Location: Multiple locations

Date: May 24-26, 2024

The fifth edition of the contemporary circus festival "Peculiar Families Festival" organized by the collective ROOM 100, will be held from May 24 to 26!
 

After last year's megalomaniacal edition with 20 performances, 50 artists and 120 circus organizers from 30 countries, this year the Festival returns to its standard dimensions. But it doesn't stop changing and growing, so this festival year will be marked by strong cooperation with cultural institutions. We will close the festival with the performance "The Green" by the Finnish artist Kalle Nio, one of the pioneers of the new magic circus genre, in the Croatian National Theater Split. This performance is also the first time the contemporary circus performances is hosted in one of the national theaters in Croatia! This collaboration will give exceptional momentum and contribution to the visibility and branding of contemporary circus as an equally valuable and high-quality type of performance art, not only in Croatia but also in the region.
 

5 contemporary circus performances, 2 concerts, 2 film screenings and 2 workshops of contemporary circus skills make up this year's festival. As before, through the program selection, the artistic director of the Festival, Antonia Kuzmanić, was guided by the idea of a festival that presents new performances that are of high quality and innovation, of a festival that displaces contemporary circus outside the framework of independent culture - into new venues and locations, and of an interdisciplinary program that through the medium of film and music reaches a new audience.
 

The opening of the Festival itself will take place in the open-air cinema Bačvice on May 24, where the laureate of the circusnext program Alice Rende will perform her award-winning show "Fora", which is performed in a box measuring 70 cm x 70 cm.
 

Then Zagreb's Cirkorama will perform the last part of its trilogy "Horror House Project: Zodiac - Circle of small animals", and we will round off the evening with a musical performance by the Japanese duo "Usaginingen"!
 

On the second day, we are at the Youth Center, where the Spanish duo Le Petite Victoria Cen will perform the play "Sorry if I introduce you as if I don't know you", which was declared the best contemporary circus show in Spain in 2023 by the Academy of Performing Arts. After the show, on Trokut (the newly renovated terrace of the Youth Center), the instrumental LHD will present their album "Off The Grid". It is a concert by former members of The Bambi Molesters, for which only 100 tickets were released.
 

This year's edition of the festival is special in that, for the first time in Croatia, contemporary circus is included in the program of a national theater. The closing of the festival will take place on May 26 at the Croatian National Theater in Split, where Finnish pioneer of new magic Kalle Nio will perform his "The Green".
 

In the accompanying program of the festival, on May 24, Catalan artist Maria Palma will hold a lecture on the new circus discipline "apnea circus" and an acrobatics workshop at the Art Academy in Split, and Alice Rende will hold a two-day workshop "Flexibility in movement research" on May 25 and 26 in AntiGravity Fitness Studio.
 

In the pre-festival program, on May 22 at the cinema “Zlatna vrata” the documentary film "Thinking Circus" will be shown. 
 

You can find the entire program of the festival on the web: https://peculiarfamilies.org/ and on social networks https://www.facebook.com/PeculiarFamiliesFestival/, https://www.instagram.com/peculiarfamiliesfestival/.

Tickets for the program on Friday and Saturday are available in the online WEBshop, at the venue one hour before the start of the show/concert and at the festival office in Prostor (Plančićeva 2, from 20 to 25 May from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.). Tickets for The Green are available through the HNK Split WEBshop or at the theater box office. 
 

The festival is called "Peculiar Families" referring to the creative and complex community of circus artists and their audience. Contemporary circus art is much more than just an art form. Specific requirements for physical fitness, the character of transdisciplinarity between performing and conceptual art, as well as production conditions, often characterize not only the work, but also the life of circus artists. For these reasons, an energetic, intimate and close cooperation between the members of the collective arises. The magic of the circus is created when this energy is transferred to the audience.

The goal of this festival is to create exactly that effect and to break the barriers between the audience and the performers, the city and the stage, the family as a community and necessity. The boundaries of the body and mind are common to everyone, the circus artist only transforms these boundaries into a creative process, expressing metaphors of everyday life through them.