A central part of our work focuses on creating artistic formats in public and community spaces that enable meaningful encounters between people who might not otherwise meet.
Through festivals, participatory city interventions, open artistic formats, and temporary community spaces, we create environments where dialogue can emerge through shared experience, collective creation, and direct human encounter.
While these formats engage different target groups and address different social contexts, they are united by the same intention: to create spaces where people can encounter one another not as abstract categories, but as neighbours, collaborators, and members of a shared community.
Große Leute Carnival — our annual city festival. For three years, Upsala-Circus has been developing Große Leute in Zeitz together with children, teenagers, families, artists, schools, and community partners — inviting the city to become, for one day, a little brighter, louder, and wonderfully more absurd.
Each edition is built around a new artistic theme that becomes a shared invitation to dream and create together — from flights and dreams to elephants (because… why not?).
Over the years, the carnival has steadily grown in scale and reach. What began as a city format continues to expand geographically through partnerships with schools and communities beyond the city centre — including collaborations with a neighbouring village school in 2025 and an expanded school network in 2026.
Rebels for Peace — an evolving artistic format exploring themes of peace, coexistence, memory, and human connection through contemporary circus, performance, and public space.
First created in Zeitz in 2018, the project began as a space for teenagers to reflect on the world around them — their experiences, questions, fears, hopes, and the fragile intersections between conflict and peace, identity and belonging, everyday life and larger political realities.
In 2019, the format developed further through an artistic residency that led to the documentary performance Domino — a work built around the personal stories of teenagers, including experiences of migration, transition, and growing up between different realities.
After our relocation to Germany, Rebels for Peace returned in 2023 in a new form: a contemporary circus promenade created together with professional artistic teams, inviting audiences to rediscover Zeitz through movement, performance, and unexpected perspectives.
The next chapter is planned for 2027, focusing on stories, biographies, and the process of getting to know one another across differences — continuing the format’s core interest in dialogue, empathy, and shared human experience.
2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsL3s6d2gX4
2019