Superheroes are dead. The Power of Circus Metaphors at Peculiar Families Festival 2025

Peculiar Families Festival turned six this year, and the current edition has been a turning point in the event's relationship with city spaces. Peripheries and unconventional places become stages for bringing circus in contact with the local audience and act as a welcome distraction in the daily life of citizens and tourists. The festival has a history of a nomadic approach, moving from place to place in Split, Croatia, but unlike circus tents, it is not always on its own free will. Every year, it has a unique way of dealing with circus as an art, which melts genres and gets surprising reactions from spontaneous spectators. This aspect brought me to question its perception, the rules inside the city, and the role of culture in the outdoor space.

As a UFO touched down in the neighbourhood, the circus arts at PFF didn’t significantly affect the local community, which continued with its usual activities, largely bypassing or ignoring the existence of a spaceship in their territory. In isolated moments when it was greeted with curiosity and enthusiasm, there was also unfamiliarity about what it is and how to approach a street performance situation. This brought me to the thought that education is a pivotal task to facilitate the fruition of local circus festivals and programs.

The context of two performances, Instante and Lontano, is best described as a temporary disruption in the everyday life of the neighborhood Split 3, an urban brutalist mastodon from the 60s, in which the appearance of exciting contemporary circus creation remained tightly enclosed in its shell, with occasional intrusions from the world it briefly inhabited. Cie 7Bis’s diptych is a two 30-minute solo cyr wheel performance combination that speaks of two completely different themes.

Superheroes are dead

The first performance, Lontano, is performed by Marica Marinoni, an Italian artist specialising in cyr wheel who received her circus education at the prestigious French CNAC. From the first moment, it is clear that the central theme is combat. The artist appears and, entering into calm preparation, slowly puts on boxing gloves and gets straight into fighting mode. I am witnessing another incredible feat of technical virtuosity that paradoxically places the circus artist far from the usual notion of an invincible superhero mastering an apparatus. In Lontano, the image of the untouchable circus superwoman goes further into history, and it is very exciting to witness in real time such radical changes currently taking place in this artistic discipline.

The artist and her circus object are equals on stage and in the interpretation. She is not simply interested in performing tricks, however, she is not sacrificing them for a narrative. She doesn’t deprive us of her exceptional special technical level, but through her style, also opens up a whole new world. She unfolds a convincing picture of the acrobat's extreme battle with her object, which can be read simultaneously as a battle with herself. 

Marica skillfully uses all the physical features of the cyr wheel, using them at the service of her story: the continuous sound of the heavy steel wheel rolling as it insidiously circles all around her, its massiveness and size compared to her delicate but strong, skilful and agile appearance. The fight goes on through various twists and turns. She attacks and retreats, at one point excruciatingly tired, as if she is at the very end of her strength, almost giving up and surrendering to the metal wheel, but only to gather strength for a new drive and strike back again.

Another interesting point is that Marica's acrobatic background includes studying trampoline, which we can clearly see when she manipulates the forces in the cyr wheel; she sends them to the floor, which launches her vertically. It doesn't end there, because in an incredible display of technical innovation, she lands precisely on the other side of the wheel, mastering all the passages of this unstable system. The sound system releases distant voices of people inciting her, accompanied by glimpses of lightning, which emphasise the unseen boxing arena.

Even without situating an imaginary place of combat around her, Lontano presents clear and exceptionally performed scenes. What we all felt was her exhausting determination in fighting. Combining her freedom in dealing with an opponent force from herself, the wheel, and her inner struggle, Marica cannot let go of that fighting mode, transforming it into an act of resistance through endurance. Who will win?

The Infinite Power of Essence 

Juan Ignacio Tula’s nonchalance in approaching the stage before his performance gives an informal feeling, as if a rehearsal is about to begin. However, when he quickly catches the thread, his character suddenly appears on stage, drawing us into an unknown dimension. He begins to spin inside his large aluminium wheel, supporting its weight with the strength of his muscles. Moving but standing, the initial establishment of rhythm influences his gaze. Given the spin where he is caught, his eyes cannot communicate precisely with the outside world. Instead, the face of a lost man opens up towards us, searching for his place under the dark evening grey-blue sky, and his eyes raise upward, suggesting a search for the Almighty. The impression is immediately effective, the massive metal wheel loses its weight in a glimpse, and we are drawn into this endless game.

As we slowly get into this new planet’s laws of physics, Juan plays with centripetal force, and the object's weight is dominant, pulling and guiding this lost man in his search. We understand that the decision to defy these laws would be fatal, and their relationship evolves into a symbiosis in which the man and his object become one interdependent system, with occasional hints of a desire to escape from this heavy metal cocoon. The artist introduces new objects with new layers of meaning - silver foil that rustles violently under the influence of forces in the wheel, reminding us that this is not a harmless game, evoking the danger of stormy seas with image and sound.

At about that point in the journey, a local pop song blares from a nearby café. Despite my efforts to neutralise the melody inside my head, the singer’s voice harshly and tirelessly penetrates the universe created by Juan. The neighbourhood and Juan's limbo in which we find ourselves intertwine and merge into a cataclysmic mush. The endless whirlwind in which Juan is caught takes on new metaphors shaped by the givens of the place we find ourselves in. In such a large gap between these two worlds, it seems unproductive to pass the blame from one side to the other; the energy is certainly more useful directed at building bridges across that gap.

We try to return and maintain focus on the metaphors he conveys to us using impressive strength and precision acquired through countless hours of training. The strobe lights up, affecting our perception of time. The artist runs in the small circle in which he is caught, creating the effect of accelerating the film strip, after which he returns to a weightless state, all in the same infinite movement, forever trapped inside a spinning wheel.

After a while, Juan finally stops his hypnotising spin and, for the first time, steps outside the space defined by the cyr wheel. What follows is another extremely clear metaphor - the wheel turns in a transverse direction, and we see the figure of a man who is once again caught in the curse of jumping over the same obstacles over and over.

The motives of weightlessness and togetherness with a heavy wheel as a companion and the constant return to the same pattern of movement perfectly underline the theme of a struggle. Juan accepts his fate, but still chooses to return to the nightmare of the dance with the wheel, this time taking out a pile of papers from the inside pocket of his jacket. Are they instructions, a manual on “how to survive” in this situation, or perhaps a few versions of farewell letters from his past? As they are carried away by the whirlwind created by his continuous, violent movement, he tries to find his way in the sea of ​​confusing information or perhaps in the silence of the blank paper, still searching for answers. Finally, the spinning slows down and slowly stops. The man collects his discarded jacket and shoes, which have been waiting at the edge of the stage the whole time, and leaves.

The Power of Circus Metaphors 

Watching these two performances and comparing them, I reached the same conclusion I felt many times watching over and over across different circus shows and even disciplines: the transformative power of a circus metaphor offers endless possibilities. From the same list of ingredients, a solo artist on stage with a cyr wheel and not much else, Juan and Marica were able to create two very different universes. Both Lontano and Instante play with space and time dimensions in their titles and meanings, fusing them with endurance. Watching the two shows made me think about the universal struggle of distance to our elusive aspirations, with time passing by, no matter the efforts we put in. Maybe the answer to all is to just be present in the moment, instantly. A moment that already belongs to the past, with a new one coming right after, and a persistent human vividly living it.

This review is published as one of the results of The Review Lab, a workshop held in Split by Around About Circus during the Peculiar Families Festival 2025 edition thanks to DUSC and Room100.

To know more about the festival, read the review by Nataša Tasić, Damocles without the Sword