Keith Gow, Writer

Andrew grew up in Perth but moved to Singapore, where he became a model and an actor – and a coveted very-white-man in the gay community. Ming was born in Singapore but moved to Perth at a young age, unable to go back to his homeland, for fear of being trapped there, forced to do military service. What happens next is a clash-of-cultures, a white boy feeling unappreciated and an Asian man being kept from his family and his history. But it’s messier than that, as history and gay sex tend to be. The spectre of colonialism remains in the form of a regressive law that makes sex between adult men illegal. And the lessons Andrew is learning are steering dangerously close to the cringeworthy novel by Elizabeth Gilbert – Eat, Pray, Love – later turned into a film starring Julia Roberts. Sutherland and his co-writer Vidya Rajan throw a lot of ideas at the wall, scrape them off, put them in a blender, and have the traditional Singaporean symbol - the merlion - spit them out

A young man sips a glass of wine, waiting for us to file into the theatre, while Kylie plays. As we settle in, he’s a long way from settled – nervous, anxious, eager to tell us about a dream he’s had. Even though he knows that when most people recount dreams, they are dead boring. He’s a country boy who has moved to the big city – let’s call it Sydney – for university. He’s sleeping on his uncle’s couch and after being shown the expected touristy sites, he starts to explore the world by himself. He’s gay and he’s never seen a penis other than his own. He’s drawn to a busker singing “My Heart Will Go On” and shaken up by two dude-bros shouting at gay couple kissing. “Stop shoving it down our throats,” they shout, unaware of how unintentionally homoerotic they sound. The guy whose story we’ve been following, decides to follow them. And this is just the start of the first vignette in a series of short moments by Chris Edwards exploring queer sex and relationships i

The Clown (Salvador Salangstrang) walks through the audience, dressed as an astronaut, bouncing along as if doing a spacewalk. He warms up the crowd with calls of cooee, but also by orchestrating a communal rendition of the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey , “Also sprach Zarathustra” – with the audience on vocals and two volunteers on drums. “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade…” With these words from President John F. Kennedy, we are brought into the 1960s and the space race. A team of astronauts walks onto the stage – the men of the Apollo moon missions – and a voiceover describes their fitness, strength and the precise nature of their work. And with that, Cirque Stratosphere begins; a show full of athleticism that requires precision from the acrobats and performers on stage. The background of the race to the moon is backdrop, colour and movement – a subtle trajectory from earth to the stars. The real strength of the show is in