The Flying Fruit Fly Circus

He'd been a, he'd done music, him and Nigel Westlake, another amazing composer now, has been for many years in Australia, but they were the band for the Flowing Fruit Fly Circus way back.

in the day and i had a video tape a vhs tape when michael ling and simon yates from akabat and all this crew were kids in the flying fruit fly circus and that's when i first saw slack rope and um between that video and going to tassie for the first time and learning off dave pickens and um another amazing street performer

yeah street performer and incredible photographer like his portraits are just world-class find him online too yeah

anyway yeah shout out to dave i learned how to do the slack rope and got really good that was the other thing you sort of there wasn't as i say there was no there was no nike there was no circus school so i sort of chose things and not many other people were doing so slack rope was a thing and i rigged it up between two trees and taught myself how to ride a unicycle on it and juggle on it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, uh, just one more thing happened in that, in that time was that I was a trainer, um, with the flying fruit fly circus.

Um, that, Um, and we're on tour doing, uh, doing a tour to, um, Far North Queensland to all these communities above Cairns in Far North Queensland.

Thanks for coming on.

I'd like to hear a bit about the origin story, because I know that the Circus Centre Melbourne is part of the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, which is Australia's national youth circus and Australia's only full-time circus school for young people.

So how did the idea come to expand from the home in Albury-Wodonga to Collingwood and to open a space like this in Melbourne? How did it all happen?

That was really a lot to do with our CEO, Richard Hull, who is, uh, someone who is eyes-open and a risk-taker.

And an opportunity came up with our, the building we're in at 50 Perry Street in Collingwood.

This is the home of Circus Oz, and due to a, a number of different events, it is still their home, but there was a space for a different lead tenant.

And Richard was able to see the potential of that space and what it would mean for the circus sector if someone like the Flying Fruit Fly Circus were to take it over and lead it to be a space for circus artists of both young and old and in between.

And it was a really big leap, the biggest risk or biggest shift in the company's, like, almost 50-year history.