“Street arts…have existed since man was created and since streets were built, in the dionysiac celebrations of Ancient Greece, the fairground shows in all of Europe during the middle ages and the Renaissance, and the Revolutionary festivities..” (Gaber, F. 2009:5). Even back to the 16^th century there was street theatre such as Commedia dell’arte and Bouffon. This was before the French revolution and even just after, street theatre continued with puppet work such as Punch and Judy. At the beginning of this semester we looked into ritual within performance, including culture, celebration and the theme of ‘circles’. This theme originates from very early on in performance where street performers create a circle (generally of rope) around them to show the passers-by their performance space. You also see many ritualistic circles, the most famous being Stonehenge. “There is always the chance that people will turn a ritual performance into an act of political theater. Central to the notion of ritual is the idea that only careful adherence to a traditionally prescribed format will ensure the efficacy of a performance. With any departure from a traditional script, a ritual ceases to be ritual” (Esherick, J.W. et al. 1990:844).

I was interested in using this theme of ritual within my performance, originally coming up with the concept of a journey; Travellers with some sort of meaning or mission, on a search like the wise men to discover something magnificent. I was originally in a group where we came up with the idea of creating vehicles out of recycled objects, such as shopping trolleys, bicycles and sack trucks. Due to illness I ended up changing groups, and therefore had to come up with a concept that related to a journey but was different to that of the other groups. We wanted to work with the theme of play. We thought it would be best to have some sort of audience interaction within our piece. “A coherent theory of play would assert that play and ritual are complimentary, ethologically based behaviours which in humans continue undiminished throughout life” (Schechner, R. 1993:26). We looked into different walkabout acts, firstly getting inspiration from an act called ‘The invasion’. Each ‘alien’ had its own physicality, body shape, movement, design and sound. The familiarity was that they were all pink, and also had a combined rhythm when together as a group.