Australian circus performer and burlesque artist Adam Malone will be spreading joy in Auckland Arts Festival circus show La Ronde this March. Talking to YOUR EX’s Oliver Hall, he discusses communicating without words, seducing straight audiences, and collective orgasms.
Scroll through Adam Malone’s Instagram and you’ll find the tagline that pretty much sums it up: “spreading my legs for a living.” When I ask if that really captures his attitude to performance, the answer is immediate and deadpan. “Literally,” he says. “It’s my full-time job.”
That frank, self-aware humour is part of Malone’s charm — but it also masks an artist with extraordinary discipline, range, and depth. A circus-trained acrobat, burlesque performer, cabaret artist and gender-blurring showstopper, Malone is appearing in La Ronde, one of the headline circus-cabaret offerings at Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival. And while there is plenty of skin, sweat, and sensuality on display, what he’s really offering is something far more intentional: connection.
Read My Body Language
Malone’s work is largely wordless. Storytelling, for him, happens through muscle memory, gaze, rhythm, and risk. “Intention is everything,” he explains. “Circus is interesting because you’re working with apparatus, which actually makes it harder than dance in some ways. Dance is a language. Circus is… weirder.”
In La Ronde, Malone isn’t trying to narrate a neat beginning-middle-end. Instead, he’s exploring ideas — especially the tension and interplay between masculinity and femininity. “I can show people who I am, and through that, they can learn something about themselves,” he tells us.
It’s an approach that feels particularly resonant in a show performed in the round, where audiences don’t just watch the artists, but watch each other watching. “The audience becomes a collective organism,” Malone says. “When you’re working in the round, everyone can see everyone else. It’s our job to unify them, and that energy just bounces back and forth.”
Straight Men & Queer Joy
Despite the overt sensuality of his work, Malone says audiences — including straight audiences — are overwhelmingly positive. Sometimes, though, you can spot discomfort. “You see people who physically can’t look at you,” he laughs. “And they don’t realise we can see them.”
What surprises him most, though, is straight men. “Especially straight men on dates. They’re often respectful, engaged, and having the best time.”
Audience reactions shift depending on how Malone presents. In drag, the dynamic changes entirely. “People are desperate for attention,” he says. “I can push things further.” Out of drag — as he is in La Ronde — the energy softens. “It’s more relaxed. More about making people comfortable. Both are valuable.”
That comfort matters, especially when the stakes are personal. Some of the most meaningful feedback Malone receives doesn’t come from critics or industry peers, but from audience members in the foyer after the show. “Mums coming up to me and saying, ‘If my son turns out like you, I’ll be happy.’ Or people asking advice for queer or trans kids. Or saying it was their first night out in ages. Those moments are what keep it special.”
From Central Coast to the Centre Stage
Malone grew up on the Central Coast of New South Wales, between Sydney and Newcastle. Circus wasn’t an early ambition so much as an accident of proximity. A local circus school opened — part training ground, part production company — and Adam, who hailed from a family of gymnastic enthusiasts, was quickly ushered onto the stage. “They saw something in me,” Malone says, “and I started working professionally as a soloist really young.”
Through his teenage years, Malone performed while finishing school, before stepping away briefly to explore makeup artistry and nightlife on Sydney’s Oxford Street. It was there he first encountered drag — well before Drag Race reshaped the scene.
“We were this arty drag collective,” he recalls. “Very girly, strong gender illusion — a bit Courtney Act, a bit Vanity — but also darker. I was a spooky bitch.” Eventually, he realised he wasn’t finished with circus. That pull led him to Melbourne and to NICA — the National Institute of Circus Arts — where he returned to formal training and committed fully to performance.
Today, drag still exists in Malone’s work, but in evolved form. “Now it’s more me in a wig with heavier makeup,” he says. “More sideshow. More gender-fuck energy.” In La Ronde, though, he’s unapologetically male.
The Evolution of Performance
Being a full-time performer might look glamorous from the outside, but Malone is clear-eyed about the realities. Physical labour, financial precarity, and the knowledge that an acrobat’s body has an expiry date all factor into his creative drive.
“I love change,” he says. “Creating new costumes, new acts, new ideas.” That need to evolve isn’t just artistic — it’s practical. “As an acrobat, your body won’t do this forever. But in burlesque, sideshow, performance art — ageism doesn’t exist in the same way. People thrive into their fifties. You evolve with your art.”
That evolution is visible in La Ronde, where Malone performs both a hoop act and a Washington trapeze act — balancing the trapeze on his head in a rare, old-school feat that still makes audiences gasp. “Hoops are stressful,” he admits. “High speed, high power, painful! Trapeze is intense too, but once you’re there, you can almost zen out. Your muscles just know what to do.”
The first head balance, he says, always lands hard with the audience. “People don’t see that act very often anymore.”
Chemistry, consent and banger after banger
La Ronde brings together an international cast, and that diversity is part of its appeal — and its challenge. “Communication and consent are everything,” Malone says. “It’s an international industry, so learning how to communicate across languages and cultures is essential. You compromise. You make it work.”
For audiences who think they’ve “seen it all,” Malone has a simple challenge: “If you can’t show someone something new, get off the stage.”
This show, he promises, delivers. “There are no slow numbers. It’s banger after banger. High energy, fun, and genuinely surprising.”
And if you’re wondering what the sexiest costume he’s ever worn might be? That’s easy.
“My trapeze costume in this show!”
Adam Malone may be spreading his legs for a living — but what he’s really doing is opening space: for pleasure, for recognition, and for audiences to see themselves reflected back.
