CIRCOSTRADA × SIPAM: Major Street Festivals

What does it mean for a festival to belong to a city? Not simply to take place there, not merely to fill its squares for a few days, but to become part of the way that city imagines itself. At what point does an event stop being an interruption and become a civic ritual? And what kind of labour, negotiation and artistic faith are required to gather people in public space, year after year, until the streets themselves seem to expect the festival’s return?

These were the questions at the heart of the CIRCOSTRADA × SIPAM panel dedicated to major street festivals, held during the Sibiu International Performing Arts Market. Moderated by Erwin Șimșensohn, General Director of the Constanța State Theatre and founder of SEAS, the conversation brought together five voices from five different European contexts: Mike Ribalta, Head of the Professionals Department at FiraTàrrega in Catalonia; Anna Šmat, festival producer at Letní Letná in Prague; Deirdre Dwyer, street theatre programmer at Spraoi Festival in Waterford; Dan Bartha-Lazăr, curator and coordinator of FITS Outdoor in Sibiu; and Nathalie Cixous, director of Chalon dans la rue in France.

Together, they spoke from the infrastructure beneath it: budgets, trust, public responsibility, professional markets, city politics, artists’ needs, audience expectations, crowd safety, programming freedom and the invisible year-round work that makes a few days of apparent magic possible.

Șimșensohn opened the discussion by naming the difficult terrain clearly. The panel, he said, would look at the identity of festivals, at how they grow, where that growth should stop, and how sponsors, artists and public institutions shape the decision-making process behind major street festivals. The question was how to keep it alive without losing the soul that made it necessary in the first place.

When a festival becomes part of the city

For Sibiu, Dan Bartha-Lazăr described FITS Outdoor as both a privilege and a responsibility. The city, he suggested, is almost uniquely suited to street performance. Its historic centre allows audiences, artists and technical teams to move easily from one place to another, while its architecture offers a natural frame for public gathering. “It is so good to have a city on our side,” he said.

But that beauty also creates pressure. Programming the outdoor section of FITS is, in his words, “a huge puzzle”: a matter of placing performances across the city in a way that respects both the artists and the urban rhythm. During the festival, he feels the public waiting for the streets to come alive. “They are waiting, really. It is the start of the summer activities,” he said. “The festival brings joy and good energy. I charge my batteries seeing what is happening in the streets.”

Șimșensohn pressed him further: how can one know that a city has truly adopted a festival? How can the connection be measured after the last performance ends?

For Bartha-Lazăr, this remains one of the most important and unresolved questions. The challenge is not only to produce a successful edition, but to keep the relationship with the community alive between editions. He spoke about participatory projects, collaborations with schools and colleges, and the desire to bring public institutions and independent artists closer together. “My dream is really to bring together the independent artists and the public institutions to create a unique event,” he said, “not only for the festival, but also during the period between the editions.”

It is an ambition that demands patience. FITS, he explained, has begun to build structures inside the theatre that work with schools, invite young people to performances and open discussions with artists. But he also admitted that the work is still at the beginning. “We are trying to connect with people,” he said. “But it is not easy at all. And I cannot measure it at this moment.”

Programming in service to the city

If Sibiu’s relationship with FITS Outdoor is one of deepening continuity, Waterford’s relationship with Spraoi Festival is one of mutual possession. Asked whether the Irish city hosts the festival or owns it, Deirdre Dwyer answered with humour and certainty: “No, we own the city. The festival owns the city. And the city owns us. It goes both ways.”

Spraoi has been part of Waterford for more than three decades. This longevity has created what Dwyer called not so much an “educated audience” as a “habituated audience”, one formed by affection, expectation and repeated experience. “Spraoi has become a noun in our town,” she said. People do not ask whether they are going to the festival; they ask what they are doing “for the Spraoi”.

That sense of belonging is built through loyalty, repetition and careful renewal. Dwyer described the work of programming as a balance between innovation and respect: respecting what the audience comes to expect, while also challenging them, sometimes gently, sometimes “a little bit less gently”. The programmer’s role, in her view, is not to impose taste from above, but to watch, listen and bring back to the city the best things encountered elsewhere. “I am thinking about programming in service to the city,” she said. “What are the brilliant things that I get to go out and see in the world that we could bring back and share?”

Yet Dwyer also resisted the assumption that every festival must engage its city all year round. Spraoi is specific in its output: a three-day festival over the August bank holiday weekend, with street performance and a large-scale participatory parade at its centre. Other organisations, she suggested, can sustain year-round cultural life. Spraoi’s task is different: to create a concentrated moment of public energy. “I don’t know that we have to engage the whole city the whole time,” she said. “Maybe we should really focus on what we are doing.”

That focus has its own kind of depth. Dwyer grew up with the festival herself, volunteering as a teenager before returning, two decades later, to work within it. She described older residents waiting for the programme to arrive, marking what they plan to see, and children growing up with the festival as a fixed point in their year. 

A festival village on Letná Hill

In Prague, Anna Šmat spoke about Letní Letná as a transformation of place. During the festival, Letná Park becomes what she called “a little circus village”, a temporary settlement built inside one of the city’s most important public spaces. “We really changed the space,” she said. “We build something unique for people to stay and enjoy shows and other activities.”

The festival’s growth, she suggested, has been possible because of continuity. It did not arrive suddenly as a massive event; it expanded slowly over time. Letní Letná exists because the city has grown used to it, and because the festival has learned how to take responsibility for the place it occupies.

That responsibility includes ecological and sustainability commitments, as well as the often-complicated relationship with municipal departments responsible for green spaces. “Our relationship with the city is great,” Šmat said. “Our relationship with the green department of the city is not so great, but we are trying on both sides.”

Letní Letná is also beginning to rethink how it communicates outside the festival period. Šmat described a new archive-based project created from the need to organise the festival’s history after two decades of inviting international companies. The project now includes archival materials, profiles of Czech companies, interviews with artists and team members, and resources that can serve both audiences and professionals. It is a way of turning memory into education, and festival history into a knowledge base.

Culture as public service

For Nathalie Cixous, director of Chalon dans la rue, the conversation about street festivals began with a principle: in France, culture is a public service. She explained that around 90% of Chalon dans la rue’s funding comes from the state, regional and local authorities, with the municipality as the main supporter. Only around 10% comes from festival revenues and sponsorship.

This model, she said, guarantees the idea that culture should remain accessible to everyone. But it does not mean that money is no longer a problem. “I still do not always sleep very well at night because of money,” she admitted.

Chalon dans la rue is connected to a national centre for street arts and public space, one of 13 such centres in France. This gives the organisation a year-round mission: to support artistic creation in public space, to host companies in residence, to build relationships with audiences and to work more slowly with the territory outside the intensity of the festival. Cixous insisted on the importance of this slower rhythm. It is necessary, she said, in order to create a festival that has meaning and remains connected to a fragile ecosystem that must be cared for throughout the year.

The paradox is that success creates pressure. Chalon dans la rue gathers around 200,000 people over four days. Public enthusiasm for street arts in France is strong and continues to grow. But public funding is not growing at the same pace. The result is a difficult equation: more audience, more expectation, but the same or reduced resources. “We are supported, but we are not supported like an opera or a major theatre,” Cixous said. Given the number of people reached, she argued, street arts festivals should have far greater resources in order to guarantee proper conditions for audiences and companies.

The marketplace, the festival and the fiesta

Mike Ribalta brought another perspective from FiraTàrrega, which is a festival, but also a performing arts market and a civic celebration. Previous artistic directors, he recalled, had described it through three Fs: fair, festival and fiesta. It is a market for professionals, a festival for the city and a party for the citizens. “We really have to combine these different hats,” he said.

FiraTàrrega is publicly funded and recognised as one of the strategic markets of the Catalan government. But its role is not primarily to secure sponsorship for companies. Its mission, Ribalta explained, is to act as an intermediary between creation and audiences, through presenters and professionals. “Our mission as a public-funded creative marketplace is to give companies the opportunity to reach audiences,” he said.

Accountability beyond the ticket

This question of mission became central when Șimșensohn asked the panel to whom street festivals are accountable, especially when audiences often do not pay for tickets. Are festivals accountable to funders, to artists, to audiences, or to the city itself?

Cixous answered by returning to the French legal framework. As the director of a national centre, she said, she is independent in her artistic choices, and funders cannot influence programming decisions. This protection is essential because festivals often make choices that will not please everyone. She also mentioned the legal protection of artistic freedom, especially important for artists working in public space, where expression is highly exposed.

For Ribalta, accountability begins with mission. FiraTàrrega is accountable to artists and creators, to audiences, to citizens, and to institutions. The festival takes over a small city of around 20,000 inhabitants, and that creates responsibilities on all sides. “We have a mission, and we have to fulfil this mission,” he said.

Šmat added that Letní Letná feels especially accountable to the field of contemporary circus in the Czech Republic. Because it is the most visible event in the country dedicated to the form, it shapes what many people understand contemporary circus to be. A large festival can introduce broad audiences to a discipline they might otherwise never encounter. But it must also exist as part of a wider ecosystem that includes smaller, more intimate and more experimental events.

Dwyer brought the conversation back to artists. Festivals, she said, are conduits: they bring work to audiences. That means accountability also involves paying artists fairly, inviting them clearly and making sure they understand what to expect.

Protecting artistic freedom

From there, the discussion moved to programming freedom and pressure. What happens when sponsors, funders or artists bring agendas of their own? Ribalta noted that FiraTàrrega’s artistic director has freedom within the organisation’s statutes, even if artistic independence is not protected by law in the same way as in France. The market has strategic obligations: part of the programme must promote Catalan companies internationally; another part reflects relationships with Spain’s autonomous communities and international partners. But when it comes to sponsors, he was pragmatic. “You have to be really privileged to be able to choose your sponsors,” he said. “We go to 20. One says yes, and we are happy.” The important thing is to approach sponsors that fit the identity of the event.

The pressure of being a flagship festival

Cixous described the pressure from artists in a different way. Chalon dans la rue is a major professional meeting point, with around 1,000 professionals and more than 600 structures attending each year. The “in” selection includes around 20 invited companies, chosen through precise artistic balances between popular, unifying formats and more singular or experimental projects. The festival also has an “off” selection, but it is not simply an open city. Around 1,300 companies apply, and only about 10% can be selected.

Each project, she explained, must be placed carefully in the city according to the writing of the work. Chalon is not a stage where performances simply follow one another. The city itself is organised to host them. Local residents sometimes accommodate companies. Networks of hospitality and logistics are activated. If the encounter works, companies can leave with two or three years of bookings. Visibility, in this context, can transform artistic careers.

The difference between “in” and “off” is significant. The “in” companies are invited by Cixous and receive a financial contract, with hospitality, transport and technical costs covered. The “off” selection receives logistical and communication support, but not a fee. Even so, it offers an important platform for encounters between artists, audiences and professionals.

When growth becomes a risk

The question of scale returned insistently throughout the panel. Major street festivals often begin with the desire to grow: to reach new audiences, expand visibility, bring more visitors, occupy more places. But when does growth become a risk? When does it deepen the bond with the city, and when does it dilute the concept?

Šmat acknowledged that, for Letní Letná, scale is a real risk. The answer, she said, is not to add a new stage every year, but to broaden the spectrum and depth of the programme. Growth can mean developing archives, knowledge, education and professional exchange, not only increasing capacity. But large public gatherings also bring practical obligations: crowd safety, evacuation plans, coordination with safety departments, and the many meetings required to make a temporary festival village function inside an open public park.

Bartha-Lazăr reflected on the issue from Sibiu’s perspective. He would like to know more precisely how many people come from the city, from elsewhere in Romania and from abroad. He estimated that perhaps 60 or 70% of the outdoor audience still comes from the local community, but admitted that better evaluation would be valuable. Sibiu’s tourism strategy has shown that many visitors come for only two or three nights, and this too matters. Festivals sit at the intersection of civic life and tourism policy, and local authorities may value them for different reasons: sometimes because they serve residents, sometimes because they attract visitors.

Cixous was clear that Chalon has reached its limit. The audience continues to grow because the festival takes place in open spaces with free access. But the organisation itself has decided, at least for now, not to grow further.

Not bigger, but better

Ribalta offered perhaps the simplest formulation of the challenge: “The challenge is not getting bigger, it is getting better.” For FiraTàrrega, which welcomes around 1,200 professionals in a city with very limited hotel capacity, scale is already a logistical puzzle. The question is how to maintain a good experience for both audiences and companies. Sometimes, he suggested, the real question is not how to expand, but how to size down intelligently.

When asked what they would cut if forced to reduce their festivals, the answers were revealing. Dwyer said it would not be a matter of cutting off one branch, but of “trimming the whole tree”. Ribalta insisted that what cannot be cut is the core: the companies, the creation itself. Šmat said that everything currently in the festival exists for a reason. Bartha-Lazăr resisted the very idea of reduction. Speaking about FITS and its 2026 theme, “Soul”, he said he had realised that FITS could be read in Romanian as “fii implicat trup și suflet” translated as be involved body and soul. To cut the outdoor programme would feel, he said, like cutting a piece of his body.

Audiences are not a monolith

The final part of the discussion turned to audiences. How does a curator balance artists’ risky work with a public that may simply want a good night out?

Dwyer challenged the premise. “I feel like you might be underestimating audiences,” she said. To speak about audiences as a single body is reductive. Audiences are made of individual human beings, with different tastes, expectations and capacities. Programming what people want is not necessarily conservative, because “people want really good things”. Excellent work, she argued, can satisfy them.

The real responsibility lies in communication and care. If audiences react badly, perhaps it is because they felt unsafe, or because the festival did not clearly communicate what they were being invited into. “It is about making sure that they are safe in the environment they have been brought into,” Dwyer said.

Šmat agreed. Problems often arise when someone expecting a simple, accessible show arrives at something completely different. Sometimes that encounter can be transformative. A person can discover something new, but sometimes they leave disappointed, not because the work failed, but because the frame was unclear. “This is sad when it happens,” she said, “because you did not specify clearly what they could expect.”

The invisible work behind public magic

In the closing moments, Șimșensohn asked the panel to reveal something audiences never see. Ribalta answered without hesitation: the work. The time. The constant labour needed to bring all the pieces together. Audiences arrive and encounter the festival as an event, but behind it is a team working all year. 

Perhaps this was the deepest lesson of the conversation. Street festivals often look spontaneous because they happen in open air, in squares, parks, streets and passageways where life already takes place. Their magic depends on appearing natural, as though the city itself has decided to perform. But behind that apparent ease is a year of choices, negotiations, care, risk, repair, hospitality and belief.

To gather people in public space is never only a logistical act, but an artistic and civic one. It means asking what kind of city we want to become when we stand together, strangers and neighbours, under the same sky. It means trusting that public space is still a place for imagination, disagreement, joy, surprise and shared attention. And it means accepting that scale, identity and belonging are never solved once and for all. They must be remade every year, with the same stubborn question at the centre: how do we bring people together, and why does it matter?