Sziget Festival drag and circus troupe want audiences to feel like family
Carnivale Royale aims to be a safe space for audiences (Polyak Attila)
As Hungary continues to grapple with its LGBTQ+ rights record, Budapest’s Sziget Festival has once again provided an important space for queer performers and audiences to celebrate themselves openly – and with 50 stages and over 1,000 performances across the week, both local and international festival-goers have been spoiled for choice.
The festival’s dedicated LGBTQ+ venue, Magic Mirror, has been a celebrated staple of Sziget for over 25 years, bringing together queer artists and audiences for a varied programme of performances, workshops, panels, and parties.
Among those bringing the tent to life is House of Circus, whose thrilling production Carnivale Royale merges the worlds of drag and circus, with six different performers showing their skills in acrobatics, aerial pole dancing, hand balancing, sword swallowing, and more. But for the group, the show is about far more than spectacle.
‘We hope that audiences will feel like they’re a part of our family‘
“What we wanted was to redefine what circus means for us,” co-founder Nick van der Heyden, better known in drag as Hayden, tells PinkNews. “For Carnivale Royale, what we’re performing here, it’s really about creative self-expression and to let the artist be authentically themselves.”
“We hope that audiences feel like they belong, that they’re part of our family, that they’re part of something bigger,” says Germain Iconnee, the troupe’s other co-founder. “To be unapologetically themselves.”
Speaking about the unique combination of drag and circus, Iconnee, who performs in drag and on stilts during the show, says: “They both are an art form that come from marginalised spaces, and they both use codes that are really similar. Drag can be complemented with a lot of things: with dance, with theatre, with lip-sync, with makeup, with costume. Circus is like that as well.
“But also, drag is an art form that really gives a lot of room for self expression. Circus, as well, it gives a lot of room for self expression. And when you put them together, the sky is the limit. There are no boundaries.
“They are both worlds that come from a community that had something to say and needed a space to say it.”
Sziget heralds itself as ‘The Island of Freedom’, a space built on its principles of inclusivity and diversity, which is reflected in the broad span of its programming.
‘We laugh here, we cry here together‘
“For a country such as Hungary, where queer rights are not what they should be, I think it’s really beautiful how they can create this super safe bubble for everyone,” Heyden, who acts as the show’s MC, says.
Iconnee adds: “Sometimes you need that moment of ‘Okay, I do belong, I do deserve everything that I am, I do deserve to be loved, to be happy.’”
Which is exactly what House of Circus have promised to deliver with Carnivale Royale. Their motto is simple: Be who you want to be, wear what you want to wear, love who you want to love.
“We laugh here, we cry here together, and you really feel that people connect around this space,” Heyden tells us. “Because it’s a safe bubble in an even safer bubble. What else do you want?”
You can pre-register for Sziget 2027 Super Early Bird tickets now, available here. Tickets go on sale on 24th August and are running until 27th August 10pm (CET).
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