ARLESHEIM. The telephone call that Valentin Steinemann did not expect came with news he had never applied for: Circus Fahraway, the small company from Arlesheim in canton Basel Country, has won the Swiss Performing Arts Award, endowed with CHF 40,000 and awarded by the Federal Office of Culture. There was nothing to apply for. The federal jury for the performing arts proposes, the office honours, and companies find out the way Steinemann did, by phone, to his open astonishment.
Fahraway is circus the way a theatre ensemble is theatre. No ringmaster, no animals, no sequence of numbered acts. The company plans from production to production, a rhythm that can stretch to three years, and builds each show from music, clowning and movement around a fixed ensemble. Steinemann shares the artistic direction with Solvejg Weyeneth, Nina Wey and Donath Weyeneth.
The current production, Elefant, tours into December, with dates in Delémont and at Station Circus on the Dreispitz site in Basel, where the company will also present its piece Ballett. Anyone wanting to see what a federal jury sees in a Basel Country circus has the chance before the year is out.
A prize that finds its winners
The Swiss Performing Arts Awards are among the country’s most distinctive cultural honours precisely because there is no application, no shortlist campaign and no acceptance-season choreography. How the jury informs itself is its own affair, Steinemann mused this week; perhaps someone came to a performance. The recognition, he added, belongs as much to the many people who believed in the company over the years as it does to the ensemble itself.
The top honour of the 2026 round, the Swiss Grand Prix for the Performing Arts together with the Hans Reinhart Ring, goes to Michèle Gurtner. The ring, passed from laureate to laureate, is the oldest theatre distinction in the country.
The awards are presented on 6 November in the Alte Reithalle of Bühne Aarau, in the presence of culture minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider. For Fahraway, the ceremony and the cheque arrive at a useful moment: a company that plans three years ahead can do a great deal with CHF 40,000 and a federal seal.
Swiss contemporary circus has had a decade of quiet ascent, from the festival circuits of France to the education programmes run out of the big tops. Fahraway’s prize suggests the establishment has finally caught up with what its audiences already knew.