But Wait…There’s More

While journalism may not be as removed from the Big Top as you might think, April Dawson and Kyle Raftery grabbed their childhood dream by the horns and steered it clear into adulthood. As part of Circus Oz, the pair travels the world eliciting gasps and laughter from young and old. Better still, the two are engaged, so we have an old-fashioned circus dynasty in the making.

“I grew up in a small country town and did a lot of dancing and gymnastics,” Dawson explains. “Pretty much anything dance-related I could do, my parents put me in. Luckily at 15 I was spotted by [Lunar Circus] and that was the pathway from there. It’s funny now, looking back and realising from quite a young age that I wanted to be in the circus without really recognising it. Obviously my parents saw something there. They would take me and my sister to touring shows whenever they came into town, and I remember one day when I was six or seven handing in some homework after seeing the circus of a weekend saying that I wanted to grow up and be an acrobat.”

Raftery has a similar genesis story, finding himself drawn to acrobatics and performance in his backyard. While his ubiquitous unicycle may have been absent back then, his love of musicals had hit the ground running, and to this day he needs little encouragement to break into song.

“I was singing all the way through training this morning,” he laughs, “and I’ll probably do a bit of singing at another event we have tonight. It’s very casual, but one of my favourite things about Circus Oz is that we have the live band, so music is a part of our everyday. You really can’t help but sing. But my background is kind of similar to April. I lived in Canada when I was four and one Halloween demanded to go dressed as a clown, but I didn’t know that until I was 21. I’d wondered what it was that made me get into circus, but my parents always knew it was going to happen.”

Dawson and Raftery are both relatively fresh faces to the Circus Oz family, having first performed with the troupe in 2014. Yet they had both been fans of the company for years while honing their skills in other projects, becoming masters of acrobatics, flying trapeze, unicycle adagio and juggling. There is something so endearingly romantic about the very idea of the circus; how readily the word conjures sights, sounds and smells that seem so much more exaggerated than everyday lives. It is a thrill that seems destined to never quite fade away.

“It is romanticised, the way it’s presented in books and film,” Raftery agrees. “It keeps that allure alive. It’s also always reinventing itself. I think that’s why circus will always stick around. It’s always been a hybrid art form. It’s always taken things that are popular at the time, a lot of performance styles into the ring, and I think that’s what we do as well. We don’t have horses going around the ring, but we have hip hop, we have electronic music. It’s about taking what’s current and making that a form of entertainment. I think that’s why it stays alive – it’s always evolving.”

“The show we’re working on at the moment has been in performance now for almost two years,” Dawson elaborates. “It’s quite strange looking back at the beginning to that very first show to where it is today. You feel like it can’t have changed a huge amount, but when you do take the time to look back at it, it’s been constantly evolving. We’re constantly working on new things, trying to change little bits, put in a bigger trick. We have people come in and out of the show as well, and they all bring something unique that we haven’t seen before.”

This latest production, But Wait…There’s More, will be striking Sydney just as the year draws to a close; a year that has seen some remarkable triumphs and struggles for the acrobatic paramours. Their stage selves promise to be heightened versions of their real lives, in a story likely to resonate with everyone who has ever wanted to take a step back from the hurricane of modern life and just take a slow breath.

“The characters you see onstage are born of our own quirks and personalities,” Raftery says. “The theme of the show is based around consumerism and the fast-paced lifestyle we have now – the fact that everyone is multitasking, doing so many things at once while the world seems to keep spinning faster and faster.

“So the whole show kind of builds up until it explodes in a way; the stage is just covered in things. We’ve reached this critical mass, and all that’s left after this explosion is us onstage. We do this piece which is just about us as humans. I think that’s a really nice thing about the show. When you switch off the tele and get rid of all the toys, sometimes it’s nice just to be human with other humans.”

[But Wait…There’s More photo by Rob Blackburn]