STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

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Street Artists in Europe
bourgeois theatre's jaded sugar daddy, old reliable audience. ‘There was another kind of
relevance going, however Street Theatre. It harked back to a really old version of relevance, that
of the classical Greek theatre or medieval churchyard plays’ 262 .
What seems to have distinguished Bread and Puppet from other theatres is that they actually
did break with the theatre and with the theatre audience (the Becks of the Living Theatre wanted
to but they could not). This involved an element of political organization, at least of
collaboration, an analysis of its possibilities and limits. It is impossible otherwise to explain its
mode and capability of playing in open squares in Poland (during the Prague Spring in 1968),
puppet festivals in Siberia, in Nicaragua, where in two weeks’ rehearsal ended with an Easter
show a third of the village were participants. This could have been done only outside the
theatre 263 .
The political motivation in the 1970s and 1980s stepped down to clear room for creating street
theatre own aesthetic. Arts de la Rue appeared at the beginning of 1970s in France. Location
theatre (site specific), capture the street and open air programs and off programs as parts of
traditional festivals were born. Circus tents, traveling projects like Czech Dragon Theatre coproductions
(Czech Republic – Denmark), Mir Caravane (1989) as a four month tour through 10
European towns, Theatre in the motion (Brno), C. Turba’s Festival 2000 (Prague), Forman
Brothers shows on the steam bout in Prague were spreading very fast and included some East-
European groups and countries (Poland, Czech Republic) even before the ‘Orange Revolution’
in 1989.
Squat-Theatre originated surprisingly in Hungary where the Group of Undergroudn Theatre
came from, and via France (1976) emigated to New York to spread out its new activity. They
won the first attention after producing the Fast Change performance in a Budapest park in 1971.
From sexual harassment and political double-meanings it was censured and banned from public
performances. The apartment performances continued in Hungary its till emigration. They
played in an abandoned church, in a house built up of dressing boxes. They did ‘Journal
Theatre’ (1975) as the daily improvised new scenes. They played on the the various levels or
reality and art – their “stage” was also seen from a street which made up the second audience
and confronted the random viewers with themselves 264 .
"Two angels wrestle with each other". The angel of creativity, the angel of criticism. And
both do a little clowning.” 265 This coexistence is quite old, not only 20 th century invention. Let
us focus on the role of street theatre in the creation and reproduction of the Irish revolutionary
movement of the 1790s. We can see how Jim Smyth learned from “riots” in 1759, 1779 and
1784. Street theatre and public spectacles served as a recruiting tool in the 1790s, especially The
Volunteers’ prologues, epilogues, interludes, masques, operas, songs, and dances 266 .
Straßentheater in Germany is another example: The political and agitating theatre originated in
the end of the 1960s in West Berlin and Western Germany. That was the birth of the Freien
Theater. Das Sozialistische Straßentheater (SST) played in West Berlin the scenes from the
military plot in Greece during the demonstration. Other groups in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Köln and
262
Adcock, Joe: Philadelphia Street Players, Nation; January 1969, Vol. 209, Issue 19, p. 611-612.
263
Nichols, Robert: Street Theater. Nation; April 1991, Vol. 252 Issue 15, p.531-534.
264
Squat-Theatre. Lexikon Theater, p. 5615, LexTheat. Bd. 2, S. 399) (c) Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH &
Co. KG, München].
265
Nichols, Robert, op. cit.
266
Burke, Helen M.: The Revolutionary Prelude: The Dublin Stage in the Late 1770s and Early 1780s. Eighteenth-
Century Life; November 1998, Vol. 22, Issue 3, p.7.
PE 375.307