Founded in 2009, CircusFest is London’s biennial international festival of contemporary circus taking place at the Roundhouse as well as selected partner venues around London. The Roundhouse’s CircusFest 2018 focuses on the future of circus: daring and diverse, punky and poetic, subversive and socially aware. From the spectacular to the intimate, the festival showcases the point where circus collides with theatre, dance, live art, film and even virtual reality.

Since its inception the festival has been one of London’s best occasions to view some of the world’s most interesting and innovative circus artists, bringing companies from Europe, the USA and Australia, offering its audience circus workshops and providing space for exhibitions, panel discussions and other complementary activities. Though the festival is based at the Roundhouse, it is spread in performance spaces all over London, including another groundbreaking circus venue – Jacksons Lane. Roundhouse provides circus programming to young people ages 16-25 all year with their Street Circus Collective, practicing circus skills and mounting performances. For this year’s edition, the festival is themed around the 250th anniversary year of the invention of modern circus. Circus has come a long way since Philip Astley created the first variety show and this year’s CircusFest shows...