Quijot!

“А man in a theatre is a prisoner of a sort, while on the street he is absolutely free. And only the interest aroused by the show will keep him among the audience”, says Horacio Chertok, director of the Italian street theatre, «Nucleo».

In order to convert the passerby into a member of the audience, the show itself mlist, above all, surprise him, grip his imagination. One can surprise people by transforming a well-known space, giving it a fantastic appearance.

...The crowd suddenly opens and, as if from under the ground, a file of drummers appears. There is sudden beam of light from the projector, lighting up the square and two figures on it -–white and black. A duel begins –the eternal duel between Good and Evil. Throughout the whole show a beam of light directs the audience from one scene to another, carrying them to different points of the playing space. Here there are songs, dances and acrobatic tricks, masks and stilts, actors breathe fire and jug­gle with it. Fires – unique mini-performances, united into one production – was the first step taken by Nucleo towards the creation of large-scale shows, permeat­ed by a single theme and constructed according to the laws of dramatic action. The most famous of the Theatre’s major canvases is Quixote!, which in the first three years of its existence was presented in over 120 European cities.

Don Quixote, and his faithful servant Sancho, appear in the square on the back of a horse, taking the form of a weird, metallic construction, separate details of which are reminiscent of a hungry nag, and set on a moped basis; on an iron barrel with wheels over which a donkey’s face rises majestically. This first appearance is inevitably accompanied by loud applause. The peripeteia of the story-line in this show are embodied in scenes which are given vivid and unexpected treatment. Visitors to a tavern, for instance, do not just drink wine, sitting decorously at tables. They literally bathe in wine, pouring huge tankards of it over each other, and plung­ing head first into wine vats. So that the artists’ health is not endangered by this scene - it is not always warm after all in the open air - they wear costumes, which look as if they are made of the inner tubes of car tyres.

There is only one set - a seven-meter-high tower, transformed now into a house, now into a windmill, off whose sails, we suddenly see our hero hanging, like a rag doll: he has been vanquished in an unequal combat. And at the finale, two huge fans, like wings, open out of the sides of the tower.

For Cora Herrendorf and Horacio Chertok street theatre means more than the work of many years. It means a particular form of life and a particular attitude to this life, in which there is room for sadness, and magic, and human passions, in which absurd heroes, who tilt with windmills, appear to be the only human beings