STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
This space allowed for a meeting, and yet, as Schechner claims, “it isn’t the only alternative for
a gathering of one or more groups” 401 .
It was actually this idea of authentic meeting, which was a noble purpose of author’s
abandonment of conventional spaces, which were appropriated by the ruling power and
authority, and the search for a new space for theatre. It could have become practically anything,
each place making a meeting possible. The shape of this space was supposed to be a signal to
establish a new form of contact between a performer and a spectator. Such spaces, which were
still not governed by conventional reception of theatrical work, were also a street or the open air.
As Wiercinski wrote it was “in-the-air theatre”, “taking place in the open air, in the wide areas
of nature or architecture” 402 . These places were ‘untamed’, and one could search in them a new
form of contact with the audience, or with a new type of spectators, who are themselves
‘untamed’ by theatre.
Performances created and presented outside theatre buildings were not only means to modernize
theatre, but also an attempt to join in the change of cultural paradigm. Boguslaw Litwiniec, who
was a founder of the Open Theatre Festival in Wroclaw (1967 – 1988), where outdoor
performances were presented in the late sixties for the first time in Poland, wrote convincingly
on this issue: “The very exit from the box of bourgeois theatre could be interpreted by a reader,
who is unacquainted with the utopian spirit rejuvenating rebellion, as a act merely architectural,
as a result of a search for more aesthetically effective ground for play made by the young
generation of theatrical experimenters. However, what we dealt with here was not a category of
beauty, but a choice motivated by the pursuit of a way of life. Entering our names on the
signposts of the New Culture (…) we step out of the cultural frames of stage with its curtain,
footlights, wings and the audience sitting back in chairs, in order to add to the list of deadly sins
duplicity, hypocrisy, advertising wooing, mental torture, senility in dogmatic stereotypes”. 403
Julian Beck, co-leader of The Living Theatre, saw the reasons behind creating theatre on the
streets in an even more uncompromising way: “The aim of guiding theatre to the streets is the
disruption of repression, and the separation of art, artists and the audience (people) from the
repressive art of civilization (…). “ 404
The street seemed to be ideal to create this “new space”. It was a public place, where the actor
looking for a new form of contact does not place himself in a privileged position. He steps out to
a potential spectator, but he also surprises the audience with “the inadequacy in the face of the
prevalent function and the atmosphere of the place in which it occurred”, as it was stated by
Wojciech Krukowski, the leader of The Akademia Ruchu (Academy of Movement)
Performance Group from Warsaw and the first postwar author, who has systematically created
actions, interventions and performances on the street 405 .
The street theatre could also allow artists for the development of a new theatre tactic – ‘hit and
run’, where the performance in a way attacked a spectator by the very fact of ‘art’ appearing in a
place seemingly not assigned for it, or even improper. The street theatre was supposed to
establish relations with the everyday life of random members of audience, and to involve art
anew in the circulation of life. What is more, such theatre could help life gain more intensity and
reality. The very comments of artists, who chose ‘creative activity on the streets’, support this
401 Ibid.
402 Edmund Wierciski, The Journal …, p. 136.
403 Boguslaw Litwiniec, Non-theatrical Places – the Space of the New Culture, in: Theatre in …. P. 219-220.
404 Julian Beck, Life of the Theatre…, p. 46.
405 Wojciech Krukowski, Theatre in the Theatre of Life. Akademia Ruchu, in: Theatre in…, p. 225.
291
PE 375.307