It’s with great excitement we welcome Cirkuliacija as new members of BNCN!
We caught up with Gildas Aleksa who will be the representative on behalf of Cirkuliacija in BNCN network.
Tell us, what is Cirkuliacija?
“Cirkuliacija” is a contemporary circus festival based in Kaunas, Lithuania. It aims to bring cultural events of the highest quality to post-soviet neighbourhoods (each year – different neighbourhood) with no cultural events. The main impulse to do this festival is derived from two observed impacts: the impact that the soviet architecture does to the communication (the lack of it) of its inhabitants, and the impact contemporary circus has on the same communication – people that have never seen circus start discussing between themselves the art, communicating with the artists, inviting them to their flats for a coffee and a talk. Those magical moments that the festival creates are the sole purpose of the existence of a festival like ours.
Why did you want to join the Baltic Nordic Circus Network?
“Cirkuliacija” is one of the two main circus festivals in Lithuania. Most, if not all the Lithuanian circus artists have a close relationship with us – we follow their studies and work, promote their creations and development as much as we can, try and find job opportunities for them on the National scale. With that in mind, we feel responsibility not only for our new audiences, but also for the sector. We are still a young festival, but we already feel the need to collaborate with our peers in the region in order to make the sector more effective, creative and diverse. We want to share our different experience with the BNCN organisations, learn from them and work together in order to have a bigger impact in our festival and maybe easier (or smarter) ways to achieve it. Although we are “informational sponges” that look for different practices and approaches, we believe we also have some capacities that we could share with the network. That is why the festival wants to join, but my personal opinion – the network consists of amazing people and experiences that will be absolutely priceless to meet and talk, learn and share on a regular basis.
What do you look forward to most in the next year?
We are in the midst of finalising our next festival edition and it will absolutely fantastic, if we will be able to do everything we planned. One thing will be for sure and I am really intrigued by it. On June 12th „Cirkuliacija“ will hold its first conference. The subject will be closely related to the neighbourhood of this year „Cirkuliacija“ – it is the most challenging neighbourhood in Kaunas and we can‘t wait to see how our festival will juggle with history, prejudice and love. The conference, in my personal opinion, will be our highlight of the festival with amazing key-speakers, stunning context and a really diverse audience. After all, the neighbourhood that the next edition will be held had much to do to stop Kaunas from being the diverse multicultural city it was in between the wars and to „achieve“ the „title“ of the most mono-ethnical city in the Baltics.
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