Performance artists with an interest in social activism may choose to stage their work on the street as a means of directly confronting or engaging the public. For example, multimedia artist Caeser Pink and his group of performers known as
The Imperial Orgy staged a piece titled
Our Daily Bread that brought performers onto the streets of the New York's financial district to ceremoniously lay loaves of
Wonder Bread along the sidewalks, each with an advertisement from Satan offering to buy people's souls in exchange for material possessions. The performance caused an uproar when police were called out and bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in to inspect the loaves of bread for explosives. Other artists consider a paying, theatre-going public to be unrepresentative of the public to whom they are trying to communicate, and performing to 'the man on the street' may be considered a more democratic form of dissemination. Some contemporary street theatre practitioners have extensively studied pre-existing street and popular theatre traditions, such as
Carnival,
commedia dell'arte etc. and wish to present them in a situation close to their original context. Whatever the reason for choosing the street, the street is a place with a different set of possibilities than the conventional theatre space. Sue Gill of
Welfare State International argues that a street theatre performance is not a lesser form than an indoor performance, nor is it simply taking what you do on stage and placing it outdoors, but a form with an energy and an integrity of its own. slums in Mumbai Many companies are politically motivated and use street theatre to combine performance with protest. This has occurred through the
guerrilla theatre of
San Francisco Mime Troupe,
The Living Theatre, the carnivalesque parades of
Bread and Puppet Theatre, and the work of
Ashesh Malla and the Sarwanam Theatre Group of
Nepal. A character-based street theatre which developed in the 1960s and 1970s was developed by groups like Lumiere and Son, John Bull Puncture Repair Kit, Exploded Eye and Natural Theatre Company. The performances were unannounced and featured characters who acted out a pre-arranged scenario, looking beautiful or surreal or simply just involving passers by in conversation. They did not seek to trick in a
Candid Camera way, but rather invited the audience to pretend along with them. No amount of planning or rehearsal could dictate what would happen. Another example would be Natural Theatre's Pink Suitcase scenario. A number of smartly dressed people carrying bright pink suitcases enter a set of streets or buildings. They search for and miss their companions. In their search they get on buses, hail cabs, end up in shop windows, etc. By the time they meet up at a pre-arranged spot with the help of passers-by, perceptions of the area have changed and shopping has ceased for at least a few moments. The humour is universal and this piece has been seen in nearly seventy countries. It is usually performed by four or five actors, but has been done with twenty-five. ==Interactive street theatre==