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This article was presented during the centenary conference of Jarry's death organized in Laval. The volume that came out of it was produced by the association. Hence the presentation below:

JARRY AND STREET ARTS
Henri Béhar

JANUARY 1902, Alfred Jarry, regular collaborator of La Revue blanche, creates a "Gestes" column there. In this framework, his first contribution formulates a rigorous program that he will strive to maintain until the disappearance of this publication. He defines, before the letter, a problematic of street arts. Stating that muscular expression is worth as much as that of the brain, he announces that he must give the same attention to a circus show as to the Comédie Française, to a society wedding as to a stallion's outburst in a stud farm, to an automobile race as to a religious procession. The title of the column, Patrick Besnier has pointed out, echoes the Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll pataphysicien (which, I recall, will not appear until 1911) and the program sounds like an anti-intellectual manifesto.
Deriving from circus games, his aesthetics encompasses various animated tableaux of nature and the street. From the articles devoted to the circus, mime, carnival, urban accidents as well as cycling races and the war waged by Parisian apaches, we will see that this perception of the world animates all his literature, from the poems of Saint-Brieuc des Choux to La Dragonne, fleshing out a perception of the world that he calls Pataphysics. […]