving between indoor and outdoor spaces and coming across a series of connected, surprising moments. Circus, theatre, movement, poetry, live music, sound and light all feed into it.

Co-director Allie Wilde says the show is about a gap in how care is valued. "Our society depends enormously on care, yet so much of that work remains undervalued and disproportionately carried out by women," she says. Those experiences are not exclusive to women, she adds, but she hopes the work makes audiences question some of the expectations they have come to accept as normal.

The show takes in the exhausting and repetitive side of caring, and the tender and funny side too. Co-director Barbara Lowing says the promenade format puts the audience right up against the performers. "You are close enough to the performers to hear their breath and see their real artistry," she says.

The cast crosses generations. Professional and emerging Queensland artists perform alongside community collaborators, including Catalogue of Forgetting, an ensemble of older participants, many of whom have lived experience of care. The Aqualina Youth Synchronised Swimming Club is also part of the production, along with Vulcana Circus itself.

Brisbane cellist Dr Danielle Bentley plays live. Winter Cyan designs the sound and lighting, and Freddy Komp is behind the captions and video design. The original text is by local slam poet Angela Peita and the Vulcana Ensemble.

Accessibility is built into the production. The promenade follows a wheelchair-accessible route through the venue and surrounding spaces. Every performance is surtitled, with text by Peita, and one performance will be audio described.

Cashless & Care-Free runs from Friday 20 to Sunday 22 November, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm each night. Tickets are $25 to $45 at vulcana.org.au.