The Circus Diaries: Jonaas comes to Melbourne University

Welcome

The Circus Diaries is a wonderful oral history and photographic project documenting traditional Australian circus life from the 1920's to the present. Over the past three years I have travelled through much of Australia interviewing and photographing circus elders and families, and living with traditional circuses.

The Circus Diaries is a PhD project in partnership with The Australian Centre of Melbourne University and the Performing Arts Collection of the Arts Centre, Victoria.The Circus Diaries exhibition opened at the George Adams Gallery of the Arts Centre, 100 St. Kilda Rd, Melbourne, on May 18th, and ran till July 15th, 2007. The exhibition was an outcome from my Australian Circus Oral History PhD research and features photographs by Cal MacKinnon. To see some of Cal's contemporary images from The Circus Diaries exhibition, please click on the link to her website on the right.

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Monday, November 3, 2008

Jonaas comes to Melbourne University

Back at Melbourne Uni I presented a piece about the marvelous and enigmatic Jonaas Zalinskas - Lithuanian circus strongman and dental trapeze artist.

The conference, called Identity and Its Discontents featured Ghassan Hage and Tony Birch discussing Palestinian / Israeli, and Aboriginal identities.

I presented a piece based on a series of photos I took of Jonaas at his caravan on a property in northern New South Wales. The photos focused on Jonaas's art works made from thousands of keys and cupie dolls. I asked questions about the disjuncture between his performed identity as the circus strongman, still to the fore even at the age of 90 or so, and his private, unknown but glimpsed identity as an elderly man living without his circus, in a caravan with no amenities.