Arnhem Land 1988
Nanjing ProjectsJuggling the Data

Welcome to People, Places and Radical Exchanges!

Using interviews and archival resources, this project aims to tell two important but less well-known stories about celebrated Australian performing arts company Circus Oz.

First, we reconstruct the 1988 tour of Arnhem Land and reflect on the company’s commitment to performing in remote and regional Australia. Second, we provide a timeline of the company’s involvement with the Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe.

We are also creating a complete record of Circus Oz tours and personnel during the 1980s and 1990s. Work on this curated dataset is ongoing, but you can find updates on our analysis and visualisation of this material here.

This interactive multimedia project was created by Kirsten Stevens, Rachel Fensham, Andrew Fuhrmann and Gillian Butcher at the University of Melbourne, with Digital Heritage Australia. Our thanks to Laurel Frank for providing access to the Circus Oz archives and advice on its contents.

To view digitised items in the University of Melbourne’s Circus Oz collection, including a large selection of videos, visit the Theatre and Dance Platform. People, Places and Radical Exchanges is a University of Melbourne project, funded by the Australian Research Council as part of the ongoing development, activation, and visualization of AusStage datasets.

Photo credits: Ponch Hawkes