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Aesthetics and Politics of Street Arts Interventions

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Aesthetics and Politics of Street Arts Interventions Notes Preface: Into the Street 1. Sue Harris (2004) in her article, ‘“Dancing in the Streets”: The Aurillac Festival of Street Theatre’ demonstrates the same thrill although in somewhat more measured tones of academic discourse. These ‘astonished reactions’ are dis- cussed in more detail in the Introduction as forms of ‘shock’. 2. ‘Street arts’ and ‘street theatre’ are contested terms. Many artists who work with some form of live performance in public spaces do not come from theatre backgrounds, but rather from music, film, dance, painting, sculpture, architec- ture, or installation art and reject the labels of ‘street theatre’ and ‘street arts’ for their creative work. Charlotte Granger lists several terms: ‘arts de la rue, théâtre de rue, théâtre itinérant, arts forains, théâtre in situ, arts urbains, animation, divertissement cultures urbains, arts dans l’espace public, arts publics, spectacles en plain air’ and claims that the range of terms signifies a range of forms and thus thwarts any common definition (Freydefont and Granger, 2008: 27). For many years in France, there was discussion over whether to call the work théâtre de rue, théâtre de la rue, or even théâtre dans la rue: a distinction hard to translate with the same connotations, but one that prioritizes essential characteristics over location. In this book, I will rely on the terms street arts, street theatre, and performance in public spaces, using them interchangeably. 3. HorsLesMurs was created in 1993 by the Minister of Culture as a resource to document and disseminate information, both scholarly and practical, about street theatre and circus. 4. I have limited my study to performance interventions that have occurred some- where in Europe even though a few of the artists are based elsewhere. Outdoor performance is a vibrant theatrical form in many areas of the world outside the European context, but often the traditions, performance practices, sources of inspiration, and engagement of the audience are quite different. These street performances are outside the scope of this book. There are many sources on these performances, but a good place to start an exploration of this street theatre is Jan Cohen-Cruz, Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology (1998). Introduction: Aesthetics and Politics of Street Arts Interventions 1. Some of the most important pioneering radical theatre companies that experimented with outdoor performance were Bread and Puppet Theatre, San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, and Living Theatre in the United States; Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed in Brazil; El Comediants in Catalonia; Il Gorilla Quadrumano, Piccolo Teatro di Pontedera, and Dario Fo in Italy; Kollektif Rote Rübe in Germany; Welfare State International, People Show, Natural Theatre Company, I.O.U., and 184 Notes 185 John Bull Puncture Repair Kit in England; Dogtroep in Holland; Akademia Ruchu in Poland; Squat Theatre in Hungary; and Théâtre de l’Unité, Théâtre à Bretelles, Théâtracide, Urban Sax, and Troupe Z in France. 2. Grant Peterson, in his doctoral thesis, traces the trajectory of the Natural Theatre Company from the 1960s to the present. This pioneering British street arts company created provocative and confrontational walkabout characters who mocked various characteristics of British national identity. Peterson uses the work of the company as a case study to explore a shift from political oppositional art to corporate entertainment. 3. Grant Kester, in The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, also suggests an alternate model in ‘dialogic, collabora- tive projects’ that rely on ‘a reciprocal testing of both ethical and aesthetic norms, the outcome of which can only be determined through the subse- quent forms of social interaction mobilized by a given work’ (2011: 185). I will return to Kester’s model later in the book. 4. See Hirschhorn’s interview with Okwui Enwezor in Thomas Hirschhorn: Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2000, pp. 27–9). Grant Kester points out that Hirschhorn ‘appropriated’ the phrase from Jean- Luc Godard who said, ‘I don’t make political films, I make films politically’ (2011: 234, footnote 24). 5. See Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’ and ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’ where she explores shock and rupture as key aspects of the art experience. 6. In a later book, however, Kester questions the power of shock to initiate insight and increased agency since the disorientation it causes resembles trauma in its psychological impact. He identifies shock as a key tactic of avant-garde art and offers an alternative model in dialogic collaboration (2011: 182–4). 7. Michael Warner in Publics and Counterpublics distinguishes between the public (‘a kind of social totality… the people in general’) and a public (‘a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theat- rical public. Such a public also has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical space’), pp. 65–6. When I use ‘public’ to refer to audiences in this book, I am using the term like Warner’s ‘a public’. 8. See Laura Cull, Deleuze and Performance (2011). 9. Nigel Thrift, in Non-Representational Theory: Sapces, Politics, Affect, identifies five schools of thought about affect in the social sciences. Each one places significant emphasis on the body (2008: 223–5). 10. Boal (1985) and Dolan (2005) use the term ‘rehearsal’ in this way. 11. A loose translation is ‘Those with no balconies.’ 12. To see a video clip of the many performances, go to: http://www.rueetcirque. fr/index/en/search_simple. Search by the name of the company or the name of the show. 1 Looking Back: A Socio-Historical and Intellectual Context for Contemporary Street Arts in Europe 1. Some sources on entertainments at the fairs are Sybil Rosenfeld, (1960) The Theatre at the London Fairs in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge 186 Notes University Press); Émile Compardon, (1970) Les Spectacles de la foire: théâtres, acteurs, sauteurs et danseurs de corde…des Foires Saint-Germain et Saint-Laurent, des Boulevards et du Palais-Royal depuis 1595 jusqu’à 1791: documents inédits recueillis aux Archives Nationales (Geneve: Slatkine, photographic repr. of 1877 edition); Virginia Scott, (1972) ‘The Infancy of English Pantomime 1716–1723’, Educational Theatre Journal 24.2: 125–34; Meg Armstrong (1992–3) ‘“A Jumble of Foreignness”: The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions’, Cultural Critique 23: 199–250. I wrote my doctoral dis- sertation on the London fairs: ‘From Booths, to Theatre, to Court’: The Theatrical Significance of the London Fairs, 1660–1724 (University of Michigan, 1984). 2. See footnote 1 in the Introduction. 3. Lieux Publics (http://www.lieuxpublics.fr/index.php) was founded in Marne la Vallée near Paris in 1983 by Michel Crespin (who remained its director until 2001) and Fabien Jannelle as a centre to encourage artistic reflection and creation. It moved to Marseille in 1990. Today, under the direction of Pierre Sauvageot, director of street music company Décor Sonore, Lieux Publics is a major national creation center that hosts companies to develop artistic crea- tions, leads conferences and symposia, and publishes books, journals, and articles on art in public space. 4. See Gaber, 40 Years of Street Arts (2009a: 71–2). 5. See also Delfour (1997) and Chaudoir (1997) who both acknowledge the importance of the long history of outdoor performance, but argue that the ‘street arts’ that flourished from the 1970s were fundamentally different. Delfour explores the problematics of urban and cultural action that he feels are unique to this period and art form. Chaudoir looks at the issues of uban- ism and locates the historical roots of contemporary street theatre in agit- prop, happenings (and Fluxus), and radical theatre. 6. Many books have been written on the events of 1968 and the circumstances leading up to them, especially in the American and French contexts. Some of the most helpful are Anderson (1999), Berman (1996), Bloom and Breines (1995), Cavallo (1999), Feenberg and Freedman (2001), Gitlin (1987), Gregoire and Perlman (1969), Macedo (1997), Miller (1994), Ross (2002), Seidman (2004), Singer (2000), Starr (1995) and Unger and Unger (1998), but there are many others. Fink, Gassert, and Junker (1998) is one of the few books that has collected essays on the events internationally. Each of the essays has an excellent bibliography that covers sources specific to the geographical loca- tion being analysed. 7. See also Kershaw (1999: 89–125). 8. Throughout his book, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Kester assesses the impact of May 1968 on the ideas of the major post-structuralists, in part as a way to locate and validate the paradigm of collaboration that he sets up in contrast to the oppositional paradigm represented in art works and theory that elevate shock, dissensus and affect (or somatic experience) to the level of key tactic to change the way the public thinks. 9. A short clip of one of the early performances is available on the HorsLesMurs website (street theatre and circus archive in Paris). To see a video clip of the performance, go to http://www.rueetcirque.fr/ and search by company name or title of the performance. Notes 187 10. Floriane Gaber (2009b), in How It All Started: Street Arts in the Context of the 1970s, offers an excellent and comprehensive description and analysis of the origins of street theatre emphasizing the work in France, but always with an eye to influences and developments outside France. The first chap- ter, ‘The Cultural Policy’, looks in detail at cultural policies in France that led to the development of street theatre. Gaber’s other book, 40 Years of Street Arts, looks at developments of street theatre from the 1970s to the present.
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