The Flying Fruit Fly Circus is fresh from a triumphant season at the Auckland Arts Festival where the show sold more than 4000 tickets and critics and audiences alike were unanimous in their praise for the Albury-Wodonga based young artists.

“It went really well, the show was received brilliantly,” Fruit Flies artistic director Jodie Farrugia says.

“It is always challenge taking 17 young people on tour anywhere let alone overseas. We are very proud of them. They did a fantastic job.”

JUNK features performers aged between 10 and 18 and was developed over several years and looks at the question “do we over supervise our children in this day and age?”.

The show tackles themes around risk and adventure, and it takes audiences back to the 1940s before television, iPhones and WiFi, when the street or backyard was a playground of limitless potential.

“I was very interested in exploring what it meant for children in a time when they were more unsupervised, when they were left to their own devices,” Mrs Farrugia says. “I started to pinpoint children in the 1940s for a number of reasons. One, it was pre-television so that technology hadn’t crept into homes yet.

“It was also post depression and war, a time when families were trying to making the ends meet day to day.”

To develop the storyline Fruit Flies students interviews residents at Westmonth Aged Care, Baranduda, about their childhood memories and how they played.

Using that information, the show was crafted – featuring a modern teenager finding himself in a 1940s-era junk yard.

JUNK is among the largest shows the Fruit Fly Circus has produced and will tour NSW, ACT and Victoria  over the next month. It enjoyed sell-out seasons at Sydney Opera House and Arts Centre Melbourne in 2017.

“It’s always really nice when we get to perform in Albury or Wodonga because the crowd is so supportive,” Mrs Farrugia says.