The Buzz and the High of Street Performing

Keeping it short this week because of the holidays:

I was eating with a fellow street performer one day when I was advised to carefully watch my drug intake. My eyebrows raised - and I prompted this performer to explain what exactly he meant by that.

There is, I learned, an adrenaline rush - a high - that comes with the thrill of performing. That I already knew. It's one thing that I love about performing magic. Many magicians (me included) often say it's the reactions that your audiences get, when they encounter the art of astonishment for the first time. It's the look of awe or happiness or excitement in a spectator's eyes. It's the glint in the eye, the yell of surprise, or the shaking of the head that accompanies an encounter with the seemingly impossible.

Seeing that reaction is what triggers the thrill of the performance...
And I guess, yeah.
It's about the high.

Seriously. I may be in a straight jacket, but this is undeniably fun.

For an introvert like me, there's a crash soon after. Soon as I get home, my brain is done, and I want to bury myself in the privacy of my room. But there's no denying that - in spite of any fears or nervousness I may have prior to the show, as soon as that audience is there and my street performing persona gets switched on, I'm having fun.

That's why, even though I've stopped actively seeking out new magic, I have never stopped performing.

And it's why I was warned to be wary around drugs; my busking friend knew of some people who sought to replicate the high of the show in their everyday lives. If this observation is true for street performers, I can't imagine it being any less true for actors, comedians, singers, musicians, or anyone else who makes a living off of performance.

I don't know how often that happens, and I don't know how much truth there is in it, but it's something to think about.

Close Encounters of the Urban Kind: Talking to Myself

Anecdotes from the Streets

Talking to Myself

Once upon a time, in a busker profile on Jeremy, the Magician from Britain, I described his tactic for getting people to stop. Essentially, all he really does is talk to himself... out loud... and in public, with the hope that passersby would mistake Jeremy-talking-to-himself for Jeremy-talking-to-them. And at one point, someone will stop.

Well, this little cartoon describes one such time when I gave this tactic a try.
I was sharing a pitch (sharing the sidewalk) with magician Emmett, also known as the Windy City Wizard. We were taking turns performing...

I'll let the (horribly-drawn) pictures tell the rest:

Woohoo! Another day of street performing!
...The pedestrians don't look like zombies at all.
Nope.

I'm sharing a spot with another busker today.
He's a professional street magician with a cane and a sometimes-southern accent...

Let's start talking to the voices in my head!
In public!

"Yo! Waddup?"

"Magic show! ...Don't eat me!"

Or, you know.. If you try and eat me, at least I'd know that you can see me...

C'mon! Why isn't months of research and theoretical knowledge working in practice?

*Insert your regularly-scheduled Doctor Who reference.

...At this point, I got comfortable with the weird looks people were giving me.

They got a chuckle out of it!

...

...obligatory stock joke?

Where are the peoplez? Hey look! Maybe they'd be interested!

...or not. C'mon! Magic is cool!

This is a line I use every so often.
Except, the way I mean it, is.. like.. people are avoiding my gaze and stuff.
Acting like they're afraid. And umm...

Her jaw dropped.
I guess people understood that line differently.

...WHY ARE ALL THESE JAWS DROPPING?!

Ohhhh... I see.

*insert shifty eyes here?*

The Kings of Michigan Avenue: The Discomfort of Talking about Race

Let's talk about one particular group of buskers and how they actually use and manipulate racial stereotypes and tensions to their advantage.

And while we're doing that, let's keep this in mind:
The only way that their performance succeeds is because racial tensions actually exist.

So introducing: The Kings of Michigan Avenue.
Also known as the KOMA Krew.

The Kings of Michigan Avenue, building an audience.

Through their performances, they directly address and challenge stereotypes of young black men as gang members and drug dealers. In their hat line (the part of their show when they ask the audience for money), they bring these prejudices up to the fore and challenge them head on. Here's a snippet from their show, in a call and response format, where one performer speaks a line of dialogue, and the rest of the acrobats respond as a group:

Call: “We’re not out here gang banging.”

Response: “No!”

Call: “We don’t sell drugs!”

Response: “No!”

Call: “We’re promoting real HIP HOP!”

Response: “Healthy Independent People Helping Other People!”

Call: “Give us a hand, y’all!”

[…]

Call: “We are street entertainers, but we do not live on the street!”

[…]

Call: “… your money helps us keep out of two places.”

Response: “Number one!”

Call: “The poor house!”

Response: “We wouldn’t want to be there!”

Call: “And number two!”

Response: “It keeps us out of your house and your house and your house.” [Acrobats make a gesture like a gun with their hands and use it to point at members of the audience]

Call: “Choice is yours!”

Response: “Give a donation today, save a TV tomorrow.”

This hat line begins by directly addressing stereotypes of young black men as “gang bangers,” drug dealers, and homeless. They then deny these stereotypes for themselves and assert their identities through the use of “hip hop” as an acronym. Immediately after this declaration, however, they ask for applause; applause from the audiences here is acknowledgement that the street performers in question could easily have become the very stereotypes that they are denying.

Applause in this instance is congratulatory; by becoming “street entertainers,” the acrobats have somehow escaped the trappings of their socioeconomic situations and discovered a means through which they could legally assert their economic and social independence as “healthy independent people.” Hand-in-hand with the acknowledgement that such stereotypes exist and the congratulations that these performers have escaped such precarious lifestyles is, significantly, reinforcement that they could easily become those stereotypes: “Choice is yours! Give a donation today, save a TV tomorrow.” In these words is the underlying message, ‘We aren't those guys, but we could be.’

Through their hat line, the KOMA Krew thus draws on their audiences’ knowledge of the wider world; the wider world, as brought into being through their performances, is one in which certain American cities, due to the shifting political economy, are known for the pains of de-industrialization. Busking is thus performed as a viable legal and licit option when alternatives for financial independence are few and far in between.

In this racially and socioeconomically-charged context, these performers play off the guilt of privileged, mostly white tourists (by reference of “the poor house”) and, even, play off inner city tensions by what seems to be a threat-disguised-as-comedy (“it keeps us out of your house and your house and your house”). While the resulting laughter – sometimes exuberant, sometimes nervous, and always affectively-tinged with a degree of shock – does a good job of concealing or assuaging the tensions, the tensions manifest most obviously when the acrobats are in the process of collecting money.

Audience members watching the show from afar.

Immediately after collecting money from the audience, they turn their attention to the line of volunteers who have been standing in front of everyone, waiting for one of the acrobats to jump over all of them:

Call: “Yo, fellas!”

Response: “What’s up?”

Call: “I think we’re forgetting somebody.”

Response: “Who?”

Call: “White guys!”

While the line is composed of more than “white guys,” the acrobats specifically seek out, in their words, “a tall white guy!” as a volunteer. When the performers address these volunteers at last and ask them for money, the volunteers’ decision to pay or not pay will be seen by everyone in the audience. The tactics used are thus palpably aggressive.

Call: “Hurry, give us something good-“

Response: “And you will live-“

Response: “We promise. Give us something good, give us something good!”  [They sing these words, while clapping]

Spectator: “I got nothing.”

Call: “You ain’t got nothing? Come to the front!”

Response: “VIP!”

Call: “Something goes wrong,”

Response: “You die first!”

Once again, the tension built up by any aggression (the situation itself as well as the words, “Give us something, and you will live”) is relieved through the use of humor and the subsequent audience laughter; the volunteer who does not pay gets moved to the front of the line (where, supposedly, he would be the most likely to get hurt if the acrobat were unable to make the jump).

By performing into being an economic and racialized context and using this context as a means to elicit donations, partially through guilt and partially through threats, these acrobats bring into play knowledge and experiences from the wider world outside of the show itself. These performers thus use, manipulate, and control racial and class tensions (in the same way that they manipulate space and flows) in order to create a certain affective experience – one in which the guilt of the socioeconomically advantaged is combined with subtle threats, all of which are alleviated through humor and the steady rhythm of their call-and-response dialogue.

In their racial comedy, there is something to laugh at and, at the same time, a question over the ethics of laughing at this kind of humor. In this process, the discomfort that these buskers create through their comedic performance can potentially impact their spectators’ perspectives of street performers and of young black men and, even, make a socioeconomic critique of life in American cities. They perform into being an acknowledgement of the socioeconomic context in which they work, a challenge against its restraints, and, ultimately, a declaration of their freedom in defiance of it.

For a little bit more about these guys, check out this Chicago Tribune article on them from 2012.

This is a placeholder.

Because... I  was traveling.
Because I got a job offer on Thursday.
And because I just spent hours on the road.

I am now in Boston.
New job! New research!

And, more importantly, new busking scene!

"What if it rains tomorrow?"

"What if it rains tomorrow? Or, you know, God forbid, a tragedy or something and you can’t make it! Then what? You’re gonna wish that you stayed out those extra couple hours no matter what you do when you go home."

I thought that was a metaphor.
It was a figure of speech - an explanation for the work ethic of this one particular Chicago street performer. Despite the freedom of life on the streets, despite the ability to choose where you work, when you work, and for how long you work, there is a specific kind of constraint that comes with that kind of independence.

For one, you lose the safety net that comes with working for a larger company. Paid sick days don't exist: you work, or you don't make money. That would, of course, be the case with any self-employed individual.

But the constraints are more basic than that... and the recognition of that constraint comes when you realize that the metaphor isn't just a metaphor.

I got a text message one afternoon in early June of 2014. In preparation for an observation that day, I asked a busker about his performance schedule. He texted back, "Brought my rig just in case but it doesn't look like this rain is going to let up anytime soon."

What if it rains tomorrow?
Basically? If it rains, you don't work. Or you can try, but your audiences aren't likely to stop. I didn't realize how literal that quote was until Jeremy (a street magician) read my thesis and nodded in agreement with that question.

"You know," he had explained to me, "you could lose money to the weather. Um, a rainy Saturday could be a fairly expensive proposition for a street performer."

One drummer covers up all his gear at the first signs of rain, out of fear that the water would damage his instruments. For him, losing busking income was one thing. Losing the tools of his trade was a bigger risk.

What that means for the performer quoted at the beginning of this post - and what it means for many professional street performers - is that they work even when they don't need the money. They work because one day, it's going to rain, they won't be able to work, and they're going to need savings to fall back on.

There's freedom in street performing - but for the most successful ones, there's discipline as well.

The winter months drive most performers indoors or down south to New Orleans. Some stop busking entirely. Then there are some who, on occasion, face Mother Nature in a tense staring contest. The Tin Man, for example, works every weekend through the winter months in spite of Chicago's biting cold.

Jeremy, known among fellow magicians as a hard worker - and described by them as "an animal," spoke of the coldest temperature that he has worked in: "The coldest I've ever worked out here in Chicago was four degrees, minus four degrees Fahrenheit. I didn't work for very long. It was only because it was the Festival of Lights and there were people here downtown. I didn't make a whole ton of money but some people stopped, and I did it just to prove that I could do it."

While the weather can drain a performer's revenue, it can also act as a different source of value - one of pride - for the busker who shows up to work in spite of extreme weather conditions.

So the next time you see a street performer working outside when all you want to do is run inside, stop for a second and take a look (and drop a buck). If they're out there in that weather, and they seem to think they can still entertain some people, they're probably pretty good.

(Please forgive the lack of pictures. Thanksgiving weekend made it harder to get a post in this week... and, er, maybe last week's horrible cartoon can make up for this week's... lack of pictures).