CIRCOSTRADA × SIPAM - The Rise and Future of Contemporary Circus Contemporary circus has spent a generation earning recognition as an art form — yet that rise looks completely different depending on where you stand. This panel gathers the people building it across Europe’s uneven map. In Sweden, Kiki Muukkonen has spent nearly two decades developing the scene from Subtopia, founding the showcases and festivals that carried Nordic circus abroad. In Bulgaria, Geo Kalev created the country’s first festival of its kind. In Hungary, Sophie Zoletnik and the OneTwoMany Collective launched MUCH — Hungary’s first contemporary circus festival — alongside a program to mentor the artists who will fill it. From Paris, Sabrina Abiad leads circusnext, the European platform that finds and backs emerging circus authors before anyone else will. And in Bucharest, Ama Butoiescu steers a metropolitan circus institution between its popular past and its contemporary future.
Together they trade the questions behind the success story: what it takes to build a circus ecosystem where none existed — funding, venues, training, audiences — and what it takes to sustain one once it does. How do platforms and festivals champion new voices without flattening them into a single, recognizable “festival style”? Where is the line between the theory-driven circus celebrated on festival stages and the popular, family-facing tradition that still fills tents? What does the form owe the performers whose careers are bounded by the body, and the popular joy it was born from? And as a once-itinerant art negotiates institutions, touring markets, and borders, the blunt shared question: is hard-won legitimacy a foundation to build on, or a comfort to resist? Ama Butoiescu · Artistic Director, Circul Metropolitan București (Romania) Geo Kalev · Chairman, Mini Art Foundation (Bulgaria) Sophie Zoletnik · Artistic Manager & Co-founder, OneTwoMany Collective / MUCH (Hungary) Kiki Muukkonen · Artistic Director Circus, Subtopia (Sweden)
