I’m Sebastian Edwards & I’m a performer with Lamplight Circus and a trainer with Westside Circus in Melbourne, Australia.
My work as a circus and physical theatre practitioner centres on the use of circus skills to illustrate narrative and thematic concepts and frequently incorporates themes and aesthetics drawn from fairytales and speculative fiction as well, increasingly, as queer issues.
I view my job as being the creation of moments of heightened reality; to make the world just that bit brighter and clearer for the audience.
For me one of the most exciting things about performing in a circus based context is that audiences come to you already prepared to experience wonders. Having a professional reason to be this in-touch with my body is a major plus as well, of course.
My professional idols are people like Emilie Autumn, David Bowie, Terry Pratchett & Amanda Palmer; people who either make this world more bearable or create new ones for you to visit & grow stronger in. That’s what I want to do with my work. I’m aware at all times when teaching that I might be able to have the same kind of influence on one of the students, so I want to do my very best for them. It’s a form of paid-forward gratitude, as much as anything else.

A big part of the reason I took to this project is that I’d heard you could travel with it internationally and see the world. This seemed like a good chance to get some of that in my life.
As described above, it also seemed like a good chance to give back to the international circus community.

With IFALL so far I’ve been helping out on office tasks like:

• the preparation of a report on refugee housing in Sweden over the past two years,
• established a curriculum and begun teaching a regular circus class as well as some school incursions at a local primary and facilitating a Thursday night exercise-chaos session for local and refugee children
• started setting up a craft room at the local riding school to prepare sets, props and costumes for theatrical endeavors
• learnt a little Swedish

I’m pleased to have created a structure for our circus classes; I want to set up a strong foundation for the CirkusSkola to continue with after I’ve left and this is an important part of that.

I’m also gratified to see the way our students are responding to the culture of athletic practice we’re trying to create. For example last Tuesday we ran an extended workshop in which we brought group based trust-falls and very basic pitching into the mix, and we got to see the kids go from relative shyness to gleefully throwing eachother almost a metre into the air over the course of less than half an hour. A lot of these people have really remarkable levels of talent and courage; It’s a joy to witness.

When I’m in cities I tend to go out and look around a great deal, and try to make friends. In small places like Örkelljunga I keep to myself quite a lot; I’ve been doing a lot of recreational reading and research online and trying to stay connected with my international community.
Prosaically enough to the extent that I’ve had any culture shock at all it’s mostly been linguistic in nature, and discovered mainly at the supermarket.
There are so many more types of spreadable cheese over here than back home. We have crispbread in in Australia, but it’s a weak and pale imitation of the knackebrod they have here.
There are types of onion flavoured yoghurt I spotted a month or so ago and I’m an open minded guy, I thought maybe the local flavor pallet is just that different from what I’m used to…I have since been informed that it’s for stirring into soup, not for eating with a spoon.
The word for the herb ‘tarragon’ in Svensk is ‘dragon’, which rather surprised me when I saw it listed as an ingredient on some bearnaise sauce.

Outside of the supermarket there is this wonderful morning/afternoon tea convention here that they call ‘fika’, which seems to mean ‘coffee and cake’.

Professionally I’ve been refining the teaching techniques for juggling and handstand that my own trainers taught me, and developing some work-arounds for the language barrier.
So much of my teaching style until now has been bound up with describing either the experience or feeling of doing the trick correctly, or the correct mindset to help the technique, but that is impossible to do in detail without a shared language, so I’m finding other methods and leaning a lot harder into demonstration. It’s inefficient but it works. I’m gathering up relevant vocabulary relatively quickly, too.

Personally I’m confirming a lot of things I already knew; my ideal social environment is a city with lots of eccentrics and lots of adventures and I feel the isolation from that quite sharply, but I can counterbalance that against trying new things and the delight and shock of the unfamiliar.
The ingredients of my happiness are found in socialization, purposeful movement of the body, performance, sunlight, craftsmanship and fascination. I’m doing what I can to access these things while I’m here.