There is something uniquely Australian about soaking up the strains of a Puccini aria, while downing a meat pie and a tinnie of beer. The ancient Romans may have laid the foundations for the outdoor spectacle; the religious pageants of Mediaeval Europe may have consolidated the art form on the cobbled highways and byways of mass entertainment; but Australia has put its own inimitable stamp on the genre, as it mutates back from street theatre to arena extravangaza.
Of course, in explaining this passion, the country's climactic advantages can't be ignored. But there's more to it than that. The bulk of Australia's streettheatre companies are from Melbourne, a southern metropolis with a decidedly northern hemisphere chill in the air, earning the town the nickname of "Bleak City".
Australia's street theatre roots go deeper. Street theatre is enjoyed for its closeness to that all-time favourite Australian pastime, "Taking the Piss". Australians have been engaged in this metaphorical form of urination since the first convict ship sailed into Botany Bay more than 200 years ago. It didn't take long for the First Fleeters to realise this was one sick joke.
Sadly, however, the Australian iconoclasm which street theatre expresses - with its hint of irreverence and dash of satire - is in decline, as arts institutions' bean counters and bottom line-driven festival directors scale down any entertainment which does not translate easily into box office returns. During the 1995 Sydney Festival of the Arts, more than a dozen performance groups were hired to roam the city or install themselves in shopping malls and store windows. For the 2000 Sydney Festival, its Artistic Director hired just one such company, Strange Fruit, who visited Galway last year.
It is not that outdoor entertainment has declined over the past decade. On the contrary, in the past few years we've had singers pretending to blow up Greenpeace boats in Sydney harbour, a musical on the Opera House steps based on the Ned Kelly legend with Irish dancers en masse to rival Riverdance and enough outdoor operatic events to make Brengenz blush. These events are big, brash and fun. And cordoned off, for the paying public only.
The gods (or the Greenhouse Effect) have not smiled kindly on these new colossuses of Aussie entertainment. Melbourne may have maintained the interminable grey drizzle that passes for rain, but when it rains in Sydney these days, it buckets. Unco-operative weather appeared to hit Sydney in the late 1980s, most disastrously for a seven million dollar outdoor production of Verdi's Aida. It had a cast of 1,250 and a menagerie of camels, elephants, lions, tigers and pythons. It rained. In fact, it poured, causing the postponement of one out of three of the 25,000-people-per-night performances.
The vagaries of the Australian climate may turn an entrepreneur's life into a never-ending chorus of Nessun Dorma, but the Australian public's thirst for "The Big Event" in "The Great Outdoors" remains unquenchable. Australians simply prefer their culture administered out in the open, come rain or come shine. To many, there is something inherently un-Australian about the idea of cloistering oneself inside a darkened auditorium, without being able to move or talk freely. The Opera House is our most internationally recognised building, but embarrassingly few Australians have ever attended a concert, play or opera there.
A critically acclaimed new production of Janacek's Jenufa languishes through a season of half-full houses in the 1,500-seat Sydney Opera House. In the remote Flinders Ranges north of Adelaide, 5,000 four-wheel drives battle closed roads, rain and mud slides to take their sodden open-air seats for Dame Kiri Te Kanawa's Opera in the Outback season.
Culture is delivered to the people en masse, and everyone feels that Australia's fiercely championed principle of egalitarianism is upheld. And occasionally, just occasionally, you might come away with a good suntan.
Kelly Burke is a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald
Blue Boys by Neil Thomas's Surrealist Window Theatre brings illusion to a window at Moons on Shop Street, Wednesday, July 21st to Saturday, July 29th, excluding Monday
The Best Of from the Chrome company brings a colony of rare and very curious Australian birds to the streets of Galway, Friday, July 28th to Sunday, July 30th
Waterheads & Gargoyles by the Erth Visual & Physical Inc. features four performers wandering the streets of Galway with their heads submerged in water, and an aerial performance in which stone figures climb up and down buildings, Thursday, July 27th to Sunday, July 30th
Fast Ground by Stalker Theatre Company features three stilt-dancers, a saxophonist and a percussionist, at Spanish Parade, Friday, July 21st to Sunday, July 23rd, 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.
