Why It Pays To Have Street Theater in the City

A street theater festival, such as B-FIT in the Street, is enjoyable and revitalizes businesses and habits.

This past weekend Bucharest was host to the twelfth edition of B-FIT in the Street, an international festival of street theater with dozens of shows including over 200 participants from four countries: France, Italy, Spain, and The Netherlands.

I happened to be out and about this weekend with a good friend who visited me here in Bucharest, and we caught some of these shows. They were great fun but, I’m sorry to say, not overly interesting, much as I did enjoy some of the pieces. They were rather simple in concept, and not theatrical enough. I would have liked some of them to also include screens with various projections, for instance, including projections of the street actors; more dance; more light shows; more actors in period costumes (to be fair, there was one such performance scheduled); and so on.

(Still, they were great fun.)

The structure of the festival, however, was a stroke of genius. Rather than having separate events in various parts of the city, the program included performances (mostly) in sequence (there were also a few instances where the program offered two choices for the same time interval, more or less), encouraging locals and tourists to move around downtown. In addition, each performance lasted thirty minutes or longer, a time long enough to allow everyone to move between locations, and short enough to keep everyone’s attention.

What I caught were the following shows:

• an aerial show (a “living installation”) called RoZéo (from France), with three women balancing on sway poles (of whom I caught two in the photo) and one woman singing and playing a keyboard. It was supposed to be “a dialogue with the landscape, an approach for the poetics of light and contemplation.” Well, I have to say that however fancy these words sound, they do match the experience of the performance. The actors and their garments and bodily movements created a mesmerizing effect. People who had gathered in University Square on Friday between approximately 4 and 4:30 p.m. seemed stuck to the ground, not even moving to get a different view from a different part of the square. I did move around, but I was aware that these aerial performers did, in fact, suggest the movement of wind and light as well as, in a strange way, the force of the mind as it moves between apprehending emotions.

• Street Piano (Italy), in front of the National Museum of Art. This wasn’t something new, and the sidewalk location wasn’t the best either. Or it was, but it could have been complemented by a flight of stairs somewhere else. I saw the latter somewhere (can’t remember if in real life or in a video), and it seemed like much more fun. But then having a piano on a horizontal surface is nice too. I tried this interactive street piano in at least one place while traveling, and it was great to be able to jump on several keys at once. This time around it seemed like only kids were trying it, and the adults were content to watch and record videos. What was strange was that older kids walked on the keys at their regular pace, not minding where the keys were. I really latched onto that observation, because it told me kids these days are bored with simple toys such as this one. Only one ten- or eleven-year-old girl (in the photo) walked carefully on tiptoes to touch the keys individually. We should have probably waited longer by this piano, to see if there were also trained performers who could play more than random notes 😊 The festival’s site includes a photo of two such performers.

• Dodos (France). This was a simple idea, yet with the dodo birds so very funny! Two men dressed in explorer garb were riding two large dodo birds. They appeared from the side of the Odeon Theater and started walking toward the Muzica Store on Victoriei Boulevard. It was really interesting to see how amused people were by the faces of the dodo birds. These were truly expressive, yes, but they were artificial. And yet they were very expressive. I think this says things bode well for cute robots interacting with kids and the elderly. Well, it’s already happening in Japan with the elderly, but it looks like there’s a lot of room for growth in the market for robotic toys.

• Finally, we saw DRiFT (France), a water show. I didn’t see much of it, because it started at 9 p.m. (on Saturday) and we got to the stretch of the Dâmbovița River where it was held around 9:30 p.m., when it was already dark. There were silhouettes made from plastic sheets (not very appealing, given the echoes plastic on water has in my mind), and then two guys in gondolas and a woman with a flute. This show was also held in Paris (on the Seine), Rome (on the Tiber), and Florence (on the Arno). Here’s part of how the performers describe their act: “Traces of a disembodied living, human moults, a whole population will then cross the city at night.” Make of that what you will.

What I made of the whole three-day affair was that with these shows — and others: parrots and giant swans among them (we caught glimpses of both, of the parrots as they were getting ready, and of the swans as they walked in University Square) — the municipality got people out and about in Bucharest on three hot summer days, offering them a bit of show and happiness and leaving them prey to hunger and thirst downtown, among loads of stores selling drinks, ice cream, and food. A very lucrative proposition for the city’s finances, no doubt, as well as for the food establishments. Which is why the municipality agrees these days to cordon off traffic on important arteries — something they weren’t all that eager to do in the past. As it happens, I don’t always agree with these decisions: I don’t see, for instance, why marathons, for instance, have to be held around so much air pollution.

But closing off Victoriei Boulevard on certain summer weekends is a great idea. Calea Victoriei, as it’s called in Romanian, is the most beautiful artery in Bucharest, with great architecture, and lots of places where you can stop for food and drink. Some of these food establishments are relatively new, including many of the gelaterias I noticed this past weekend. They’re new and they make sense.

I welcome these events because they offer entertainment to Bucharesters and raise the profile of the city for holidaymakers. They also help downtown businesses make more money — and these are very nice food establishments in all price ranges. For locals on a rather tight budget like me, there was a tasty and filling lunch menu in the Old Town, a superb cappuccino and a nice chocolate mousse cake at Tucano Coffee, a great lemonade at 5 To Go, and an amazing scoop of coffee ice cream from a vendor on Victoriei Boulevard.

I’d like to comment in detail on this last bit. Securing a location for an ice cream stand on Calea Victoriei is quite a boon. Of course, it only works in the summer (and some of spring and fall), which may invite a few tricks to maximize profits. It shouldn’t be that way, and it’s not in other instances, for example at various fairs at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant or when we celebrate mărțișor and various sellers appear downtown selling spring tokens to celebrate a March 1 tradition we have. But in this instance it was, and it was enough to prompt my good friend, who now lives in Spain, to say that Romanians will never learn to behave any better (a very harsh statement).

Here’s what happened. I asked for a scoop and the ice cream vendor said in a very assured voice “16 lei” (3.23 EUR/$3.52). But then I asked for a receipt (to keep track of all the weekend expenses), and the ice cream suddenly became 12 lei (2.42 EUR/$2.64).

I was very disappointed. She would have had a good personal profit even at the price of 12 lei without a receipt, which very few people ask for, but she had the gall to ask for 16 lei.

This bothers me because the vast majority of people in this country are honest but we still uphold, so to speak, a reputation for cheating and stealing, one we have honed in communist times, when a lot of people helped themselves to state property, whether that meant paper or pens or factory supplies.

Okay, moving on. Around the spots where these shows were held there is a French pastry shop called Paul (good stuff), a Pizza Hut restaurant, lots of really good gelaterias and coffee shops, a Starbucks, a Burger King, pizza places, and other food joints, along with loads of other restaurants in the Old Town (Romanian, Italian, Greek, fusion, etc.).

When you organize a street festival of this magnitude, people are bound to come and eat at these food establishments. Which is wonderful. The Old Town has been a vibrant part of Bucharest in the past few years but, unfortunately, prices have gone way up with the current inflation, which has pushed locals away from this part of downtown; events such as B-FIT in the Street bring back Bucharesters to these restaurants, which is great.

They also give a chance to occasional vendors to make a few bucks during these weekends.

And, to state the obvious, such a festival gets people moving in the streets from one location to another, until they cover kilometers going back and forth and around locations downtown. We did several things besides the street festival this weekend, but trying to make it to certain B-FIT performances got us walking at least 15 km on Saturday. B-FIT indeed 😊

I hope that Calea Victoriei will become a pedestrian boulevard in the near future as it’s high time we had one of those downtown, and this is the perfect artery for that. Most of us need to walk more and having a beautiful boulevard to stroll along is a great motivator.

Also, a street festival that stages performances in sequence, moving them around the city one after another is a superb way to get crowds moving and getting that B-FIT exercise. You are not only motivated to walk more, but you do so in the swell of energy that moves large strands of other people around you. It’s almost like being in a slow-motion marathon.

All in all, a delightful experience.

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