Illustration and design: Marin Remić
Illustration and design: Marin Remić

CirkoBalkana, the regional travelling festival, marks its tenth anniversary!
With the slogan LIVE CIRCUS, the festival artistic team wishes to emphasize the constant struggle to keep circus a significant art form, a form of expression and social criticism, an expression which can speak up, has something to offer, and which can stimulate thinking in these trying times of pressures, control, and various limitations.
That is why we are even more determined to fight for art that inspires us, that widens horizons and offers freedom!
Just like in the previous years, the concept of the festival is to gather and support local, regional, and European circus practices, to encourage cooperation and promote exchange of experiences, and thus present contemporary circus through its authentic and innovative performing vocabulary which comes from their transdisciplinary nature. We have prepared a programme which will give the audiences an opportunity to see the diversity of the current circus thought by artists from France, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia.
With an idea to mark this anniversary in a unique way and to offer Belgrade audiences an exceptional experience in the circus, we will set up two big tops and fill them with performances, workshops, concerts, exhibitions, film screenings, and many other activities for adults and for children. For the first time, the festival will also feature a flying trapeze, where both professionals and amateurs will have an opportunity to give it a try. 
This year, CirkoBalkana is organized in cooperation with the Italian circus group Magdaclan Circo, the Turbul circus school from France, but also as a part of the project Solo but Not Alone, carried out with the Italian contemporary circus artists from the organization Quattrox4.
We invite the audiences to join us in the celebration of the festival’s 10th anniversary, to remember the previous challenges, cooperations, and memories, but also to take a look at the uncertain future.

Welcome to Live Circus together!

The festival is organized in the partnership with BITEF festival and the French Institute in Belgrade, with the logistic support by Silosi Beograd, GAIA movement and Luka Beograd.
It is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, the City of Belgrade, Teatroskop, a program initiated by French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, French Ministry of Culture, and Institut français Paris, the region of Occitania, the Embassy of Spain in Belgrade and the Institute Cervantes, the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrade, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, and the programme Erasmus+.
 

Program
(Not) the End of the World

(Not) the End of the World

Other

Open Stage

Open Stage

CirkoBalkana 10 Festival Opening

Read more
The Crisis of Imagination

The Crisis of Imagination

The Crisis of Imagination is a contemporary circus performance that links physical theatre, object manipulation, and acrobatics, trying to transfer the adventurous, daring, and dreamy spirit of children into the spirit of adults, relying on the power of imagination. A tragicomic work, in which the characters create absurd and poetic situations full of magic, risk and fantasy.

Read more
Sound and Body

Sound and Body

Contemporary circus performance which, through an interaction between aerials and sound improvisations, speaks of the search for harmony. A body moved by music and the sound shaped by movement are combined to address the topics of control, dominance, defiance, cooperation, and coexistence, where one cannot exist without the other. Each movement of the body and of the hoop is illustrated or completely dictated by the music created on site and is in direct communication with the ...

Read more
Hemisphere

Hemisphere

It’s happening again, one thought puts them in motion. It happens 60,000 times a day. It goes on forever. Tiny molecules crash against each other, hug each other, walk, play, dance; chemical messengers respond to every stimulation, neurotransmitters of emotions. There are 60,000 modes of existence, transmissions of anger, fear, love, trust. Hemisphere is their journey, as well as it is yours: a constantly developing reaction, an homage to man and his incredible mechanism, ...

Read more
Bakéké

Bakéké

Dressed in a black overcoat and a straw hat, a stammering, dizzy man starts manoeuvring buckets like a worker performing routine operations. But the operations never end up as planned. The buckets turn into an object of game and invention, opening the door of a dreamlike world of absurd. In Hawaiian language, Bakéké means bucket.

Read more
Bestiary

Bestiary

Just like a ringmaster in the traditional circus with animals, the acrobat Hichem Chérif embodies the animals living inside of him. Without any masks, he changes his human nature and becomes a four-legged creature, a bird, a primate. Bestiary is a contemporary image of a traditional circus, in which the individual in front of the audience is neither a freak nor a champion in an extravagant category, but a member of human menagerie that looks like us. A source of surprise and ...

Read more
Feathers

Feathers

Feathers is a journey through struggles and sources of solitude. An emotional rollercoaster of a woman who is waiting. Waiting for what? For herself? For all the things she has lost? For a new beginning? It’s a quest for an exit from a mental loop, the concert of a gesture that conveys powerful images. The performance Feathers explores clown language, toying with the poetic and the grotesque, the comic and the subliminal, between the rhythms and the flight of birds. Elena ...

Read more
Tangle… In The Womb of a Juggler

Tangle… In The Womb of a Juggler

In a specific atmosphere of an abstract dream, the new performance by Francesca Mari explores the movement inspired by the mythology of Tonga, femininity, and juggling. It’s a tribute to a traditional culture which unites women with the immense joy brought by the simple act of throwing objects. The performance is inspired by the hiko dance from Tongan islands, where young women dance and throw round tui-tui nuts into the air. Combining her practice and ...

Read more
Breach

Breach

A knot, the fruit of the oppression of her pleasure. A knot that binds her hands and forces her to inflict violence on herself. After externalizing the anger and physically experiencing the pain, she begins to forgive and connect with her inner being. Breach talks about sexist violence against a woman's body as a collective and transgenerational memory, perpetrated by the patriarchal system and Christian heritage. Violence is not individual, direct, or isolated; rather, it is ...

Read more
My Death and Me

My Death and Me

How can we, in terms of emotions, deal with mortality and face ourselves as mortal beings? The performer establishes a very close relationship with her stage partner - death - thus trying to convey a very specific emotion and to present death as inevitability, a part of life, while toying with grotesque, with the elements of horror, drama, comedy, and parody alongside her trapeze performance. The wish to get to know death, the fear, the passion, the anger, those are just some of ...

Read more

Multimedia

Gallery
56Bitef22: Closing Night

56Bitef22: Closing Night

Gallery
IETM: Field Trip to Novi Sad

IETM: Field Trip to Novi Sad

Gallery
56Bitef22: (Not) The End of the World PHOTO GALLERY

56Bitef22: (Not) The End of the World PHOTO GALLERY

Gallery
56Bitef22: World Without Women & Dr Ausländer (Made For Germany)

56Bitef22: World Without Women & Dr Ausländer (Made For Germany)

Read more