Circa's Duck Pond reimagines Swan Lake with flippers, trapezes, and human towers
New twist on a classic ballet is full of beauty and wit, breaking new ground for the Aussie modern-circus troupe
The White Swan in Circa’s Duck Pond. Photo by Damien Bredberg
DanceHouse and The Cultch present Circa’s Duck Pond at the Vancouver Playhouse from January 22 to 25
THE LAST TIME Australia’s form-pushing Circa packed the Vancouver Playhouse, it was with 2023’s Sacre, a darkly ominous acrobatic take on Igor Stravinsky’s legendary The Rite of Spring. Now the critically lauded, world-touring troupe is back here across the Pacific with another twist on an iconic ballet: Swan Lake. But this time, the spectacle is full of beauty and fun, with a little bit of The Ugly Duckling fairy tale thrown in. Think burlesque black swans, flipper-wearing ducks, tutus, trapezes, and human towers.
“It's as far apart as you can possibly get from Sacre,” advises artistic director Yaron Lifschitz, speaking to Stir over Zoom from the company’s headquarters in Brisbane. “Sacre is physically uncompromising, very stripped back, very visceral, very muscular. It’s like you're watching the inside of a circus or inside of a body. Duck Pond is much more theatrical. It's much more sumptuous, elegant. You know, why can't circus have nice things? Why can't we find beauty and a bit of magic dust?”
The grace and prettiness of ballet: Lifschitz admits it’s a space he doesn’t come to easily.
“I was never drawn to theatre because of glitter and beauty,” he says. “I do think beauty is important, but there’s different kinds of beauty. The beauty that I naturally respond to is probably a more flinty kind of beauty. So this was a different world to work in. And I think it therefore interested me: what are the challenges, and what are the opportunities to work in that world?”
The result is an ambitious production that pushed the modern-circus company into new artistic ground, grappling with narrative in ways it had never done before. Despite its generous hits of humour, Duck Pond is not a satirical take on the artform in the vein of, say, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. It meant serious research. In fact, Lifschitz can’t count the number of times he watched different renditions of Swan Lake, from the classical to the sharply contemporary. The circus troupe even brought in a ballet dramaturg for the creation process.
“We learned a lot about ballet as a form, and we kind of banned parody ballet from the room, which I think was a really important step,” he stresses. “We weren’t interested in mocking it. We were interested in understanding it, utilizing its languages and tropes, but also kind of being in a conversation with it. But it was a very fresh and new world to us. I think it would have been fairly easy in the piece to become too light or too superficial, and we had to find its depth and its authenticity.
“I mean, you know, we’re Australian, and we’re from a circus, so our bandwidth for respect and homage may be below some of our more cultured brethren, but I think we do all right for a bunch of Colonials,” he adds jokingly.
That homage does not include a traditional rendition of Tchaikovsky’s ornate and instantly recognizable score. Composer Jethro Woodward has interwoven fragments from the piece with percussive beats into a new soundtrack. “There was no doubt we needed to crumble the score and pull out material from it and then rebuild it into something new and fresh,” Lifschitz says.
Circa’s Duck Pond. Photo by Pia Johnson
As usual for Circa, the show will also be filled with an inventive aerial work and contorting, somersaulting, and stacking bodies. But, if it has one thing in common with Sacre, it is also packed with inspired partnering and choreographic flow. Based on ballet, it nudges appealingly toward contemporary dance; in fact, DanceHouse is copresenting this show with The Cultch. How does Lifschitz feel about that?
“Terrified,” the affable Aussie quips. “I mean, I have no background in dance. I don’t know the first thing about it. Somebody once tried to teach me how to waltz, and I failed miserably. So I’m a complete interloper, and I do feel like the interesting thing about dance is that it is such a broad canvas that you can do lots of things, but when you see things specifically through a dance eye, you become very often interested in externals, in form, in the timing, are the toes pointed, are the counts accurate, all those kinds of things.”
With Circa, as ever, Lifschitz uses circus arts to dig at something more raw and human. One of Circa’s most famous shows, after all, was called Humans—a stirring look at our bodies’ physical limits and how much we can take as beings. And all that’s ultimately what may separate the perfection of a Swan Lake ballet from Duck Pond.
“How does the experience register in the body of the viewer? How does it write personality and imperfection across it?” he says. “I come at it just with a curious mind, that here are stories that are interesting to tell, and where are flavours that are interesting, too, that haven't yet been experienced. Where are conversations that can be fostered or nurtured, or flames of curiosity that can be rekindled? And also, doing it with circus just means it's generally going to be a bit less boring!” 
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