Festival Circolo: relaxed and sunny festival celebrates circus innovation without glitz ACTUAL

A campfire, primeval hamburgers and flammkuchen with bacon and cream, as well as coffee with oat milk and remarkably many loose buns in Tilburg's Leijpark. White wine, kombucha and speciality beer. Some people get pimples from such combinations, but it felt remarkably good, last Monday at Festival Circolo. The hipster crowd, considered super sustainable, mixes effortlessly with the burgundian Brabanter, right in a park on the highway that surrounds Tilburg's city centre....

Acrobats and jugglers, until a few years ago only to be found in summer France, Spain and Italy, are now also professionally trained in the Netherlands, which is very nice for a festival that takes place in times of Corona. No acts from the Far East or Latin America means an abundance of young and innovative circus offerings from Europe, from mostly creators under 40.

Cattlemen

Although there was also a marquee of De Stijle, Want..., whose remaining members are now all over sixty. But then those are only there on film, in a true Brabant biopic that stopped halfway through due to technical problems no one could fix. A bit painful, but also fitting for this company of benign theatrical charlatans, who caused a furore in the 1990s with performances on De Parade, for which you queued longer (and more fun) than you got in.

Their energy (with accompanying tents) was partly the origin (so they claim) of Terts Brinkhoff's touring festival, but they are not mentioned in the anniversary book. Sic transit gloria mundi, as the last of RK De Veulpoepers BV (because that's where their roots lie) in the park of the bankrupt Festival Mundial, which descended from the Bikse Fiste, also of the Veulpoepers, in a tent with the founder of the Veulpoepers in the audience, see their video jammed and we'll never know how it ends.

Dangerous

Fortunately, there is the youth, for example in the form of Camiel Corneille, who showed a work-in-progress of a very special kind of balancing act. More an installation than acrobatics, but no less impressive for that. The same goes for the group Familiar Faces, which performed a water ballet while balancing on each other's bodies that was playful, comical, corporeal and a bit dangerous, which is of course what we come for when it comes to circus.

Topper this Monday on that front was Camille Paycha's act Ice Skates and Other Cruelties. She skates around a mountain of breakable glass and eventually falls into it, albeit without any visible injuries.

Art

Performances like this are the new trend in modern circus, where not just the tricks but also the arts have a place. The performances are hushed, the performers do not ask for applause after every handstand and their clothes are functional, not showy. Not sensuous in beauty either, but that doesn't bother. The overwhelm of Cirque du Soleil, in which the acts were eternal and the performers interchangeable, does not suit something as intimate as Circolo.

Dubai

And then there are clowns. I was pranked at the beginning of the afternoon, at En Fait, Actually... by Duo Ginger Moustache, by a very nice one (along with the whole audience), and that's pretty special for someone who usually shuns clowns. But this time, a very nice girl came and sat next to me before the performance, and that was such a nice conversation, that I was really shocked hard when, when the lights went out and the programme started, she started talking louder and louder to me, and once I became hopeless in my attempts to get her to quiet down, she left the room, already on the phone with a friend from Dubai. Leaving the room in bewilderment. Only to return ten minutes later as the programme's main performer.

Maybe a simple act, but it worked. Added to that, while chatting, she literally performed breakneck antics as a highly skilled acrobat, along with her supposedly bumbling partner.

Clowns, they still can. Go experience it in Tilburg, in all its variations.

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