Street theatre and the production of postindustrial space

Working memories

David Calder

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526121615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Danza

Deindustrialising communities have called upon street theatre companies to re-animate public space and commemorate industrial heritage. How have these companies converted derelict factories into spaces of theatrical production? How do they connect their work to the industrial work that once occurred there? How do those connections manifest in theatrical events, and how do such events give shape and meaning to ongoing redevelopment projects? This book develops an understanding of the relationship between theatre and redevelopment that goes beyond accusations of gentrification or celebrations of radical resistance. Ultimately, Calder argues that deindustrialisation and redevelopment depend on theatrical events and performative acts to make ongoing change intelligible and navigable. Working memories brings together some of current theatre scholarship's fundamental concerns while demonstrating the significance of those concerns to an interdisciplinary readership.

1

Theatre in ruins: street and theatre at the end of Fordism

1973 was an inauspicious year for France’s economy and a surprisingly sunny one for its street performers. After the spring crash in the global property market but before the autumn oil embargo, Jean Digne, director of the Théâtre du Centre in Aix-en-Provence, and Charles Nugue, director of the city’s cultural centre, organized a festival: Aix, ville ouverte aux saltimbanques (Aix, city open to street performers). The event brought tumblers, jugglers, fire-spinners, magicians, and busking musicians – the familiar denizens of ‘the street’ – together with visual artists and theatre troupes seeking to experiment with alternative modes of expanding and engaging with their publics. The festival ran for three subsequent summers and, in retrospect, assumed the status of a ‘foundational moment’ for contemporary French street theatre.¹

It is historical coincidence that this foundational moment was so neatly bookended by two key episodes in the collapse of the Fordist compromise and the end of post-World War II economic growth. The spring property crash did not directly cause the summer street theatre festival any more than the summer street theatre festival caused the autumn oil embargo. But the deindustrialization, economic crisis, and urban change that ensued provide more than mere context for the development of French street theatre; they furnished contemporary street theatre with its material and symbolic conditions of possibility. The move away from high modernist urban projects after 1973 signalled a return to what David Wiles has called a ‘traditionalist public space’ in which small-scale street performance could thrive.² France’s new urban policy of the 1970s explicitly encouraged the ‘reanimation’ of public space, in a marked departure from the uniform tower blocks skewered by the likes of Henri Lefebvre, the Situationist International, and Jean-Luc Godard. From the 1980s onward, as deindustrialization accelerated and intensified, street theatre companies joined other artists in appropriating disused factories as studio, construction, and rehearsal spaces. Some of these sites later became officially sanctioned and well-funded centres of artistic creation, especially as formerly industrial cities and towns sought to use cultural projects to reinvent themselves to suit new economic circumstances.

During this period, French street theatre developed to include not only a loosely affiliated collection of aesthetic practices, but also a formalized set of professional institutions, publications, and events. These included Lieux Publics, a national centre for the creation of street arts founded by Michel Crespin and Fabien Jannelle in 1983; Goliath, a trade magazine for and directory of street theatre practitioners (first published 1985); prominent festivals at Aurillac (from 1986) and Chalon-sur-Saône (from 1987); and HorsLesMurs, a national resource centre for street arts, created in 1993. Throughout the 1990s there emerged, often in former industrial spaces, a network of fabriques, centres of street theatre creation that host companies in residence as they develop new work; these sites include Les Abattoirs in Chalon-sur-Saône (1991), Le Fourneau in Brest (1994), Le Moulin Fondu in Noisy-le-Sec (1996), and l’Atelier 231 in Sotteville-lès-Rouen (1998).³ The names of these centres, and their collective designation as fabriques, recall their previous occupations while underscoring their continued status as sites of production: street theatre is made here, not simply disseminated.

In the introduction to this book I proposed that, in contemporary France, street theatre is working memory’s privileged artistic form. In this chapter I explain why. It is not merely because, as outlined above, street theatre developed and professionalized amidst economic crisis, the new urban policy of the 1970s, and deindustrialization. This historical coincidence is necessary but not sufficient to explain French street theatre’s function as working memory. Rather, street theatre is working memory’s privileged artistic form because of how it engages space and time, its fraught relationship with Fordist-Taylorist modernity, and its ambivalence towards a mythologized, premodern urban ideal. These traits are legible in the prevailing origin stories that continue to govern French street theatre’s production and reception, and perceptible in some of French street theatre’s longest-running and most iconic performances. Therefore this chapter brings together street theatre historiography and performance analysis. In doing so, it shows how street theatre’s engagement with real and imagined pasts shapes persistent assumptions about its political efficacy and its relationship to theatre in purpose-built spaces. French street theatre’s origin stories trace the form to the protests of May 1968 or link it to a premodern carnivalesque; in both cases, street theatre is supposed to transcend the atomization of bodies in space and time by eliminating the distinction between performer and spectator. I find this claim to be anti-theatrical, and also inadequate in its reductive account of street theatre’s political, spatial, and temporal work. Ultimately, this investigation reveals that street performers might do more complex historiographic work in the theatrical event than these dominant origin stories would suggest.⁴

Street theatre’s negative space

Contemporary French street theatre emerged concomitantly with what François Hartog calls a ‘memorial wave’ in the 1970s and 1980s.⁵ French historians and film-makers released works that reckoned with the legacy of Vichy and Nazi collaboration.⁶ The editors of immigrant magazine Sans Frontière (founded in 1979) created a regular feature, ‘Mémoire Immigré,’ dedicated to narratives of working-class immigrant lives, personal testimonies, and family histories.⁷ Labour historians drew on oral histories of factory workers to write ‘history from below.’ Memoirs of rural and peasant life became national bestsellers, and in some cases their authors became television celebrities.⁸ The proliferation and consumption of memory work responded to the imminent disappearance or radical transformation of the documented experiences: the aging and natural death of Holocaust survivors, a shift in the immigrant experience from temporary working arrangement to permanent family resettlement, the deindustrialization of urban areas, and the industrialization of agriculture.⁹ Memorial work, the forging of a link between present and past, kept the recent past present before it could slip away.

The figure of the saltimbanque, so prominent in the name of the 1973 Aix-en-Provence festival and in the discourse of street theatre throughout the 1970s, operates somewhat differently. Though above I have conformed to current usage and translated saltimbanque simply as ‘street performer,’ the image of the saltimbanque corresponds more precisely to the Italian saltimbanco or English mountebank: the early modern medicine man who peddled panaceas in the marketplace from atop a trestle stage, often accompanied by musicians or commedia actors.¹⁰ The street performers at the 1973 Aix-en-Provence festival did not dispense medical advice, but they did (or were supposed to) embody a pre-industrial mode of urban sociality. As Jean Digne writes, ‘the city in its incubator shell had not lived up to its potential since the Middle Ages.’¹¹ The celebration of the saltimbanque by proponents of the emergent form of street theatre does not preserve a repertoire in the process of disappearing (as was the case with much memory work of the 1970s) so much as it facilitates the re-emergence of a repertoire supposedly long since vanished. By resurrecting the saltimbanque as their ‘figurehead,’ street theatre practitioners bracketed French modernization.¹² The relationship to space and time embodied by the saltimbanque evoked both the pre-industrial past and more recent crises in Fordist modernity, including, crucially, the festive energies of May 1968.

Kristin Ross has called May 1968 the ‘confirming afterthought’ of France’s postwar modernization.¹³ During the postwar decades, France sought a ‘third way’ between American-style capitalism and Soviet-style socialism, neither of which was particularly attractive. But ultimately it became a consumer society in the model of the United States: mass production facilitated mass consumption, and a combination of job security and rising wages (both hard-won by unions) formed the basis of a compromise between labour and capital. But this compromise did nothing to resolve the problem of worker alienation. Inside the factory, the rhythms of the Fordist assembly line dominated the production process. Throughout the Trente Glorieuses, France’s thirty continuous years of postwar economic growth, the general trend was towards deskilling labour. For many, automation and mechanization eliminated backbreaking work and complete physical exhaustion. But these were replaced by equally draining mental fatigue and repetitive tasks. Thus striking workers in May 1968 replaced conventional quantitative demands (pertaining to working hours, vacation time, rate of pay) with qualitative demands for a ‘humanization of work.’¹⁴ These qualitative demands were not necessarily revolutionary or fundamentally anti-capitalist – though many were – but they rejected the tight regulation, close surveillance, and mechanical repetitiveness of Fordist-Taylorist factory production. Inside worker-occupied factories, strike committees organized music, dances, games, film screenings, and theatrical performances. Arts and festive practices undermined the rhythms and spatio-temporal compartmentalization of the Fordist factory.

The spectre of May 1968 looms large in French street theatre historiography; it is largely from 1968 that the discourse of street theatre inherits its persistent rhetoric of border crossing (see the Introduction). For Ross, May 1968 was a ‘crisis in functionalism,’ during which students and workers challenged the confines of their designated spaces and social roles.¹⁵ The same was true of the theatre. Post-World War II cultural decentralization efforts had produced numerous ‘popular’ or ‘people’s’ theatre buildings in working-class areas, but rather than nurturing new working-class audiences, these theatres tended to attract existing bourgeois audiences who were willing to make a pilgrimage to see noted directors’ productions of Shakespeare, Molière, and Brecht. Faced with empty auditoria during May 1968, theatre-makers took to the streets or arranged with strike committees to perform in occupied factories.¹⁶ The goal was not merely to find missing audiences, but also to join workers and students in challenging the compartmentalization of intellectual/creative and manual/productive labour. Philippe Ivernel explains:

More than the occupation of the Odeon, the major phenomenon [for theatre in 1968] is without doubt the desertion and closure of the auditoria. Real life is elsewhere, in the street, in the factories, in the occupied universities, everywhere the collective reappropriation of spaces of life and work is underway. This reappropriation, it must be stressed, does not promote new enclosures. If real life is somewhere, properly speaking, it is in the transgression of borders that in times of normalcy (that is to say, of normativity) partition different social spaces, isolate different activities: the economic, the cultural, the political.¹⁷

In May 1968 theatre endeavours to get closer to something called real life, not through mimetic fidelity but through physical proximity. This real life is at once somewhere – in the streets, in occupied factories and universities – and in the act of crossing to those somewheres from somewhere else.

Street theatre scholarship depicts this act of crossing not merely as a taking to the streets but as a retaking of the streets. As Emmanuel Wallon writes, ‘since the end of the 1960s, theatre, music, dance, puppetry, circus, visual art, cinema and video, without forgetting pyrotechnics, have newly taken hold of public space, from which the authorities and their police, the academies, and other institutions had driven them after the age of fairgrounds.’¹⁸ In this prevalent version of events, the late 1960s marked both a rupture (suggested by newly) and a return to a poorly periodized golden age of street performance (the vaguely Bakhtinian ‘age of fairgrounds’). Philippe Chaudoir has suggested that street theatre practitioners and scholars claim a connection to medieval performance practice in order to establish contemporary street theatre’s artistic legitimacy.¹⁹ But street theatre practitioners do not, and cannot, trace direct acts of transfer in the way that Shakespearean actors like Kean once did; histories of French street theatre rely on the gap between the mythologized distant past (the age of fairgrounds) and the mythologized recent past (May 1968). This break, the negative space of French street theatre historiography, allows street theatre practitioners to situate themselves as both traditional and radical, as legitimate claimants to the street and as sufficiently illegitimate to launch anti-institutional critiques.

As the 1973 Aix-en-Provence festival suggests, street theatre’s boundary crossing is both spatial and temporal; it marks an attempt to access, if not other spaces and times, then other relationships to space and time, prior to the spatio-temporal abstractions and regimentations of modernity, and often described in shorthand as festival....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: working memory
• 1 Theatre in ruins: street and theatre at the end of Fordism
• 2 Reincorporation: putting the countryside back to work
• 3 Excavation: the imaginary archaeology of redevelopment
• 4 Resurfacing: continuous theatre for a creative city
• 5 Recuperation: alternative pasts, sustainable futures
• Bibliography
• Index