At first everything was empty and dull; then Dinamico Festival came along.

I would like the festival I’ve helped shape over the past ten years to be remembered this way. Anyone who’s tasted both the joys and the concrete efforts of creating, organizing, and sustaining a festival would likely wish the same - perhaps along with a few more months of vacation.

And yet, very often, festivals and cultural spaces assume a central role in a community only to vanish as swiftly as they arrived when faced with familiar sectoral challenges. When grievances do arise, they rarely reverse course. Nonetheless, should we interview residents, we’d discover that those spaces have left indelible memories, feelings, and practices in those communities. Have we grown so accustomed to closures and cuts - in healthcare, education, and beyond - that our indignation no longer sparks effective action?

Is our indifference to the disappearance of cultural outposts - and, with them, the steady erosion of public gathering places, unless one has the spending power to approach them - one of the many tiles in a reversed mosaic, depicting social cohesion as it unravels, rather than binding together?

We should ask ourselves, as cultural professionals, why, despite having produced contents aimed at filling voids (voids of meaning, empty spaces, market niches), we find ourselves in an environment that has never been so, in recent times, hostile to research, plurality and diversity, cultural risk-taking, education, prevention - everything we ought to and wish to represent.

A precarious framework

Italy’s performing arts sector relies on three-years funding cycles coming from the Ministry of Culture. In the absence of a true framework law, rules to apply to such funding are “re-created or reconfirmed” every triennium through government decrees. This lack of legislative stability conveys the everyday precariousness faced by cultural workers, who are faced with unjust welfare tools to influence their field to its fullest.

As Ateatro, one of the major national performing arts webzine, wisely put it: “2025 began like 2024, which began like 2023, which began like 2022… - all while awaiting the Performing Arts Code”. This long-awaited legal framework was supposed to clarify minimum worker protections and sector funding criteria. In 2024 it seemed within reach - consultations, working groups, promises about publishing it by spring, then by summer… and then again, nothing.

Worse still, instead of the Code, a new Ministerial Decree redefined funding for 2025-27, essentially acting as a stand-in law. Early results and analysis reveal three clear trends:

1. Tradition over innovation: granting favor to a “culture that unites” (with topics such as family, nation, etc.) at the expense of research and cultural risk-taking.

2. Efficiency metrics on the rise: evaluations hinge on values such as cost-per-spectator, largely underestimating aspects such as sustainability, social impact, or geographic diversity.

3. Resource scarcity: despite grand political claims, no significant resources injection happened in the Performing Arts National Fund (FNSV), limiting evaluators’ ability to effect meaningful change in its resources’ distribution

Amid this turmoil, contemporary circus’ peculiar position

While contemporary theatre and dance have seen score cuts and budget slashes, contemporary circus has not experienced significant downturns (some cases exist, but let’s keep it simple for now). This isn’t necessarily a privilege, as it could also be interpreted as a sign of the sector’s marginalization: after all, less than 3% of the allocated public resources go to circus (including traditional and traveling shows), whereas, for comparison, the opera sector absorbs roughly 50%.

Yet even within traditional circuses, tradition reasserts itself. Industrial-scale circuses - colorful, well-attended, market-savvy - demonstrate resilience (the capitalistic type) and are counter-intuitively rewarded with public funding, while experimental companies linger on the margins.

As of August 2025, final funds allocation still need to be published. Some may shift following the ongoing sector’s mobilizations, so the landscape could change swiftly.

Reimagining “sector”

What role can contemporary circus play in current mobilizations? Perhaps the answer lies in the very notion of “sector.” Addressing systemic flaws with the system’s own tools - and following its own rules - risks outcomes designed to protect the status quo. Sectoral divisions (divide et impera, as someone would say) among theatre, dance, and circus facilitate orderly - but opaque - resource distribution. Reducing any field, especially culture, to administrative compliance drains it of meaning: bureaucratic categories and delays should serve development, not constrain it.

Can contemporary circus pose itself as a mediator?. Recently recognized as a fundable sector within the FNSV, it has simultaneously pursued institutional recognition and preserved a “grey zone” of experimentation - less subject to ideological pressures, and therefore freer.

At Dinamico Festival, and alongside other Italian contemporary circus entities, we’ve spent over a year co-creating a group of discussion about circus within C.Re.S.Co, one of the main associations representing contemporary performing arts. This forum unites circus professionals with peers from theatre and dance, bringing “fresh air” and concrete proposals to reshape sectoral funding criteria.

The next C.Re.S.Co board meeting - the first after the new ministerial allocations - has taken place at Dinamico Festival in September. A peculiar public gathering where circus, theatre, dance, and academia have discussed emerging and contradictory data together with potential future actions. A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a circus festival - once dismissed as mere family entertainment - to become a key forum for performing arts’ future.

Imagination professionals, crisis of imagination

If the cultural world has been caught unprepared by division, it is nevertheless composed of imagination-professionals. The present crisis of imagination - our collective inability to imagine a future which is not the “natural consequence” of the present - limits innovation and amplifies helplessness in the face of social and economic challenges. Festivals, as spaces of artistic creation, collective meaning-making, and community engagement, are uniquely positioned to counter this “imagination crisis”, bolstering resilience, and laying foundations for concrete alternatives.

In the past, now, and into the future, we’ll always face new “voids” to fill. As imagination’s practicioners, our aim should be filling those gaps with contents able to restore our place to the very heart of the social-cohesion debate, where we have long belonged.

Matteo Giovanardi

Cultural researcher and project designer, active across festivals and institutions. His work focuses on innovation through culture, culture&health and community empowerment. He contributed to Dinamico Festival’s growth in the past 10 years and he’s currently researching at Ca’ Foscari university.