CIRKOBALKANA 14 : GENERATIONS
ZAGREB
29.5. – 6.6.2026.
CIRKOBALKANA TENT AND POGON JEDINSTVO
“You are old, father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head —
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
“In my youth,” father William replied to his son,
“I feared it would injure the brain;
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”
~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 1865
(BE)COMING: Aging and Transmission in Contemporary Circus
Contemporary circus has come of age Since the nouveau cirque first emerged in the early 70s, the art form has been reimagining itself – reinventing its methods, defiantly questioning its boundaries and its forms. Today its practitioners span the full arc of a creative life: artists in their twenties making their first work alongside founders and pioneers, still creating, performing, revolutionizing what the form can do. The artists who founded its first companies are in their seventies. The graduates of its earliest schools are in their fifties.
CirkoBalkana’s 14 theme, Generations might at first sound like a meditation on age. But more precisely, it’s a reflection on becoming, on transmission, on time. For most of its history, circus has organized itself around the body in its prime. Fast, elastic, lithe, fearless, existing in that one virtuosic moment, created and recreated each evening, outside of time. The present tense is not incidental to circus. It is its condition.
To be contemporary is to remain restless — to refuse the comfort of what the form already knows how to do, and to treat that refusal as a permanent condition. By introducing duration, failure, repetition, silence, contemporary circus authors and artists have made time itself a dramaturgical material. They’ve moved away from the compressed, spectacular climax of the classical act toward the open, uncertain, malleable time of human experience. This shift was no minor aesthetic adjustment. It was a redefinition of what circus could mean.
An art form that has interrogated every assumption about what circus can be now confronts a vast, fertile frontier. By engaging with our own duration, approaching this most intimate passage of time not as an enemy to outwit, but as material to explore, we discover that growing older, being old, in circus becomes a full-fledged artistic gesture.
What does a body know that a mind has yet to grasp? And what does a mind carry that a body can no longer hold? How does circus authorship evolve over time – what becomes of our repertoire, what transforms, what is lost, what accumulates, what settles — not in spite of the passage of time but through it?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that this edition of CirkoBalkana places, openly and deliberately, at the centre of its program.
Circus is the feeling of what happens. Not the representation of what happens, not the narration of what happens, but the thing itself, live and alive. It does not ask you to imagine. This is what makes circus’s relationship to its public unique. Theatre, dance, music — each relies, to varying degrees, on the audience’s willingness to meet it halfway, to accept certain conventions, to suspend disbelief. Circus does not deal in the suspension of disbelief. It deals in the activation of belief — direct, physical, immediate.
Bourdieu writes, “only in imaginary experience (in the folk tale, for example), which neutralizes the sense of social realities, does the social world take the form of a universe of possibles equally possible for any possible subject.” (The Logic of Practice, 1990, p64) In everyday life, possibility is distributed unequally, shaped by who we are and where we come from.
Circus operates in that realm of imaginary experience — neutralizing physical realities, bodies and objects briefly free themselves from the constraints that govern everyone else. A circus body is crafted through years of practice – hours of repetition, falls and recalibrations build a body of knowledge so deeply inscribed that it no longer passes through thought. A knowledgeable body, inhabiting a state of informed faith. The mind’s job: to get out of the way, to not block the way with its chattering doubts, to let the body do what it does (fly!).
What we share with our public is the living folk tale. Spectators know what is at stake in every gesture — not because they can perform it themselves, but because their own bodies recognize the territory. We understand the tightwire walker because we all know what it feels like to balance. Every child will learn to walk and then, test its limits – on one foot, on a tree branch, on the edge of the sidewalk. Can I run without touching any cracks? Can I approach the edge of a canyon, the balustrade of a building and dare to look over, gulp at the height, imagine the fall?
Circus performer and spectator meet first not through social codes or cultural literacy, but through the most direct route: the shared knowledge of what it is to be a body in the world. Each spectator carries an accumulated physical history, a lifetime of negotiating gravity, risk, balance and the weight of others. When the circus body does the impossible, flies through the air, balances on a wire, keeps multiple objects simultaneously in motion, the audience does not observe from a safe aesthetic distance. They encounter something familiar, they receive it, and bring their own bodily knowledge in return. The circus body does not transcend the human. It extends it. Circus does not teach these sensations. It summons them, revealing within the shared physical world that performer and spectator both inhabit a universe of possibles that every body already knows.
Even when we write circus through metaphor, those metaphors communicate more directly – riding on this physiological sensation of self, they land in the flesh before reaching the mind, richer for having passed through this shared embodied truth.
This is why circus metaphors, when they work, work so deeply. A hand-to-hand balance that speaks of trust is more than an image- it is trust, made physically legible, arriving through the audience’s body before ever reaching their mind. The meaning needs no decoding: it is already known.
Aging is the most unoriginal act our bodies perform. Its unfolding remains constantly surprising, shocking even. The widening gap between who we feel ourselves to be and what our bodies will currently agree to is universal. An aging body is partly defined by its embodied memory of what it felt like before – to leap, to skip, to move through the world with a physical assurance that felt, at the time, simply like being alive. That sensorial memory — the precise feeling of what the body once could do — outlives physical capacity by decades. We carry it with us long after the body itself has moved on, a vivid and sometimes startling interior knowledge of former possibles.
No less in circus. The body that circus cultivates is extraordinary and specific: trained to do what bodies are not supposed to do, confidently staking claim to territories that ordinary bodies might approach with trepidation. That confidence does not disappear when physical capacity peaks and begins to shift. It lingers. It insists. At fifty, I have not attempted a back salto on the wire for more than twenty years, yet I can still feel with startling vividness exactly what it is. Not as abstraction but as living sensation, immediate enough that sometimes practicing jumps I can feel my body long hard to flip and the confidence (that it knows how! and it will be glorious!) is vivid enough that I must check myself and rejoin the platform post haste, lest I hurl myself backward and land on my middle-aged head. The knowledge is still there. The body that learned it is still there, inside the body that has changed. Only the capacity has moved on — slowly, reluctantly, in pieces.
These embodied memories of former possibles, these ghosts of bodies that once were our bodies, are shared. Each person in the audience carries within a history of their own bodily surpassings and retreats.. This is not only a common physical language, but a common physical history. The circus body does not only speak to the body in the audience. It speaks to every body that body has ever been.
And an aging circus body — one that carries its history visibly, that has recalibrated its relationship to what it can do — speaks to that history with a particular and irreplaceable intimacy.
There is something irreplaceable about watching a young body discover, in real time, what it can do — the rawness, the hunger, the openness to risk that experience can sometimes close off. Yet to assume that this is what circus essentially is — young, spectacular, operating at the outer limit of physical possibility — is not a natural law. It is a construction that circus had produced about itself and then forgotten it produced, mistaking it for simple truth.
The body that has spent twenty years in circus is not a diminished version of the body before but a wholly different instrument. The young acrobat and the experienced one may perform what appears to be the same gesture. It is not the same gesture. In one, the movement is still being discovered, carrying within it the excitement and spark and certitude of first encounter. In the other, it carries every previous attempt — every failure, every refinement, every moment the body was pushed past what seemed possible and found something it had not known was there. The aging body ceases to be the instrument of demonstration and becomes the site of testimony. It carries traces. It has a history. It says something the twenty-year-old body cannot yet say. Not to deny time, but to summon it onto the stage. To make it an accomplice.
What CirkoBalkana 14 proposes is not a comparison between young and old but a dialogue: between the young authors discovering, proclaiming, and artists that have spent decades hulling what they carry forward, between the urgency of first flights and the depth and grace of sustained practice. These conversations do not offer resolution. What they offer is a picture of circus as an art form genuinely alive- a practice that changes as the bodies carrying it change, that becomes, over time, not less but differently, multitudinous.
Molly Saudek, 2026.
PERFORMANCE AND MUSIC PROGRAMME
FRIDAY, May 29, 2026
8:00 PM — CirkoBalkana Tent
Performance
Cirkusfera (RS): Entropija
Ticket: €12
Buy ticket:
https://core-event.co/en/events/cirkobalkana-14-cirkusfera-entropija-3832
9:00 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo Courtyard
DJ’s Ben & San Andrea
SATURDAY, May 30, 2026
8:00 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo, Main Hall
Work-in-progress presentation
T.O.A. (HR): Corvus Obscura
Free entrance, voluntary donations welcome
9:00 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo Courtyard
DJ’s Labud & Slip_22
SUNDAY, May 31, 2026
7:00 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo, Main Hall
Work-in-progress presentation, circusnext finalist
T.O.A. (HR): Corvus Obscura
Free entrance, voluntary donations welcome
8:00 PM — CirkoBalkana Tent
Performance
Palestinian Circus (PS): Sarab
Ticket: €15
Buy ticket:
https://core-event.co/en/events/cirkobalkana-14-palestinski-cirkus-pa-sarab-e837
9:00 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo Courtyard
DJ’s Ramljak & Hvala Sven
MONDAY, June 1, 2026
8:00 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo Courtyard
DJ’s Bangavi & Barbarella
TUESDAY, June 2, 2026
8:00 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo Courtyard
DJ’s Zmayo & Dino Barabadub
WEDNESDAY, June 3, 2026
7:30 PM — CirkoBalkana Tent
From the World, Yet Ours!
Short performances by young regional circus artists studying abroad:
Maja Wiena Benić, Iskra Dilkić, Klara Barišić, Maša Borović, Mia Bradić, Noah Cvijanović
Free entrance, voluntary donations welcome
9:00 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo Courtyard
DJ’s Robert Mareković & Lord Čardak
THURSDAY, June 4, 2026
7:30 PM — CirkoBalkana Tent
Work-in-progress presentation
Mismo Nismo (SLO): Tuga
Free entrance, voluntary donations welcome
8:30 PM — Secret Location
Performance
Los Galindos (ESP): MDR
Ticket: €15
Buy ticket:
https://core-event.co/en/events/cirkobalakana-14-los-galindos-mdr-9446
10:00 PM — Močvara
Circus Party
Concert: Skier and Jeti
FRIDAY, June 5, 2026
7:30 PM — CirkoBalkana Tent
Performance
My! Laika (FR): Dolores
Ticket: €12
Buy ticket:
https://core-event.co/en/events/cirkobalkana-14-my-laika-dolores-cdaf
8:30 PM — Secret Location
Performance
Los Galindos (ESP): MDR
Ticket: €15
Buy ticket:
https://core-event.co/en/events/cirkobalakana-14-los-galindos-mdr-9446
9:30 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo Courtyard
DJ’s Erol & Zak
SATURDAY, June 6, 2026
7:00 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo, Big Hall
Performance
Un Loup pour l’Homme (FR): Grand-Mother Project
Ticket: €12
Buy ticket:
https://core-event.co/en/events/cirkobalkana-14-un-loup-pour-lhomme-grand-mother-project-c746
8:15 PM — CirkoBalkana Tent
Performance
Cie Intrepidus Squad (FR): STEK
Ticket: €15
Buy ticket:
https://core-event.co/en/events/cirkobalkana-14-intrepidus-squadfr-stek-8397
9:00 PM — Pogon Jedinstvo Courtyard
DJ’s MMMeniga & Stankoff
EDUCATION AT CIRKOBALKANA 14
June 1 & 2, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Pogon Jedinstvo, Main Hall
Circus Pedagogy Workshop (Turbul circus school methodology)
https://fb.me/e/k2xmXgxgh
June 1 & 2, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Pogon Jedinstvo, Main Hall
Introduction to Vertical Dance Workshop with Danka Sekulović
https://fb.me/e/9vvfA9Rrp
June 3 & 4, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Pogon Jedinstvo, Main Hall
Hand-to-Hand Workshop with My! Laika
https://fb.me/e/1XPZ6TyoSG
CIRCUS REFLECTIONS
a series of moderated conversations with artists on contemporary topics
SATURDAY, May 30
2:00 PM CirkoBalkana Tent
Bodies of Resistance, Poetics of Survival
Conversation with artists from the Palestinian Circus
TUESDAY, June 2
6:00 PM Pogon Jedinstvo, Main Hall
(Im)Possibilities in the Region
An open public conversation with a younger generation of regional circus artists about educational opportunities and professional life after circus school
Moderated by: Danka Sekulović
WEDNESDAY, June 3
6:00 PM Pogon Jedinstvo, Main Hall
Bodies That Remember
An open public conversation with 40+ circus artists about the possibilities and capacities of the 40+ circus body
Moderated by: Katarina Kolega
CirkoBalkana 14 is organised by Cirkorama and Cirkusfera, and co-funded by the City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb, the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, Teatroskop, the French Institute, Solidarna Foundation, and Kultura Nova Foundation. The festival is realised in collaboration with Pogon – Zagreb Center for Independent Culture and Youth .We also wish to thank our wonderful food donors supporting the festival kitchen that feeds the artists and crew: Vedrini, Annapurna, Biomara, Pekinška Patka, OP OP OP OP. Media partner: Yammat.fm