Simply Circus / CircusNews.com

During a Saturday night performance at the International Circus Festival in Indonesia, part of a tent collapsed, injuring two. The collapse is believed to have been caused by heavy rains and strong winds.

Various news services reported that a security officer had banned journalists from entering the scene. The security officer was quoted as saying “You can’t go there, that is an instruction from my boss”.

Today, the local organizer of Cirque Le Masque, Joko Pramulyo, apologized for an incident. “We are deeply sorry for the incident. We are responsible for this,” Joko Pramulyo, the director of PT. Nant Adi Pariwara – the organizer of the circus – said as quoted by detik.com here on Sunday.

He promised to cooperate with the police investigation.

Part of the tent covering a parking lot in Senayan, South Jakarta, suddenly collapsed during the show, injuring two people – Poltar, 37, a cleaning worker and Ilona, 20, a spectator. The two were taken to Mintoharjo Hospital in Central Jakarta with head injuries.

The police suspected the tent was not built strongly enough to withstand the additional weight of rain water delivered by a heavy downpour Saturday night, according to Tanah Abang Police sub-precinct chief Comr. Hendra Gunawan.

JAKARTA, July 3 (Xinhua) — Indonesia will make the International Circus Festival an annual event to commemorate the anniversary of the capital city Jakarta.

Muhammad Hananto, director of PT Nant Adi Pariwara, the organizer of the International Circus Festival 2010, said on Friday that next year, the company will invite more circus groups to make Jakarta’s anniversary more joyful.

“This year’s International Circus Festival scheduled on July 2 to 11 is the first time in Indonesia. Next year, more circus groups will be invited with more stages. We will re-arrange concept, improve things so that it will be better for Indonesia, for Jakarta,” said the 19-year-old director.

He added that circus will provide alternative amusement for people except music performances.

“In line with our theme of “See the World Beautifully”, we invite people to join us in this joyful moment,” he said.

Hananto said that the event would be also useful to promote tourism in the country.

Such an event is also a good effort to introduce other countries’ culture in Indonesia.

Xiao Junkong, 30, team manager of China’s New Shanghai Circus, told Xinhua that the team is happy to bring the Chinese traditional art to Indonesia.

“We are very glad to show our culture of acrobatics here, sharing with other performers all over the world. We hope that families in Jakarta could see us performing,” she said.

Hananto said that bringing circus groups in Indonesia is not an easy job.

“In circus, there are equipments that hard to find. We have to provide the equipments as best as we can so that they could make their best performance,” he said.

“European teams are from Russia, Italy, German and Turkey,” said Hananto.

More than 250 performances will be performed, involving thousands of people.