Contemporary circus and street art festival Re Riga! celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. The festival will take place from August 17 to 21, and the joy of meeting has been chosen as its main theme. The main guest artists of the festival will be the circus collective Be Flat from Belgium.
This year Re Riga! will be held for the tenth time, and in the anniversary year the festival will offer a wide programme with performances from both the Baltic and other countries. According to the organisers of the festival, the range of performances is also rich in terms of genres, themes, and formats.
The motto of the event — Hello, and follow me! — refers to the main guest artists of the festival, the Belgian circus collective Be Flat, which will visit Riga with the performances Follow Me and Double You. Follow Me is an urban performance that is specially created for each venue. The audience follows the artists who move around the city in an unconventional way, jumping on the roofs of houses, hanging under bridges, and climbing balconies.
The creative director of the Riga Circus and the founder of the festival Re Riga! Mārtiņš Ķibers is pleased with the opportunity to bring Be Flat to Riga: «We already planned the show Follow Me in the 2020 festival programme, but due to the pandemic, the plan was not realised. I have seen the show in several European cities, and it is different every time, but the audience is always delighted by the witty, unexpected solutions. I would even say that this is a cathartic performance.»
Mārtiņš points out that the second performance of Be Flat is also exciting: «These artists are called chameleons for a reason — each of their performances is completely different. Double You is a masterpiece that plays on the so-called FOMO (fear of missing out) syndrome, or people’s fear of not knowing everything. Each group of spectators sees only a part of the play. It is a show about friendship and diversity — six bright characters meet in a musically and rhythmically crazy show and create a miracle.»
The festival programme also includes the cheerful performance for all generations Encore Une Fois by the collective Tripotes la Compagnie (Belgium), as well as the unusually plastic and charismatic contortionist (the so-called rubber man) Marina Cherry (USA, Sweden, Belgium) with the performance Only Bones v1.6. There will also be an opportunity to attend several performances by Baltic artists, for example the exciting and intellectually challenging collaborative performance of Latvian and Lithuanian artists Up To This Point, created by the collective Taigi Circuses. The Kanta Company collective from Lithuania will reveal its future performance 107 Ways to Deal With Pressure.
During the festival, there will also be Riga Circus School’s workshops for children, as well as Be Flat’s master classes for performing arts professionals from the Baltics. Full programme and detailed information about the artists can be found on the Riga Circus website.
Viedokļi