-the French mediatheque will be transformed into the Festival Center during the week of the Festival. It is not an every-day situation where a cultural institution pauses its usual year-round activities to such a degree. That is a significant indicator of our cooperation and partnership – said Ivan Kralj, Festival director .

The Ambassador of France, His Excellency, Mr. Jérôme Pasquier also arrived to greet the Festival: – I am very happy that France occupies such an exceptional place in the New Circus Festival. While we are connected with other festivals in Zagreb, with Festival novog cirkusa we foster a special relationship.

- this edition of the Festival brings exclusively performances by women. Two of which are Croatian. "Poppins Descending" by Dubravka Crnojević-Carić is the first local circus performance produced with the promise of support from the Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb (“post-viewing” financing). In that performance, three young acrobats from Triko question their own femininity, it is not recommended for the youngest visitors due to scenes containing nudity. On the other side, the performance "Bambula", directed by the German Croat Ante Ursić, tells about the body as a vessel of memmories. The closing performance by Psychological Art Circus takes place in Jedinstvo Hall, a fusion of virtuous aerial circus, corporeal mime and original soundtrack- the director announced.

The press conference audio file can be downloaded from here

If you wish to interview any of the performing artists or organizer, please specify this in your accreditation request.

For any aditional photos or press material in English, visit our download section or contact us at festival@cirkus.hr.

Third in a row Cirkuskabare since the opening of Performing Arts Hall at the Autonomous Culture Center Medika, presents performers whose circus and other skills have been trained at this independent culture space. This squatted building is a former pharmaceuticals factory where clever squatters have escaped delocalization by building a fake wall and entering exercise area through a fake wardrobe. Such Narnian mimicry saved them from the hand of justice once, though not for long. After their belongings have been thrown out in a swift police action, Mayor Milan Bandić, with the elections approaching, has given the dilapidated building for temporary usage to Attack association. The building is now a site of daily training process for Zagreb circus artists and a site of education, performance and experience exchange. The acrobacy room is still to be entered through the wardrobe.

"A Hymn"
Fusion of patriotism, comedy, stature, voice and pride.
Performance: Ratko Bokić

Wohn Jayne: "Wild Wild East“
The fastest wrist of the north.
Performance: Domagoj Šoić

Natalie La Moustache: "Tour de France“
Former top-model on a brakeless bycicle.
Performance: Nikola Mijatović

Magister Ludi: "Louie i Mala“
Split personality and a brass contrabass.
Performance: Davor Peršić

Nikolinanina: "Pozdrav Milivoju“
A lover who made a woman out of a girl and a whore out of a woman.
Performance: Nikolina Komljenović

Kesten Impro Cabaret Kolektiv: "Contactometria“
Searching for bits of poetry in the everyday life of a mechanized movement.
Performance: Matija Vuletić and Mia Mrđenović

Gita & Greta: "TangoRing“
Acrobacy tango in the ring, on a ring, underneath the ring…
Performance: Jadranka Žinić Mijatović and Iva Peter Dragan

Vergl Grind
follow up band + a mini concert after the performance
Vergl Grind is a new project of underground musicians of Zagreb aiming towards theatre. After playing in supersonic bands like Peach Pit, Tigrova Mast, Seven That Spells and Owie Pockshull for several consecutive years, they have decided to take a break from constant ear bleeding and scratching the wounds – they have taken accoustic instruments and hurled themselves into playing drunken valtzes and circus vignettes. Soon enough they took the advice provided by their guru the Great White Rat and finally left the underground for stage lights. The new Sun has fried them into mutants willing to cooperate with clowns, acrobats and artists of other inclinations. Bounce to the sound of Vergl grinding bones!

Moderator: Christian Rene Peter – Kiki
Scene worker on duty: Aleksandar Đikić
Light technician: Goran Borojević
Sound technician: Igor Ivanković

Workshop moderators: Jadranka Žinić-Mijatović (acrobalance and aerial techniques), Nikola Mijatović (equilibristics and baloon modellling), Domagoj Šoić (juggling), Nikolina Majdak (clown)

The idea of Circus Factory as a community involvement workshop project is to be the meeting place for borderline social groups with those pertaining to the social core. Avoiding to form new ghettoization (special workshops for special groups is something we tried to bypass), all of the previous workshops have included general population members into work with groups of Roma children, young people with dissabilities, children coming from dysfunctional families and retired people.
The fifth Festival circus skills workshop is an educational project open to kindergarten teachers. Six workshop weeks will result in a workshop production.

Authors: Jean-Pierre Estournet, Goran Katić, Domagoj Knežević , Zvonimir Kušec, Darko Pauković

Thematic exhibition “Circus Women” depicts circus female performers, participants of the second, the third and the fourth New Circus Festival, seen through the camera of five photographers. None of the photographs taken at the first Festival (which took place in 2005) has been enlisted – only men performed that year.

28.11.2009.; 9:30 – 12:30, 14:30 – 18:00
Festival centre – French mediatheque
Preradovićeva 5

meetings are intended for local and international professionals with invitation

Circostrada is a European platform for information, research and professional mobility in contemporary circus and street art sectors. It was founded in 2003 by HorsLesMurs, French national circus and street art development center. The network is composed of around thirty European correspondents elected for their knowledge of the sector in each of the participating countries. Circostrada’s aim is to work in unison on developing and structuring circus and street art in Europe. Regular meetings are held three times a year – mutual strategies, publishing, and studies implementation are being set there, seminars and international forums organized, cultural policy solutions reconsidered… Following London and Görlitz, third annual meeting is held in Zagreb at the fifth in a row New Circus Festival, being also the first meeting held outside the European Union. Notable French promoters’ network Territoires de cirque will join the meeting as well – they have chosen Zagreb to be their first collective international excursion site.

Mala performerska scena, New Circus Festival organizers, have been admitted as full members of Circostrada in 2006, as the only such organization outside the European Union, as a result of their successful and internationally acknowledged projects in the field of circus and street art development.

Circostrada meeting is being organized with the financial support provided by the European Commission (Culture program), Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the City office for education, culture and sports of the City of Zagreb.

Following the tradition, Festival novog cirkusa created yet another animated festival intro. The novelty is in presentation – besides being available on Internet video services, you can see it on the Croatian national television channel.

Every night, after midnight, in the company of commercials for recent blockbuster movies and book editions, our festival intro finds its place. It was created by multimedia artist Bruno Razum, and this time he brought our (still unnamed) festival hero together with Botticelli's Venus under the Tree of Knowledge.

This paper will explore the long historical roots of the paradoxical place of the circus woman as a freighted cultural symbol of modernity—representing respectability, dainty femininity, sexual titillation, liberation, gender bending physical prowess, and racially inflected ideologies of “savagery.” Although this paper will pay special attention to circus women in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century during the so-called “golden age” of the circus, it is also attentive to select female performers around the world at different historical moments. At its heart, this paper argues that cultural representations of circus women in multiple cultural settings provide a vivid portal into the fraught tensions of cultures caught in the crossroads of modernity. Women performers often found a refuge in circus life from a world in which they did not fit; however showmen simultaneously marketed these same women as models of feminine normality as a way to contain their boundary-breaking potential as ambivalent symbols of a new age.

Guest lecture realized with the support of the USA Embassy.

Janet M. Davis is the associate professor of American Studies and History at the University of Texas at Austin. She recieved her Ph. D. on the subject ’Instruct the Minds of All Classes’: The Circus and American Culture at the Turn of the Century". She is the author of the award-winning book "The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top" and editor of the book "Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Memoir of Tiny Kline".

Guest lecture realized with the support of the Embassy of Sweden.

Camilla Damkjaer, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Department of Musicology and Performance Studies at Stockholm University. She is also teaching at the University College of Dance Stockholm and at the Academy of the Dramatic Arts. Her current research area is contemporary circus in particular, and physical performance genres in general. She finished her double Ph.D. thesis "The Aesthetics of Movement – Variations on Gilles Deleuze and Merce Cunningham" in 2005 at the University of Stockholm and the University of Paris.