Publics and Their Health: La Grande Manifestive, Aurillac, 2021

Abstract

In 2021, the International Festival of Street Theatre in Aurillac, France, was cancelled for the second consecutive summer. Amidst the ensuing furore, street theatre artists and their advocates risked conflating public health measures with the oppressive policies of the security state. This essay critically examines the underlying assumptions at work in these arguments and insists on the importance of public health to the defence of public space.

Keywords:

• Street theatre
• public space
• publics
• Aurillac

David Calder is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Manchester. His current research explores queer performances of public space in 21st-century Europe.

Notes

1. La Fédération Nationale des Arts de la Rue (FNAR), ‘La Grande Manifestive: La Fédération Nationale des Arts de la Rue appelle à une grande manifestation ce mercredi 18 août pour la defénse des libertés dans l’espace public’, August 11, 2021, https://www.federationartsdelarue.org/ressources/grande-manifestivefederation-appellegrande-manifestationce-mercredi-18-aout (accessed December 15, 2021). The full title of the demonstration was ‘la Grande Manifestive pour les libertés d’expression, de circulation et de création en espace public’ (the Great Manifestive for the freedoms of expression, of circulation, and of creation in public space).

2. Former Aurillac artistic director Jean-Marie Songy noted, reasonably enough, that if masked people could sit side-by-side for hours on a crowded train, then surely they could attend an outdoor festival. This was less a battle cry and more a call for consistency.

3. For more on French street theatre during the state of emergency, see David Calder, ‘Street Theatre in a State of Exception: Performing in Public after Bataclan’, Contemporary Theatre Review 30, no. 3 (2020): 308–25.

4. Etienne Sorin, ‘L’air du soupçon plane sur les arts de la rue’, Le Figaro, June 11, 2020, 30.

5. Rosita Boisseau, ‘Face au Covid-19, les artistes prennent la rue’, Le Monde, July 23, 2020, 16.

6. Quoted in Juliette Micheneau, ‘Cantal: Le festival de rue d’Aurillac totalement annulé’, France Bleu, July 13, 2021, https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/culture-loisirs/cantal-le-festival-de-theatre-de-rue-d-aurillac-totalement-annule-1626196210 (accessed December 15, 2021).

7. Collectif Saint-Amand, ‘La déclaration de Saint-Amand’, https://www.change.org/p/jeanmarie-songy-furies-fr-la-d%C3%A9claration-de-saint-amand-pour-la-d%C3%A9fense-des-arts-de-la-rue-%C3%A0-aurillac (accessed December 15, 2021).

8. FNAR, ‘Aurillac, de la rue à l’impasse’, July 16, 2021, https://www.federationartsdelarue.org/ressources/aurillac-rue-limpasse (accessed December 15, 2021).

9. Laetitia Lafforgue, interview by Gaëlle Cloarec, ‘Les arts de la rue manifestivent à Aurillac’, Zibeline, August 19, 2021, https://www.journalzibeline.fr/societe/les-arts-de-la-rue-manifestivent-a-aurillac/(accessed December 15, 2021).

10. Stéphanie Ruffier, ‘La Grande Manifestive, Fédération nationale des arts de la rue à Aurillac’, Les Trois Coups, August 20, 2021, https://lestroiscoups.fr/la-grande-manifestive-federation-nationale-des-arts-de-la-rue-a-aurillac/ (accessed December 15, 2021).

11. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 151.

12. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

13. Ruffier, ‘La Grande Manifestive’.

14. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 171–2.

15. Ibid., 172.

16. Joëlle Gayot, ‘Un été meurtrier pour l’art vivant’? Télérama, April 25, 2020, 16.

17. We could extend this further: what kind of public do we create when wealthy nations engage in vaccine nationalism, prolonging the pandemic and risking the emergence of new variants by hoarding life-saving vaccines or allowing companies to charge exorbitant prices out of reach of poorer governments in the Global South?