Aino Mäkipää / Kanta Company (FIN/LT)  

“It‘s early morning, the sun just started to rise, the ground is covered with dew, and the fields are surrounded by a mysterious mist. A stork‘s nest is built on a tall black pole. A proud and slightly dirty white stork stands inside of it.”

With the arrival of the new circus, everyone seems to have forgotten about the participation of animals in the performance. However, after choosing an animal as the object of artistic research in contemporary circus, they return to the stage, only this time in a more mindful way – in the form of an idea. Like the migratory birds – storks, circus artists do not stay in one place for too long, their life is a constant movement. Inspired by this nomadic status, a stack of documentaries, books for children and adults, and peoples’ tales, Finnish artist Aino Mäkipää uses a Chinese pole and juggling to tell the dramatic story of an elegantly rough-looking bird from a human perspective in her first solo creation – Stork.

Electrico 28 (CAT)  

Work in progress description:

The Place is a story about a place that, at first sight, is not a place to fall in love with. It is not the kind of place that would be announced in a travel guide or that one would photograph.

Eléctrico 28’s new performance is about the relationship with a place like that. Observing it, sensing it, inhabiting it, imagining and describing it. What places, things and beings exist inside of it? What does it expect from us? What could happen to it? Does it take us elsewhere, too?

The performance invites the audience to see, listen, touch and connect to a place and the places inside it. To consider that we are actually a place ourselves.

If Circus (CAT) 

The piece Melic made by the company If Circus, composed by Mar and Shalom, is inspired by the ancient art of knitting and the reclaiming of their ancestors’ knowledge. A dialogue between hand-knitted ropes that transform, tighten and loosen , knit and unknit. Ropes that support them and rock them.

Melic is willing to share the passion of its own building process. It is a research from the material which builds the structures (the Melic, which means belly button in catalan) bringing them to the expression and physicality of knitting. It is the range of possibilities that offers, the resistance and fragility of each one, the textures that contrast them and the rhythm that brings them together.
Mar and Shalom invite you to a trip into the inner world of the materials which are knitted and dissolved on scene, to feel what lives inside these objects, so special for those who create them. A ritual of preparation allows the dialogue between rope and human bodies when they breathe at the same time. Elements guided by the humans that shared their more valued knitted and crocheted ropes to find a meeting point. A place to treat them with delicateness and use them as an artistic discipline. Knitting, Unknitting, swinging and falling.

Marcelo Nunes (FR)

Hertz is the Dissociated Company‘s first full-length creation since Pacemaker, a 30-minute performance in non-dedicated spaces, both exploring the fakirism and jester. The creation of this piece started in February 2024 and is presented as a full-length performance for all audiences aged 10 years and over. The performance continues my explorations of fakirism and jester topics with a scenographic approach that combines theatre, performance and installation. I am especially interested in pushing the boundaries we set ourselves and get used to. Going beyond the limits to feel alive is a topic that intrigues me, exploring such themes as pain, resilience, pleasure, suffering and the limits of the impossible. The conflict of controversial feelings reflects the existence of a human being in modern society. To achieve this, fakirism, jester movement and installation are in a dialogue with each other, using glass for fakirism, through dance and acrobatics evolution on shattered glass. The installation plays the central role with a carpet of shattered glass on the stage weighing more than 750 kg and plastic interventions with broken glass and bottles in the common areas of the performance.

My job, similar to the purpose of a jester, is to reach the deepest human sincerity. It involves returning to the wild and pure state of humanity, playing a game with social and bodily norms and exploring the codes of the body and the society.

Combining fakirism and the jester genre, Hertz explores the sensitive but very poetic territories, exposing our contradictions. The performance is at the edge of the primal senses in order to transcend simple human dichotomy and reveal its complexity. This confrontation of conflicting emotions and senses re-humanises us. By exploring all sides of humanity in all its forms, Hertz invites the public to accept our weaknesses and discover a more authentic and resilient humanity.

Grete Gross (EE) 

Kehakone is a warm embrace of a show. “At one point I figured that Kehakone is like a large playhouse, the kind made of blankets and sheets I used to build as a child. This piece in this space carries the same sense of safety and limitless possibilities and the first tools I have in hand to play with are aerial acrobatics, ceremonies, storytelling, music, joy and sincerity”, Grete Gross presents the performance.

Kehakõne translates as “body talk” or “body discussion” in Estonian. Another meaning could be “my dear body”. And it all starts from this kind feeling I have towards my body, holding it, sensing that there is so very much – stories, memories, life fitting into this body. It seems insane that so very much can fit in one person. And how do we fit into one room with all of these bodies full of stories?