Looking Back: A Socio-Historical and Intellectual Context for Contemporary Street Arts in Europe

Abstract

Performances have taken over the streets and squares of European cities for centuries: ancient mimes, jugglers, acrobats, and bards; the medieval cycles, miracles and morality plays; royal entries of the Renaissance; itinerant commedia dell’arte troupes; tableaux vivants; showmen exhibiting anything out of the ordinary from religious relics to freaks of nature throughout the centuries; and the popular entertainments of the great fairs, like Bartholomew Fair and Southwark Fair in London and Foire Saint-Germain, Foire Saint-Laurent, and Foire Saint-Ovide in Paris (some of which lasted into the 19th century).1 All these street performances and many others used art to shift the focus of their audiences from ordinary day-to-day activities to special events of religious celebration, entertainment, or displays of power and transformed the function of the public space in which they took place. The long and vivid history of outdoor performance clearly contributed to what is called street arts today, but contemporary street theatre in Europe is not simply a continuation, an elaboration, or a modernization of the traditions of the past. Although adapting centuries-old outdoor performance techniques, the current form of street arts was deeply influenced by and developed as an artistic response to the same anti-establishment impulses and seeds of rebellion that initiated social unrest in the 1960s and led to the vivid, and often violent, demonstrations and riots around the world in 1968.