A circus show that tackles gender politics and body-shaming amid aerials, comedy, and spoken word? Why not? New Zealand’s genre- and now gender-busting Dust Palace company has been “renovating” circus since its beginnings in 2009.

The troupe brought its grittily spectacular The Goblin Market, an adult exploration of sexuality and addiction, here in 2017. Now, to kick off the Cultch’s annual winter Femme Series, it’s bringing The WonderWombs, an acrobatic creation that upends the traditional foundation of its art form: the highly gendered roles in acrobatics that have seen muscular artists swinging and catching sequin-clad women for more than a century.

“You’ve got the strongman and the tiny ballerinalike aerialist—that would be the dynamic from the past,” says Dust Palace cofounder and performer Eve Gordon, speaking to the Straight from her home in Auckland, where she reports the orange-glowing sky being caused by smoke from Australian bush fires has finally dissipated. “It’s the assumption that you need the man in the story to make the skills hard and the tricks difficult and the circus of it exciting. There’s a feeling working in circus that you need the men’s power to make the thing right.

“From a whole show-creation position, we said, ‘Okay, you don’t have that dynamic of a very heteronormative relationship that the audience can cling on to, so what stories can come out of that?’ ”

Ironically, she points out, even in the old days of travelling circuses, any women doing these athletic feats would have to be “tough cookies”. And here’s where body image comes into the story.

“We were definitely interested in exploring the physicality and the fact that all these amazing circus women are incredibly muscular and are often still considered by society as masculine,” Gordon explains. “Interestingly, many of us [in the show] came through our childhoods wanting to be tomboyish for a variety of reasons. So we were wanting to be very clear about the construction of gender and what that is and how we each choose to express that.”

The end product is a show that manages to merge feminist ideas and sex-positivity with the magic of circus, with seven female and nonbinary performers mashing together acrobatics, burlesque, dance, and spoken word. There’s a lot of laughter amid the silk, hoop, and cyr-wheel work, but the show takes you into some darker territory as well. One rope act ventures into a story of sexual assault; an empowering aerial number takes pole dance out of the strip-club. Look also for sendups of male posturing in gyms, and a mock fashion show where one participant tries to “wear” both virgin and whore stereotypes.

Gordon says the mix was the result of a unique process that brought the group together in late 2018 with newcomers like director Jess Holly Bates and choreographer Hannah Tasker-Poland. They spent as much time in discussions as they did defying gravity in Dust Palace’s studio.

“We really wanted to make sure that everything came directly out of us,” Gordon explains. “So we talked a lot in an honest way about our pasts—things that made us the way we were and why we’d chosen to be aerialists and what that means in society.”

That emotional honesty is at the root of The WonderWombs’ messages, Gordon says. Her troupe is known for presenting its interdisciplinary circus on an intimate scale that makes it even more awe-inducing. But there’s something unique to circus that opens viewers up to connect emotionally, she suggests. “The spectacle of it—the adrenaline, the fear, the possibility of something going awry—those things are what can strip away an audience’s filters. So you get to the layers underneath. For a person who's just gone, 'Agghhh!'" she says with a gasping noise, "that leads to the story, and you can affect an audience more in circus.

“This show came out of some of the rawest parts of all of us as people,” she adds. “And it’s very real-life stuff. None of us are putting ourselves in another life or acting characters.” In other words, these are real women—ones who just happen to be able to pull off unreal acts.

The Cultch presents The WonderWombs at the York Theatre from Tuesday (January 14) to January 19.