After we made the decision to postpone this very first edition of the festival due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the inevitable question arose: “And now?”
The magazine VOICES is our answer.
CircusDanceFestival invites and presents international artists from the wide, crossover fields of contemporary circus and dance. Two art forms that inspire and influence each other, sharing an intensive physicality as a means of expression.
Both art forms have their inherent historical path, they offer different perspectives on the moving body with its norms, gender roles and societal hierarchies. Circus and dance need to be defined individually, as this constitutes their existence and recognition as an art form. But artists, having passed through a hybrid educational background, or drawing inspiration from both fields, often share the wish of underpassing categorization and to keep a fluid and interdisciplinary identity. This is what CircusDanceFestival focuses on: In-between contemporary circus and dance! The shaping of that fluid field is up to to the artists, their performances and their voices.
The Voices online magazine opens a sort of megaphone for the festival artists, beyond performing in circus chapiteaus and on stages. It makes visible what they think we should talk about right now, and what moves and troubles them. Above all, it opens space for the topics that their pieces deal with - usually “live”.
It was the desire for encounters that led us to have online-meetings with the artists.
These conversational interviews put into writing can now be found as interviews in this issue, slightly shortened. In this exceptional situation and out of their respective private rooms, very personal encounters have arisen that would not otherwise have taken place.
In addition to the interviews, we also invited the artists to experiment with the currently possible forms of artistic creation. This resulted in several "Carte blanche" commissioned works. In this case, the "Carte blanche" is the invitation to develop a video work for the magazine within three weeks, freely in terms of content, length and form. I am delighted that this challenge was accepted so enthusiastically, and I am looking forward to the new works.
Special thanks goes to Katharina Klapdor, who conducted the interviews with me and formed the editorial team, as well as to the closer magazine team Mechtild Tellmann and Heike Diehm. Thanks also to the whole festival team Jenny Patschovsky, Garlef Keßler, Yolande Sommer, Sophia Oltmanns, Tobias Bergmann, Michael Straßburger, Martin Forsbach. Many thanks also to our partner TPZAK Köln under direction of Éva Adorjan and all funders and cooperation partners for this TANZPAKT Stadt-Land-Bund project.
Enjoy browsing and diving into the magazine. We'll see each other again soon at the next festival in Cologne in may 2021!
Tim Behren
Artistic director Overhead Project an CircusDanceFestival
Cologne, 25th may 2020