The Dubrovnik Summer Festival have prepared a special preliminary festival programme that will present contemporary circus and street art, a rapidly developing form in Croatia and Europe, and to which the Festival wants to give special visibility. The programme, which will include various events such as street performances, acrobatics, aerial silk dance, clownery and object theatre, starts on 7 July and it will take place on different locations across Dubrovnik.

First on the schedule is the Encounter between performance artist Nikolina Komljenović and musician Žarko Dragojević, which will be held as part of the conceptual project If I Play a New Game... on the Island of Lokrum on Friday, 7 July at 11 am and 6 pm, and on Saturday, 8 July at 6 pm. This is a performance that  combines the body, suspended in air, and multimedia, wherein the body improvises on two ribbons of silk reaching for the heights and creating its own ever-moving steps by placing the the smooth material under limbs with great physical effort. Improvisational movement is determined by the mutual listening and observation of all participants in the performance – sound, light, time, space and everyone present. Contemporary dance and circus artist, choreographer and acrobat Nikolina Komljenović has a master's degree in art history and comparative literature dealing with the idea of performativity of the body as a subject. She explores concepts such as subconsciousness, movement, gaze, voice, presence, space, time and relationship on a cellular, experiential and relational level through self-creation. Komljenović deals with the body and body-in-air through various media forms. Dubrovnik musician Žarko Dragojević has been active on the culture and arts scene for more than 15 years, and he has been composing music for film and theate since 2016. He began his musical journey in 2008 as the frontman of the band Embassy 516, and through his albums he boldly speaks about today's society. In the last decade, as an employee of the Marin Držić Theatre, he worked on more than 80 productions with some of the most distinguished domestic and regional directors. Dragojević also writes original music for a number of television, radio and multimedia projects.

After a successful collaboration through the Ride and Camp project, the renowned French acrobatic collective Un loup pour l'homme and regional circus organizations Cirkorama and Cirkusfera continue their work in the region with a project that encourages and supports local artists to continue moving towards a professional circus career. Through co-production on the Duel performance scheduled for Saturday, 8 July at 8 pm and Sunday, 9 July at 6 and 8 pm on the Marin Držić Square, four acrobats will face each other in front of the Festival audience, sometimes playing against each other, and sometimes playing together. The performers emphasize that the immediate and direct relationship with the audience makes contemporary circus one of the most accessible art forms, which has greatly developed compared to some earlier understanding of classical circus from their childhoods.

One of the best Croatian clowns, Nikolina Majdak, has created the programmes Occupation and Send in the Clowns for the Dubrovnik Summer Festival in collaboration with the CIRKPOZOR Arts Organisation. The programmes will be performed as pop-up events at different locations around the City from 9 to 11 July and they will contain a series of clown, juggling and object theatre performances intended for open space that play with the idea of a twisted and angular body in cabaret form: a legged suitcase, an operatic diva cow, a lonely centaur, a bearded woman, a man with a drooping head. Nikolina Majdak is a performance artist and actress who deals with theatre and film in their various forms, researching and learning above all through the use of body and movement, and in the field of physical comedy and clowning. She draws inspiration from circus aesthetics and the immediacy of street theatre, always having as a base politically minded theatre and the fringes of independent cultural scene from which it originates. Circus-Inspired Fringe Theatre POZOR is a fictitious space where the founders combine their greatest loves in the arts: theatre, film, visual art and the circus, with the obligatory spice of their greatest passion: the streets.