The Candy Butchers –a circus sweetmeat

Contemporary circus luminaries Derek Ives & Azaria Universe join forces with Jess Love & DJ Garner to create -
The Candy Butchers; proud purveyors of elegant stunts, dirty acrobatics and dark clowning.

A darkly humorous voyage into a neo-vaudevillian world of an imaginary sideshow era, see high level circus combined with pathos, drama and tragedy to create a vision that is at once delicately touching, visually enchanting and physically impressive.

The Candy Butchers was born from a desire to delve deep into the world of old time circus and physical story telling to create a high risk human spectacle. It is the culmination of more than a decade of international work in various circus and sideshow troupes combined with hundreds of hours of training in circus schools from Melbourne to Beijing and Moscow.
Winner of ‘The Most Outstanding Production Award’ at the Melbourne Fringe Festival 2004, and ‘Best Show / Independent Theatre’ The Green Room Award Association 2004 and following a Sell Out season at The Studio - Sydney Opera House, The Candy Butchers –a circus sweetmeat has been heralded as one of the most important works to emerge from the new Australian circus movement in recent memory.

The performance seamlessly blends the perverse with the poetic to create a circus with a heart… a twisted black one!

-The Sunday Telegraph
‘A timeless 21st Century sideshow… at once monstrous and delicate, macabre and heart-warming –startling, substantial and technically spectacular’
- The Australian
‘…a beautifully paced flow of punchy action and sentimental moments that build a surreal journey’
- Impress Magazine
‘awe inspiring and exquisitely executed physical feats’
-The Sydney Morning Herald
‘short, sharp and refreshingly dark’
-The Courier Mail
‘At times it feels hallucinatory. It’s inventive, curious and original’

WINNER Most Outstanding Production - Melbourne Fringe 2004
WINNER Best Show / Independent Theatre -Green Room Awards 2005

This project has been supported by The Studio-Sydney Opera House,The Australia Council for the Arts and Circus Oz.
The Candy Butchers new work – ‘The Dog and Pony Show’, premiered at The Hobart Summer Festival 2006.