About
About CommunityCircus and How This Directory Is Put Together
What the site is for, and the rules it follows.
CommunityCircus is a reference site for circus in New Zealand. It exists because the underlying information is entirely real but badly scattered: every school and company publishes its own details perfectly well, and nothing anywhere gathers them into a single comparable form that lets a reader weigh one against another.
The site is editorial rather than commercial in how it is put together. Organisations appear here because they operate in this country, entries are grouped by region rather than ranked in any order of preference, and every listing links out to the organisation’s own page as the authority on its own details.
What is listed, and what is not
Schools, community trusts, performing companies and national bodies are all listed here. Individual coaches and one-off workshops are deliberately not, because they change far too quickly for any directory to track without becoming actively misleading to the people who most need the information to be correct, and the same applies to anything advertised only for a single season.
Timetables, term dates and prices are deliberately left out for exactly the same reason. They move every term without announcement, and a page that repeats them ends up quietly wrong for most of the year while continuing to look entirely authoritative to any reader encountering it for the very first time.
How the guides are written
The skills pages aim to answer the question people actually have before booking anything: what does this discipline demand physically, how long until something finally works, and what will the first few weeks genuinely feel like. That is considerably more useful to a beginner than a description of the apparatus.
Where a figure is genuinely variable, the guides say so plainly rather than inventing a false precision that would read better. Learning times and costs differ enough between individual people and between providers that any single confident number would be misleading to most of the readers who relied on it.
Why a directory rather than a blog
The gap this site fills is structural rather than editorial. Individual schools and companies already explain themselves perfectly well on their own pages; what has never existed is anything that lets a reader see all of them at once and work out which is relevant to them, and closing it needs a directory.
That shapes what gets written here. Pages are built to be read once, acted on, and left, rather than followed as a stream of new posts. A reader who finds a school near them and never returns has been served exactly as intended by the site, which is a deliberately unfashionable way to run a site.
Corrections
Directory entries go out of date steadily as organisations move premises, rename themselves, change focus or close down altogether. Corrections are genuinely useful and are acted on, particularly where an organisation has substantially changed what it does or has stopped operating without announcing it anywhere public, and a stale entry looks exactly as authoritative as a correct one.
Additions are equally welcome and arguably more valuable. The intention is coverage of every established circus organisation in the country, and the remaining gaps are far more likely to be in the smaller regions than in the main centres, where the established providers are already well documented, because an unknown organisation is the one a local reader most needs.
Get in touchThe contact page has the details, and the full listing being described here is the directory.
Questions people ask
How are organisations chosen for the directory?
By whether they actually operate, and by very little else. Established schools, community trusts and performing companies working in New Zealand are listed regardless of their size or how long they have been running, and every entry links out to the organisation’s own page rather than attempting to replace it.
Why are prices and timetables not published here?
Because they change every single term, and any directory that repeats them is quietly wrong within a few weeks while still looking perfectly authoritative. Listing the listed organisation and linking straight to its own page keeps the information accurate at the one point where it genuinely matters to a reader.
Can an organisation be added or corrected?
Yes, and both are genuinely useful. Corrections to an existing entry and additions of organisations that are actually operating are equally welcome, particularly from the smaller regions where coverage is thinnest. The contact page explains what information is helpful to send and how to send it, and a correction naming the specific entry.