It shaped how you move through the world.
THRESHOLD
What if fear isn't the enemy?
What if it's the most intelligent signal your body produces?
THRESHOLD is a contemporary circus work that asks one question:
What lives on the other side of what you have always been afraid to feel?
Ten acts. Four divine archetypes. Two human characters navigating the three distortions of fear.
Aerial apparatus, fire, contact improvisation, dance, movement, and partner acrobatics.
Built from thirty years of clinical practice and doctoral research in Consciousness Studies,
every act is a nervous system event designed to be felt before it is understood.
"This is not aesthetic darkness for its own sake.
It is a show that knows exactly what it is doing with an audience's nervous system."
"This is not a show you simply watch.
It is a show that watches you back."
A bold debut production featuring mesmerising acts, striking visual worlds, and Perth performers unafraid to hold a mirror to what lives beneath the surface.
The final image is six bodies holding fire above their heads in the dark. Terror and awe in the same breath. Refusing to choose between them.
That image does not leave an audience. It does not leave the room.
Harrison Production · Perth, Western AustraliaTEN ACTS
An opening, ten acts, and a finale — a journey through the body of fear
"She has been waiting inside your fear this whole time."
A world premiere from Perth's own Harrison Production.
Born at the intersection of art, nervous system science, and thirty years of clinical depth.
Not a show about fear.
A show that moves through fear with you.
THRESHOLD is built from the inside out. Every act is a nervous system event. Every archetype maps onto a real fear pattern that lives inside a human body. The aerial sequences, the fire, the contact improvisation — none of it is spectacle for spectacle's sake.
The show draws on polyvagal theory, Kabbalistic cosmology, and thirty years of complex trauma work. The result is a production that audiences don't just watch — they regulate, they remember, they recognise something in themselves they did not have language for before.
That is THRESHOLD. Psychologically rigorous. Physically extraordinary. Emotionally undeniable.
"Bodies that know something your mind has not yet caught up to."
Aerial apparatus including silks, chains, and cane work. Contact improvisation between archetypes and human characters. Partner acrobatics that maps the nervous system's push and pull. Live voice woven through every transition.
And fire. Held by people who have learned to stop running from it.
Perth performers. Perth premiere. A show made for and by this city.
MEET THE CREATIVE TEAM
Cynthia J. Harrison is a practitioner researcher whose career spans thirty years across social work, anthropology, trauma-informed and somatic practice, and the visual arts. She holds degrees in social work and visual arts, a Master's degree, and is completing her PhD in Consciousness Studies. Her clinical background includes complex trauma specialism with a particular focus on the nervous system and the body. Her work in trauma led her past language-based therapy toward the body itself, training in sandplay therapy in Switzerland and sensory motor psychotherapy. As a visual artist she has exhibited and spoken internationally, served as Artist in Residence for the Stillpoint Institute, and is a published author and creator of Spirit Whisperer, an interview series featuring international leaders and visionaries. She is the founder of the Academy for Conscious Evolution. THRESHOLD is the theatrical realisation of her research and her first production made together with her daughter.
Tara Harrison is an award-winning aerialist, creative producer, and co-director of THRESHOLD. An electrician by trade and circus artist by calling, she moves between switchyards and aerial rigs with equal fluency, carrying the precision of her trade into everything she creates. Her performance work spans aerial, flow, fire, and large-scale feature acts, backed by professional rigging knowledge and her own aerial rig hire business. As a producer she champions Western Australia's independent circus and festival communities, platforming local talent at Merge, Blossom, Blazing Swan, SURGE, and Perth's Air Nightclub. She mentors emerging artists and speaks to young women as a STEM presenter. THRESHOLD is her first co-production with her mother.
Cast — Coming Soon
Fractal, fluid, curious. The feminine explores before she fears. An aerial artist whose movement is instinctive before it becomes compulsive.
Fierce, precise, uncompromising. The shadow that protects the unprotected. Requires an artist whose body reads as authority.
Still, warm, continuous. The presence is the room-regulator. Her act is a nervous system event. Voice and aerial combined into something that arrives rather than performs.
Opens alone, in darkness and breath. Must hold the audience before a single word is spoken. Cane work, stillness, and partner acrobatics in the final act.
The body that cannot rest. Hypervigilance made visible. Movement that reads as survival — relentless, searching, unable to settle.
The heart that cannot open. Contact improvisation that maps the body's approach-and-retreat from intimacy. Requires an artist who can hold ambivalence in their body without resolving it.
Six bodies. Fire above heads. The image that does not leave an audience. The Finale requires performers who can hold fire and stillness simultaneously — terror and awe in the same breath.
Harrison Production is a Perth-based, mother-daughter creative team. Founded by Cynthia J. Harrison and Tara Harrison, it exists to make work that is psychologically rigorous, physically extraordinary, and made with and for this city.
The name Harrison carries two women — a mother and a daughter — who decided the work they were each already making would be stronger, stranger, and more alive if they made it together.
THRESHOLD is the debut production. It will not be the last.
Perth · Western Australia · Est. 2025