Antonella Casella
Antonella is an award-winning circus performer, director, educator, facilitator, creative producer, analyst and advocate who has worked with leading Australian and international circus companies. She is particularly interested in the intersections of contemporary circus, community engagement and performances for the broadest possible audience. She sees all circus as form of embodied liberation.
For over twenty years she has created acclaimed shows, co-designed and delivered innovative social circus programs, and spearheaded artist development programs. She has worked for Circus Oz, the Women's Circus, Vulcana Women’s Circus, and Circus UK. She has collaborated with Canada’s The Seven Fingers (Les Slept Doigts), the Shanghai Circus School, and Colombia’s Teatro La Candelaria.
She is currently lecturer in circus history and culture for Australia's National Institute of Circus Arts. She is also a board member for The Circus Center, Ethiopia. See this website for updates on the build for Africa's first purpose-built hard-top circus tent.
Antonella’s circus career began when she co-founded Rock’n’Roll Circus (now known as Circa). She went on to perform at the London Circus Space, and with Circus UK and other UK-based companies. She returned to Australia to become founding Artistic Director of Brisbane’s Vulcana Women’s Circus, where she directed the company’s first six major shows to critical acclaim: "This is brilliant physical theatre ... smartly designed, conceptually coherent, musically brilliant...uplifts the spirits as triumphantly as the performers built their towers of acrobatic bodies” (The Australian); "This show was innovative in its ideas and attention to images created in terms of the women’s bodies and how they used them ... The fact that a collaboration on such as scale as Vulcana, which involved 50 women over an eight-month period culminated in a show of this scale and professional standard speaks volumes of the courage and determination of all involved. And that’s real community cultural development!” (Brisbane Community Arts Network News).
More recently, at Circus Oz, as Senior Artistic Associate (2014-2019), she spearheaded and curated various artform development programs including The Strong Women Program, Sidesault-in-Residence, and the Green Room award-winning Sidesault-at-the-Melba Festival, an experimental circus festival curated with a view to "pushing the artform into new spaces" (Theatrepress). Arts Hub described the festival as "playful, provocative, boldly original...an exhilarating night...to be congratulated."