Terminal 2018

Save yourself from the abyss of indifference. It is in this complex challenge that we grasp the essence of an impetuous art like the circus. The ability to create and grow a community through an artistic proposal is instead the very first certificate of guarantee that evaluates its success. The birth of a human bond tells the story of the success of the efforts hidden during the long phases of creation, preparation and research. A community as an inexhaustible resource of energy helps the man withered in front of the screens that organize his life. It is a coincidence that just as a group of Israeli acrobats spends their artistic residency in the spaces of the Circo all’inCirca, a few days after Terminal, the clashes in Gaza kill more than fifty people. Meanwhile, a group of Muslim circus performers is stopped at the Italian border, it seems they will not be able to reach the festival. There are no formal reasons, simply the color of the skin takes precedence over any other human reason. The world seems to travel at double speed. A Palestinian flag flies in the festival audience, splashed in the face of the Israelis’ performance. The unconditional freedom of opinion, expression and speech have generated such a babel of meanings and information that no one dares to say who is on the right side, no one even dares to imagine that a right side exists. It is in this mix of stimuli, doubts and perplexities, while a French couple at the aerial tableau even questions their own technical skills, that magic happens. The profound lightness of the circus has managed to eliminate languages, judgments and pre-understandings. Having put to sleep the logic of a world that feeds on conflict, now it is the bodies that speak. They dance, thirty bodies, as many as the artists of the festival, they are demonstrating that a Moroccan Muslim with the writing “free palestine” on his sweatshirt is capable of dancing with an Israeli acrobat without any taboos, that the color of the flag does not matter, what counts are the hours of sweat spent preparing one’s body to make it capable of transmitting emotions, what counts is the need to always and without hesitation seek the truth, what counts is the search for beauty. It was above all this Terminal 2018, beyond the successes with the public, beyond the sure success of Respire staged inside a suggestive deconsecrated church, it was the communities that revolve around the festival that made it an event full of meaning, true. Not only the community of artists who lived and who normally live in the apartments and residential spaces of the Circo all’inCirca, also the community of local artists gave meaning to Terminal: actors, dancers, visual designers, musicians from Friuli. A huge collective that inhabits one of the most unknown squares in the city. The art here is not street art. Where the classic buskers festival tries to reach the unsuspecting public of a historic center, already crossed by passers-by and tourists, Terminal chooses the uninhabited places of the city, aware that only in this way can it say something to the world, can generate a new sense of belonging and community. It is not a radical chic choice, but a sort of artistic vocation that with all its strength urges the public not to stay in the comforts of city indifference. It is not a given to find art in the city: it is necessary to move to look for it, discover it and bring it to life. A common goal is the starting point for an effective relationship. It is in this sense that the circus also becomes the home of other artistic disciplines: within a sort of circus vision of the performance space, various disciplines question their own canons and play together to discover a new point of view on the city and the local artistic community. A series of concentric communities, full of meaning and capable of finding alternative answers to the depersonalizing global logics, this is Terminal.