STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

And yet, conversely …
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Street Artists in Europe
"I don’t care about the country. The work has to be of good quality and this is the main reason
to invite a company. Secondly are the technical and financial limits. If I’m not touched by a
performance or performer, I don’t invite him, even if he comes for free. We don’t have an off
festival, to avoid that everybody can come and so we can’t guarantee the quality anymore. Good
products sell themselves. If you look at e.g. producciones imperdibles, well, they have 3 groups
doing the same performance because the demand is so big.”
4.3. Number of Productions
The HorsLesMurs questionnaire asked respondents how many street arts shows had been
created in 2005. Not surprisingly there was very little information – the majority of respondents
claimed they had no idea, some from the same country ‘guessed’ with sometimes very different
results (Belgium: 3-5 to Portugal: 400) . It was clear that there is a problem of definition for
some respondents:
‘The number of shows produced is not possible to assess, since again, as in the case of the new
circus, they are primarily a local level activity, not included in the statistical data of the State
Statistics Office. In any case they are more numerous that new circus shows.’
H/C also asked further questions about shows, which again did not produce very useful
responses. Questions such as ‘how many artists do you use to make a show? How long do you
rehearse a show*? And how long do you keep a show running? produced very inconsequential
answers (and some irritated, even angry responses).
‘I have worked on projects with a touring team of 15 which involved a further 8 artists and am
currently working on a project with just 5 artists to create it and a touring team of 6. I have seen
projects with 38-100 people touring!’
‘Impossible to say - If I speak about our shows we perform them as long as they are still
interesting for us and still attract audiences. We often renew them. So we perform them at least
200 times. They last from 1 hour to 1 and a half hours.’
‘400 shows over 4 yrs’
‘This will depend on the success, marketing, international touring’
‘150 times,’
‘5 yrs’
‘12 shows a year.’
4.4. Cultural Diversity
The European Union is growing in size every few years; in 2005 a host of new countries joined,
many former states of the Soviet Union; in 2007 Romania and Bulgaria have been added.The
cultures of the twenty five countries are extremely varied, with many different languages, social
habits, economic fortunes, religions and educational experience. Additionally, there has been an
increasing level of immigration into the nation states of people originating in countries
elsewhere in the world that were formerly part of European empires and colonies.
These factors have put increasing strain on many social structures (beyond the remit of this
report to define these). However, it is a key role of cultural organisations and structures to find
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