To celebrate 40 years of the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, the Borderville Circus Festival will feature a week of performances and workshops from December 4 to 7 all focused around the Circus Big Top in Hovell Tree Park in Albury.

It is the same location as the first performance of the circus in the summer of 1979.

Forty years ago Murray River Performing Group ran a children's holiday program along with a few circus artists. Together they trained more than 80 children in six weeks.

The resultant show by the so-called Flying Fruit Fly Circus in Hovell Tree Park was a resounding success.

Flying Fruit Fly Circus artistic director Anni Davey said it was apt for the company to return to its roots.

She said while the original circus was meant to perform only once, it had sown the seeds for a unique and contemporary company on the Border.

"Forty years ago an extraordinary thing happened in Albury; a bunch of ordinary, country kids trained together and made a circus!" she said.

"That circus is still here, still strong and still leading and influencing the development of contemporary circus throughout the world."

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Throughout the anniversary celebrations, the feature event will be a new work, Back in the Big Top, created by Davey herself.

Back in the Big Top will showcase the current 79 students of the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, aged 8-19.

It will be created in collaboration with artists from Circus Oz and Casus and will be the first time the ensemble has performed together.

"It is a family show and it really celebrates the spirit of the Fruities," Davey said.

Also created especially for the festival, Fruities at 40 is a one-night-only, cabaret performance to celebrate four decades of talent, passion, magic, mayhem and unbreakable spirit, featuring generations of Flying Fruit Fly Circus superstars.

Other events include Circus Open House, open workshops for children new to circus, Now and Then, a circus documentary double bill with Regent Cinemas, plus Capturing Creativity, an exhibition by Border photographer Ian Sutherland, who has been documenting the circus for the past five years.