The International festival of contemporary circus Cirkuliacija is a platform that breaks stereotypes about the circus and becomes a meeting point to discuss, share experiences and learn from each other. The festival takes place during June 4–19, 2022 in non-traditional urban spaces in the city of Kaunas in Lithuania. It presents a variety of contemporary circus disciplines, performances and artistic views from Lithuania and abroad.

This year’s festival includes professional days during June 8–11, 2022. The Circostrada network will have its general meeting in the context of the festival and the Baltic-Nordic Samovar Circles project will gather for a meeting there. As Kaunas soon becomes a true hotspot of circus professionals, CircusInfo Finland invited the driving force behind it, the artistic director, Gildas Aleksa, for an interview. Johanna Mäkelä: How did the Cirkuliacija festival get started?  Gildas Aleksa: The Cirkuliacija festival started in 2015. My day job is a theatre director. I saw contemporary circus on the internet and I wanted to create a show. Then I realised I cannot do it without circus performers. But we didn’t have any circus performers in Lithuania, so we started a small educational festival in which we organised workshops for other types of disciplines includ...