Breaking down the walls

interventionist performance strategies in French Street theatre

Susan Haedicke

pp. 162-173

in: Clare Finburgh, Carl Lavery (eds), Contemporary French theatre and performance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

What in France is today known as théâtre de rue (street theatre) exploded on to the urban stage in the 1970s. Although adapted from centuries-old techniques, its immediate aesthetico-political heritage is found in the same anti-establishment impulses that inspired Guy Debord and the Situationists in the 1950s and 1960s, and which led to the student/worker uprisings in May 1968. "Last May, speech was taken the way, in 1789, the Bastille was taken. The stronghold that was assailed is a knowledge held by the dispensers of culture/ wrote Michel de Certeau in October following the May riots (1998: 11). He argued that while the political regime withstood the assault of "May "68", the protesters "created a network of symbols by taking the signs of a society in order to invert their meaning" (ibid.: 7). In this way, they produced what de Certeau calls 'symbolic sites' where seemingly impossible images or events "modified the tacitly "received" code that separates the possible from the impossible, the licit from the illicit" (ibid.: 8). The dominant discourses — political, social and aesthetic — were thus transformed.

Cited authors

Debord Guy

de Certeau Michel