Top of the heap
There’s some Junk worth seeking out at the Auckland Arts Festival, writes Dionne Christian
Once, in the not too dim and distant past, if you said you were leaving the kids to their own devices, it didn’t mean they were on the couch armed with a mobile phone or tablet to Instagram friends while watching, on the big screen, YouTube videos of other people playing Minecraft.
Instead, they were going outside, probably for hours, where, armed with a good measure of imagination and gumption, they would make their own fun and games.
Now here comes an answer to the “glued to their devices” issue; a way to show the young there’s more to life than logging on, swiping and liking. It starts with a story to warm the heart.
Back in 1979, the International Year of the Child, the Murray River Performing Arts Group (MRPG) on the border of Albury, New South Wales and Wodonga, Victoria, joined the celebrations by starting a children’s holiday circus programme. In six weeks, it worked with 80 kids and set the foundations for what would become Australia’s National Youth Circus.
As it says on its website, it was never meant to last. But it did.
Some 39 years on, Flying Fruit Fly Circus has an international reputation as one of the world’s leading circus schools — and it’s an actual school where kids aged 8-18 from all over Australia board and attend classes. Except that along with subjects such as maths and English, there’s juggling and clowning (among the 20 hours of training pupils do each week).
It became known as the Flying Fruit Fly Circus because the Fruities’ first show was about a quarantine station between twin cities Albury and Wodonga, where people had to surrender any fruit they carried to stop the spread of fruit flies. Relatable.
“The beautiful thing about circus, I feel, is that it’s inclusive of all sorts of kids,” says artistic director Jodie Farrugia. “It’s not just the daredevils who love risk and danger, but kids who are really patient and want to concentrate on small detailed things like hand-balancing; then there are the quirky kids who want to clown or those who are perhaps more mathematically minded and want to give things like juggling a go.”
The “Fruities” are the circus-in-residence at Sydney Opera House and The Cube in Wodonga. Past pupils have flown the nest to work with some of the world’s high-profile circuses. The company is invited to perform all around the world; now it’s coming to New Zealand — remarkably its first visit — for the Auckland Arts Festival (AAF) with a show called Junk. The title’s a nod to inventor Thomas Edison who once said, ‘To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk’. That’s pretty much exactly what the 17 young performers work with in a thought-provoking story about what it means to play and whether we’ve become too riskaverse.
A 21st century boy, encased in safety gear, prepares to ride his bike; he is suddenly sucked back in time to a junkyard inhabited by the spirits of children from the 1940s. World-class acrobatics, magical shadow puppetry and high levels of hijinks, as well as social commentary about the idea of child’s play, all find a place in the story.
What’s more, it was a story made through the What: With the Auckland Arts Festival and New Zealand Festival in Wellington under way, we’ve been catching up with some of our leading choreographers and dancers, theatre-makers, playwrights and poets, musicians and singers to find out why they make the art they do and what can we expect to see from them at our biggest arts festivals. Today, we talk to theatre-maker and musician Robin Kelly about the power of family. See nzherald.co.nz/culture Where & when: