Members of the Flying Fruit Fly Circus performing ‘Chinese Pole’ in New York 1999. Image supplied.
A rare collaboration between Australia’s national youth circus, the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, and a group of master Chinese acrobats in the 1980s was to have remarkable impact on the Australian circus sector. Indeed, the ramifications of the ‘Nanjing Project’ as it became known (an initiative of Carrillo Gantner AO, then Cultural Attaché to the Australian Embassy in China) are still being felt today.