TALKING to Yaron Lifschitz, the artistic director of Circa, the extraordinary physical theatre company from Queensland, proves to be a surprise.

His recent works have been praised as “stunning”, “exquisite” and “the standard to which all other circuses can aspire”, but he’d rather talk about mathematical concepts than theatre.

He may have directed more than 60 productions “from Buenos Aires to Port Macquarie”, as he says, but when it comes down to it, he absolutely loathes theatre in the normal sense of the word, preferring to play with abstract ideas and shapes in the never-ending hope of being able to conjure up “electricity”.

Lifschitz’s alma maters are the University of NSW and NIDA, both hubs of drama, but he’s no conventional theatre expert and at university quickly gave up drama studies in favour of maths, English literature and his favourite – history, which he describes as “my single academic passion”.

“Mine is not the background you would expect,” Lifschitz says. “I basically failed as a theatre director, I just didn’t like it, I didn’t understand actors and I didn’t see my work as a set of stories.”

So out why on earth did he go into it? I ask.

“The reason was that electric moment at the beginning of a show when the lights went down – I felt jolted by electricity, anything seemed possible,” he says.

“What would I need to do to keep that energy going? At first I didn’t have much luck, so I continued directing and I suppose I could have continued for a long time.”

But Queensland – “a strange place,” he says – offered him a new way and Circa fitted into his “mission” without ever being planned that way. As in the Zen proverb, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”, Circa taught him how to explore concepts far beyond the literal storytelling of the south.

“Beyond” serves as an example. It’s been described as “dreamy and hallucinogenic” – there’s a man in a bear suit, women in outsized white rabbit heads moving to music from Frank Sinatra, Bonnie Tyler and Amanda Palmer, and there’s a breathtaking trapeze act in which gender roles are undermined.

As for the animals, that came in a bolt of inspiration while he was having an afternoon nap in Paris.

“I woke my partner up and told her, ‘they’re all animals’… my idea is that we all have an inner animal – a whole zoo – my proposition is that you can’t understand your own humanity unless you embrace this animal,” he says.

The show went through “so many iterations” as he worked with designers who created stages within stages and costumiers who brought the inner and outer animals together. Above all, he says, there was his “really fantastic cast – it hasn’t been easy for them.”

One thing Lifschitz can’t stand in the theatre is what he terms “unloving energy”, something often seen in circus. “I wanted tender, surreal, warm-hearted theatre, but not a sentimental show,” he says.

As well, he wanted to avoid the dangers of easy laughs. “It would be far too easy to turn it into the comic… you need a degree of grit and thoughtfulness to achieve its full range.”

“Beyond,” Canberra Theatre, February 25-28, pre-show forum, Wednesday, February 25 at 6.30pm, bookings to canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.