STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

299
Street Artists in Europe
democratic Poland and not willing to be a public persona, left the country. Since 1990 to 2002
he lived in Paris. Since 2004 he has been active in Ukraine and Belarus.
Orange Alternative was protesting against the world subordinated to the utopian doctrine
determined by a scientific paradigm of thought which by many thinkers, e.g. Zygmunt Bauman,
is considered as the ultimate, final version of modernist way of thinking. 433 Therefore, was the
action of artistically re-conquering a public space - a street which before Major’s conquista was
grey, anonymous, ruled by routine, totally captive. Laughter which suddenly started to sound on
Swidnicka Street, in the very centre of Wroclaw, was the first sign of the liberation of “real
existence” in Poland. The political liberation came later.
The role of the street theatre in the political transformation seems impossible to be
overestimated. As Dariusz Jachimowicz, a culture operator from Warsaw put it, “the street
theatre in Poland was able to overthrow the Communism” 434 . It helped people break away from
the reduction of their lives merely to a private sphere, and help find themselves in a large group
of people who are used to the fact, that each gathering on the street, which is not summoned by
the authorities, may be considered by the representatives of ‘the social order’ as illegal, and may
lead to political repression (e.g. imprisonment for 48 hours). Moving on to the street by theatre
helped people believe in a possibility to constitute a real public space in the sense of Habermas.
2. The street theatre festivals
With more or less such understanding of the street theatre we entered into the nineties in Poland.
At that time festivals focused on presentation of street performances began to spring up like
weeds 435 . In this sense, the appearance of many companies practicing street theatre and a huge
popularity of this domain of art, both among the audience and the local authorities, was a
symbolic takeover of the public space, and was supposed to serve its transformation. The
festivals would appear not only in large cities, but also in quite small towns, and for their
inhabitants it was the only contact with theatre. Such festivals had a dimension of local holiday
of the whole community of residents. Actors appeared on the street, the space of presentation,
before the shows, and behaved unlike ‘the artist’ standing on a pedestal, which goes along with
the Polish, romantic tradition of perceiving artist’s position in society. They were also technical
workers, who set up decorations themselves. All of this made the future contact with spectators
easier. Pawel Szkotak, the leader and director of Biuro Podrózy (Travel Agency) Theatre from
Poznan, which often performed in such small towns soon after the political transformation in
1989, recalled that audience did not walk off to their homes after the performances, but they
often invited the actors to their places and had conversations on social situation, which were full
of hope in the possibility of reshaping the political life in Poland 436 . Unfortunately, this social
potential was not put into use.
The popularity of the street theatre in such spaces did not only have a social dimension, but also
a practical one. Many small towns in Poland are not provided with any sort of infrastructure for
433
See: Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and Ambivalence. London 1991; Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and The
Holocaust. London 1989.
434
The comment made by Dariusz Jachimowicz in the conversation with Joanna Ostrowska and Juliusz Tyszka on
13 th January, 2007.
435
Before that time, there also existed festivals of the street theatre, e.g. in Wroclaw or Jalenia Góra, but the way
thy functioned, and most of all, the role they played at that time, was different from the newly founded ones.
436 th
The comment of Pawel Szkotak in the conversation with Joanna Ostrowska and Juliusz Tyszka on 7 January,
2007.
PE 375.307