New circus show The Defiant was forged in tiny windows of space amid the precarity of repeated COVID lockdowns.“But it’s not about the pandemic,” says director Elena Kirschbaum, who is presenting five shows at this year’s Fringe, while also fulfilling her role as co-director of Gluttony.Kirschbaum’s production company, Highwire Entertainment, is based between Adelaide and Melbourne. For the company’s team of 25 artists, the last two years have been some of the harshest of their careers, with lockdowns obliterating their touring schedule and making training, rehearsal and creative development largely impossible.

While The Defiant isn’t about the pandemic, Kirschbaum says it does draw on the difficulty of those experiences.

“It has a post-apocalyptic theme and aesthetic to it and one of the things that we have spent a lot of time working on is the way that the individual performers connect with those kind of world-shattering moments,” she says.

“But the show is not about the trauma and the darkness of the apocalyptic moment, it’s about the camaraderie and the celebration and the community… the way that you pick those pieces back up.” … Link to Full Article by Farrin Foster at the InDaily.