In early October 2026, the circus company CIRCA will be in residence at fabrik Potsdam for the final rehearsals and the world premiere of their new production, North of Now. The show will subsequently be presented in Stuttgart and Berlin. In an interview, Yaron Lifschitz, the company’s artistic director, reveals the working methods and the ideas behind the new production.
Mr Lifschitz, could you tell us about the creation process? What sparked this production?
Yaron Lifschitz: North of Now began as a kind of distillation. Last year I made a very large work, To See the Stars Again, which premiered in a Roman amphitheatre in Lyon > the Grand Palais in Paris > Montpellier. Twelve acrobats, four musicians, enormous spaces. When something that big finishes you find yourself asking what it was actually made of. The answer, for me, was humans, the connections between them and the hope this inspires. So this work strips everything else away and starts there.
The process is the ensemble in a room in Brisbane. I set tasks, create languages, the acrobats generate material, and we edit. Most of what we make is discarded. What survives tends to be the material where the relationship between the bodies is legible, where you can see people negotiating weight, trust and risk in real time. It has been an intense creation period. The work is being built quickly, which suits it. It keeps everything close to the moment.
The info of the company suggests a process-oriented approach. A search to reach a certain state, frame of mind, utopia or someone?
Yaron Lifschitz: The search is for presence. Now is the hardest place to reach. We spend our lives slightly ahead of ourselves or slightly behind, planning and regretting, and the present keeps slipping away. The proposition of the show is that now might be reachable, but only together. Presence is something we make between us, in the exchange of weight and attention. Acrobatics is a good instrument for this because it cannot be faked. When someone is standing on your shoulders, you are both entirely in the present. The stakes see to it. So the acrobats are searching for a state, yes, but the state only exists as a relation. There is no utopia at the end. There is just the possibility of arriving, briefly, where you already are.
Yaron Lifschitz: The search is for presence. Now is the hardest place to reach. We spend our lives slightly ahead of ourselves or slightly behind, planning and regretting, and the present keeps slipping away. The proposition of the show is that now might be reachable, but only together. Presence is something we make between us, in the exchange of weight and attention. Acrobatics is a good instrument for this because it cannot be faked. When someone is standing on your shoulders, you are both entirely in the present. The stakes see to it. So the acrobats are searching for a state, yes, but the state only exists as a relation. There is no utopia at the end. There is just the possibility of arriving, briefly, where you already are.
Could you elaborate on the atmosphere / setting?
Yaron Lifschitz: The setting is deliberately bare. Seven bodies, an empty stage, light to see them by. The acrobats emerge without explanation or past. Nothing shelters them and nothing distracts from them. Within that frame the work moves through very different weathers. There are passages of real velocity and force, and there are passages of great stillness and tenderness. Intensity in circus is often confused with speed. For me it lives just as much in slowness, in a held balance, in the moment before a catch. The atmosphere shifts the way relationships shift. Sometimes charged, sometimes brutal, sometimes very quiet. The audience is close to all of it. There is nowhere for the performers to hide, and after a while, nowhere for the audience either.
I think it functions like a poem - you are inside it, you live within it; rather than an object, it’s an experience.
"In the rivers north of the future, I cast the net," wrote Paul Celan. Could you elaborate?
Yaron Lifschitz: Celan has been a companion of mine for decades. That line describes an impossible geography. You cannot go north of the future, just as you cannot go north of now. And yet he casts the net. The gesture is made anyway, into waters that cannot exist, in the hope of catching something. That is very close to what acrobats do. Every throw is a net cast into a future that has not arrived. The catch is not guaranteed. What makes it bearable, and beautiful, is that someone is waiting. Celan wrote from inside genuine desolation, and still the line reaches forward. I take from him the idea that hope is a practice rather than a mood. You cast the net because casting is what hope looks like. The show lives in that gesture, repeated for an hour, between seven people.
You worked with a composer, Gabriel Cazes. How has his music influenced the creation?
Yaron Lifschitz: Gabriel's music breathes with the performers rather than pushing them, and it carries a melodic, emotional line that the acrobatics can lean into or resist. He is working with a wide pallet - voice, instruments, piano, sound. We are figuring out how to get his theatrical frame to fit our circus one. The collaboration has been close. Gabriel sends sketches, we put bodies against them, and the structure of the show and the structure of the score have grown up together rather than one being fitted to the other. We argue productively about endings. His music has pulled the work towards tenderness in places I might otherwise have kept cool or demanded energy and I have learned to trust that.
North of Now by CIRCA: 08 to 11 Oct 2026 at fabrik Potsdam
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