BIRZEIT, WEST BANK // The Palestinian Circus School formed in 2006 out of a circus performance group of eight men and women who began training together in the Palestinian Territories.
The school’s mission is to introduce circus performance arts to children to help them cope with the challenges of life under Israeli occupation.
Its founding members — Palestinian Shadi Zmorrod and his Belgian wife Jessika Devlieghere – saw how life was getting increasingly difficult for Palestinian children after the start of the second Intifada in 2000. Many children saw their homes demolished and their family members killed. New checkpoints were set up and their freedoms were drastically curbed, with many suffering abuse and detention at the hands of Israeli forces.
In August 2006, the group performed for the first time together to a crowd of 250 people in Ramallah. For the next six months, they would deliver six more performances in Ramallah and one in Bethlehem despite not having a permanent base to train from.
By 2008, three new trainers had joined them and they were working with about 80 children on a weekly basis. The children are aged six to 18.
Today, the number has nearly quadrupled, with more than 300 Palestinian children from across the West Bank coming to the school to learn circus performance skills each week.
After years of not having a permanent home, the group finally moved in 2011 to a refurbished building in Birzeit, 10 kilometres from Ramallah, which is being funded by the Belgian government.
The circus pedagogy is to help stimulate and develop the mental, physical, artistic and social abilities of apprentices, while teaching them to resist the occupation in a peaceful manner.
The children are taught circus techniques like acrobatics — which include floor acrobatics, trampoline and pair-acrobatics — and aerial acrobatics, such as using a trapeze. Other activities include juggling balls, clubs, diablo and scarfs; balancing on the Chinese pole or a tight wire; and pedalling on a unicycle. The training also includes artistic interpretation skills such as how to use the circus to tell a story.
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