There are two kinds of people in the world, those who seek attention and those who shun the spotlight.
Barcelona-based Osadia founder and street performance artist Alex Rendon is far more interested in the latter when it comes to choosing someone from the crowd to feature in one of his artistic hair sculpting transformations.
“That is the element that I think the show is really based around, getting people out of their shells and presenting themselves in a way that they wouldn’t normally want to be seen,” Rendon explains to STM, as he prepares to bring the show to Fremantle.
“We look for people who are not wanting to draw attention to themselves but allow themselves to be seduced into it. I like the mental transformation that a person goes through when they dare to draw attention.
“It’s less about them reacting to their hair sculpture, and more how they react to people reacting to them being these transformed characters. They are suddenly being photographed, suddenly being looked at, suddenly have the opportunity to be a star for a day.”
Born in Colombia, Rendon moved to Brisbane with his family as a child before his post-high-school days were spent living in Sydney while training to be a hairdresser and make-up artist.
After discovering the monotonous nature of a 9-to-5 hairdressing salon job was not for him, Rendon was working on music videos when his curiosity for overseas adventure came calling.
“It wasn’t a holiday, it was a quest to see what the world had to offer,” the 58-year-old recounts.
“I ended up in Barcelona because while I was in Spain, I met somebody in Granada who invited me to visit them in Barcelona. The people who I met, and the attractiveness of the city drew me to want to live there. I think I was called by fate to end up in Barcelona.”
Rendon started to promote himself as a hairdresser in theatre festivals while on the hunt for work, developing an idea where he would ask people to be involved in a public hairdressing presentation.
Purely as promotion, he would style and cut hair on a stage, taking it up a notch the following year by letting volunteers choose between either a cut or outrageous hairstyle.
“The seed of the project was this idea that doing radical makeovers on stage with a public watching was something that people wanted to do, and that there was an emotional element about being a spectacle,” he says.
“The third year (1996) that I did the promotion, I paired up with a girl who’d been observing what I’d been doing the previous two years, and we decided to do a show together. She asked me if I would work with her, and we promoted a recycled art exhibition, which was an exhibition where people would make things out of recyclable materials, make artwork with it.
“What we came up with was the idea of decorating the hair with objects made of a recycled product. So that’s when the idea of doing art with hair really came into it.
“Barcelona was a place that street theatre programmers would focus on to look for avant-garde theatre and what we had accidentally created without any real intention was recognised as radical street theatre.”
Choosing the name Osadia, meaning daring and audacious in Spanish, the street theatre company evolved to Rendon training dancers, actors and musicians to either perform hair sculpting with him as a duo — having undergone their own extraordinary transformations — or sending two artists to work at a festival when dates clashed and he could not be in two places at once.
Costumes and make-up became more extreme as he took it further into the artistic and theatrical realm, and Rendon developed hair sculpting techniques as Osadia’s main performer, which he could teach to those without any hairdresser training.
Rendon says preparation is key, as he oversees all the costumes, make-up, hair art designs and objects in workshops before taking it to the streets, finding inspiration in anything to do with theatre, art and music.
“It’s been a long ongoing process,” Rendon shares, with Osadia having toured extensively across Europe, Australia, the Americas, Africa, China and Southeast Asia.
“This company first started presenting the work professionally in 1997, so we’re almost at the 30-year mark.
“In today’s festival landscape, these moments often extend beyond the physical space. Spectators capture the transformations, share them instantly, and amplify the experience through social media, allowing the ephemeral artwork to travel far beyond the square or theatre where it was created. What begins as a local encounter becomes a global visual statement.”
Rendon first travelled back to Australia with Osadia in 2000 for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival and Perth’s AWESOME Festival later that same year, returning for Melbourne’s Moomba Festival in 2001, WOMADelaide in Adelaide on multiple occasions, Perth International Arts Festival 2004 and Brisbane Festival 2009.
He will return to WA with artist Lindsay Dos Ramos to present Osadia’s Fremantle International Street Arts Festival (FISAF) premiere at the annual Easter long weekend event, which began in 1999 as the Fremantle Buskers Festival.
FISAF creative producer Brendan Coleman performed with Fremantle-based circus, comedy and street theatre act Bizircus for the first five years of the festival, before taking on his current role and changing its name to Fremantle Street Arts Festival. The “International” component would be added to the event title a few years later.
“It began essentially as just a road closure and a bunch of local circus artists, including myself,” 54-year-old Coleman says, who grew up north of the Swan River in Yokine and started in community arts while at Mt Lawley Senior High School.
“Those were the days when you could see John Butler busking in the streets in front of the markets. In fact, I think he played at the closing gathering of the first one in 1999.
“I guess the initial idea was something really simple, which was just the council coming together to celebrate Fremantle’s busking culture, and it being a place on the weekends where street performers would naturally gravitate without any intervention.
“But to put a circle around that in 1999, it just worked straightaway. It was a very low budget affair, but it did spark.”
Support has seen the festival’s expansion while it retains the concept of presenting the best local, national and international artists who enjoy making work that can be presented in the street or in an outdoor theatre environment.
It goes beyond the simple genres of street performance — although they are still showcased — and Coleman says the ambition is to present a very diverse program of smaller to mid-scale works that make up the sum of the whole over a four-day concept.
“It’s a curated festival . . . we take a collection of artists from various genres and countries, where they inhabit the city of Freo through the streets, parks and harbours,” he says.
“It means you can really engage with the festival however you like and choose your own adventure in different ways that work for you. People come from midday each day and we go into the evenings on Saturday and Sunday, filling the streets with live music as well.
“The festival is essentially Fremantle’s shine time. There are no tickets, there’s no barriers. The philosophy is to keep infrastructure to quality, but not to overproduce it, and let the artists and the town be the experience.
“It is certainly an affordable option if you need to cancel your trip to Dunsborough with the price of petrol.”
Further highlights in the 2026 program of more than 160 performances and events include fourth generation Chinese acrobat Cho Kairin and his protege Ma Kenluck who perform feats of balance, precision and strength.
French company Cie Sacekripa from Toulouse will present quirky site-specific show Surcouf on the water of Fishing Boat Harbour near Bon Scott Statue, the clown duo making the most of the amphitheatre setting.
Weight(less) created by UK-based Mimbre, a female-led company renowned for over 25 years of breathtaking acrobatic theatre, will blend physical theatre skills with humour portraying the resilience of three women shining through life’s challenges.
FISAF has also commissioned Karla Hart Productions in collaboration with ZAP Circus to create Karla Kaartdijin, Noongar for fire knowledge, a powerful 12-minute Noongar performance with pyrotechnics, storytelling and choreography, grounded in country and culture.
“ZAP’s pyrotechnics and fire effects add a layer of spectacle but is also a really interesting way to enhance some of the storytelling, using fire effects to denote this 12-minute narrative piece,” Coleman says.
“Developing First Nations work within the street arts concept is something we’d love to do more of in the future. What victory looks like is all voices within the community being seen, represented and celebrated.”
Fremantle International Street Arts Festival takes over the streets and venues of Fremantle, April 3-6. Program at streetartsfestival.com.au.