BETA CIRCUS Participatory experience is a cooperation project that aims to create an European transnational opportunity to explore the participatory circus as a future trend to engage the public participation in the circus creative process, letting the audience to become co-authors, editors, and observers of the artistic work.

Applying the participatory arts methodology to the contemporary circus scene will promote the engaging of the local community of the intervention place with a full and integrated creation process applied to unconventional spaces for artistic presentation, including the public space, connecting contemporary arts to the immaterial local cultural heritage by the voice of the inhabitants as co-creators with professional artists.

A partnership connecting Italy, Latvia, Portugal and Serbia is the starting-point to an European vision methodology, opened to artists from all over Europe that wish to explore the participatory work applied to circus arts. Circus artists selected by an European open call will join local collectives with experience in participatory arts, joining forces for a collaborative experience supported by expert mentors. Artistic laboratories, collaborative meetings, artistic research and creative residencies in the selected places with the local community are the key steps of the project. Each artistic experience is completed with a public performance.

Connecting contemporary circus with participatory arts methodology is a possible future trend that the project wish to test and explore, complementing the capacity-building and co-creative artistic activities with a research and monitoring level that will allow the publication of a toolkit and a documentary in the end of the project to disseminate the methodology and the experience for all the European and international artistic professionals.