My Land

Premiering at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, My Land was rated by critics as the best production of the entire 2018 Edinburgh International Festival, in the following year was a sold-out success at Avignon OFF in France, at the world’s premier performing arts festival. In this cirque danse piece, Artistic Director Bence Vági worked with seven of Ukraine's most talented circus artists to present a vision of light and shadow fusing ancient traditions with mind-blowing skills. Pushing the boundaries of the human body, My Land resonates with the most ancient myths of humanity, following the artists as they search for the sound of their own freedom in a timeless space expanded by illusions. In My Land’s ambitious staging, performers rise up from a soil-covered set to tell their personal stories, creating mesmerising images evoking tradition, freedom and love. Featuring traditional Tatar, Moldavian, and other music pieces from the Ukraine, and never before seen physical feats, My Land is part modern dance, part circus performance, incorporating theatrical finesse and the energy of the Eastern European acrobatic arts to create the new performing arts genre, cirque danse. Focusing on the eternal link between people and their homelands, My Land is performed on an earth-covered stage, where – illuminated by piercing rays of light – the performers climb ever higher to the almost unbelievable heights of the abilities of the human body. In front of a stripped-down background, the lighting creates a space where the bond with the homeland – along with the flow of life that sweeps the characters away from it and all the struggles and loves and the beauty and pain that this entails – can unfold.