The circus is in town - although it's nothing like you think.
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Brisbane-based circus company Circa opens its new show Landscape with Monsters at Canberra Theatre Centre on Wednesday night, but don't expect juggling, red noses or a trapeze.
The show, which explores the meeting of humans and their environment, combines little more than wooden boxes, a hard floor, tall metal structures, and some seriously strong performers.
Circa's artistic director Yaron Lifschitz said the show takes the raw, physical skills of circus, and turns them into something else.
"We turn them into sexy cabaret, we turn them into hardcore acrobatic dance, we turn them into a show like Landscape with Monsters which is almost object theatre. So we take these amazing things artists can do and we keep exploring different ways we can talk to audiences with them and communicate and make meaning," he said.
"In [Landscape With Monsters] there are no traditional circus apparatus - there's no trapezes, or handstand canes or that sort of stuff. It's really based around really simple objects - some boxes, ladders, planks and basically out of this we kind of create a duet between people and their world. It's kind of the landscape we find ourselves in; what happens when our soft edges encounter the hard form of the world around it?"
Billie Wilson-Coffey is one of seven performers in the show, who push the human body to extremes with grace and elegance, and nothing but a hard stage floor beneath them and a live audience watching on.
"There's something about watching live performance and performing it too that I don't get from anything else," she said.
"You see struggle, you see humanity, people working together, you see strength. You see the risk and you see the skill, and hopefully we move the audience through all of those things combined. "
It's the sort of theatre that appeals to everyone from regular theatre-goers to newcomers according to Mr Lifschitz.
"We have the great privilege of making work that doesn't bore our audiences. A lot of theatre is boring - circus isn't boring. It's exciting, it's thrilling, it's dangerous, it's heart stopping," he said.
"I think that theatre is one of those great places - there aren't a lot of places where you can come into a public place, share an intense personal experience and then leave safely at the end of it."
Landscape With Monsters is on at Canberra Theatre Centre September 6-9. Tickets at canberratheatrecentre.com.au.
