Since 2020, Germany’s CircusDanceFestivalhas worked to help young talents promote themselves and share their work with a public audience… and to bolster the status of Germany’s circus sector. Theater Art Life’s Liam Klenk provides an overview of years one through three of the festival.

The CircusDanceFestival project was initiated by the company label Overhead Project to further the promotion of young German talent in circus and dance. A combination of a standard festival, a sector-specific residency, and a co-production program, the project initially followed a three-year model, which ran from 2020 to 2022, with nationwide broadcasting in Germany. It has since been extended into 2023 and beyond.

In its initial run, the heart of the project – the five-day festival – first took place during Pentecost in 2020, again in 2021, and one last time in 2022. The main location is in three large tents in the outdoor area of the TPZAK Circus and Artistic Center of Cologne.

However, the performances were presented in various formats: tent performances, university cooperation, site-specific and city interventions, lectures, workshops, and research presentations.

TheCircusDanceFestival’s goal is to reach a broad regional audience as well as to interest and connect with the professional international circus and dance scene.

Through the first three years of the project, the program section Junge Wilde (Young and Wild) offered visibility and networking for regional youth and young talent groups.

The residencies are offered in advance of the annual five-day festival. Artistic coaching for young performers is provided during those residencies.

In addition to the entire project space and support for national German applicants, four residencies and two co-productions are also open for groups from outside of Germany. They take applications every year.

An international symposium was held for the festival’s second edition in 2021.

In the long run, Cologne plans to keep hosting the CircusDanceFestival as a Germany-wide competence center for the presentation and production of pieces in the interdisciplinary genre of dance and contemporary circus.

The project has been developed under the artistic and organizational direction of Overhead Project, a label that has been active in this area for ten years and is internationally established and connected.

For the 2021 festival, a cooperation between the festival, the Cologne Center for Contemporary Dance, and the Brussels circus university ESAC was initiated.

As part of the projects for the festival, the students initially went out into urban and rural areas. There, they interacted with stairs, trees, piles of sand, and gravel.

And they climbed the heights with the help of human pyramids which they formed with their own bodies.

Another focus of this year’s festival was the human body.

Unfortunately, some productions couldn’t be shown on stage due to Covid restrictions.

One example was 3xEva, a fascinating piece by performers Laura Runge, Yolande Sommer, and Rahel Gieselmann.

In their performance, the three deal with the sexualizing looks that they felt on their bodies as young artists in the children’s and youth circus and as gymnasts in competitive sports.

Yolande Sommer also focuses intensively on the menstruating body and its absence in the prevailing discourses on rehearsals and training. This definitely is a topic for other body-based arts as well.

Because of the limited opportunities to perform and travel, many of the performances were instead presented through documentaries. The TV channel Arte, for example, proved to be an excellent partner and produced some spectacular films.

For 2022, the festival organizers hoped to be able to present the entire program in front of a live audience. They were able to do so successfully come the festival date in early June.

For the German circus industry as a whole, they also hope that the central demands of the Contemporary Circus Manifesto, published in 2016 and presented to German authorities, will finally be implemented.

The manifesto includes the recognition of circus as an art form within the performing arts space, with a clear division of the circus sector in the respective institutions; equal treatment in the case of public funding; and equal access to venues and rehearsal rooms.

The public funding of the CircusDanceFestival is a positive and important step in the right direction.

Official website CircusDanceFestival

Facebook page CircusDanceFestival

Further sources:

The article “Ode ans Object” by Tom Mustroph in Theater der Zeit

The CircusDanceFestival is a festival launched by Overhead Project in cooperation with TPZAK Cologne.
Funded by TANZPAKT Stadt-Land-Bund with funds from the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, Ministry for Culture and Science, State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Cologne.
Artistic director Tim Behren.
Project management Malte Garrecht.
Management / PR Mechtild Tellmann Young and Wild program section ZAK Cologne Communication k3 Berlin.

This article, written by TheatreArtLife's Content Producer Liam Klenk, was originally published on TheatreArtLife.com in 2021. This version has been updated to reflect the current year.

Anna Robb

All around the world there are people working in arts and entertainment. They are not in the industry for the money, the fame or the work/life balance. They are there through a sheer driving force; The need to create. From this community, TheatreArtLife was born.
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