Five women explore old age as something already present in the body. Through circus, dance and object manipulation, with masks and artificial limbs that merge organically with them, they interact with prostheses of the possible: faces appearing on an elbow, arms growing from a rocking chair, torsos emerging from a chair. Between humour, contortion and loss of control, their bodies mutate, tremble, split and transform. Old age is already contained within the body, as something intimate and tender, like a shadow or an anticipatory ghost.

Ara o mai is a hybrid composition made with all the strings that Jur has on her bow; clown, music, theatre, object manipulation, juggling, all assembled with the unique imprint of that magnificent madness that is hers. It is the performance of a woman in full artistic emancipation, accompanied by an acrobat, music created by Jur and Antoine Eole and a short film created by Jur and the actress Juliette Zannon.

Here, in Bleu Électrique, a cinematic atmosphere hovers. The characters are there, on the border between garbage and oblivion. Beneath an apparent ugliness that reflects a harsh everyday life, Bleu Électrique transcends toward a dreamlike beauty and lightness. Here, humanity is portrayed in all its splendour, its cruelty and its absurdity. Unpredictable behaviours and relationships, distressing events, absurd repercussions and endings complicit with general indifference. A nervousness, both pleasant and unsettling, takes hold of the audience, witness to this reality. By addressing fundamental human feelings — fears, anxieties, but also desires and aspirations — Bleu Électrique takes the risk of offering a raw and uncompromising look at reality, while at the same time inviting us, sometimes in the same impulse, to dream. But only sometimes — no miraculous recipe is offered here. With strength, sarcasm and humour, the audience is immersed in this human comedy, both absurd and profound. All of it is quite disconcerting.

Where is the real? Out there. And surely in very bad shape. Among old cameras and obsolete television sets, Chou Chou stages distractions to trick the Darkness that constantly threatens him. By proposing an absurd game, he plunges the audience into his own tragicomic delirium. Wearing briefs and a puffer jacket, Federico Robledo embodies this eccentric character, trapped in his extreme solitude, joyfully isolating himself from the programmed obsolescence of his own species.

Modern Nature is a conceptual EP in which my alter ego, Coconauta, explores the intersection between nature and technology in the era of hyperconnectivity. Through a fusion of experimental electronics and alternative sensibility, the project examines how the technologization of existence has reconfigured our perception of the living world, dissolving the boundaries between the biological and the artificial.

Compost Collaps arrives from Trufu, in the 22nd century. A world where many things have changed, but where we still continue to party intensely. A drummer and his CC-220: a 100% recycled homemade instrument — the sound system of the future. A live performance, with compositions inspired by dance floors from here and everywhere, linked together as DJs used to do. For a bright and lively tomorrow, so that everywhere, always, the party continues.

Five jugglers with a sporty appearance enter the space and warm up, in reference to Pasolini’s ragazzi. An anthem to absurdity resounds; the show can begin. Next, the safety rules and the rules of the game are explained to the audience. The music starts and, with it, a choreographic and juggling dialogue that reveals the different personalities of the performers and their relationships, which will evolve throughout the whole show. Copyleft speaks about the relationship of the individual with the group and about the vitality of the body allied with the virtuosity of juggling, in constant evolution with the music. Poetry is found in the details, in the encounter between two performers or with a spectator, in the perfection of a juggling gesture synchronized with the musical chords.

Each year we write the synopsis of something that does not yet exist, because that is precisely the point. We create a performance not yet revealed among people who do not know each other: an instant fiction, or a sum of fictions embodied by borrowed bodies, crossed by the wild intuition of surrendering to the stage with a poetic conspiracy in our hands. Each time we decipher codes, invent methods that bring us together to understand the ephemeral, brushing against the very reason for creation. We question the origin of time, values, meaning, signifiers, and the questions we need to break open. We venture into shadows, into matter, into light and into the ether. In chaos everything exists at once: madness decodes it and art translates it. The risk lies in inventing our own fire and burning our own house in order to see the sky beyond the roof. In a way, Crulab is about seeing further, through a supposed invention. This time there will be heads and feathers, characters, lamps and paintings. The story will be the story each person carries within themselves: Lupa Maimome — Multidisciplinary artist Silvia Capell — Contemporary circus Marta Lofi — Scenic arts / scenography Felix — Músic / Sound Martina Calvo / Acrodance Emiliano Pino — Creation, direction and performance

Under a suspended set, in a circular ring and inside an intimate arena, you are invited to a singular universe where clumsiness and feats coexist, small gestures and the extraordinary, appearance and false appearances. There will be bodies floating and swinging, alone and magnificent. There will be hats manipulated by a man who is himself manipulated. There will be stacks of coats, stripping of jackets, accumulations of capes, flights of tailcoats, the defoliation of blouses, the unfolding of jackets, the dripping of silk. There will be violins, guitars, keyboards, percussions, unusual objects, happy accidents, fanfare beings and orchestra bodies. A timeless and dreamlike circus that drags souls into the depths of humanity.

Dolores are Elske and Philine, circus artists who put their hand-to-hand discipline on stage in a naive way, without theatricalizing it at all. They play a game in which it is allowed to fail, to fail again and to fail even better (literary reference). Repeating tricks without shame is what is planned, as they show us the most difficult — perhaps even impossible — tricks from their repertoire created during twenty years of experience. The piece shows us their ritual and senseless side, which makes us reflect on the beginning of art and on its end. The acrobats generate a theatrical catharsis through an intense life experience that explores the limits of their bodies. Like in circus but with other rules; more absurd.

A hanging lamp, a switch cord, a glass of water, a ball and a candle. Each object is in its place, a speaker plays a retro tango. In this space where technical means are always elements of play, Léo Rousselet plays with time, light and the ball to create moments of suspension that vary in rhythm, move and transform as if by magic! The logic of causality gradually dissipates, reality becomes more complex and absurd. The switch cord tickles him…

Among digital ruins and the parasitic waves of a looping world, Jean Peiry, alias Erreurjean, asserts himself as a sound spectre in revolt. Experimenting with sound for years, only recently has the Fribourg artist decided to take this project, situated on the borders of electronics, post-punk and noise, out of his private sphere. With his synthesizers, out-of-sync drum machines and poorly recorded samples, he intentionally provokes error and chaos. Sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, his voice overlays industrial loops and raw beats. Like a liberation, his music is a cry of rage against the errors of the system.

The itinerant vocation of the circus and traveling shows involves a constant search for points of arrival—places that can host performances, rehearsals, meetings, or simply offer a place to rest. Circus, in its contemporary forms, develops its trajectory in a constant relationship with the realities capable of understanding, sustaining, and welcoming it. In this dynamic, tied to the need for training, reaching an audience, and storing equipment—and given the scarcity of official opportunities—contemporary circus artists have developed a knack for sensing, discovering, and inventing an infinite number of possibilities. It is thanks to this initiative, distinct from that of theater or dance, that the circus finds its place. Where? In alternative spaces, primarily "alien" to official cultural structures. Over the last thirty years, the link between these locations—often occupied spaces—and circus artists has become indissoluble: it is a connection worth discussing.

Always involved in a thousand musical adventures (such as Les Aus or Zeidún, to name just two), Mau Boada lives tucked away in the Montseny but moves like no one else within the local and global music scene, collaborating tirelessly with a wide and eclectic roster of artists. With his most personal project, Esperit!, he presents—together with a band—his fourth full-length album, Cançons, which culminates the path begun with Endavant continu (2011), La lluminosa (2014) and Ilíada (2019).

We contemplate the sheep, the birds of prey, and the streams. We count the stones. We sort them by size and by color. We also try to find the path to cross to the other side of the mountain. Sometimes we make it, sometimes we don’t. Inutile Randonnée is an initiatory journey filled with determined synthesizers, strange noises, and muscular guitars. A duo formed by Antoine Bocquet and Anthony Caruna (Cirque Pardi!), based in the south of France.

Sunday 19/04 - 8:00 PM Traditions only the ones we invent ourselves. Once again we will close the festival with a cabaret conducted by the dynamic duo formed by Edoardo de Montis and Salvatore Frasca, and through which artist friends and rock stars who have come to Kontrast to perform or to visit will pass by — it matters little to us. The point is to come together and enjoy high-level circus numbers (or whatever it may be) and above all to laugh a lot, which in the times we are living through is very much needed.

Eight characters lost in the city, each with their suitcase. Travellers or immigrants? Naive, curious, with emotions on the surface, they do not know the rules, our rules, our way of living. Their play is so subtle that it blends with reality. This is how a space for dialogue opens, where the spectator becomes an actor in the exchange and the experimentation. Kamchàtka finally becomes a mirror: that of our behaviours towards the other, the foreigner, the different. Will we build the future with the Kamchàtka or will we reject them?

Konvent Klub is the collective of DJs and musicians of Konvent, a community from which, through art, a former disused religious and industrial space is resignified in a rural context. Konvent Klub seeks to create immersive musical experiences to resignify the dance space as a space of inclusive collective catharsis, with an eclectic line open to transformation; a celebration of building from ruins; a risky party space without concessions.

Losers Arcade present Beauty Roulette For a small coin, lucky participants can spin the wheel and let fortune decide their look for the day Wherever the roulette arrow points will determine your colour scheme as you are propelled into the Losers Salon of Wellmess and Beauty for a full makeover, a partial makeover or a surprise makeover With massage and other delights

A character appears, buried under 35 kilos of steel. An armour too heavy, too noisy, too alive to be just a costume. Each step raises a question, each gesture renegotiates a peace treaty between the body and the metal. Between circus and dance, he tries to tame this capricious mass that sometimes helps him and sometimes challenges him. Then, one by one, the pieces detach. The weight decreases, the space opens and each element finds a second wind. Object, tool, counterweight, matter to manipulate or juggle: the metal reinvents itself at the same rhythm as the body that frees itself from it. Miror explores that moment when lightening oneself is not renouncing, but transforming. A danced and circus journey where we discover that removing weight can sometimes open up a whole world… and that the objects we thought were heavy also know how to surprise.

Friday 17/04 - 11:30 PM Muovipussi is an electronic music group formed by Milla Lahtinen, Niklas Blomberg and Heidi Finnberg in 2018. Muovipussi’s music incorporates elements of rap, crispy pop and metal. The group’s concerts are explosive packages full of extravagant and energetic sequences that guarantee to keep you hooked throughout the show. Between instrumental virtuosity and fast rap, there is plenty of space to have fun and to make the audience travel through a wide range of emotions. Muovipussi wants to create a concert with ingredients that have not been seen or experienced live before. If the audience asks — What is happening? — Muovipussi’s mission will have been a success. The group aspires to entertain while blowing up into oblivion old and dusty norms, beliefs and social structures.

Perdón is a declaration of love and hate to dance. A piece that explores limits: of artistic creation; of dancing; of the performer’s freedom on stage or their relationship with the audience; of discomfort and also of chicken elastics. Limits as an artistic manifesto or as a privileged space for surprise and provocation, where what is beautiful can become grotesque or a display of vulnerability. Without victimism or moralism, without prejudices about good, evil, what is beautiful or what is boring, we put our heart directly on the grill to say: This is what we are: this is the proof that you can dance with ‘v’, with humour and with spelling mistakes. (And if this is another synopsis that does not clarify anything for you, sorry.)

More than a decade after the release of her solo debut album, the award-winning producer, DJ and multi-instrumentalist Sasha Perera, also known as Perera Elsewhere, seamlessly integrates experimental rap, psychedelic grime and dancefloor-oriented footwork with her distinctive avant-pop sound, for which she has become known. Her voracity for Just Wanna Live Some makes her borderless expressions, through songs and pieces, have only one thing in common: they are human, a consideration that has never been more urgent.

Queerass(é). Act I: Chants of a genderless body A figure covered in plaster cracks, dismantles itself and reveals what never fit. Queerass(é) does not represent an identity: it carves it. The stage becomes porous; the audience is inside, touched, invoked. There is no fourth wall. There is skin, breath, vertigo. This work does not seek a form: it undoes form as an embodied gesture. Between choreography of rubble and indocile ceremony, it resonates like a spirituality without temple, made of bodies that offer themselves without guarantee, like provisional dwellings of desire. Crystallized identity breaks and presence becomes a rhizome, without origin, without end, without centre. Queerass(é) moves like a collective body in flight, between text, movement and image. It was created without subsidies or obedience, outside the cultural thanatopolitical circuit. It was born in a living room and rises in the theatre as an embodied trench.

Berlin’s chameleon of pulse and protest, Rafush bends frequencies into narrative. A shape-shifter behind the decks, they claim their corner of the cosmos with sweat and intent—where rhythm be- comes resistance and sound, a soft revolution. Rafush’s mission braids incandescent beats and genre genealogy with leftist visions of liberation and communal get-down. Their sound isn’t a genre—it’s an argument for multiplicity, a heartbeat that refuses reduction, a protest disguised as rhythm. This is playful politics as much as a politics of play—stitching together blends and juxtapositions that leave us glued, skewed, and moved. Their sets move like quicksilver—veering from sun-drenched percussion to nocturnal noise, from the Afrofuturist underground to the electronic ether. Rafush toys with genre the way wind toys with smoke—each transition a defi ance, each beat a retelling. Yet through every unexpected shift, a story holds the spine of the night. Their narrative sense is magnetic: no matter how far they drift, the dance never un- threads. The crowd stays glued, breath hitched, until the last pulse fades.

A “circnematic” journey that awakens the desire to live in a freer and more exciting world. A celebration of essence. Streamers, tablecloths, glasses and all the tableware will be dyed with our circus discoveries. We will toast, immortalize moments and you will look at the world through a 360º hole; you will play at being the epicentre of the ring. These will be the risks on our ròdol, ...and yours if you come to the celebration. It is also an invitation to peek, to be voyeurs, to look differently at what perhaps we had never seen in that way. To understand or question why and how trees, lampposts, balconies or even the phenomenon of human bipedalism stand upright. ...also, with virtual reality glasses, we will enter a film in which we will be the epicentre of the ring. For a few minutes we will be like a stone guest until we are questioned about what we are doing there.

A ROAST is a comedy format where different invited comedians gather to publicly criticize the protagonist of the show. A BEEF is a confrontation between 2 rap singers through lyrics and rhyme. A ROAST BEEF or ROSBIF is a tender cut of beef roasted in the oven. ROSE BIF is Sarah Anglada’s solo. Five monochromatic characters emerge from a 1100L green trash container, the common one, where we all periodically throw our waste, the dirt, the filth; what is seen and what we hide. We will talk about shit, yes, but without offending, because shit is wise, it is pure anthropology. We constantly generate it and it speaks, bluntly, about ourselves.

For years we made people laugh while having fun ourselves, until being a clown became just a job, built on old tricks repeated to reassure an audience that wants to switch off its brain, like in front of a screen. But a clown is not meant to provide comfort: he is madness, diversity, freedom. With Rubbish Rabbit we want to return to that spirit, drawing inspiration from children: chaotic, noisy, destructive, authentic. On stage we break objects, shoot each other, fall down, fight, and play with giant stuffed animals, following our instincts. A show that is not reassuring, but free and wild.

Charlie Dirty and Daddy Schwartz, who have been retired in Tibet for the past four years, return with diagnoses of ADHD, TDS, borderline and depressive states. Both of them managed to get out of toxic relationships with narcissistic abusers thanks to great artistic resilience and the help of the mafia. Today they propose a dystopian music in which the voice becomes a kind of sonic landscape that shoves a big Volvo up your backside. “Bringing together someone unable to sing with someone else who has absolutely no sense of rhythm struck me as an innovative concept for entertainment at the dawn of the rise of AI.” KIKI — Product Manager and Head of Marketing, Innovation Improvement Schlaasss.

A proposal of adult puppet mini-theatre, an intimate comedy for three spectators who spy through a confessional on the fantasies and contradictions of the eroticism of sin, he or the “voyeur” who kneels not to confess, but to enjoy scenes of lustful concupiscence full of sin. A divertimento that seeks to provoke by the hand of Madame Paulette.

2 artistic proposals in the process of creation that we will discover in a walk through the interior of the Konvent factory. **“PEOPLE” CLAUDIO STELLATO** <br> As in all his works, Claudio seeks to push the limits of contemporary circus towards decidedly daring territories. PEOPLE appropriates compulsive accumulation, a deforming mirror of our era, where objects pile up like so many traces of an existence adrift. Bodies rush, matter splashes: on stage, chaos organizes itself in radical black and white, between frenzy and poetry. Unleashed performative play, raw energy, relentless rhythm — PEOPLE pushes absurdity to the limit, where every gesture becomes a cry, every fall a resistance. Seated at the heart of the arena, you will be struck by this sensory experience, where beauty is born from disorder and emotion explodes without filters. **Système 47** <br> A territory in its raw state, seemingly inert. An expanse saturated by the world's noise where time loses its way. Within the fissure of the landscape a form emerges, like an unknown variable. Upon crystallizing, the silhouette blurs the horizon line and ripples the surrounding atmosphere to its very edge. An energy is unleashed, leaving the reducing agent to order the chaos and give soul to the light. RedOx immortalizes a mutation where space is imbued with a sensitive matter capable of changing its own poetics.

WANDER is a sonic and physical journey, a body that speaks and a voice that transforms. A wandering in a small intimate space, inviting the audience to get lost in this eccentric journey that seems without destination, yet advances with great determination. Where am I going? Where are we going? As individuals, as a society. A mobile cartography of possible migrations. A living map, collectively drawn, with steps that slide toward new horizons to inhabit. COME WANDER WITH ME.