Susanne Stemmer · Founder & Creative Director

Manfred Forster — Fossie — from Kinderkulturzentrum Kuddelmuddel called me one winter to talk about Ilvie Little. Somewhere in the conversation, we got onto the next Kinderklangwolke. He said he was still looking for an idea.

“What do you have in mind?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “I know this young woman who does hula hoop.”

I was walking through Vienna at the time. And for the next twenty minutes, my head did what it sometimes does when someone gives it a problem: it started throwing pictures at me. A circus. A ring. Music. Acrobatics. Strange characters. A story.

Maybe that wasn't entirely accidental. When I was a teenager, I desperately wanted to join the circus — as a saxophone player. I even applied. My family gently suggested that perhaps finishing school first might be a good idea. They won that one.

The circus didn't disappear, though. Apparently it had just been waiting.

By the time I reached the office, I had the skeleton of a story. Not a sequence of circus acts, but an adventure that could hold all of them together — and ask a question that mattered beyond the stage:

What happens to the dreams we stop dreaming?

Frida and Sven set off to find them. And suddenly the hula hoop had become Circus Circus – Auf der Suche nach den verlorenen Träumen.

I called Fossie back and asked if I could send him a concept. There was a short pause. “You already have one?” Well. Yes, I think so.

From there, the world grew. Titus Vadon wrote the music. Circus artists, musicians, dancers, actors and young performers came together. We built a story about dreams, courage and the strange things that happen when you dare to take yourself seriously.

And once again, I found myself learning just as much from the children and young people as they might have learned from us.

They surprise me. They challenge what I think is possible. They try things, fall down, get back up, practise, laugh and try again. And somehow, impossible stops looking quite so impossible.

4500 people were there.

And somewhere between the circus ring, the music, the acrobatics, the laughter and thousands of people watching together, an idea that had appeared during a twenty-minute walk had become very real.