We barely turned around, and the 5th edition of the festival is already here!

After last year’s colossal edition, where we hosted 20 performances, 50 artists, and 120 circus organizers from 30 countries over five days, this year the festival returns to its standard form. However, it continues to change and grow, making this festival year marked by strong collaboration with cultural institutions.

We will be closing the festival with the performance “The Green” by the Finnish artist Kalle Nio, one of the pioneers of the contemporary circus genre of new magic, at the Croatian National Theatre in Split! This performance is also the first presentation of contemporary circus into one of the national theater houses in Croatia. We hope that this collaboration will provide significant momentum and contribute to the visibility and branding of contemporary circus as an equally valuable and high-quality type of performing art.

This year’s festival includes 5 contemporary circus performances, 2 concerts, 2 film screenings, and 2 circus workshops. As always, our program selection was guided by the idea of presenting new performances that are high-quality and innovative, moving contemporary circus beyond the confines of independent culture into new spaces, and offering an interdisciplinary program that reaches new audiences through the media of film and music.

The name “Peculiar Families Festival” refers to the creative and complex community of circus artists and their audience. Contemporary circus art is much more than just an artistic form. The specific demands for physical fitness, the transdisciplinary nature between performance and conceptual art, as well as production conditions, often characterize not only the work but also the lives of circus artists. For these reasons, energetic, intimate, and close collaboration among collective members arises. The magic of the circus happens when this energy is transferred to the audience. The goal of this festival is to create just that effect and break down barriers between the audience and performers, the city and the stage, family as a community, and necessity. The boundaries of body and mind are common to everyone, circus artists simply turn these boundaries into a creative process, expressing through them metaphors of everyday life.