STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
example, the electronic media. What may prove it is not only the Polish or the Malta example,
but also the example of mass protests in Belgrade and the whole Serbia (1991-92, 1996-97),
called to attention by Katarina Pejovic.
The example of Malta may also prove that wherever a community has some other ways of autocelebration
and initiating holidays, which are well-grounded in tradition and have the power to
gather people, it is much more difficult to bring street theatre into being, as an autonomous
artistic phenomenon.
Paradoxically, the Polish street theatre still has this particular role to play – the role of
constituting the public space. And it is because of “The Act on Mass Events”, which binds the
people organizing theatre performances, and which caused the private space to be not merely
appropriated but rather privatized (by the democratically elected local authorities or by
institutions under democratic control, e.g. the police). And although agora is nowadays located
somewhere else, the street theatre still has a chance to perform an important function of
integrating community, even if it is by the very fact of creating a pretext for people to get out of
their homes and meet with other real existences – the living people, and not merely their media
projections. It is linked to the striving, which has lately appeared more animatedly in Europe, for
restoration of the urban street to people instead of cars (major highways), and also to the
snatching of interpersonal contacts from the virtual space, and what follows – to the revival of
social bonds.
This revival of direct interpersonal relations seems to be in the present media-reigned world the
value which was often pointed to by both the people who filled the HorsLesMurs questionnaire
(e.g. the organizer of Belfast festival, who talked about “collecting people from different
backgrounds in one place”), as well as by our interviewees (e.g. Pawel Szkotak). In the Polish
context it was also important to integrate different age groups. We remember well the situation,
when an elderly lady dressed in a white blouse with a lace collar was running after a
performance-parade “Bivouac” of a French group Generik Vapeur during the Malta Festival
(1995), because, in the colloquial understanding, such type of theatre belonged to ‘young
audience’, and the fact that it can play a role of ‘family theatre’ was at that time a brand new
discovery. Of course, it may be more difficult for such theatre to carry out such mission, since,
as Marcin Herich noticed, the street is nowadays considered as a dangerous place. It should be
added here, that Herich works in Upper Silesia, the region which is almost entirely employed in
coal mines, and in which the economic transformations led to some deep social changes
(structural unemployment).
These social changes, however, open a completely new field to the street theatre, meaning the
involvement in ‘integration of the excluded groups’. The most basic level of this involvement is
gratuitous quality of the theatre on the streets, which lets all interested people take part in
performances, regardless of the contents of their wallets. It is a vast potential, which disregarded
led, for example, to a difficult situation at the MALTA Festival in Poznan in 2005. That year the
amount of free performances was reduced to only 20%, which was hailed the greatest cultural
failure of that year by readers of the local newspaper, so de facto by the audience of the festival.
A deeper level of involvement into the ‘integration of the excluded groups’ is, for example, the
way, in which the artists from the Teatr Strefa Ciszy (Zone of Silence Theatre) employed bums
loitering at the Old Square in Poznan in their street action “The Peepholes”, and treated them as
hosts of this city. As a result, since they were treated in this way, they partially took over the
responsibility of the show and eagerly supported the artists in the course of the performance.
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