Stars and Stunts
The Nanjing Acrobats Come to Town
As the train ambled into the Albury train station in 1983, it was met by a motley crew of excitable children and adult circus performers. An admittedly off-kilter marching band announced the arrival of the Nanjing Acrobatic Group as they cautiously stepped onto the platform and eager clowns rushed to greet them. One attendee wore a pair of green satin shorts adorned with white stars – a common costume item worn by the Flying Fruit Fly Circus throughout the 1980s.
The first meeting of its kind worldwide, the acrobats from Jiangsu, China had been sent to run a three-month intensive training course for a combination of circus performers from the Fruit Flies, Circus Oz, and a selection of practising artists from around the country. The program had taken three years to negotiate but the cultural exchange, intended to improve goodwill between the two countries and up-skill the local industry, had finally begun.
It quickly became apparent just how different the circus arts were between the two cultures. The Chinese acrobats had been officially selected to achieve high levels of precision and excellence, with participants noting that some of them had physical deformities (like an indented forehead or a lower shoulder blade) from dedicated training of their particular act.
On the other hand, Australian circus arts often showcased achievable performances rich with individual character to accommodate the diversity in age, ability, and skill level between performers – the performer didn’t adapt to the act, the act adapted to the performer.
While the 8-hour days were gruelling, the program was enormously influential upon Australian circus training from that point onward. While the usual rigour of the Chinese style was lessened, the techniques and equipment they introduced brought fresh acts to the scene and helped refine training methods at the Flying Fruit Fly Circus.
This program ended with The Great Leap Forward, a series of shows in Albury where the Nanjing acrobats performed their specialised acts side-by-side with their talented Australian students, a number of whom performed in starry shorts. They had a tearful farewell when all was said and done, luckily it would not be the last time the troupe would visit.
