STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Mime 193 16 8.29
99
Street Artists in Europe
Mask theatre 10 3 30.00
Street theatre (text) 1072 403 37.59
Theatre on the boards 75 14 18.67
Action theatre 13 4 30.77
Shadow theatre 40 1 2.50
Experimental theatre 7 1 14.29
Travelling theatre 178 56 31.46
Gestural theatre 476 76 15.97
Musical theatre 371 68 18.33
6. Conclusion
Although street arts are part of the long history of theatre, it is not true to say that they are the
successors to Greek or mediaeval theatre, because concepts of actors and public spaces in
contemporary society are very different from what they were then. The reference to that history
by many participants therefore reflects more of a syncretic approach, an attempt to draw on the
past in order to move forward, than nostalgic evidence of roots.
Artistically, street arts draw on a wide range of skills and disciplines. They bring in directors,
plastic artists, scenographers, video makers and technicians, who work to produce an artistic
project in the heart of the public space, in direct proximity to the audience. Street arts include
theatre, circus arts, urban plastic arts, music, dance, pyrotechnics, multimedia. Shows take place
in the open air, in one spot or moving around. They range from giant structures to performances
on the most intimate scale. Artists have strong roots in the theatre and are highly inventive in
their use of non-textual writing. The shows are a perpetual work-in-progress as they are tailored
to performance venues: town centres, outlying and rural areas. Some companies even
collaborate with the fields of architecture and town planning. Lastly, the unique relationship
with the spectators through interaction and audience participation is a very strong part of the
creative process.
However, the wide range of techniques means that the artistic quality of shows is variable.
Whilst some forms are successful and original, others have dramatic weaknesses, or are more in
the nature of entertainment than pure creation. Because of the variety of forms, the field is
difficult to define and the definition varies from one country to another: street arts and street
theatre in France, travelling theatre and arts in Belgium, in situ theatre in the Netherlands, new
forms of artistic expression in Spain, animation in Germany, entertainment in the United
Kingdom, urban culture or communication, street shows, outdoor shows, shows in public
spaces, in open spaces, and so on. Thus the generic name for these various performances is
crucial; they need to be more precisely identified.
Since very few resource centres and video collections have been set up so far, street artists have
no real opportunities to look objectively at contemporary artistic creation in their field.
Furthermore, no research has been done on their cultural consumption. Nothing is known about
their other sources of artistic inspiration.
Writing for street shows is therefore based on new skills, influenced partly by the desire to move
away from the conventional and partly by financial constraints. So the urban space as public
space, the relationship with different audiences, the non-hierarchical borrowing from various
live performance disciplines, the mixture of languages and various kinds of writing, the artistic
choices reflected in unexpected juxtapositions and unusual combinations, and the different
PE 375.307