Street theatre is a form of theatrical performance and presentation in outdoor public spaces without a specific paying audience. These spaces can be anywhere, including shopping centres, car parks, recreational reserves and street corners. They are especially seen in outdoor spaces where there are large numbers of people. The actors who perform street theatre range from buskers to organised theatre companies or groups that want to experiment with performance spaces, or to promote their mainstream work.
Sometimes performers are commissioned, especially for street festivals, children's shows or parades, but more often street theatre performers are unpaid or gather some income through the dropping of a coin in a hat by the audience.
The logistics of doing street theatre necessitate simple costumes and props, and generally there is little or no amplification of sound, with actors depending on their natural vocal and physical ability. This issue with sound has meant that physical theatre, including dance, mime and slapstick, is a very popular genre in an outdoor setting. The performances need to be highy visible, loud and simple to follow in order to attract a crowd.
Street theatre should be distinguished from other more formal outdoor theatrical performances, such as performances in a park or garden, where there is a discrete space set aside (or roped off) and a ticketed audience.
In some cases, street theatre performers have to get a licence or specific permission through local or state governments, in order to perform.
Street theatre is arguably the oldest form of theatre in existence: most mainstream entertainment mediums can be traced back to origins in street performing, including religious passion plays and many other forms. More recently performers who, a hundred years ago, would have made their living working in variety theatres, music halls and in vaudeville, now often perform professionally in the many well-known street performance areas throughout the world.
One of the most interesting points about modern street theatre is its unique sociopolitical place. People who might not have ever been to, or been able to afford to go to, the "legitimate" theatre can watch a street show. By virtue of where the shows take place, their audience is made up of anyone and everyone who wants to watch. If an audience member can't afford it, then it's free.
Performance Violence & Terroristic Threat
Street theater also refers to Performance Protest, public demonstrations aimed at broadcasting or spreading a particular political message or propaganda which may be communicated through a variety of mediums, and includes every type of activism from eco-terrorism to anti-globalization protesters. Actors performing this particular kind of street theater may stage non-violent, lawful exhibitions or more sensational acts involving but not limited to reckless endangerment, harassment, stalking, intimidation, and criminal mischief.[1] While some of the more creative and imaginative protests can be similar to the artistic street theatre, when performed by more aggressive combatants, 'street theater' can also take on the framework of terrorism, including acts as violent and deadly as car bombs being detonated at airports or crowded villages. 'Street theater' in this more violent context, refers to Theatre of War, in which theater defines a specific geographic area within which fighting occurs.[2] Some street theater events are scripted, directed, and orchestrated incorporating cunning, complicated plans, schemes, plots, and stratagem. These spectacles are specifically designed to impress, disturb or otherwise affect a wider audience beyond those in the immediate vicinity of the demonstrations. The Ku Klux Klan, some gangs, and other similarly organized groups find their roots in such public performances, conveying radical political messages to their surrounding communities by utilizing distinctive and identifiable forms of dramatic presentations including parades, carnivals, minstrel shows,[3] and more extreme events related to lynchings[4] involving acts of communal, collective, or mob violence such as persistent harassment or behavior that intimidates, threatens, or torments from hanging signs like the noose[5] to extrajudicial executions[6] in attempts to convey prejudice, discrimination, and cultural backlash to conceived threats, real or imagined.
A further usage of Street Theatre is that of discrediting tactics and smear campaigns to cause injury, harm, or damages to the reputation or status of a person, persons, or entity through the systematic distribution of deceptive and distorted information sometimes used by groups with political motivations.[7] Groups utilize, among other tactics, stalking or organized harassment in which a task force of two or more people often associated with larger collectives collaborate and conspire to carry out unauthorized surveillance or other acts involving invasion of privacy as well as strategically planned series of attacks ranging in degree of severity from nuisance to assault and sometimes escalating to imminent threat to life including attacks with and without weapons[8] striking frequently and individually in sequence to mitigate group liability; threats of violence; mobbing, which differs from organized harassment in that instead of one attacker at a time there are many acting at once; defamation of character, violence, threats of violence, and violations against persons and property in an effort to cause disturbance which interferes with civil liberties or human rights and disrupt, hinder, or restrict the pursuit of normal legal activities through unlawful punitive measures. An example can be seen in the film School for Scoundrels. Further uses of street theater are tactics and techniques associated with America's covert CIA and Special Forces involving information warfare and psychological warfare. The Lansdale "trickster" approach to psychological warfare as published by the Department of the Army in training manuals and pamphlets include ‘pranks’ such as distributing drinks laced with drugs to demonstrators and also “criminal violence - the murder and mutilation of captives and the display of their bodies.”[9]
See also
External links
References
- ^ http://definitions.uslegal.com/t/terroristic-threat/
- ^ http://www.irpp.org/po/archive/sep02/panitch.pdf
- ^ Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan
- ^ "Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American" by JW CLARKE - British Journal of Political Science, 2001 - Cambridge Univ Press [1]
- ^ "Noose: ‘Shameful' sign makes ominous return", by Darryl Fears, Washington Post, Published: October 21, 2007 6:00 a.m.[2]
- ^ "KKK verdict sees 'justice arrive'", BBC News - Jun 22, 2005[3]
- ^ http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0162-895X.00078
- ^ http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/2003/mar2003/mar03leb.htm
- ^ Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990 [4]