Carnival Cinema –

Carnival Cinema connects the Australian Sideshow, Circus, Cabaret & Physical Performance community as well as other artistic inhabitants of our subculture, Musicians, visual artists, makers and creators of all types.

We aim to inspire, inform, celebrate, help sustain and reflect our community to a global distributed worldwide online audience via our various arms: This Online Magazine, Art Photography, Video, our online channels, our events and movie nights. We aim to provide a regular stream of stunning imagery, connection, reflection and inspiration as well as contribute to and support the mental well being of our community.

We are a part of a community, creating and curating a collection of words & pictures, moving & still. We reflect the community of sweaty acrobats, inventive makers, hold-fast riggers, compulsive aerialists, indefatigable technicians, obsessive jugglers, resourceful stage managers, addicted hoopers, gutsy tour managers, self-made freaks, ingenious musicians and fanatical supporters and volunteers that make up the community of people we know, love and work with. A close-knit family built from warm generous support, deep irreverent curiosity and sheer audacious spectacle. An online hub celebrating Australian Circus Culture, and sharing it with the planet.

Carnival Cinema was founded by Hamish McCormick and Frodo Sandven Aka Captain Frodo in 2003. Based on Hamish’s incredible video and photography work, and inspired by Frodo’s storytelling and showmanship, it is now a hub for the Australian Sideshow, Circus, Cabaret & Physical Performance community. While Frodo has continued to tour the world as a New Vaudevillian, Author and Director, Hamish ‘became’ Carnival Cinema and since 2005 has been shooting thousands of hours of unique onstage, backstage and offstage circus footage and thousands of stills.

In 2018 Carnival Cinema expanded to include Kareena Hodgson and Mike Finch, who came on board to help grow Carnival Cinema into its next iteration.

Things in the works: Carnival Cinema Podcast, Physical magazine and more events where we can connect in real life.

Circus . Community . Connection . Culture

 

The People –

 

Hamish McCormick – Founder, Creative Director, Executive Producer & Editor in Chief……..

I could add: chief photographer, video guy, website manager, graphic designer, marketer, mailchimp novice, reluctant social media guy, sales rep, office boy but I won’t……………………………………………doh!

Hang on I’ll get serious – actually I’ll get Mike to write my blurb!

Hamish McCormick is a filmmaker, photographer and documentarian. Originally a Circus/Sideshow performer he’s now primarily a documenter of the contemporary circus, sideshow and new vaudeville community in Australia. Hamish trained with Rock n Roll Circus as a teenager and went to the National Circus Festival, Golconda Tasmania as their stage manager at the tender age of 15 in 1996 and never looked back. He left school at 17 to work ‘fulltime’ with Spaghetti Circus, was in the inaugural intake of Australia’s National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) in 1999, before working as a freelance circus/sideshow performer and trainer. He performed with, or ‘trained’ for, The Happy Sideshow, The Flying Fruit Fly Circus, Strut’n’Fret, Arena Theatre Company, The National Circus Festival and Circus Oz. And toured Australia and the world to many many places, countries and festivals.

In 2003 Hamish focused his career on being a videographer and filmmaker and formed Carnival Cinema with Captain Frodo, whilst they were both performing with The Happy Sideshow. By 2005 he had given up performing and was fully committed to documenting the live performing arts as a director of photography, editor, director and producer as carnival Cinema.

Hamish documents and promotes the festivals, companies, tours and individual artists that make up this vibrant and booming contemporary circus sub-culture, capturing their performances, behind-the-scenes footage and interviews. The list of artists and companies that Hamish has shot and collaborated with is literally a Who’s Who of the contemporary Australian circus scene.

In 2017 Hamish started this, the Carnival Cinema Online Magazine as the next phase of this lifelong project.

He is also a dad of 2 rocking kids and partner of the amazingly talented musician, composer & teacher Suzanne Simpson and resides in Mullumbimby, Northern NSW on beautiful Bundjalung country.

 

Kareena Hodgson –  Senior Editor, Executive Coach, Moral Backbone.

Kareena Hodgson started her career as an acrobat, aerialist and circus performer with Brisbane’s legendary Rock’n’Roll Circus. Eventually, she joined Circus Oz and toured the world, on the way almost single-handedly inspiring Australia’s circus hula hoop craze. Kareena was a full-time professional international circus performer for 20 years, before starting a new career as a life coach and counsellor after the birth of her two children. Kareena is now a qualified and accredited life coach and counsellor. The Manifesto is her professional consultancy. She has a fierce loyalty to her partner, her children, her friends and her clients. One area of her practice is to work with artists/performers/crew around the difficulties attached to touring, creating and performing life. Kareena’s experience as a mother, partner, daughter, sister, performer and producer means she has a deep understanding of the multiple roles we play and the need for reinvention throughout their lives. Kareena’s experiences provide many of the metaphors and analogies that underpin her practice.

More Kareena & Manifesto at – http://www.the-manifesto.com.au/

Mike Finch – Creative Producer, Connector, Strategist.

With a small group of friends, Mike co-founded the companies Precarious and Circus Monoxide, touring Australia in an outdoor show based off a double-decker bus. In 1997, at the age of 27, Mike was given the job of Artistic Director and co-CEO of Circus Oz, a role he held for over 17 years. During his term, he was responsible for creating or overseeing all of Circus Oz’s performance work and building the business to annually tour across Australia and the world, from Arnhem Land to 42nd Street New York, London to Broome, across Europe and quite a few places in between. Now he’s a freelance idiot, a freelance Change Agent, Event Director, Facilitator and Consultant, advising on Creativity, Innovation and Communication.

Other excellent Carnival Cinema Contributors, Inspirations & Trouble Makers:

Captain Frodo – Columnist & Carnival Cinema Co-Founder

Master Showman, Writer & Carnival Philosopher. Currently residing in Las Vegas. You might remember him from such stages as, La Clique, la Soiree, Circus Oz, The Happy Sideshow, Opium.

On Carnival Cinema you’ll find his musings at ‘On The Way Of the Showman’. 

Captain Frodo – Facebook Page

Kate Pardey – Contributing Photographer

Over the past three years, Kate Pardey and her camera have been unintentionally creating a photographic survey of the real moments of the friends and performers on the travelling carnival circuit of some of the world’s largest performing arts festivals (particularly the Adelaide and Edinburgh festival fringes/fringe festivals). A world she first entered as a quiet kid sent to theatre class in the Adelaide Hills who slowly grew to love the world behind the stage, and then as a professional stage manager and lighting designer.

Website: https://katepardey.com/

Intagram: @katepardey

Facebook: Kate Pardey Photography

Aaron Walker – Contributing Photographer

Aaron is a professional photographer with a fifteen-year career in the arts industry as an international aerial performer, circus trainer and show consultant. Specialising in capturing physical movement, and portraiture. His passion for photography grew once he started capturing artists on stage and behind the scenes. During his extensive touring he has photographed a wide range of cultures, people and places.

Website: www.aaronwalkerphotography.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/aaronwalkerphotography/

Instagram: www.instagram.com/aawalkerphoto/

 

Adrienne Truscott  – Guest Writer (See her posts Here)

Adrienne Truscott has been making genre-straddling work in New York City and abroad for over 20 years. The Wau Wau Sisters, her neo-vaudevillian collaboration with Tanya Gagne, has been presented by such iconic venues as the Sydney Opera House (Aus), Joe’s Pub and CBGB’s (NYC), Victoria Arts Center (Melbourne) and The Roundhouse (London). The Wau Wau sisters are fixtures at most Fringe Festivals and are seen regularly in the international sensations La Soiree and La Clique. Their contemporaries broadly recognize the influence of their radical and ludicrous take on circus and cabaret and received a Herald Angel Award among others. Her evening-length solo and group works have been presented at Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Just For Laughs, Darwin Festival, PS122, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, Dublin Fringe, Danspace, and Dance Theater Workshop among others and she is the recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, the Fosters’ Panel Prize, and the Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Ingenuity and was a finalist for the Total Theater Award for experimentation with form.

Truscott has taught at Wesleyan University Dance Department and Sarah Lawrence College’s Theater and Dance Departments and is currently teaching at Bard College, Barnard College and the Pratt Institute.

 

Simone O’Brien – Guest Writer (See her posts – Here)

Simone is a performance maker specialising in circus & physical theatre for over 30 years. She is passionate about social circus, making work in alternate spaces & creating large-scale, site-specific performance. She was Spaghetti Circus Creative Director 2014 -2017, Legs on the Wall Artistic Associate 2006 – 2012 and has worked for Circus Oz, Stalker, Urban Theatre Projects, NIDA, NICA and many youth circuses including Fruities, Brewarrina, Sandfly, Corrugated Iron, Aerialize and Catapult Festival and was co-founder of notorious ’90’s aerial group Club Swing. She recently co-founded the Not For Profit SeedArts Australia with Jacqui Levy to deliver quality community arts projects with, by and for regional and remote communities. Website – https://www.seedartsaustralia.com.au/

 

Chris Bennett – Contributing Film Maker

Chris (Aka Underground Media) is a filmmaker based out of Melbourne but he is happy to travel for work!

Check out more of his work below –

Follow Chris on Vimeo  and Youtube

Chris’s ‘non-circus’ Showreel on Vimeo.

Underground Media website 

 

John W McCormick – Contributing Photographer

Hamish’s dad………………Thats it!

No there is more – he is an amazing photographer that has been documenting the arts and alternative community in the Byron Shire for the last 37 or so years. I don’t know where I get it from.

There are many more 1 off Contributors writing great things or taking excellent photographs. Big ups and respect to all of those!

As always a special shout out to all the Carnival Cinema Members out there,
Many Thanks!

Cross your bones.

Carnival Cinema

Hamish,

Mike and Kareena

The way we do things around here is that regardless of Age, Gender, Sexuality or Ethnicity, our philosophy and our logo stands for inclusion, safety, connection and family.

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We acknowledge the people of the Bundjalung Nation, traditional custodians of the land on which this Newsletter and the Magazine originates and pay our respects to their elders past, present and future.
The way we do things around here is that regardless of Age, Gender, Sexuality, Ethnicity our philosophy and our logo stands for inclusion, safety, connection and family.

*If you enjoy this magazine and you believe its adding value to our awesome subculture and community and you want to see it continue and grow, please consider supporting it by becoming a Carnival Cinema Member for as little US$5 each month – the price of a beer!