Jose Piris, director and founder of Nouveau Colombier
José tilts his head, listening. A smile plays on his lips as I fumble through my notes and before asking my first question. With 30+ years on stage, the celebrated mime, stage designer, and former professor has racked up awards, but one of his greatest sources of pride may come as a surprise.
“One of my most significant professional achievements,” he explains, “if I speak personally, is being able to dedicate myself to something I love—my craft—and to earn a living from it.
While earning a living as a performer in a bustling metropolis has always been notoriously difficult, it is getting harder in Madrid. Recently enacted municipal legislation makes allowances for musicians to busk at designated spots in the Spanish capital but casts other performers aside, resulting in hefty fines for puppeteers, mimes and travelling clowns merely trying to earn their keep in the public space. According to the City Council’s own website, authorisation permits for performances in the city centre are limited exclusively to “musical performances in public areas, excluding any other form of artistic expression.” It then clarifies: “Theatre, dance, performance, poetry, mime, etc.”
As the sun beat down on us on top of La Casa Encendida, an eclectic cultural centre in the heart of Madrid, I asked the ageless performer for his thoughts on Pearls for Breakfast (2007), the Pulitzer Prize-winning article by The Washington Post’sGene Weingarten. The piece is structured around the question, “Does Art Need a Frame to be Appreciated?” and involves an experiment with world-class musician Joshua Bell performing outside the L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station in Washington. The result? The concert hall violinist, whose tickets sold for over 100 dollars a pop at the time, gained a mere 32 dollars after 45 minutes of busking.
“The fact that an extraordinary artist performs in the underground or in a great opera house does not change the fact that he is a great violinist, we can all agree on that. Therefore, we should ask ourselves if it is only about the setting or context of the art, or if it is about the level of sensitivity of those who listen to his music in order to evaluate it…possibly many of the people who go to see the violinist’s concerts only value or begin to value his art because it is placed in a specific place, it is placed on a plinth, let’s say, with a specific frame that says, ‘this is art’, so from now on you can begin to consume it.”
As a new arrival in Madrid back in 2012, one of the things that first struck me was the number of highly talented street performers, jugglers, mimes, circus artists, and dancers dappled across the city. In my view, they were physical manifestations of Madrid’s multiculturalism and modernity, celebrations of life that somehow made me feel more at home in a foreign place. Surely that has value?
The City Centre Special Acoustic Zone Plan (Plan de la Zona de Protección Acústica Especial del Distrito Centro) was officially approved by the City Council in 2019 as a way of regulating and restricting street performances in the Spanish capital, but stories of performers with decades of experience being punished by local authorities had already been circulating the web. In 2018, a social media post by a circus artist known as Javi Javichy (stage name), went viral after he claimed he was fined for using an amplifier during one of his numbers in El Retiro, the same park he had been performing in for over two decades.
“The mayor of Madrid won’t allow me access to a permit and I’m not bothering anyone here,” he informed his Facebook followers in a video.
One user responded: “Keep your chin up, Javichi! Unbelievable to be fined for making people smile and laugh!”
Another replied: “Instead of appreciating you, they fine you!”
Javichy later told local media: “I’ve been working in this park for 22 years and nothing like this has ever happened to me.”
“We just want to be left alone so that we can carry out our work in a dignified way.”
Miguel, a veteran street performer and circus artist, voiced similar concerns on air with Radio Madrid in 2017:
“I work in one of the oldest professions (in the world): circus and street theatre,” he stated. “They make us feel like criminals.”
The circus artist also works as a professional clown in a theatrical festival known as Festiclown, which is aimed at raising money for social projects in Palestine.
“Street performers aren’t looking for the same sort of reviews that an opera singer or a dancer like Baryshnikof might receive,” said José.
“They don’t want that. When they burst onto the scene they are already presenting an argument; that the theatres or the stages that belong to big institutions are not only the only stages, that the public shouldn’t be required to pay for a ticket in order to have access to theatre, (they) have the need to express themselves in the public space because (they believe that) public areas should also be regarded as artistic spaces, just as political spaces or social spaces (exist) in cities.”
Remember the permit Javi Javichy referred to in his video? It traces back to 2014, when Madrid’s city centre was officially declared a Special Acoustic Protection Zone (ZPAE). Soon after, then-mayor Ana Botella of the Partido Popular (PP) began to limit the number of public performances in Madrid by distributing “authorisation permits” to street artists, provided they passed a sort of exam reportedly designed to assess their capabilities. The problem? For reasons that remain unclear, the exam was only made available to musicians.
“You can do politics in cities, you can do social work, you can do commercial work, why can’t you do artistic work?” José ruminated.
“So it’s a bit of a contradiction, this recent City Council trend of trying to set rules upon rules and requiring licences on top of permits in order for street artists to do a job that they have been doing for centuries, using performers supposedly interrupting public traffic as an excuse, or claiming that they don’t declare their taxes off the money they’ve earned from the hat… these kinds of things that have more to do with societal control than with the freedoms that a society and the different individuals within a society require.”
Even though the exam was eventually scrapped in 2018 by Ahora Madrid, led by Manuela Carmena, who was mayor at the time, murky legislation dictates that street performers are still required to carry permits that are currently only granted to musicians. What’s more, the number of permits shelled out by the City Council was reduced from 900 to 500 in 2020, and the lucky few who receive them (permits are granted through a lottery-based system) are required to renew them every six months. Those in possession of a permit were initially allowed to work with loudspeakers and amplifiers of up to 20 watts before the use of these small machines was prohibited in 2022 (leading to Javi Javichy officially being fined for using an amplifier during his performance in 2018 as he is not a musician and could not apply for said permit – to make things even clearer/more confusing?)
Back at La Casa Encendida, José examined a leaf. As a budding artist, the 52-year-old mime studied under greats such as Étienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau and participated in various forms of street performance, including happenings and interventions.
“Regardless of whether or not there is a place for it,” he began, “I think there is a place for it, of course a street artist has a purpose, a clown performing in a small town, doing his act in the town square, has his purpose, an opera singer or the Cirque du Soleil have purpose, but they are different purposes.”
“Some seek to entertain, others aim for some sort of political reflection, some may look for a social reflection while others are searching for catharsis in the rite.”
“So, I think all forms of art have their place.”
And some artists are trying to reclaim that space. In an October 2022 article entitled, The Metro, A Refuge For Artists Who Cannot Perform On The Streets Of Madrid (El Metro, El Refugio De Los Artistas Que No Pueden Tocar En Las Calles De Madrid)journalist Jorge Bravo explains that due to the limited number of permits that are granted to musicians in the city centre, “many seek to develop their artistic work in the metro.”
This is because performances are reportedly permitted on platforms and carriages without the need for permits, provided they comply with Article 4 of The Madrid Metropolitan Railway Passenger Regulations (Reglamento de Viajeros del Ferrocarril Metropolitano de Madrid), which states:
“…both the trains and the facilities to which the public has access […] must be maintained in such a state that they can be used in good conditions of comfort, lighting, hygiene, order and safety.”
“Logically this has to be managed from a very different place,” José added, “but I think that Spain, due to its historical characteristics, is not going to, from an organic place, find a solution to this, unless there is a very well positioned defence of it, which is something that is not very common in our country, our country is quite laissez-faire and not really about asserting itself, or at least at present it is very dormant. I think that today we live in a world with much more censorship than 20 years ago, where realities get confused, and it is because (public) criteria is increasingly absent, because we associate ourselves more and more with ideas that appear publicly and on social networks… and we repeat these ideas like parrots without going any deeper, despite the powerful capacity of the mind to create, to imagine, to propose…”
A 2021 documentary called, The Street has Magic (La Calle Tiene Magia) discusses the legitimacy of public areas as artistic spaces with a number of street performers in Madrid.
“It’s a stage within arm’s reach,” states one artist. “Passers-by are the purest type of audience because they only stop if they want to.”
Another anonymous performer argues that street artists give city dwellers a way to reclaim public areas.
“A positive attitude is saying, ‘I’m going outside to see what’s going on today, instead of staying at home chatting or watching TV, I’ll go outside because things are happening,’” she explains.
Musician Borja Cantanesi tells the camera: “If the streets were used more as a cultural space, as an artistic space, it would ultimately help artists grow… as the street is a place to develop creativity, but since that hasn’t really been a possibility, street musicians are associated with begging or scraping out a living.”
Our rooftop meeting concluded with an anecdote from José:
“I have a 5-year-old son, Nicolas, and the other day I was on the bus with him. To keep him amused, I said, “Look out the window and tell me how many street artists you see.” One of the times the bus stopped, he saw a homeless man asking for charity in the street, and he said, “look, Dad, a street artist!” And I said, “Nicolas, what is this artist doing?” “He’s asking for money,” he said. And I said, “But do street artists ask for money?” He replied, “Yes”. I said, “I don’t think so, Nicolas. I think street performers play instruments, make puppets, juggle, sing, do acrobatics.” “Oh, that’s true,” he said. “And the thing is, they’re so gracious that they let you decide how much you’re going to pay for their show.”
Madrid en Poesía 
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