Photo — Patrick Van Vlerken
Photo — Frauke Verreyde
Photo — Tom Herbots
Photo — Patrick Van Vlerken
Photo — Patrick Van Vlerken
Photo — Patrick Van Vlerken
Photo — Jean Philipse
Photo — Jean Philipse
$20 — 20 years old and younger
25 % discount for students
MIDI 50 Tickets
A quest for reconciliation, between father and son, between performer and audience, between former glory and fresh opportunities.
Danny and Pepijn Ronaldo, father and son, together on stage. United by a shared passion for music and tricks, they build a bridge between similarities and differences. The father seems entrenched in his past, desperately searching for an age-old but faded feeling of ecstasy. The son seeks to reconcile the old circus created by his father with the world beyond.
The roots of Circus Ronaldo stretch far back into the past, with Danny and Pepijn as the sixth and seventh generations. With seven being a sacred number, they now pay tribute to this past: ‘Sono io?’ (‘Is that me?).
Since 1996 Circus Ronaldo has been performing all over the world for prestigious theatre houses and major circus and arts festivals. With European tours from Reykjavik to Lisbon and big world trips to Australia and New Zealand. In Flanders, Circus Ronaldo is most commonly featured in the programmes of the larger Cultural Centres. The tours are still put together by Frans Brood Productions in Ghent.
Circus Ronaldo is something unique in the hearts of many spectators. It creates an innovative form of circus, which is inextricably linked to the roots from the past. Based on old performance traditions, still-authentic caravans and the reuse of material from many generations back, Circus Ronaldo presents a tribute to the old circus theatre. It draws its inspiration from the commedia dell’arte and a predilection for the power that de Tsukomogami (the use of the spirit of worn-out materials) exerts over the unconscious. At the same time, the audience, when it enters into Ronaldo’s world, discovers a familiarity, a self-evidence, a mirror for their own fragile identity. A world of magical realism is created, in which the spectator is in doubt as to what is real and what is not. In a virtuoso manner, the company digs down into the deeper layers of their own emotions and thereby holds up a mischievous mirror to them. Circus Ronaldo plays with an intense experience of the ‘now’, which is highly familiar to many spectators. It links a nostalgia to a reality that will unsettle you, in an intimate, passionate, everlasting dance.
