Interrupting a legacy of hatred : Friches Théâtre Urbain's Lieu Commun

In a violent clash between rival gangs from Asnières and Gennevilliers in the banlieue north of Paris, a 15-year-old boy was killed at the metro station Les Courtilles, the last stop on Line 13. Inevitably, revenge attacks occurred. Security was heightened with hundreds of police patrolling the area, but residents and city officials alike understood that increased police presence alone would never be a long-term solution. Realising the need for radically different approaches to halt an escalation of violence, city officials, asked Sarah Harper, Artistic Director of Friches Théâtre Urbain, a street theatre company in Paris, to develop a community-based art-making project that would augment attempts by the youth workers and others to defuse the volatile situation. In Lieu Commun, the multi-faceted project lasting 20 months, Harper developed innovative approaches to collaborative art-making resulting in vibrant public art that repeatedly interrupted the legacy of hatred between Asnières and Gennevilliers. The slow process of collaborative art-making began with symbolic links between the residents of the two towns rather than face-to-face contact, an innovative approach that eased the way for more profound activist cooperation. The co-created public art took the form of elaborate, often mobile, performance installations that began to replace the narrative of conflict that had become customary for Asnières and Gennevilliers with an opposing narrative of cooperation, both depicted in the art product and practiced in the art-making. Community collaboration in the creation of this ephemeral public art played a significant role not only in changing the character of the confrontational and often dangerous public space of the metro station, but also in altering attitudes of both residents and city officials toward the potential for art to foster cooperation and active citizenship

Performing Farmscapes on urban streets

In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch introduces the idea of the “Not-Yet”, a ubiquitous utopian impulse that stimulates future-oriented thinking about “something … that has never been conscious before.” These imaginings of a better future, Bloch argues, are really only ways to understand the obscurities of the present. Street theatre companies, like Le Phun, Opéra Pagaï, Friches Théâtre Urbain and Fallen Fruit, seek to envisage a “not-yet” of future urban farmscapes in familiar present-day locations. Their performance-based projects highlight contemporary social issues around alternative agricultural practices and suggest imaginative provocations to world-wide concerns around food security by proposing ephemeral urban farms in unexpected city sites and restoring the efficacy of an agricultural “commons” where resources and tasks are shared. Each project thus metaphorically marks the urban landscape with creative possibilities for a more secure food future. Dr Susan Haedicke is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick, UK. Her current research interests include a focus on local food growing initiatives and community gardens worldwide and how they ‘perform’ in the larger social setting

Co-performance of bodies and buildings : Compagnie Willi Dorner’s bodies in urban spaces and fitting and Asphalt Piloten’s around the block

Street performances disrupt everyday activities in public spaces and challenge the status quo with propositions of alternative possible worlds. While many street performances rely upon urban public spaces and architecture as a way to expose normative behavioral codes and social constructions of seemingly neutral spaces, Compagnie Willi Dorner and Asphalt Piloten focus attention on re-placing the human body in and on city buildings to interrogate the complex materiality of urban architecture and imagine symbiotic links between bodies and buildings that revise expectations about city life. Their ephemeral performance installations appear to merge bodies and buildings, enabling the artists to dispute notions of architectural solidity and durability, to suggest the possibility of human thing-ness, and thus to question ways of inhabiting the city. Key to political engagement is that these artists create events in which the public, consciously or unconsciously, can re-view the workings of the city, and initiate debate (in words or actions) about the city’s priorities, processes, and agendas. The possible worlds suggested by Compagnie Willi Dorner and Asphalt Piloten are not completed projects, but rather stimuli for inquiry into alternative urban futures because they invite audiences to enter a reciprocal relationship between bodies and buildings that acknowledges mutual growth, change, and dependence. These alternatives enable the spectator to experience previously unimagined possible worlds—some optimistic, some exceedingly pessimistic

Hope is a wooded time : an eco-performance of biodiversity in discarded geographic and social space

Friches Théâtre Urbain’s Hope is a Wooded Time is an ongoing community-based eco-art project outside Paris that draws inspiration from its site’s evocative heritage as part of les Murs à Pêches, ‘living walls’ for espaliered fruit trees in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and its contemporary reality as a wooded wasteland. The project encourages ethical encounters between ecological processes of biodiversity and human interventions by its neighbours, ethnically and culturally diverse populations of Sinti and Romany gypsies, Russian and North African immigrants and native French

The Aroma-Home Community Garden Project’s democratic narratives : embodied memory-stories of planting and cooking

Aroma-Home, a community garden project just outside Paris, France, originated in aromatics, flavours, guerrilla gardening and conversations. In 2013, Sarah Harper of Friches Théâtre Urbain joined forces with local inhabitants to reclaim urban public spaces marred by construction and neglect and to heal social and environmental wounds caused by this damage. Creating tiny artistic (agri)cultural eco-oases in brownfields, participants began to alter both the urban landscape and attitudes towards active citizenship as they used a community garden/art-making process to establish an urban agricultural ‘commons’ of natural and cultural resources equitably shared. Here, the shared resources were the gardeners’ edible stories and storied edibles: the collective memories of food growing and preparation, the shared meals, communal gardening and the incipient community activism of the participants. This essay explores how Aroma-Home Community Garden grew a garden rooted in local life by drawing on embodied memory stories of land, horticulture and food — stories shared sometimes in words, sometimes in gardening and cooking activities, and it argues that the garden’s efficacy is located in the participants’ memories and practices

Aroma-Home’s edible stories : an urban community garden performs

Aroma-Home, an artist-initiated community garden in Villetaneuse, just outside Paris, France, originated as a way to poeticize damaged urban locations by creating small communally-created pockets of unexpected natural beauty. In 2013, Sarah Harper of Friches Théâtre Urbain joined forces with local inhabitants to reclaim public spaces marred by construction and neglect. Together, they began to alter the urban landscape with whimsical plant-based interventions that sprouted up behind construction fences. This guerrilla gardening soon led to the sowing of a community garden that wove together food-growing, story-telling and place-making and fashioned its particular identity through cultural practices around growing, preparing and sharing food of the multi-ethnic participants. The horticultural-culinary conversations became inextricably connected to gardening activities: edible stories involving food memories and horticultural skills that nourished those who prepared and consumed them. This ‘From the Field’ paper looks at how the community garden/art-making processes of Aroma-Home transformed a bleak construction site into a mini-urban agricultural ‘commons’ where imagining, planting and harvesting the garden and its edible stories were all shared

Discomfort at the intersection of the imaginary and everyday worlds in friches théâtre urbain's Macbeth for the Street

During 2004 and 2005, Friches Théâtre Urbain, a Paris-based professional théâtre de rue, performed a multilingual adaptation of Macbeth at several European street theatre festivals. This vivid promenade performance pushed the limits in terms of scale and intensity in its use of stilts, giant flags, animal masks, abundant fireworks, and loud music and challenged the spectator physically, emotionally, and intellectually as it took possession of the real time-space of the streets. This essay explores how the audience's physical discomfort contributes to the blurring of boundaries between art and life, thereby pushing the aesthetic world of the play into the everyday world of the street and potentially influencing the efficacy of the performance