A lot of modern circus shows emphasize their dazzling production values as much as their feats of fancy. A Simple Space offers something no less impressive, but far more intimate.

It’s an acrobatics showcase that highlights what people and their bodies are capable of with grit, determination, and sweat. Lots of sweat. And the audience is right beside them the whole time.

“It’s seven acrobats pushing their limits, and doing it in a way that is challenging each other,” explains  Lachlan Harper, one of the performers in A Simple Space. “We're playing games—It's not like, ‘Oh, I'm better than you.’ It's very much, let's push each other to our limits, but we're all really enjoying the fun of seeing where our limits are.”

Presented by Australian company Gravity & Other Myths, A Simple Space will appear at this year’s International Children’s Festival of the Arts. With both daytime and evening shows, it’ll be a family-friendly chance to see astonishing stunts up close—in addition to the other acts at this year’s Children’s festival, including Treehouse TV’s Splash N’ Boots, The Merry Marching Band, and Ahkamēyimok’s showcase of powwow dancing.

It was that the stripped-down approach to circus that first drew Harper to working with Gravity & Other Myths: an acrobat who’s trained at Australia’s National institute of Circus Arts, he joined the company in 2016, and hasn’t looked back.

“This was humans being raw, physical and acknowledging humanity, which was so interesting to me,” he says.

And also to the audience: when performers pull off logic-defying feats of physical derring-do, and you’re sitting mere feet away from them, Harper notes, it creates a unique experience every time.

“They're really close,” he says, of the audience. “Which is scary at first, but it's actually so interesting because you can play with the audience. Every show ends up being a little bit different based on audience reactions and how much you can interact with them, which is pretty different for a lot of circus.”

And for those who think that sounds like you might be sitting too close, remember: they are trained professionals.

“We know how much space we need,” Harper says. “We've really trained it to the point where we're [we know], this is the safe amount of space and we have a little bit of excess on that as well. We definitely don't put anyone in danger, but we like making it feel like they're on the edge of their seat … In that way you can see everything, every interaction between each of us and with the audience, which is just so close and so fresh.”

Article Written by: Paul Blinov

A special evening performance of A Simple Space will take place Saturday, May 31, 2025 at 7 pm. Tickets for A Simple Space, and the rest of the International Children's Festival of the Arts programming, are available now. 

Video length - 00:01:59

- 30 -