STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
44) who mounted an eight-month opera season each year, with guest performers from the
Kärntnertortheater and the Városi Színház (Municipal Theatre) in Pest, as well as open-air
performances in summer. In Cagliari (1858) the municipal authority founded the Banda Civica,
which gave open-air concerts, suppressed in 1917. There The Nuovo Teatro Diurno (1859) was
originally an open-air theatre until 1869. After 1860 open-air ensembles became very popular in
Arles where regular concerts consisting of dances, overtures and numbers from fashionable
operas and operettas were made. During the summer 1864 F. A. Barbieri became the artistic
director of the Campos Eliseos, Madrid’s first open-air concerts in the gardens.
4. Contemporary street theatre – inspiration from the present
Circus and other derived forms are contributing and revoking the medieval forms of public
entertainment and animal shows. The traditional characters were renovated and transformed
even in the silent movie grotesque, criticism and humor (Charlie Chaplin).
The 20 th century media especially television made theatrum from watching sports with
cheerleaders and from Olympic Games opening/closing ceremonies in stadium and ice-rings.
Televised catastrophes and wars brought another public theatrum where children easily do not
recognize what is real and what is a fiction.
Also, there were constant revivals for the street theatre development. Dramatist Edward Gordon
Craig has advised the actors to imitate marionettes (1920). This theatre was then closely linked
with political theatre and agitating theatre. It was a typical ingredient of the 1 st May parades
and demonstrations where allegoric wagons, masks, military units, anti-capitalist banners and
scenes, dancers and brass music were included. There were even allegoric boats and trains and
fireworks included. Another mass show was the huge collective exercise at a Prague stadium –
‘Spartakiada’. Paradoxally it was watched over those who did not participate. Totalitarian street
‘art’ during the communist 1 st May parades was a pushed and unfree way of employing street
theatre means in a very vulgar and low artistic way.
For nine years, the New York Street Theater Caravan has been traveling around the country
performing for poor and working-class audiences. Their itinerary might serve as a map of social,
movements over the past decade: ghettos, prisons, migrant labor camps, Indian reservations,
mining and textile towns. Drawing characters from their travels and from history, they’ve
created an original repertory of plays and skits that pose radical questions. (The skit portrays a
football game between management and labor in which the goal is a contract.) The union used a
strategy of solidarity to win. Marketa Kimrell’s politics have caused her trouble throughout her
adult life. A Czechoslovakian refugee (1953) was denied U.S. citizenship until the year 1980,
originally because she had the wrong friends in Hollywood during the McCarthy era. Then she
was blacklisted from television in the early 1960s 261 . In the 1960s these utility goals were
overcome (in United States) by rising ideas and deeds how to bring the alternative (fringe)
theatre to people whilst they do not attend theatre buildings.
American Living theatre (1960s) shaped new political rituality and praised empty space as an
attempt to involve the street theatre methods in modern theatre. It witnessed the Living Theatre
with its theatrical production "Paradise Now," the Performance Group with its theatrical
production "Dionysus in '69," the Free Store with its theatrical production "Che" and others. A
theatrical reaction against discontents was often a novel show, full of thrills and titillation for the
261 Hauser, Dedra: Art and Agitprop. Nation; May 1980, Vol. 230, Issue 13, p. 403-408, 6p.
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