In 50-up: The Rewind, a circus cabaret set on the studio floor of Countdown, every performer is over 50. Co-founders Mary Wyer and Hazel Palmer talk ageism, aerials and the not-for-profit they built to give older Australians a way in. At Fool's Paradise, Entertainment Quarter, for Sydney Fringe, 19-20 September.
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In 50-Up: The Rewind, a funk-filled cabaret set inside a mock-up of the Countdown TV studio, featuring an ensemble of performers aged 50 and over. Mary Wyer and Hazel Palmer, co-founders of 50-Up Circus Incorporated, sit down with Sydney Dramaturgical ahead of the show's two-day Sydney Fringe run at Fool's Paradise, Entertainment Quarter, 19-20 September.
HEADER CAPTION: The 50-Up Circus cast at the Sydney Fringe 2025 Retro TV Spectacular. Photo: Tony Palmer @tonypalmer.photos
Mary Wyer took her first trapeze class on her fifty-fifth birthday. Five years later, looking around at a circus scene that made a fuss over forty-year-olds still swinging, she decided to build her own stage. 50-Up Circus started as a cold-email dare to Sydney's circus schools: send me your over-fifties. A sold-out double-bill at Sydney Trapeze School turned into a Sydney Fringe run in 2024, then a not-for-profit, then a partnership with COTA New South Wales bringing circus workshops to social housing tenants.
This year's show, The Rewind, is set on the studio floor of Countdown — the Sunday-night ritual where a generation of Australians first saw Madonna. Molly Meldrum has been reimagined, Hazel is the harried TV producer keeping the floor running, and Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights gets a spin on the lyra. Between them, Mary and Hazel talk ageism, the sandwich generation, insurance, and the creativity, commitment and joy of discovering circus at any age.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
MARY: 50-Up Circus is only a few years old. It started from me watching my daughter on the sidelines — being a circus mum, watching her do trapeze for seven years at Sydney Trapeze School. One day I thought, oh, I would've liked to have done this, but maybe it's too late. Then I saw one of the other mums up there doing trapeze and asked her how that happened. She said, 'I took classes.' And I thought, well, if she can take classes, I can take classes too. So on my fifty-fifth birthday, that's what I did. Fell totally in love with static trapeze.
About five years later, around my sixtieth, I realised there aren't many places for older people to perform. I asked Sydney Trapeze School if they'd support us putting on a show for amateurs who started circus later in life. We did. That's how I met Hazel — she was one of the responders to that call. We put on a couple of sold-out shows, got into Fringe in 2024, and at the end of that year decided to set up a not-for-profit to consolidate it.
The driver behind the shows was never for us as performers to earn money. It was to give back — use ticket sales to get other people over 50 into circus, through workshops or shows they could come and see.
MARY: We sent them a random email last year asking if they'd advertise the show to their members. They were so excited by it, they kind of took us under their wing. We've been collaborating on circus workshops for people in social housing groups. Their research shows loneliness is one of the biggest challenges people face as they get older. Circus, it turns out, is a fantastic way to bring joy to older Australians.
MARY: You need to remember we're amateur performers with day jobs. I'm a nurse. Hazel's a medical writer. We're on the edges of the scene.
HAZEL: It's not as visible in Sydney as it is in Melbourne or Adelaide. There's a lot of frustration around funding — how to apply, how to make circus visible in New South Wales. There's not a lot of recognition of it as an art form. If you know the right boxes to tick on a grant application, fine. But a lot of people struggle to get circus seen for what it is. We've got theatre, dance, music. Circus is still not quite accepted as mainstream. Versus, say, Montreal, where it's huge.
HAZEL: It's not a solution in and of itself. It provides us with a platform where we can be a bit more visible. When we contacted COTA, they took us under their wing partly because they're a not-for-profit and we're a not-for-profit — there's that shared understanding that we're doing things for the greater good rather than for money.
If we were just a group of older circus performers trying to talk to government about the mental health benefits, the social benefits, the balance, without being a not-for-profit, we wouldn't have that platform. It's useful — we're taken seriously as a group rather than just people who've come together.
MARY: It did factor in. I applied to get into a few different amateur shows, not competitions, and it sometimes felt like they made a big deal about forty-year-olds. And I'd think, well, you could have had a sixty-year-old. So, yeah, we're pushing back against that.
HAZEL: In The Rewind we're pretending the stage is a TV studio like where Countdown was filmed in the 1970s.
MARY: Countdown was a music show that was huge from the seventies into the eighties — pre-Internet, obviously. We'd run home on Sunday for six o'clock because Countdown was on and it was going to show us what the latest music was. It's where we first saw Madonna. First time you'd see overseas performers — sometimes in the live studio, sometimes just a film clip — counting down the top ten. Molly Meldrum was the emcee. A real character. He's still around.
HAZEL: So that's what we're recreating. We have our own version of Molly. I'm on the ground playing the TV producer, running around keeping everybody on track, making sure nothing goes wrong. Each artist comes out portraying a different song. Ground acts, aerial acts, hand-balancing, juggling — each act is a song.
MARY: We're quite dispersed around Sydney. We have people coming from Newcastle, from out west. Everyone trains at their own respective school in whatever they want to train in. Most of us have a preferred apparatus. I much prefer static trapeze, though I'm doing something on lyra this show. Hazel does straps and lyra. Some people do flying trapeze on top of everything else.
HAZEL: John is a hand-balancer — canes — and I convinced him to try straps, which is a pretty tough discipline to learn. It's completely the opposite of what he's used to, but he's loving it. And Delwyn, who's performing with us, is 76. She didn't start doing lyra until she was 75. She's pretty amazing.
MARY: Of course we have public liability cover. We want the people getting up in our shows to be safe. We undertake various risk assessments for each venue we perform at.
HAZEL: It's a huge consideration. People want to put their hand up, but we have to be mindful of the risks to 50-Up Circus as a group, and to them as individuals. Starting planning early helps us to manage the risks by giving everyone time to develop, rehearse and refine their act so they can perform it safely.
HAZEL: The community that opened up to me. Finding Mary, getting involved in 50-Up Circus, it opened up this wonderful community I would never have met otherwise. Taking that risk — stepping out of my comfort zone to go and do a show at a school I'd never even set foot in — brought me on a lovely journey into a beautiful community. I wasn't expecting that.
MARY: I didn't expect the friendship and connection Hazel and I have. We're really very much on the same page. Being part of something that gives back is very important to me. What surprised me was that from the first 50-Up Circus show came a not-for-profit that now works with COTA New South Wales. We might go on to do a study looking at how circus can help older people with balance, mental health, joy and belonging.
MARY: Even before the not-for-profit, my primary motivation was that I love performing. I'm always happy performing, dressing up, doing makeup, all of it. But I'm a nurse, so I'm in the caring profession anyway. Directing is a love-hate thing. It's great when it comes together and it can be very taxing and frustrating. But it's an extension of the creativity of performing — thinking of an overall creative concept. I'm just very grateful I've got Hazel to work on it with. And every person who comes to it, even though they're not performers in their daily life, arrives with something creative — sometimes hilarious, sometimes very serious.
MARY: I don't think it's made it better. But it's surprised us how we can have serious day jobs and then also have an element of creativeness. There are some who never thought of being a performer, and doing circus has made them realise how much they like it. And I think something about being older you tend to care less about what other people think. We're bringing lived experience and less worried about trying something new or having to be perfect. You give less f*cks as you get older.
MARY: If people want to join 50-UP Circus they can become a member of our organisation by visiting the website. If they want to perform then they can reply to our expressions of interest for upcoming shows. The other way to get involved, if they don't want to get up in the air, is to come and see the show.
If you've never done circus before, see what a circus or aerials school near you offers. For example, Sydney Trapeze School runs five-week terms every Saturday for absolute beginners, covering ground skills and some aerials. Otherwise, go to your local circus school and ask what they've got for a beginner coming in as an older person.
For those of with some aerials experience, George, who trains out of the Movement Academy, runs 50-Up hangouts for people to come together as a community and help each other.
MARY: Last year, doing the retro TV show, I loved bringing together the things that shaped us when we were young. We took the TV shows that inspired us as youngsters, and brought them back to life in our acts. For this year, we wanted to do something like that again. We switched the focus to music instead of TV, because everyone knows that feeling when they hear a song that mattered to them as a teenager and, of course, Countdown was a huge part of many of our lives. So, in a sense, were recreating that nostalgia.
MARY: A reminder about the show. It's on the 19th and 20th of September, at midday.
A lot of 50-Ups are in what's called The Sandwich Generation; looking after elderly parents on one end and kids on the other, and you're in the middle. So we feel like the midday slot fits perfectly.
People can bring their elderly parents and they can bring their kids. They can even make a day of it — there's actually a Sydney Trapeze School youth show, called Kaleidoscope, on after us in the same venue.
The money we make from our shows goes towards workshops and other community activities. Every ticket to a 50-UP Circus show helps another older Australian find some joy of circus. That's a really important message for us to get across.
Date: 12 noon, 19-20 September 2026
Location: The Virago at Fool's Paradise, Entertainment Quarter.
Co-founder, Producer & Performer: Mary Wyer
Co-founder, Producer & Performer: Hazel Palmer
Interviewed by Aubrey Naur.
Website: 50upcircus.org · Instagram: @50up_circus · Facebook: 50up Circus · LinkedIn: 50up-circus-incorporated · Fringe: sydneyfringe.com/events/50-up-the-rewind
Fool's Paradise, Entertainment Quarter, 122 Lang Road, Moore Park 2021 (Gadigal Country).
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