Urlicht Primal Light

By Gaia Clotilde Chernetich

At first glance, the pairing of Gustav Mahler’s music with contemporary circus might seem, to say the least, unexpected. And yet, this is one of those rare encounters whose fertility—alongside its uniqueness—offers audiences an experience as surprising as it is genuine. The collaboration between director Yaron Lifschitz, one of the most innovative figures in contemporary circus, and the Franui Musicbanda brings together diverse artistic and cultural dimensions.

The Australian company Circa Contemporary Circus, founded in 2004, appears here in the national premiere of Urlicht Primal Light, performed with the young artists of the GmC Lighthouse. Internationally acclaimed and among the most prominent companies in the world, Circa masterfully blends circus acrobatics, contemporary dance, and theatrical expression—each brought to its highest level. Their repertoire, rooted in a sophisticated approach to physicality and sonic space, now includes over twenty productions developed in dialogue with chamber, symphonic, and operatic music traditions. Based in the Brisbane region, Circa’s shows tour globally and have mesmerized more than two million spectators worldwide.

Franui Musicbanda, by contrast, is a musical ensemble founded in 1993 in East Tyrol, Austria. Their name—an homage to an alpine pasture in Innervillgraten, the childhood village of many of the musicians—hints at the group’s strong sense of place. Franui’s work spans genres, blending jazz, folk, contemporary, and classical influences. Their performances might best be described as “creative collaborations” with the original compositions they reinterpret. Much like reenactments in the performing arts, their reworkings may at times “betray” the source material in order to reveal new dimensions; at others, they enhance the beauty of the originals through reinterpretation, improvisation, and recomposition.

The convergence of these two creative universes is born of a shared fascination with Mahler’s music. As Andreas Schett, a member of Franui, explains: “Gustav Mahler is our neighbor. Dobbiaco, where he spent the last three summers of his life, lies just beyond the mountain from our home village, Innervillgraten. When we listen to his music, we feel a profound connection to him. There’s nothing more exciting than fusing this sonic world with the visual and physical language of the Australian company Circa.” Yaron Lifschitz responds: “What Franui does with Mahler, Circa does with circus. We begin with tradition—respectfully, yet innovatively—to discover new forms of poetry. Our aim was to create a symphony of bodies and music, capable of stirring emotion.”

Thus Urlicht Primal Light unites two seemingly distant worlds—Austria and Australia—that prove to share a common poetic impulse. Franui’s refined musical sensibility engages in dialogue with a stage inhabited by multiple disciplines—circus, theatre, and contemporary dance—that blend and dissolve into one another. Both groups share an “extra-disciplinary” approach: a desire to stretch creativity beyond the conventional boundaries of their respective fields.

There are, in fact, many intrinsic elements that circus, music, and theatre hold in common. Their histories have long been intertwined, but in the past two decades especially, all three have undergone profound renewal—reaching new audiences and absorbing narratives once confined to a single art form. Depending on how artists present them, and how audiences receive them, circus and theatre—together with music—become expressions of a dynamic, proactive cultural vision, capable of moving the world and reshaping our collective imagination. In this sense, the stage becomes a kind of highly specialized laboratory: a site where distant cultural particles and nuclei—separated by time and space—can collide and spark transformation. Following this line of imagery, the history of the arts might well be rewritten as a series of both collective and individual experiences, where each perspective contributes to a broader opportunity to participate, to enjoy, to learn, to reflect, to express, to celebrate—and at times, to question.

These “performative universes,” transcending geographies and cultures, converge to reveal how the daring feats of circus can stand alongside the surprising power of music and the evocative storytelling of theatre—each passing down, from generation to generation, stories drawn from the flow of time itself.

From the audience’s point of view, the experience of a theatre or a circus tent is not, in essence, so different. The fixed architecture of the theatre finds its perfect counterpoint in the circus’s nomadic spirit. They are two sides of the same coin—a coin that, in fact, represents humanity itself, whose evolution has explored the virtues and shortcomings of both stability and movement. When the house lights dim, an experience begins that contains all possibilities. In Urlicht Primal Light, we encounter the theme of the journey in its dual form: an inner, dreamlike voyage and an outward one, inviting us to new places, languages, sounds, scents—and to bodies, gestures, and emotions.

And thus, theatrical magic becomes something that reshapes its own boundaries. To be part of the audience is to take a spectacular leap—usually while seated. Sheltered by the darkness, our eyes become channels for images that speak to us intimately, transporting us back in time or projecting us into imagined futures. During the performance, we may rediscover the wide-eyed wonder of childhood. It will happen as we listen to the Lieder of a towering composer, Gustav Mahler, who—like Circa’s contemporary circus—was able to fuse elements of everyday simplicity with grand orchestral scores, forging a refined and astonishing complexity.