Led by a social mission to reach and empower local, disadvantaged children Tini Tinou is a month-long contemporary circus festival split between Cambodia's two largest and most populous cities: Phnom Penh and Battambang. Beginning with two weeks of workshops that invite practitioners from around the world to participate in intercultural exchange, the festival then moves on to a short artistic programme bookended by opening and closing parades in the two host cities.
The artistic programme has act-based work in solo aerial and comic street shows, but interestingly also shows from the visual/performing/music school Phare Ponleu Selpak (literally, poetically, The Brightness of Art), which was originally set up in a refugee camp on the Thai border to help young refugees overcome the trauma of war through artistic expression. The school has a long-running association with the French company Cie UBI – in fact a detailed and ambitious three-year programme aimed at melding French circus languages with the existing cultural materials and forms – and the urgent social pressures – of contemporary Cambodia.