Talks · Publications — June 2010

Themes and tendencies in the street arts

Published in the journal ADE Teatro No. 130 and in the book Movs 2010. El espectador activo. 2010

Also given as a talk at the street arts professional meetings in the Basque Country, organised by Artekale

Street arts, yes — but for which street? What is our street like? What is our daily life in the street like? What do we use the street for? Is the street part of the way we live? How many of you have to take the car to go shopping? Are there benches in the squares? How many? Are benches being replaced by single seats? Where do you live? In a village? A small town, a medium one? A big city? How far away is your workplace? Do you know your neighbour? In the squares where the old people gathered only a few years ago, are they still there? Where are they? Because some will have died, but others arrive. How many kinds of rubbish container can you list? Does anyone take less than twenty minutes to park? What do we do to enjoy ourselves? Where do we go? In the children’s playgrounds, do the swings have safety belts? How long is it since you sat by the light of a bonfire? How did you hear the latest piece of gossip? Was it whispered in your ear or did it come through Facebook? How many phone calls do you make a day? How many texts do you get? How many do you send? Could you name five superheroes? And five mythological heroes? How many hours do you watch television? When was the last time you went to the cinema? And to the theatre? Where is the biggest tree in your town? How many people can look out onto the street from your window at once? What floor do you live on? From that height, do you see the pedestrians as tiny, as large, or as if they were mosquitoes? Do you see pedestrians? Cars? Can you hear the arguments in the flat next door? Do the street lamps in your neighbourhood look like the ones in other cities? Are they the same ones? How many television cameras record your steps from home to work? If we were blindfolded and taken to another city, how long would it take us to notice the change? When was the last journey you made without GPS? Home sweet home, or rather hotel sweet hotel? Do you feel safe in your house? And in the street?

In the last century, the twentieth, great transformations revolutionised the way we perceive the world and the different ways in which we represent it.

We have drawn closer to other cultures out of curiosity about them, with the ease that tourism offers, as against expansionist colonial expeditions; we have tightened trade links far more than we could have imagined in earlier times; we have soaked up and been infected by ways of dressing, of speaking, of shaping thought; we have become a global and in many respects homogenised world. And sometimes it seems we know more about someone living ten thousand kilometres away than about the person living opposite.

We have learnt to read events by dehumanising them. I would give as an example the impression that, as in films, wars are what is seen on television: distant, decorated, directed, clean and odourless, to the point that at times they have become a stand-in for fiction, or at least have been represented as such, using the mechanisms and languages of the media. Let us remember the Gulf war, or the fall of the twin towers and its broadcast at peak viewing time.

The city remains a model in which the mentality of a society is reflected. The concept of the city is as variable as the societies that inhabit them. The great cities were born near places rich in raw materials, which favoured industrial production, and then went on growing around trade and services. Now, in the middle of the technological age, the concept of the city is reinventing itself and blurring. Public space takes on a completely different meaning. Children no longer play in the street. The current tendency leads us towards a scattered city: aseptic, functional and tremendously depersonalised. A city barely different from the rest. A city permanently watched, a city that expands and devours small urban centres. A city with neither gates nor walls, often without a centre; a city in which, in short, public space has been privatised, when not turned into merchandise. We could walk through many cities of the world and not notice a single difference; we would feel at home, and in a society whose roots are sunk in fear this new design is genuinely reassuring. The city has gone from being a jungle to being a garden where nature is conspicuous by its absence

Street arts evolve according to where they take place; it cannot be otherwise, it always has been so, and that is not going to change. To speak about how street arts evolve, we have to think about how urban landscapes evolve, and about the concept of public space and the uses made of it. I do not intend to establish a linear synchrony in which a graph over time would show a continuous change in a single direction. I could not. Each space calls for an expression in keeping with the place itself and with the society that inhabits it.

It is a long time since the different arts stopped being watertight compartments and began to fuse with one another. These fusions run both ways. Today the borders between the different stage languages have blurred and in many cases disappeared, giving rise to a new grammar of signs, the fruit of the synergies produced by the fusion of the different disciplines — scenic, artistic and technical alike. Before us is a new poetics, built on transdisciplinary foundations, in which the street arts move like fish in water.

In all these new creative processes — which draw on everything from urban intervention to post-performance, from anti-system guerrilla action to advertising strategies, by way of martial arts, sport, architecture, biology, the mechanic on the corner and the neighbour opposite experimenting with who knows what — the street arts have a great deal to say. Let us hope that this time their virtues are not taken from them, as has happened so often through history.

Cinema and television have shaped the spectator and the maker enormously. In the beginning, cinema drew on the performing arts to develop its own language: it took narrative, acting and scenographic techniques and slowly modified them according to its own intrinsic characteristics, eventually generating a language of its own. The spectator — a spectator without prejudices, since they grew up and were educated at the same time as cinema and television — took in this new language entirely naturally. Now the performing arts take up those findings and fold them into their productions and, more importantly, rework the language once again to bring it onto their own ground, generating a new grammar.

In Europe, immigration is plainly changing society. The mixing of cultures, when it happens, is a cultural enrichment that widens the horizons of makers and potential audiences alike and opens new paths for research. Fusion is served. And it is in the street that these fusions begin, because it is in the street that these emerging cultures find room to grow and take hold. Later they will quite possibly leave the place where they were born and settle into a theatre, wrapped in critical approval and with the blessing of society as a whole. We cannot ignore the fact that many artistic movements have been born outside the shelter of established culture, thanks to a need for expression that, ignored by everyone, finds its natural habitat in the street. An art that develops its own codes at the margins of the dominant culture, but which little by little will seep in, becoming strangely familiar, and end up over the years admirably integrated, as if it had always been there, becoming indispensable — and I would go so far as to say becoming a defining feature of the very culture that once repudiated it.

We have a clear example in hip-hop culture. From the Vietnam war to the present day, hip-hop has gone from being a means of expression belonging to the excluded to becoming an icon of youth, and its fruits can now be sampled in prestigious museums and great theatres or festivals on payment of the appropriate ticket.

Think of the phenomenon of parkour, known as Yamakasi thanks to the film of that name, whose leads are companions of David Belle, founder of the discipline, who at fifteen began a path that would lead to what they themselves call “the arts of displacement”. A movement whose roots are sunk in the use of street furniture — the very furniture that so often gets in our way when we organise a festival. For them it is their reason to be, their space. They use it both as sign and as symbol, shaping scenographies out of the real, but also elements of technical support and propulsion that today are evolving and taking on ever more interesting scenic qualities. Very close to the Agbar tower in Barcelona, a good number of practitioners can be found at “La Makabra”.

Right now, at this very moment, new forms of expression directly related to the street are taking shape, forms that we, members of a dominant and closed culture, do not want to approach because we consider them minor. Time will tell. I fear we will repeat the same patterns that have worked so well for us. We will assimilate the new forms, and in that process of assimilation we will bring onto our own ground the talent, the innovation and the energy of these emerging artists, and we will strip the street once again of makers — real intellectuals, renewers — who, had they gone on working there, would have achieved at least the same artistic results, and who I think might well have reached somewhere we cannot even imagine. But the street is for losers, the dispossessed, the outcasts, the crusties. What a sad perversion…

Quite apart from the synergies between the different arts, we find other disciplines which, without belonging to the artistic field, use the resources inherent to the street arts for their own benefit, setting out a new map of what we might call urban actions that are hard to classify, many of them with advertising, political or protest intentions.

Advertising has found fertile ground in dehumanised cities, where the difference between fiction and reality is a line so fine that it often passes unnoticed. When the potential customer is saturated with the classic advertising hits on television, in the press, on hoardings and walls; when nothing surprises us any more because everything is predictable; when reality is perceived from an armchair in front of a plasma television — that is when street actions take on a revealing prominence, hooking the customer again and sending them straight out to buy the fashionable handset. Many street arts companies have worked, with more or less controversy, with advertising firms, building a series of actions designed to seduce the spectator. As an example I will mention a company known to us all, La Fura dels Baus.

But the creatives of advertising do not stop there; they go on imagining new ways of reaching the customer, and the street arts remain excellent collaborators. From great events designed to grab precious minutes on television or right-hand pages in the press, we move on to word of mouth, one citizen at a time. Street actions are designed on a minimal budget and are seen by a small number of spectators, taken by surprise. Most of these actions try to hide their true face until the very end, making the citizen believe that what they are seeing is real. When the action ends, that is when the advertising message is launched, and it goes off like a depth charge in the future customer, who also takes on the role of accomplice, since they will not miss the chance to recount the event over and over to their astonished listeners, who will in turn recount what happened, in a chain that reproduces exponentially.

The internet is today playing an important role in society, transforming consumption habits and creating new channels of communication. If we focus on the phenomenon of social networks, also known as Internet 2, we find a paradox that is unsettling to say the least: the role of the spectator has been perverted to such a degree that it is now the receiver of the information who takes charge of putting the content in. We become actors and spectators. On these networks a constant game is set up in which reality and fiction live together in perfect harmony. The real protagonist becomes the group, and the individual is relegated to the role of an unimportant supporting actor in this constantly evolving dramaturgical web. We are generators and devourers of stories, and what is more, in many cases we pay for it.

A clear example of practical application is the Improv Everywhere collective, who display their interventions on their website like trophies. Of everyone and for everyone: from professional actors and dancers to the old man feeding the pigeons, there is room for all in this project. The collective keeps an internet portal and uses it as a platform to sell the books and dvds they make from their various interventions, to make themselves known and to call up future actors, dancers, passers-by, twins, people with a limp, ladies with little dogs, taxi drivers or simply anonymous citizens willing to take part in a collective action. In that call-out they are asked to dress in a particular way and to bring a set of objects needed for the intervention. They are given a date, a precise time and the chosen place, and they do what falls to them. As an example I will mention “Mp3 Experiment”, a series of interventions with large numbers of participants (around 600 people) carried out in different cities. Those taking part download an mp3 file from the internet and turn up at the place, having synchronised their watches beforehand so that everyone starts playing the file at the same moment. They simply have to do what they are told, which is no small thing. From heading into a wood to dancing on tiptoe. They may find themselves caught up in a battle or end up seduced by who knows what. To take part in this action all that is required is to let yourself go; there is no age limit, no social class and no colour.

They also make interventions that require a high degree of skill. In “Food court musical” they leave an entire shopping-centre restaurant open-mouthed, mid-chew, improvising a comedy in the key of a musical — this time without mp3, but with the lines learnt and of course singing, acting and dancing, as the genre demands. Worth mentioning too is “Human Mirror”. Picture eighteen twins paired off, one facing the other in an underground carriage; picture the reaction of the other passengers. I say no more.

To what extent are the street arts influenced by the internet and by emerging technologies? Let me say that the transformation these technologies are bringing about in the civilised countries affects every part of society without exception. And let me state roundly that one of the changes that most directly affects street arts professionals is the change in the way reality is perceived. The spectator’s reception is changing drastically, at a speed that is, to say the least, hard to keep up with.

The transmission of information, and the way it is encoded, now works very differently from the way it did only sixty years ago. We are talking about complex information transmitted through a single channel. Now information is transmitted simply through multiple channels, and I like to think it is in the process of decoding that information that it takes on a complex meaning. All this has helped strengthen sensory dramaturgies, especially visual ones, and experiential ones too. But it is also producing changes in conventional performing arts, altering the running time of a production, the building of its argument, the scenic and scenographic approach and the construction of the various signs that shape the dramaturgical web.

Applying multimedia techniques to the street arts opens up an enormous world of possibilities. What barely ten years ago we did not even dare imagine can today be done at ever more affordable cost. Advances in optics, sound, electronics and computing allow stagings that use these tools to transform space and take us into a poetic universe without limits. Used, indeed, live. There are two ways of understanding technological use applied to the street arts. The first consists of using these tools as a substitute for physical elements, in order to cut costs or simply to freshen the aesthetic. The other, to my mind far more interesting, consists of technological and scenic research aimed at generating a new language, at opening new paths.

Jenny Holzer is a multidisciplinary artist who at the end of the 1970s began a series of text works probing the belief in universal truths. These texts are projected onto buildings, invade advertising hoardings and take shape in street furniture. Using a single sentence, or a succession of them, she forms a range of opinions that lay bare the diversity and the contradiction of our contemporary society before the eyes of the spectator–reader.

Play the Magic have created an installation, “Building Music”, in which the spectator interacts with the façade of a building using a torch. Depending on where the torch is pointed, one sound or another plays and that part of the building lights up as though it were a key, turning the whole block into a musical instrument at the spectators’ disposal. The same company made the site-specific installation “Los fantasmas del matadero” as part of the contemporary art biennial at Matadero. Using the characteristics of the place, which really was a slaughterhouse, the company designed a system of interaction similar to the one explored in “Building Music”, but this time the torch shows what human eyes do not see. Ghosts: the ghosts of the animals slaughtered there over the years, and their cries at the moment of slaughter.

In his installations, Marcelí Antúnez develops a whole system of signs that interact with the spectator and turn the installation into an autonomous system defined by the various actions the public performs, either consciously through an interface or unconsciously through sensors. It is not even necessary for the spectator to be in the same city. The action of a spectator in another town brings about an interaction in the rest of the installations running simultaneously in different places.

Robert Lepage is a well-known theatre director who works hand in hand with technology. When he was called on to contribute to the 400th anniversary of the city of Quebec, he designed a visual and sound spectacle with projections measuring thirty by six hundred metres, completely transforming the landscape of the city. How can someone feel on seeing a spectacle of such dimensions? We might draw a parallel with the pilgrim who, centuries ago, at the end of an eventful journey, beheld the façade of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela for the first time in his life. Dimensions like that, never seen by him before, carried him at once to the majesty of God Almighty, to the miracle, to the power of Holy Mother Church, and to poor wretched me, filthy tadpole, who have made it this far. Now these new pilgrims, turned into tourists, quite possibly feel something similar, but from the perspective of a secular setting.

Peter Reder and his “Guided Tour” are a clear example of a transdisciplinary search and of making use of the particular characteristics of the place of performance. This maker from the United Kingdom draws us into a ferocious critique of the heritage industries by becoming a tourist guide who, while telling us about a particular space, calls up the need to recover the individual’s own personal view of the events of the past. The artist works directly with the space, changing the production according to the place and the historical facts that define it. I am not talking about adapting to the surroundings; I am talking about a complete restructuring of the production, even modifying, through small installations, the place of performance, and setting out a new reading of the surroundings.

Starting from similar premises, Délices Dada pass themselves off as tourist guides ready to show us the peculiarities of the city, with one peculiarity of their own: they invent absolutely everything, and are able to show us a metropolis that bears no resemblance to the one we are looking at, but that will stay in our memory for many years, living alongside it in harmony and making us smile — because the city, our city, will happily never be the same again. In some way our idea of it will have changed for ever.

Another clear example of what interdisciplinary fusions can offer us is found in dance, and more precisely in aerial dance. Using climbing techniques and combining them with choreographic language and architecture, they manage to surprise the spectator with work that finds its full sense and reason to be in the street. Out of the possibilities and the limitations of this discipline come new paths to explore, which will determine its corresponding poetics. It is still too early to pass judgement, or even to sense where it will evolve. Today these makers are setting out on a new path, full of obstacles, accompanied by engineers, mechanics, climbers and physicists ready to find solutions to each obstacle. We do not know where they will get to, but quite possibly one day they will find something that changes for ever our current idea of this emerging form of dance. Two examples: the companies Retouramont and Deambulants.

But contemporary dance also flirts with the street, freeing itself from the yoke of tradition and developing new spatial relationships with the architectural surroundings and with the public, who, far from sitting in a seat, move, come in, go out, sit down or stand up, lean out of a balcony or simply walk on by. Companies such as Ex nihilo, Beau geste, Frecuencia moderada, Senza Tempo, Sol Picó, Juschka Weigel, Alexis Fernández and Caterina Varela, among many others, are exploring the new possibilities of dance in public spaces, understanding those spaces not only as spatial but as historical, social and poetic, generating choreographies that interact with the surroundings and with the spectator on different narrative planes.

We find work closer to urban guerrilla action, seeking to make the passer-by aware of certain issues by using public space and some street arts techniques, from theatre to dance or circus.

In Spain, the project Invasión Danza is one of the most visible. The proposal is simple: a particular public space is chosen — anything goes, from a zebra crossing to a bus, from a street packed with people to a public fountain, a hotel, a bar or a lift — a choreography is designed for the chosen place and performed without warning before astonished passers-by, while being filmed so that the documented process can then be posted on the internet and put on record. Through these actions Invasión Danza aims to raise citizens’ awareness, to draw sensibilities in and to spread an art which, like so many others, can barely survive.

What happens when a whole village agrees to light the fire at a given hour? What happens when the smoke from each chimney comes out a particular colour? What do we see if we watch this action from a nearby hill? And in a big city, what happens when, at an appointed hour, the lights in hundreds of windows go off or on, forming sentences, drawing landscapes? What happens when, in the middle of the seven o’clock morning jam, hundreds of drivers, synchronised to the millimetre, sound their horns and compose a melody everyone recognises?

Actions like these have been carried out and are carried out continually, on a greater or smaller scale. Whoever the thinking head, the maker, may be, hundreds of people can take part and the result is enjoyed by many more. One minimal individual action — pressing a switch, say — takes on a gigantic global dimension.

Let us go back in time and turn our gaze to the markets and fairs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The baker, the fishmonger and the spice seller shared the markets and squares with theatre booths displaying the most astonishing curiosities. Now, in the twenty-first century, some makers have taken up this popular form again and, in their lorries and small tents, in their “travelling theatres”, they tour the world with intimate, delicate productions, moving us as they did in the old days. Rien Merci, or the Forman Brothers, are a clear example of this. I cannot fail to name the Circo Gitano Romanés, from Hungary and settled in France, and I think the best way to define it is Alexander Romanés’s own words: “My family has always done circus. In the old days my grandfather went from village to village with his three wives, his children and a bear. At twenty-five I left the family circus. I spent a while with the poets. Then I bought a few pieces of clothing, an old lorry and some caravans. Délia came with me, we had a few children and we took to the road. Some gypsies performed in the ring, while Délia sang surrounded by a cello, a double bass and an accordion.” What impressed me most about this company was seeing the children performing under the watchful eye of their mothers, who, sitting opposite with a baby in their arms, watched the performance and watched us. I could see three generations at once in the ring: the past, the present and the future. And that happens few times in a life. It was so real that the fiction moved you.

In January 2001, after writing his “Manifiesto del susurro”, Olivier Comte created a poetic intervention group he called Les Souffleurs, poetic commandos. They propose a poetic metaphor of spoken language, whispering little tales into the ear through hollow canes. They perform the intervention practically anywhere — a station, a public park, a waiting room, a bar — and plunge the spectator into a dreamlike world that does not let them stay indifferent. The piece is structured along two clearly defined lines. The first, global, refers to the intervention as a whole; the second, personal, refers to the tale that only they, as privileged spectators, hear in the most absolute intimacy, in the presence of everyone.

Provocation, humour, the invasion of public space and the transgression of the rules that govern it are a constant inspiration for companies. Performers who bring traffic to a halt, climb up lamp-posts, burst into a supermarket, break the everyday order and bring delight, astonishment and the occasional fit of temper from the public. Performers who, as in a distorting mirror, show society from its basest instincts to the most spontaneous tenderness. Performers who take a risk at every performance, since the reactions of the public are of the most varied kind. From a kiss to a slap, anything can happen. They are capable of throwing themselves under the wheels of a car or stealing the entire contents of a market stall and handing it out among the spectators. Two examples: Kamchàtka, directed by Adrian Schvarzstein, and the Compañía de teatro gestual de Chile.

There are productions that completely change the appearance of the surroundings in which they take place, that let us look at the city with different eyes, that take our focus off the everyday and oblige us to fix a new gaze. We find installations that have developed their own language in the street and for the street, and that cannot be done anywhere else because they would lose their intrinsic characteristics. They would be left without a soul, they would be wan shadows. Transformed places where sound, touch, smell, architecture and the very idea of the spectator are redefined. Installations in which the city loses its face, where cultural, spatial and temporal markers disappear and reveal unknown forms. Where public space is questioned. The city is transcended and each spectator makes their own reading.

Carabosse is a clear example. Through their fire installations and their carefully made sound design they plunge the spectator into a new sensory world. They create experiences. Ephemeral worlds that will stay in the memory for ever. The spectator decides the route to follow: as with a book, they can open one page or another, start at the end or finish in the middle; they can even get lost, they can sit down, they can do as they please — after all, they are co-author of the piece.

Ilotopie, made up of a team of makers, performers, sculptors, dancers, musicians, inventors, scenographers and researchers, works by creating what they themselves define as “actions of artistic disorder”, taking possession of spaces in order to raise, through their transformation, a question about present-day society. “Land act” is an artistic action designed for open spaces and structured around a route taken by the spectators, along which they come upon different installations and performances. Its high poetic content, its research into materials and into technical and narrative structures, its commitment to permanent research and the relationship it establishes between the piece, the spectator and the surroundings make each of their creations a unique experience in each place.

Taking up again the spirit of the sixties and seventies, marked by movements of social agitation in which the effectiveness of the argument and the ideology counted for more than the aesthetic, some companies today explore ways of showing the world nobody wants to see and of speaking out on committed, delicate and thoroughly topical subjects, following in the wake of Bread & Puppet, among others, or even of Brecht or Piscator.

Délice Dada was formed in 1984; their collectively written work puts a finger on the wound and, through humour and poetry, manages both to entertain the public and to raise its awareness. Another example is the production by the company Hortzmuga teatroa, which in “Cónsules de la calle: momento” ventures into the sordid world of the outcast.

The video creation workshop SalAV, with the support of Telenoika — a non-profit collective based in Catalonia with a web portal that serves as a meeting point for the community of video makers — presented an audiovisual intervention against property speculation in the Gracia district of Barcelona. They chose the façade of a house that had just been demolished, so that all that remained, like a cross-section on the wall of the adjoining building, was the outline, the remains of what the house had been, the position of the beams and the marks that showed through where the rooms had been. Onto that wall they projected moving images of characters and objects, who thus came to inhabit the ruins, while denouncing through projected texts the abusive price of housing, the enrichment of some and the loss of spending power of others.

Telenoika have also specialised in mapping work, a technique that uses 3D and 2D modelling to project gigantic images onto a building, confusing the spectator to such a degree that they come to doubt what is real and what is not.

I have barely mentioned site-specific work, and I have not done so because I believe that in many of the tendencies I have talked about there is a clear reference to it, this mode being completely interwoven with them, an inseparable part of the piece from its birth to its showing.

Site-specific work is the fruit of the evolution of makers and of audiences, of festivals, of everyone’s interest in dignifying it and offering a theoretical frame on which to rest the argument. But, fashions aside, site-specific work was always there, even if we did not know its name.

And now the big question. Where are we going?

By way of conclusion, in order to know where the tendencies of the street arts are heading, we have to go back over what the street is like, what the city is like today.

Because the street is not only the place of passage between all the other spaces; it is also the place that belongs to the citizen, in which they take part, communicate, celebrate and make demands.

Vicente Verdú has reflected on contemporary urban models in his book El estilo del mundo. He explains how the old town is turned into a theme park and how the new cities take shape, expanding into megalopolises or private cities in which direct, simple communication is clearly made harder.

He tells us how the traditional city is refurbished, lit and made up to attract the tourists who ask that the city become entertainment, a centre for leisure and fantasy. That is to say, a spectacle.

In parallel, an expanding multicellular city is generated — “creeping cities” growing at speed around airports, great motorway junctions and high-speed rail lines, but also around technology or business parks or shopping centres, spreading outwards at the speed of speculation.

Urban planners speak of the post-city to refer to these vast megalopolises whose proportions exceed every known scale and where history lost the thread long ago.

Now, on the Pearl River in China, one of the world’s main financial and commercial configurations is being woven, equipped with five airports and made up of 50 million people. The centre, Shenzhen, was a fishing town of 30,000 inhabitants fifteen years ago; it now has a population of 8,277,500, of whom 1,819,300 are legal residents, the remaining 6,458,200 being people living there temporarily as a result of migration from other regions in search of temporary work. Its density is 4,334 inhabitants per km², according to Wikipedia.

Post-urban models in which the population of the outlying areas grows, forming monotonous webs of residential streets, shopping complexes and office blocks with no centre. Models made of wide headless regions, equipped with corporate high technology and radiant shopping centres, and generating an absolute dependence on the car.

In clear reaction to this model, private cities are born: gated communities, or C.I.D. (common-interest developments).

They are made up of houses with their own swimming pool, their lovely garden tended down to the last detail and terrifyingly like the one in the town next door, their coloured paving, their painstaking signs, their beautiful sunrises, their coloured net curtains, all identical or following a most designed design; their schools, offices, immaculate shops where you wonder whether the meat is real or part of the set — in short, they have everything a proper town has to have. The only difference is that nothing is public. Not a square, not a bench, not so much as a street lamp. Everything has been privatised. They are watched over by private guards, barriers and video cameras, with exclusive rights for their owners and restricted access for visitors. A gilded prison, no less. Safe, mind you, very safe, extremely safe, and I would go so far as to say boring, very boring, extremely boring.

I ask myself again: where are we going? What do we do with this? Where, then, is chance, the stumble, the disquiet, the essence of expression in the street? This answer, like so many others, will be in the mouths of the artists; they are the ones who will answer us. We only have to wait — they are already working on it, and that reassures me.

I have spoken of techniques, aesthetics and companies, but there are other agents who bear on the creative process. There are productions that can only be made when fully consolidated infrastructures are available. Large-scale productions with production needs that exceed the budget of many festivals; productions that see the light thanks to festivals and governments joining forces in co-production. Productions born of communication, of working networks, of complicities. And this too is a characteristic of our society: how very easy we find it, when we want to, to communicate. Let us not forget the small-scale productions, which need, just as the big ones do, a long process of research before they see the light.

In this age of ours we are making progress, a great deal of it, but I do not want to let the chance go by to ask for a space, a commitment to artistic residencies at every festival, a place for experiment, a university, and — while I am asking — a research, development and innovation department in every company. We belong to the ephemeral; our battle is fought in the most immediate present, and afterwards nothing is left. We are responsible for letting the invisible show through, we live on ideas and we need to feed them, to let them grow so that they can get it wrong and show us another road, asking nothing of them in return. That is the game. I create, you help me, and in that way you create too, with me, together. Hand in hand.