A brand-new addition to the capital’s cultural calendar, the inaugural Canberra Circus Festival will roll up and into town later this month, bringing in some of Australia’s best and brightest circus performers.

Designed as an entertainment spectacle featuring 15 contemporary circus performances from 10 companies, the Festival will also act as a professional development opportunity for the next generation of performers.

Youth circus troupes and young circus artists from around the country will converge on Canberra to train, rehearse, and perform alongside Australia’s elite circus professionals.

Professional circus artists and coaches from across Australia will gather at Lions Youth Haven in Kambah – the site of the Festival – to offer masterclasses in a range of circus specialties to the next generation.

Festival director and Warehouse Circus artistic director, Tom Davis, told Canberra Daily it would serve to boost the visibility of circus while simultaneously celebrating the capital’s vibrant performing arts scene.

“Warehouse has been present in Canberra for over 30 years and we have really good circus tours here all the time,” he said. “We’re bringing some amazing artists to Canberra, some of whom grew up here.

“We wanted to really celebrate not just a festival in Canberra, but what Canberra brings to the national arts scene …  it’s just big enough to have a lot on, but small enough that the arts scene all knows one another.”

Based in Melbourne, Davis first joined Warehouse Circus in 1997. Opportunities then took him out of Canberra, but he reached back out in 2017 after suffering a shoulder injury that kept him on the sidelines for some time.

Then, in 2019, he was offered the role as artistic director, which he took up in 2020 just as the pandemic hit.

“Suddenly we were scrambling to keep things open,” he said, “team just jumped into gear and everyone did everything they could to keep us going, It was amazing.

“It was a pretty hairy couple of months, and then after that it was just the logistics to make sure we were running as safe as we could in a public health emergency.”

Warehouse Circus has ‘strong history’ of giving kids creative control

After getting his start with Warehouse Circus at 14, prior to the pandemic, Canberra born-and-raised circus performer Pablo Latona had spent the previous 25 years touring the world.

Describing himself as a “funsmith” rather than a traditional circus performer, Latona’s brand of absurd physical comedy has travelled well right throughout Europe and Africa.

He praised Warehouse Circus for their “strong history” of giving a lot of artistic control to the kids.

“I remember as a 14-year-old doing a show on the main stage at the Street Theatre and the trainers essentially fiving me full creative control of putting together a magic act,” he said.

“At that age to just go ‘I want to do this and this’, and then have the trainers go away and build the props was a pretty wild experience.”

Those experiences with Warehouse proved formative for Latona: “That part of circus is what I’ve been doing ever since, taking the odd things I see in my dream an imagination and sticking them on a stage for other people to enjoy and laugh at”.

“It was a beautiful thing to have your inner world put in the external world and shared with a big audience.”

Having been grounded here in his hometown for the past two years due to Covid, Latona has kept busy through commissions, creating several participatory art experiences across town.

Returning to the stage for the Festival, he will perform his popular solo physical comedy in The Ridiculous Show.

“It’s definitely not traditional circus … I do absurd physical comedy to make people feel good,” he said.

“It’s celebrating the absurdity of life together, is really the vibe of the show. Audiences always seem to have fun with it, and I certainly have a good time on stage doing it.”

The Canberra Circus Festival will take place at Lions Youth Haven, Kambah, 19-23 April; canberracircusfestival.com.au