“Some Kind of Euphoric”: Yaron Lifschitz on Surveillance, Risk, and Circa’s Powerhouse Takeover

Yaron Lifschitz does not mince words when it comes to the dramatic stage.

“I have a dirty secret,” he confesses. “I find theatre really boring. I love being in the theatre, I love when the lights go down and you think, wow, anything can happen now. And then... the lights come up and there’s a middle-aged couple talking about their alcoholic child or whatever it is that they’re doing on a sofa, and within three minutes I want to eat my eyeballs out.”

Yaron Lifschitz, Artistic Director of Circa

It is a disarmingly blunt diagnosis from an artist whose work has spent more than two decades dismantling the polite boundaries of performance. Since moving to Brisbane in 1999 to direct Rock ’n’ Roll Circus and transforming it into Circa in 2004, Lifschitz has guided the company across 45 countries, six continents, and an audience base of more than two million people. Along the way, Lifschitz has collected six Helpmann Awards, an ISPA Distinguished Artist Award, and an international reputation for rewriting the physical vocabulary of contemporary circus.

Yet in conversation, Lifschitz actively resists romanticising his craft. Reflecting on his directing background, he waves away any myth of innate performing pedigree with characteristic self-effacement.

Circa performers at the Melt Festival launch. Photo: Joe Ruckli

“I’m a woefully bad actor,” he admits. “In fact, one of the strange things about me, I think, is that I’m only good at doing things that I’m really bad at doing.”

Directing physical theatre, for Lifschitz, has always hinged on that creative contradiction. By his own reckoning, he possesses none of the fundamental performance tools of his company.

“I don’t dance, I don’t sing, I don’t play music, I don’t act, I don’t have any of the core skills, so I’ve had to kind of figure out how to blag my way through,” he says. “What it’s done more realistically is it’s given me a sense of curiosity. I don’t see the same things as other people see... I don’t like the same things as many other people like, and that’s given me, I think, a bit of a unique slant on the work that I make.”

The Architecture of Resistance

That perspective was tested and hardened across an unglamorous early chapter in Brisbane. After stripping Rock ’n’ Roll Circus back to a tight nucleus of three or four artists, Circa spent years experimenting away from commercial expectations.

“We had the great privilege of spending many years back here in Brisbane, in the early days, being seen by no one, annoying everyone... being kind of not very popular, not very well liked,” he recalls, wry and pragmatic. “I think that was a great opportunity for us to really find out what was at the heart of what we might be able to do. And as we gradually started to figure out who we were, we made a couple of shows that started to kind of not suck.”

The turning point was The Space Between, an intimate studio production supported by Brisbane Festival.

“We played to about 10 people a night in our studio,” Lifschitz remembers. “And the next year we brought it back and we played to about 12 people a night in our studio... And that show just somehow had a bit of a charmed life. We toured to Melbourne, we started getting requests from Korea and places, and so it just sort of took off from there... None of it’s simple, you can’t take any of it for granted.”

Out of that period emerged Circa’s signature: a refusal to treat circus as an athletic novelty or an isolated display of technical tricks.

Circa performers at the Melt Festival launch. Photo: Joe Ruckli

“What normally happens is a circus performer walks around a stage awkwardly, maybe they do some choreography or they do some acting, and then they do a skill... As a colleague of mine describes it: I love you, I hate you, we do a handstand, right?”

For Circa, the artform lies in bridging that divide.

“What we do, I think, is we try and really blur, bring performers that can hold the stage and create a continuity between the acrobatics and the non-acrobatics,” he explains. “And then we do interesting things to the acrobatics themselves. We put them under pressure, we give them resistance, we apply kind of some sort of artistic processes and approaches to the acrobatics that make them more, I think, emotionally resonant and interesting.”

In the Shadows of New Farm

That vocabulary faces a far more visceral trial this week as Circa returns to the Brisbane Powerhouse—the venue where the company mounted its first performances following pandemic shutdowns—to close out Melt Festival 2026.

Circa performers at the Melt Festival launch. Photo: Joe Ruckli

Commissioned after conversations with Brisbane Powerhouse Artistic Director Louise Bezzina, Show Me Love originated from a desire to take an unresolved work in development and dismantle it from scratch. Lifschitz pitched it to Bezzina as “a bit of a risk, a bit of an adventure,” finding her immediately willing to back the experiment.

The production has evolved into a comprehensive venue takeover. Instead of ushering ticket holders directly into the theatre, the experience begins as an activated journey through the building’s utilitarian back corridors. Ten Circa ensemble members, alongside guest artists, inhabit these raw spaces, challenging the audience’s proximity to physical risk before the main performance even commences.

For Lifschitz, the architecture of the venue serves an inquiry into modern scrutiny and human self-consciousness.

“One of the reasons for calling the whole piece Show Me Love is to try and look at this idea of... that old kind of cliché of dance like no one’s watching,” Lifschitz says. “Well, of course, it’s almost impossible now, everyone’s watching all the time and someone’s probably filming it. So we play with the idea of how things are seen and being seen, of what you can see. And so as you go through this experience, I think it moves from darker shades and more obscure into presence and into colour.”

Stage lighting is used to sculpt and negotiate that exposure, alternating between shadow and revelation as the audience moves through the building. “In the show block for us where we have most of the stage lighting, we really play a lot with how to make light reveal and obscure,” he explains. “The lights are moving quite a bit, there’s quite a bit of texture in the lights.”

The Dancefloor as Sanctuary

When the journey eventually spills onto the main stage, Show Me Love transitions from quiet surveillance into a high-energy dancefloor driven by Sydney DJ and producer DJ Sveta.

A stalwart of Australian club culture and a pioneer of Sydney’s Queer Central, Sveta provides the heavy-bass soundtrack that underpins the ensemble’s physical abandon. It draws on an underground dance lineage where dancefloors served as sanctuaries built on collective identity rather than institutional permission.

Lifschitz notes that the pairing has provoked an uninhibited physical shift within his ensemble.

“What I’m finding in terms of flavours is that this is bringing out a kind of... slightly saucier, slightly darker side to some of my acrobats,” he says. “It’s fun, it’s playful, it’s cheeky, it’s a little bit transgressive, which are perfect flavours for Melt Festival... You’re watching people who can really control nuance but also bring abandon and power to the stage.”

For Lifschitz, the collision of physical virtuosity and underground club energy taps into the lineage of dancefloors built from communal connection. When asked what he hopes someone walking in cold will take away from the experience, his focus is clear and generous.

“What you are is you’re in the presence of virtuosic people giving it their all with great skill, but also with great energy,” he says. “Even the show has its dark elements, has fun and playful elements, but it’s got gritty elements, but I think it creates this kind of sense of: wow, we’re just all going there... It should feel like a great night at a club where it’s kind of, it’s hot and sweaty, it’s not always comfortable, but it’s joyous. Ultimately, we’re trying to get to some kind of euphoric.”

Show Me Love
Circa / Melt Festival
Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse
119 Lamington Street, New Farm
Season: Thursday 5 – Saturday 7 November 2026
Information and bookings via brisbanepowerhouse.org and melt.org.au.