Erasmus+ EDUCIRCATION: CIRCE partnership project
Written by Marada Manussen, aka Miss Radida, The Invisible Circus’ European Partnership project coordinator.
‘Educircation’ is a European partnership project between 7 countries which focuses on circus pedagogy. The Invisible Circus, based in Bristol, UK, work with Kids in Action from Thessaloniki, Greece: Hungarian Juggling Association from Budapest, Hungary: Cirqueon from Prague, Czech Republic: Cabuwazi from Berlin, Germany; Cirkus in Beweging from Leuven in Belgium; and Espai de Circ from Valencia in Spain.
We are funded by the European Union’s Erasmus+ adult learning programme, and our aim is to improve the quality of circus teaching across Europe.
The partnership has been running now since 2010 starting with only five countries, growing to six with the addition of the Leuven circus school and then finally on to seven when Kids in Action joined. This round’s project, known as ‘CIRCE’ (the abbreviation of which stands for Cooperative for Information and Research in Circus Education) will finish in June of this year, bringing us to the end of 4 x 2-year projects together.
We believe circus has strong therapeutic, social and educational influences. We believe that training circus skills has a large multiplying positive effect for community empowerment.
We believe circus teaches life skills such as coordination, cooperation, confidence, positive body awareness, trust, kindness, joy, creativity, and positive cross-cultural relationships.
Our aim is to establish a field of circus education Beyond Borders through exchange, cooperation and respect.
Our other aims are:
- To empower circus teachers in their personal and professional capacities.
- To support strong humanitarian perspectives, where friendships are created that change lives.
Each country holds a masterclass in a certain circus discipline over a two-year period, and 2 people from each country attend each of these workshops together. We seek out master teachers to come and lead the workshops.
Workshops that we have run during this project include:
Fusing social circus and percussion, clowning workshops, adaptive juggling workshops (which means learning innovative ways to teach juggling to everybody including people with disabilities), balancing workshop- including skills such as tightwire, rola bola, hand balancing etc; parkour, partner acrobatics, and from 4th-8th March 2019 we will hold the Bristol workshop where we will host 12 teachers from the 6 partner countries in Bristol to learn the methods of Albin Warette, a teacher from the Toulouse circus school Le Lido, about how to fuse theatre with circus.
We have run some pretty incredible projects over the years including working with youth from Ethnic minority backgrounds in Bristol- the Invisible Youth run ongoing weekly free circus workshops for youth that attend the playground to learn circus skills, which is open to all Bristol youth; other projects include teaching circus to refugees, prisoners incarcerated, working with remote Roma communities, youth in psychiatric hospitals and rehabilitation centres, youth with physical disabilities, how to create shows with social messages, and workshops to teach parents how to play with their children.
Another branch of the CIRCE project is holding joint staff training exchanges where members of each organisation have travelled to another country to learn about and from each other’s projects, and we have also been holding organisational meetings on topics we find interesting and important to us. I have just got back from Prague last week from one of these meetings where we met with circus festival organisers from the Czech Republic to talk about how to run a circus festival. We spoke to the director, technicians, and programmers from the Letni Letna Festival in Prague, and Cirq-uff festival based in Trutnov in the north of the Czech Republic.
Have a look at our lovely new video outlining the project here:
If you wish to get in touch, please contact rada@invisiblecircus.co.uk or for more information on Educircation please visit the project’s website at www.educircation.eu.
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