The night has just fallen on the streets of central Athens. There’s not any national celebration or anything special to keep people outside their houses. It’s not even the weekend; it’s just an ordinary day of October 2010.

The exterior of the Kalimarmaro stadium begs to differ though. A person who would just happen to pass by would see a big semicircle of parents and children, teenagers, elderly couples, university students, police officers and pretty much all kinds of people while from the interior of the semicircle a cloud of smoke is making its way towards the sky.

This is neither a riot nor a demonstration. Getting closer to see the happening one would face a bunch of perfectly aligned people in four lines, holding a twisting around lightened up torches while also making all kinds of impressive dance moves. However nothing was as impressive as the fact that all of them where three meters tall or more, due to the bouncing stilts that they were wearing on their feet.

There were also actors and singers, and even sound and light engineers besides the stage so this couldn’t be a show of random travelers or of some talented homeless desperate to win some cents to buy dinner. However, there were wasn’t any visible border between the audience and the performers, the way it is inside the theaters. It seemed as if people could jump in anytime and dance together with the protagonists. One step and one was closer to the magic of fantasy and further away from the routine of reality.

“It’s an artistic form with the element of representation, transformation and theatricality expressed on a public place that breaks away from conventional borders of traditional theater” says Nikos Xatzipapas, the founder and Art Director of the “International Street Theater Festival”, about the phenomenon of “Street Theater”. It is the form of theater that breaks the pre-established boundaries between the performer and the audience and creates a new experience for both of them.

The International Street Theater Festival is an annual event since 2009, organized by eight people whose purpose is to promote and canonize this, still quite unknown to Greece, Art form by gathering up street theater teams from around the world and perform for four days in different public places of Athens, throughout the whole day. There are no age restrictions for the audience, no limited seats and most importantly; there are no tickets, all shows are for free.

However, before anything this free entertainment’s main specialty is that it can take many different forms. From pantomimes, acrobatics, puppet shows and stilts to bakery men mashing pasta and transforming it into a big tree made of bread.

“What I learned from the festival about Street Theatre is that anything can be made into a performance. The minimum you need is just one or two people with a passionate heart” says Dimitris Kakavoulas who is both an actor and part of the backstage team, as the persons responsible for the Festival’s volunteers. During the three year’s of the Festival’s existence, Kakavoulas has witness performances that included from people throwing pillows to each to productions with such impressive acrobatics, acting, and singing that would put the National Theatre to shame.

“The infrastructure of Street theatre is probably what differentiates the most from Traditional Theatre”, says Neofitos Panagiotou, the persons responsible for the Festival’s schedule, “It gives more emphasis to visuals rather than to speech”. This is also why many of the performances that one sees in the Street Theatre resemble numbers that we see in the circus. Street Theatre can make a performance in any public place, but public places are full of noise, cars, traffic jams and many other kinds of distractions so the audience need something more than an average theatre performance, a vision that will widen their eyes and be forever printed in their memory.

1Apart from being a free entertainment, Street Theatre provides the audience with also another benefit. “In traditional theatre situation, people open up a magazine, learn about a performance, dress up and go to pay the ticket and watch it. However, when it comes to Street Theatre it’s the performance that goes to the people, not the other way around” says Xatzipapas, referring to the fact that anyone in any public place in central Athens has the chance to suddenly bump into a street theatre performance of the festival. “After the performance goes to them, people decide whether they want watch one second, the whole performance or not at all. There’s nothing there that binds them”.

However, the story of Street Theatre in Greece doesn’t start with the first International Street Festival three years ago. In 1987, Xatzipapas created the first street theatre team in Greece “Helix” which is also participating up until today in the festival. “My relationship with the art of Street Theatre is definitely supernatural. Because I am pretty sure that in one of my previous lives I was a wandering artist in the boulevards of medieval castles, with a monkey on my shoulder as my company” says Xatzipapas. The truth is though, hundreds of years after the medieval boulevards, no one in Greece had any idea what Street Theatre, except just a few theatre teams.

Xatzipapas and “Helix” couldn’t accept the fact that teams still refused to break the chains of the closed convenient traditional theatre and explore this phenomenon, so in 2007 they decided to motivate them by making a request to “Ε.Κ.Ε.Θ.Ε.Χ” (National Centre of Theater and dance) for the approval of the First International Street Theatre Festival. They expected lots of participations from abroad, but the big surprise was the number of the Greek teams; 50 teams where willing to participate in the first Street Theatre Festival in Greece, in 2009.

But the road to success always includes obstacles. During the first stages when Street Theatre had started becoming better known, Xatzipapas’s Helix team was invited by the municipality of Arta to a local feast. Out of the massive amount of people who attended the feast, not even one was in front of Helix’s show.
“This kind of snobbish response from the audience was a rarity, that’s what I remember it so vividly. The only audience we had were the local gypsies who even decided to participate and enjoy our show.”

The problems don’t have to arise only from the audience though. In the last’s years festival there were teams that were hunting and struggling to secure a position the Festival’s schedule, but not only they caused problems such as showing up late, but even not showing up at all.
“Even though it was devastating, we want to learn from these experiences and improve in the long run the image and the organization of the Festival, so both us and the audience will be pleased” says Panagiotou.

Between the problems that can be caused by the Festival’s organization or performers and the audience, also lay some unexpected events. During the first year of his participation, Kakavoulas has experienced some of unpredictable situation. The was once a show that involved some middle sized wooden boxes, that the team had placed but once they focused their attention on another task, the public cleaner had taken away the boxes and disposed them believing that it was simply trash. The climax of these events was when Kakavoulas and other actors of a certain play who were supposed to hide in sacks, but the police who was passing by mistook them as homeless and forced them to get out.

“These kind of things can happen a lot, because people who aren’t aware of what’s happening can get scared or misunderstood or get in the stage by accident since it’s not bordered, like a dog did the other day and just stood there. But unpredictability is also the magic of the streets after all”, says Kakavoulas.

Even though Street Theatre is still overcoming difficulties in Greece, Xatzipapas is not only striving to canonize the festival but he is also willing to take it a step further and include any kind of artistic activity into the schedule, like performances of music bands or drawing, as long as it is performed on a public place, which of course can be pretty much anything. “Even a public parking lot is a public place that has the probability to become a place of artistic expression, and I’m willing to take advantage of it”.

The streets bring all kinds of trouble; from a sleepy dog to the police. But they also bring all kinds of people to watch a show that will take them to a trip away from reality for us much as they choose to be. As Xatzipapas says Street Theatre is the ultimate form that unites the artist with the audience.

“There are no walls or steels around you. In Street Theatre it’s you facing the whole city in front of you”.