by Susan Haedicke

Susan Haedicke is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at University of Warwick, UK, and works as a professional dramaturg in experimental and street theatres in France and the United States. Her book on street theatre, Contemporary European Street Theatre: Aesthetics and Politics, will be published in 2011.

Ilotopie’s Water Fools (Fous de Bassin)

Every summer, hundreds of thousands of spectators brave the hot sun or cold drizzle at more than 300 street theatre festivals in cities and towns all over Europe, although mostly in France. The long and vivid history of outdoor performance in Europe, dating back to the medieval period, clearly contributed to what is called "street theatre" today, but this theatrical form is not simply a continuation of the traditions of the past. Although adapting centuries-old techniques, the current form of théâtre de rue exploded onto the urban stage in the 1970s in response to the same anti-establishment impulses that led to the May 1968 student/worker uprisings throughout France and social unrest all over Europe.

Pioneering companies abandoned traditional theatre buildings for the freedom and populist appeal of the street, offered their shows for free, and insisted on a revolutionary aesthetic of innovation, provocation, and overthrow of norms. These radical performances were created to launch an artistic intervention into the actual life of the city, and thereby change the public's understanding of social life by challenging the demarcation between the fiction of the theatre and reality of the street. These productions inhabited the theatrical world and the everyday world simultaneously and created public memories of ordinary places transformed into communal public stages.

From its beginnings by a handful of radical artists, street theatre in Europe has blossomed in the years since the 1970s to encompass over 1,000 professional street theatre companies. The festivals vary both in size and in length, lasting from a few days to several weeks. Some of the oldest French festivals, like those in Aurillac, Chalon-sur-Saône, and Sotteville-lès-Rouen, have already celebrated their twentieth anniversary. Street theatre festivals offer a wide range of performances, from the cutting edge and provocative to the just plain silly. Audiences can see stilt-walking, puppetry, aerial acrobatics in the trees or on the sides of buildings, huge inflatable floating sculptures, musical ensembles parading through the streets or hanging from cranes, urban dance, living statues, walkabouts, theatre of fire, performance installations, storytelling, promenade performances and large-scale spectacles.

Like their predecessors in the last decades of the 20th century, many of the shows created by contemporary street theatre companies continue to superimpose fictional or unexpected scenes on an actual site, and so bridge the gap between the daily activity of the spectator and the aesthetic activity of performance. As artistic "interventions," the performances transform an unnoticed public space into a hyper-visible performance space, thus enabling audiences to experience familiar locations and daily activities differently. This altered relationship between place, performance, and public cannot eliminate the boundary between the fictional world and the actual world, but it does encourage spectators to re-imagine public art, public space, community, and democracy.

Ilotopie’s La Vie en Abri-bus

Long-time photographer of street theatre events, Christophe Renaud de Lage asserts,

To break the established rapport between stage and auditorium, to leave the beaten path created by institutions, to transform the rapport with the public, to rediscover a taste for risk and innovation, to invent new modes of production, to refuse the tyranny of money and its submission to mass appeal, to imagine other ways of living, to look for new connections with objects, things, and people, to replace the focus on ‘me’ with one on the collective, all that, yes, is really revolutionary, it is true that in order to change life, we must begin by transforming, each at his own pace, our rapport with the world.

And street performance can change our rapport with the world and our understanding of social life by creating an alternative experience of the social reality—one based in aesthetic experience rather than everyday activities. Street theatre artists strive to change the public's experience of the world by making performance an integral part of the street. As spectators, they participate in these events in public spaces, and thereby reassert their right to engage in the public life of a democracy.

Ilotopie’s La Mousse en Cage

Ilotopie, one of the earliest French street theatre companies, is co-directed by Bruno Schnebelin and Françoise Léger. Since its inception in 1980, Ilotopie has created over 50 shows, large and small, experimenting with innovative ways to create artistic interventions that interrogate public space and reclaim the street for people and for art. The name of the company, Ilotopie, is created from the words for île (island), topos (theme or motif), and utopie (utopia), and it embodies Ilotopie's mission of taking spectacles to the public and creating alternative experiences. Some of Ilotopie's early productions wedged themselves into ordinary urban life of the city as they played with the audience's perceptions of the city. In La Vie en Abri-bus (1984) couples set up a kitchen, a bedroom, or living room in covered bus stops around a city, "living" there for a few days to the surprise of commuters. La Mousse en Cage (1987) began as actors, dressed all in white and in white cages, engaged in ordinary activities like reading a book, and played almost ritualistically with brightly colored polyurethane foam that gradually hardened, transforming the live actor into a statue frozen in the act of daily life.

Ilotopie’s Les Gens de Couleur

In Les Gens de Couleur (created in 1989 and performed around the world since then), almost naked actors painted with thick shiny bright colors of red, blue, purple, green and yellow, walk throughout the city, drawn to objects of the same color—a blue body closely follows a policeman, a red one lies among bright red flowers. One of the company's most controversial pieces, P.L.M. (1990) was performed only once when Ilotopie transformed a low-income apartment building in a Marseille housing project into a five-star hotel for a week. With the actors as waiters, maids, chauffeurs, doormen, bartenders and entertainers, the "hotel" offered free room service, maid service, limousines and lobby café with entertainment to all the actual residents. Confins (2003) was the fourth in a series of "Champ d'Expériences" that explored various facets of the "social field" of human interaction. For this durational performance, Ilotopie built an imaginative and ephemeral community on urban sidewalks: a self-contained "village-spectacle" of orange tubes and green, blue and orange elliptical pods housing showers, toilets and beds. The 12 actors actually lived in their space age-looking village for over a week, spending their time talking with passers-by, sharing food and playing with children with the intent to challenge the anonymity of the urban experience.

Ilotopie’s P.L.M

In addition to creating innovative and free performances, Ilotopie opened the doors of Le Citron Jaune in 1992. This large warehouse-like space is used in multiple ways: as the site of exploration, innovation and creation for Ilotopie's shows; as a workshop space for other artists to invent, rehearse and construct their shows in residence for up to three months; and as a meeting place between artists and the local public. In 2005 Le Citron Jaune became one of nine Centres Nationaux des Arts de la Rue or National Centers for Street Arts, a designation that represented a political recognition of the significance of street theatre as a vibrant public art form and of Ilotopie's contribution to artistic innovation.

Ilotopie's home is on a small island in the Rhône Delta in the Camargue, south of Arles, where the beautiful landscape juxtaposes the natural wilderness of the delta's sandbars and salt lagoons with gigantic industrial sites and the Mediterranean Sea. So it is not surprising that the company has experimented with several shows since 1985 that use the water as an imaginative "untrodden" stage. Water Fools (Fous de Bassin), was created in 2005 in collaboration with Groupe F, a street theatre company specializing in pyrotechnics, to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the city, Port-Saint-Louis in the Camargue. Water Fools is a large-scale outdoor spectacle where a lake or bay becomes the stage for "a floating populace going about its business."

Ilotopie’s Confins

The show begins as a car drives across the water and a city worker lights the street lamps that rise from the lake. A man sits under a tree "growing" far from shore as he reads the paper and watches the daily life happening on the water around him. A mother pushes a buggy, a boy rides a bicycle, the garbage man collects the trash, and a woman enters with her shopping. Suddenly, the man's head bursts into flames as his thoughts or dreams explode. His paper catches on fire, and the daily life around him is transformed into the fantastical. An oversized bed carrying a dreamer crosses the lake and anchors itself to a tree; a woman with a huge red skirt several meters tall passes in front of the audience; a naked king on his gondola and his court of fools on several flaming rafts careen around, and fireworks set the lake ablaze. And then the sky goes dark, but the colors, the music, and the fanciful and extravagant images remain embedded in the minds of the audience who have experienced the ordinary world transformed into the extraordinary.

Water Fools offers an ephemeral form of public art that challenges the ideological significance, assumptions, and function of a specific site. Playing with notions of theatricality and a willing suspension of disbelief, Ilotopie creates public memories based in imagination, and implants embodied ideas and motifs for a possible utopian future in the public consciousness. While street theatre may not change the world, it can begin to change how we see and experience activities and places so familiar we no longer notice them—an awareness that may indeed lead to a revision of our communal reality.