#Freshcircus5 @Circa - Auch

From 21st to 26th October, Circo all'inCirca was in Auch, in Occitania, 85km from Toulouse. Here, the development of the circus has a thirty-year history. Born as an effervescent phenomenon of counterculture, it developed thanks to a visionary cultural policy. This is the key to understanding surprising phenomena such as the one represented by Auch: a town of about twenty thousand inhabitants, located in a mostly agricultural region, completely disconnected from public transport networks, produces a contemporary circus festival that counts something like 5,000 tickets sold per day, a perennial "sold out" and an artistic innovation capable of attracting and hosting one of the most important meetings on the world circus scene: Fresh Circus. A meeting of circus operators that takes place once every two years in cities and festivals that are always different. In Auch this year we were about 700 operators from all over the world.

Circus as a culture of change? The French example gives a completely affirmative answer: a sector of the cultural industry that has nothing to envy of the sectors of cinema, theater and dance. A way of thinking about the performing arts that goes beyond pure entertainment and becomes a massive tourist industry, as well as an effective pulpit for artists. Because here the artists are not forced to bend to the logic of the market, thanks to the support of the French political economy they still manage to be vigilant sentinels of democracy. Isn't this the role that ultimately belongs to art: to offer man the possibility of being more human, sensitive, attentive to his own civilization and therefore democratic? If this intuition is true then it is possible that the difficulties that the very few reckless young people in Italy who decide to work in the field of art have to face today have to do with a politics that is increasingly less interested in democracy. It is a possibility. In the meantime we continue to work hard to offer our city and our little corner of Italy a place where humanity prevails above all else.