STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

156
Street Artists in Europe
of deaf and mute persons to reduce the formal language even more. There are evergreen topics
and themes as love affairs, politics, extra-marital affairs, religiosity always ready and easily
resonating with any audience. Then there are the new ones like feminism, globalization,
terrorism etc. In the 1990s, the street theatre groups started adapting the classical authors and
plays (Molière, national history), translating them into the new street theatre methods and
aesthetics.
Student ‘flippy theatre’ demonstrates the active and didactic reactions on the actual society and
social topics using bare stage, campus corners to play at, and banners or flip-over illustrations to
substitute the scenic equipment. The form was borrowed from a 16 th century circus sideshow act
called a bankelsang. A bankelsang was a single sheet of pictures, showing a number of drawings
illustrating some historical or contemporary event; a narrator with a pointer told the story. The
German playwright Bertolt Brecht revived the bankelsang in the 1930s as a theatre form to deal
with contemporary social problems. The actors often switch for ‘breakout’ technique and call
the audience to participate with simple music instruments or just bottles or soft-drink cans to
play on.
There is even a direct political activism in Canada nowadays. “People feel they have no outlet
within the parliamentary system to effect change … Because free trade deals are done behind
closed doors” 277 and New Democratic Party conservatives were less likely to protest in early
2001. Similarly there were street theatres performing activists during the convention of the
American Israeli Political Action Committee in Washington D.C. in 2002. Another
demonstration by Rainforest Action network, Green Peace and Amazon Watch took place in
2006 at the Bank of America's annual investor conference. Tactics used in the demonstration
included street theatre, the use of bullhorns and distribution of fliers. World Social Forum
(WSF), an international summit of social movements in 2006, suggested a profound canniness
about self-presentation that owes something to the radical street theatre of the 1960s and
1970s.The street theatre in these cases, however, is too much used as a functional tool to address
people mainly politically and has little theatrical ambitions.
On the other hand, the street theatre protesters against the Republican National Convention in
New York City (2004) was full of creativity: pedaling bicyclers outfitted with cardboard horse
heads, shouting "The Republicans are coming!", a half-hour recitation of the First Amendment -
the group will talk into cell phones to avoid looking like protesters - near Ground Zero on
August 31 st , about 3,000 people encircled the World Trade Center site on August 28 th and
chimed 2,749 bells for the 9/11 victims to "ring in peace and justice and ring out war and the
suppression of liberties", about 100 women draped in American flags and wearing anti-
Republican "protest panties" performed a "mass flash" on Sept. 1, etc. “There is another world:
Space, theatre and global anti-capitalism” comments Sophie Nield the 2006 protest situation in
USA 278 .
Performance advertising is another supermarket policy how to influence the buyers. The actors
pretend they themselves are buyers with the full baskets of articles and lots of suggestions and
recommendations giving to other people there.
277
Torrance, Kelly Jane: The need for street theatre. Report / Newsmagazine, National Edition; 03/05/2001, Vol.
28, Issue 5, p. 52.
278
Nield, Sophie: There is another world: Space, theatre and global anti-capitalism. Contemporary Theatre
Review; 2006, Vol. 16 Issue 1, p. 51-61.
PE 375.307