Review: Circa’s Sacre Enthralls but Falls Short of the Score

The Dance Current

The Australian circus-dance company’s take on The Rite of Spring nails spectacle but just misses sensitivity

It’s difficult to place the genre of performance presented to us by Circa. Promotional material boasts that the Australian company “blurs the lines between movement, dance, theatre and circus.” What we see in Sacre, by artistic director Yaron Lifschitz, is a vast borrowing that makes use of circus, contemporary dance, martial arts, gymnastics and even cheerleading to create a wildly impressive 65 minutes of entertainment. However, this melding of styles creates friction in the viewing – lacking both the embodied sensitivity of dance and the charming levity of circus, it lands somewhere illegible in between.…