STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
rules of the game that lead to aggression, and ignoring and denying of others, are suspended.
New and authentic social bonds are born this way. Hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands
of people get together, even though up to now they simply have not learned how to be with
others and certainly not in such large numbers. They have not learned normal, human reactions
towards others and strangers, except for situations where forms of behaviour were ruled by
government and church institutions. Therefore, the fact itself, that people of their own, unforced
will get together on the occasion of a theatrical holiday, proves that life is returning to normal.
Because of this, the theatre festivals are unexpectedly becoming a form of anti-neurosis therapy.
It helps gradually change the habits which regulate micro-interactions. Theatre holidays soften
the old habits, and build new ones, which are at least neutral; they teach patience and
understanding. They certainly break our habit of aggression.
One of the general characteristics of strategy applied by organisers of these holidays and
involving artists and their audience is the departure from the institutionalised cultural model.
The informal model was present before 1989, but it was confined to periphery of student clubs,
where alternative culture was being cultivated. Now, the world's alternative culture with all the
accumulated baggage of forty years' experience is pouring out onto the Polish streets.
The destruction of border between art and reality, one of the typical strategies of the twentieth
century avant-garde and counterculture, has surprising social effects. Going beyond the border
of art and reality is generally perceived as a revolutionary act - it is a reflection of spiritually
anxious periods in the record of human culture. From the beginning of our century, going
beyond the space of art by artists has caused a dynamic interfusion of two orders - art and not
art, and of two realities - fictional and real. This process is particularly important in theatre
regarding the reception of theatre performances. The communication between artist and an
audience is not here intermediated by a specially-designed mediating space, which usually
smoothes the contact between the viewer and the theatrical game and the fiction born out of this
process.
Artists usually enter arenas of daily life when they acknowledge that this mediating space was
specially prepared for them to surrender, in any given epoch, to an excess of institutionalisation.
The roles of viewer (listener) and performer become within it too rigid, limited by too many
conventions resultant prohibitions, too removed from the everyday life expanding dynamically
beyond the theatre walls, concert hall, museum or gallery.
As a result, the artistic message loses its power to integrate and synthesize daily impressions and
emotions, and it is no longer an act of creation joining the ethical and developmental realms of
life. Thus, that contact between executor and receiver does not cross the boundaries of the play,
and the two groups do not go together towards the artistic experience.
A departure from traditional settings of Art usually requires an open manifestation of wills to
soften the stiffened and petrified social bonds, in a kind of revolutionary and carnival challenge
to the traditional world order. Such a departure is needed today in Poland – and it is happening
but mainly through theatre festivals, and not through the routine productions of the repertory
houses. (…)
Polish festival performances are not merely 'anti-stress' therapy and a chance at normal being
together. They are important occasions for a few thousand citizens of a free country to take a
look at each other and attempt to more closely define their actual identity.
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PE 375.307