Where were you when you accepted your current job? On the bus? At your previous workplace? Perhaps at home with your unemployed self? 19-year-old, LUCIA CARBINES was 20 metres in the air at the Melbourne Grand Prix, gearing up for the next performance of the high wire motorbike trapeze stunt – a stunt which saw Carbines hanging upside-down, underneath a motorbike travelling over a 200 metre long highwire over a lake – when she got the call up for her current gig as Miss A in a Bubble, in Speigelworld’s latest circus-meets-burlesque-meets-comedy-meets-vaudeville extravaganza, EMPIRE.
Fresh from a stint on Broadway and a run of dates in capital cities across Australia, Empire brings together a unique mix of performers, including seductive Eastern European burlesque dancers, Ethiopian foot jugglers, roller skaters, acrobats, hula hoopers, and many more, under the directorship of Terence O’Connell, whose creative credits range from Circus Oz to Rocky Horror Picture Show, with choreography and costume design by long-time Baz Luhrmann collaborators John “Cha Cha” O’Connell (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby) and Angus Strathie (Academy Award winner, Moulin Rouge) respectively.
Carbines has the honour of opening the night’s proceedings – twisting, bending and contorting her limbs inside her Perspex bubble, suspended high above the crowd in the antique Speigeltent, in a display that is as mesmerising and graceful as it is death-defying. The result is an awe-inspiring start to the show and one that has been known to drop a cone of silence onto the oft-stunned audience.
But as Carbines told AMELIA PARROTT, mastering the sphere was not exactly as straight forward as she had first expected. “Sometimes if I spin the bubble too fast I do feel a bit queasy after the act,” laughs Carbines down the telephone line, about two weeks out from Empire’s opening night in Newcastle. “I tried the first few nights to make eye contact with people in the audience but because I was spinning so much I just got completely disorientated. I didn’t know where I was or what way was what and the tent, because it’s circular, every exit seems the same. The guy who helped me out of the bubble literally just picked me up, turned me around to go off in the right direction because I had no idea where I was, I was so dizzy and so disorientated, it was the strangest feeling.”
The teenaged Gold Coast native began her career as an aerial artist with Gold Coast based aerial academy, Aerial Angels, at the age of 14, and by 17 she was performing with the Academy’s professional crew, working the silks, lyra and trapeze at corporate events both at home and abroad. It was also around this time that Carbines discovered her knack for contortion. “It wasn’t until I was two years into my aerial training that I discovered that I was a lot more flexible than everyone else. Originally [my aerial teachers] were worried because my spine was so bendy they were like, ‘You’re going to break yourself if you don’t know how to control it!’ I youtubed a lot and started training contortion, seeing what other contortionists were doing and making up routines. I never really had a contortion trainer or teacher. If people ask me what I do at parties I’ll often just say I’m a dancer because once you say you’re a contortionist the questions never end – they never cease,” jokes Carbine.
Although she only officially joined the Empire cast on its Adelaide leg in September (she had originally been filling in for an injured cast member), Carbines has made Miss A in a Bubble her own, adding in aerial stunts that play to her strengths as a performer, as well as working on a brand new contortion act that will make its worldwide debut when Empire opens in Newcastle this week.
Carbines is adamant the show will be a spectacle unlike any other. “Every act in the show is technically really difficult and the artists are amazing! It’s not like a normal show where you will see a few average acts and then there will be one really good act to lift the level up, every single act in this show is on a really high level. Empire is completely unique.”
Empire will take over Wheeler Place, next to Civic Theatre, Newcastle from November 14 to December 8. Tickets are available through Ticketek, www.civictheatrenewcastle.com.au or by calling 4929 1977.