STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
unique process of creation where the training, the experimentation, is an organic and natural part
of the creation. Our conviction is that the cultural market of EU is made to move by these
decentralized, small institutions holding the right of sovereign decision making, owning fiscal
strength to buy and sell productions that can contribute to the renewal of theatre art. Most of the
Hungarian fringe groups work among catastrophic infrastructural conditions. Protection of
common interests, lobby work, promoting changes of theatre structure.
The Hungarian theatre world is much more permeatable today then ten years ago. There are no
rigid barricades between the ’stone theatres’, the alternative and amateur theatres. But the nonstate
maintained field of Hungarian theatre gets around 1% of the whole spenditure on theatres.
In Hungary there is no relevant private sponsorship that would show serious interest in
supporting our community. So we can only count on those funds that the state offers: the
category of "Prominent Companies" and the rest (145 million) was spent on the others living on
a day-by-day base like beggars. The representative festival of AHAIT in Budapest SZASZSZ is
based on pre-selected participation and spread out all over the city.
The Kolibri International Festival of Street Puppeteers in Budapest presents puppetry, youth
theatre, concerts, exhibitions and many-day non-stop family theatre program right in front of the
theatre building on Jókai square for the past fourteen years. Generation differences (conflicts)
dissolve at such times. While the bigger children are watching performances, mothers with
prams can freely move about with the smaller ones between the playground and the seats. Their
integration is all the more easier because the adults who come to a performance with children
are emotionally motivated to worriedly see how the performance effects the children and if they
are satisfied, they themselves also relax and accept the collectiveness in becoming an equal
member of the audience and an integral part of the performance.
Another street theatre production is offered by the Iron Rooster International Puppet Festival in
Győr and International Street Theatre Festival in Nyírbátor.
Italy
At the end of the century a new theatrical generation emerged. The protagonists of this new
wave are theatrical companies born and grown far away from the normal theatrical network, and
often also from the theatres: it is easier to see the shows produced by these young people and
also younger people in places of aggregation like social centres and discotheques and it is easier
that they work in disuse and isolated shacks in sheds. They use a theatrical language that, as all
theatrical avant-gardes assert, put on the same place all the elements that share to the theatrical
event (therefore they don’t use only the word, sometimes announced, but also the body, the
music and the sound and the scene). The contaminations between the theatre and the other arts,
and other aspects of the truth are preferred. This new levy developed by auto-pedagogy, often
explicitly declared. Scenic engines of amazing and fascinating complexity are often able to
establish a relation with the public. Therefore the actor has to reform its role. These companies
investigate about the reasons and the modalities of the non performable of the real and don’t
search anymore an automatic tuning with the sensibility of the spectator; indeed the scandal, the
provocation becomes an indispensable ingredient in order to hook, amaze, upset; even if it
happens within a mechanism of rules, spaces, most rigid semiotic flows, where there isn’t space
for the distraction or the reverie of the observer. The conditions of the communication - as says
McLuhan - become the same object of the communication. Beside this trend originated in the
nineties, is it possible to identify in the last years a new way to make theatre. This is
characterized both by a direct communication and an extreme simplification of the scenic
167
PE 375.307