To promote contemporary circus creation, from 2019 till 2022 we offered an artistic residencies program.
Here the selected artists and companies have the opportunity to further develop their artistic projects for two weeks at different locations in Cologne. An overview of all residencies can be found here.
In the current research on moving fractals the make a move collective is looking for new ways to move in urban space and to expand their own movement vocabulary. For this purpose, ball-like objects are used, which enable a soft and at the same time dynamic interaction with each other as well as with the surrounding space and which invite to bounce, roll and play as co-performers.
Since 2016, the make a move collective has been staging choreographies on the threshold of contemporary dance and parkour that encourage the audience to look closely and perceive urban space from a different perspective.
The Duck Performance questions the relationship between humans and animals as performers. Marija Baranauskaitė moves away from the pattern of the traditional circus of training animals as performers according to the wishes of humans. Rather, she explores the ways in which ducks in their natural habitat can make up the show.
Trained at the Philippe Gaulier Clown School in Paris, Marija Baranauskaitė worked for many years as an actress, lecturer and artistic director for the Red Noses Clown Doctors. She has participated as a performer and developer in several dance, theater and circus works. Today she is considered one of the first professional contemporary circus artists in Lithuania. She also participated in the creation of the Contemporary Circus Association in Lithuania and teaches at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.
Kaleiding will be a contemporary circus performance that explores partnering dance, light installations and partner acrobatics. Lily Schlinker and Janick Kremer are two young artists from Berlin. They have spent the last four years studying contemporary circus in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, at the Codarts School of the Arts, and are now returning to Germany to help establish contemporary circus here and become an active part of the local cultural landscape.
The week at the Circus Dance Festival was one of the first residencies for the Kaleiding project and was therefore filled with experimentation. Without committing themselves too much to content yet, they took the time to examine the mirror as a medium and explored a wide variety of forms that only become a whole when reflected upon.
Originating from the desire to deal with discriminatory structures in the circus world, regular exchange meetings of the (local) circus scene have been established since summer 2021. This has given rise to the desire for a more in-depth discussion: A core group of nine people will enter into an intensive discourse and research process for one week in December 2021, relaxing around the following questions: How do we train, how are we trained? How do we learn and how do we teach? Who becomes big on stage or who stays small? How can we shape gender equity in circus? What discriminatory structures exist in production processes, how can we counteract them? Research will be done on already existing resources in the European area. How can we position ourselves as circus educators, artists and circus workers and form a feminist network?
Acoustic Resonance is an interdisciplinary duet of contemporary dance and rope artistry that explores the complexities of human communication. In this piece, two performers from different disciplines – circus and dance – with different mother tongues and cultural contexts – Israel and Germany – meet and seek mutual understanding through movement. Inspired by the phenomenon of acoustic resonance, in which acoustic waves mix with each other and sound is amplified as a result, we work in this piece with the vibrations of the vertical rope and two bodies that try to find each other and yet keep interfering with each other.