The old circus big top at Sydney’s Luna Park has had a decidedly 21st century makeover. The new space, called Sydney’s Immersive Big Top, is a $15m investment: a “magic box” that can deliver spatially mapped audio, specialty lighting, hologram technology and 360-degree projections.
Sydney is no stranger to light and sound projections – Vivid had record attendance numbers in 2023 and the city has played host to everything from gargantuan Van Gogh hangars to Louis Vuitton and Gucci brand activations-slash-interactive exhibitions. This is a city that lives large but the Big Top is Sydney’s first permanent space for work of this nature.
Experiences will rotate in and out of the space but it’s opening with Luna Park’s own original creation that attempts to honour the Big Top location: Dream Circus, creatively directed and designed by Artists in Motion, the Sydney-based group behind the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony and Disneyland’s light and sound shows in California and Tokyo.
What exactly is a Dream Circus, you might ask? It’s a place – according to the show’s marketing, and as you’re exhaustively reminded by the characters – where nothing makes sense. It’s a heavy-handed, almost self-conscious excuse for what the piece actually is: a series of aesthetically driven vignettes that let top-notch projection, audio and light artists show off their work.
It’s more showreel than show: often, Dream Circus feels like a lookbook of local artistic talent. To its credit, the talent is worth touting: including the choreographer Nathan Wright (whose CV includes The Rocky Horror Show and multiple Olympic Games ceremonies) and the musical director Max Lambert (behind the Sydney 2000 opening and closing ceremonies, and The Boy From Oz).
The story, such as there is one, is simple: a ringmaster (Socratis Otto) receives a call saying the circus needs to make sense or it won’t go on. He insists it will never make sense. And so the circus goes on and a series of nonsensical acts occur.
While it’s staged on a traditional proscenium, there is no live element to Dream Circus; it’s all pre-taped. Scenes between the ringmaster, strongman Samson (Euan Fistrovic Doidge), diva Luna (Sheridan Harbridge) and vaudevillian circus clowns (Darren Gilshenan and Amber McMahon) largely play out on screens set far back on a modest thrust stage, while the world of the circus – backstage crew members, dancers warming up, jugglers testing their skills – is projected on the walls to each side.
The more conventional acts are interspersed with sound and audio confections that glossily take over the space and take us to other worlds: underwater, where squid dance; in the sky, where biplanes fly in formation, dancers on the wings; and briefly – perhaps most successfully – on the track of a rollercoaster.
Above you, a circular disc mimicking a tent canopy transforms into a viewing portal, giving you a ceiling view into the worlds that emerge through countless projections. It’s all striking to watch and you are encouraged to take photos and video throughout – though, at an hour, it feels too long and, as a narrative work, it’s unresolved.
The frequent reminders that it isn’t supposed to make sense feel like an excuse for the show’s clear lack of dramaturgical clarity. And perhaps it’s not even a show at all: a speech before the opening night referred to Dream Circus as not merely theatre but a “catalyst for change”. But is change supposed to be this confusing?
Consider the Dream Machine sequence. Luna warns the ringmaster he will hate the next act, in which an artist played by Anica Calida transforms the space into an art pop daydream by singing a catchy number (including the phrase “tick tock”, if it wasn’t clear you should be sharing everything you capture to your socials). It’s fun but it makes no sense in the narrative. It’s no wackier than the rest of the circus, so why would the ringmaster hate it? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter; we never see his reaction and the circus morphs into a new sequence that’s equally as non-sequitur as Dream Machine.
Of course, you’re not supposed to think this much about it. This is an immersive experience designed to activate your senses and your camera trigger more than your hunger for narrative. Running every 90 minutes at Luna Park, it’s a pleasing enough confection – though it might leave you unsatisfied.
Dream Circus runs every 90 minutes daily, with tickets $45 for adults and $35 for children 13 and under. The ticket price does not include park access
