We sat down with Yaron Lifschitz, director of Australian contemporary circus company Circa ahead of the UK Premiere of Duck Pond, their reimagining of Swan Lake opening this Christmas at Royal Festival Hall.
- How does it feel to have Duck Pond premiering here in the UK?
Amazing! Royal Festival Hall at Southbank Centre is an iconic space and London is a great cultural capital. So, bringing the UK premiere of Duck Pond is thrilling. What an opportunity to show this beautiful, exciting vision! And for the season we are making the show bigger, shinier and better than ever before. We can’t wait to share Duck Pond with London audiences and are excited to be working with the Roast and Southbank Centre team to bring this show to life.
- What do you hope audiences here will take away from it? Is there a particular message you want people to receive?
This is an exuberant show full of joy, amazing skills and sumptuous textures. It is fun, moving and engaging. As its core it is a tale of identity and becoming – an ugly duckling becomes a swan, people search for their true loves and true selves. And of course, everyone needs an army of ducks to cheer them up!
- Can you tell us a bit about the journey of Duck Pond – how did the idea come about?
I’m particularly interested in fairy tale myths that have resonance today. I started to look at Swan Lake, perhaps the greatest romantic ballet of all time. And I thought about it in relation to the story of The Ugly Duckling. I came up with the idea of a swan who is cursed to be a human, or conversely a human who is cursed to be a swan, who thinks it’s a duck. Those two stories seem to be tales of identity, of discovery and of self-knowledge, all with resonance. And I wondered what might happen if we put them together?
At the same time, I’m interested in how circus can read, interrogate and reinvigorate the canon. Grappling musically with the work of composer, Tchaikovsky, with the performance tradition of classical ballet and the fairy tale traditions of Hans Christian Andersen seemed to me to be resonant and timely. I wanted to do something that was unashamedly glossy and beautiful. Our recent work has been physically muscular in body and a little bit gritty and tough. I thought it would be nice to scrub up for a while!
- Were there any specific challenges you faced during the making of the show?
Learning how to reference the grace, line, beauty and poise of ballet and trying to abstract that into circus has been challenging and also enlivening. A few years ago, I did an opera in Lyon in France which is based in tango, but we didn’t dance any tango we just abstracted the moves. In this production we worked with a ballet dramaturg to pull apart some of the codes and figures of ballet and help us figure out how to infuse our acrobatics with its essence.
The one thing I said was that there would be no mocking ballet, there is a tiny flash of some aspiring ballerinas in the back end but mostly this is a very respectful and exuberant take on Swan Lake.
- Do you have a favourite scene in the show?
It’s like asking if I have a favourite child! They are all wonderful if often messy and occasionally challenging!
- What advice would you give to anyone aspiring to be a circus performer?
Train, train, train and embrace culture – read books, see plays, watch movies listen to music. Be open to the world. And train.