Barcelona, Spain – Caesar is the first to arrive, at about 10 a.m.
He is completely white – from his flowing toga to his frosted hair to the tips of his painted fingers and eyelashes.
He climbs onto a box at a corner of Spain’s most famous street – a wide, tree-lined boulevard in Barcelona called Las Ramblas – and waves at passers-by, handing them a little stone gem if they stop to have their picture taken with him and drop a coin at his feet.
Soon, he’s joined by Flowerman, dressed from wide- brimmed hat to petal-covered toes in artificial flowers.
The devil sits on a steamer trunk, using a small roller to slather crimson paint on hard- to-reach spots on his back, and attaching horns and pointy ears with gooey latex.
“You become your character. I couldn’t be a fairy or anything nice. I had to be a demon,” says Bryce Alexander, 36, an Englishman who has done his satanic performance on Las Ramblas for about four years, sometimes earning more than 100 euros (about $125) a day from people who plop a coin into a can to see what happens. “I go crazy to get the money,” he said.
By noon, Las Ramblas is transformed from a classic European boulevard – with cafes and bars, newsstands and metro stops – into an outdoor street theater-cum-circus. Dozens of estatuas vivientes, or living statues, line the street, in extraordinarily imaginative costumes, painstakingly refined.
Some stand perfectly still; others perform wildly, drawing large, raucous crowds.
There are celebrities and movie stars, historic personalities and science-fiction characters, religious figures and mythic icons. And there’s a lot of weirdness.
Large crowds form around two men painted black as they sit on bicycles with wide grins, both with plastic skeletons in sidecars, each with his own can. At the telltale clink of a tossed coin, off they pedal, ringing bells, honking horns, their plastic sidekicks bobbing back and forth.
