For me, it was on the University of Memphis campus, right
after the lunch rush for the day. It was the end of January 2011. Students
loitering between classes stopped to watch: One hour, two shows, and two hats
later, my cell phone died. I headed home early because I was afraid to be out
and alone in the city by myself without a working phone.
For magician
Billy Kidd, it was in her hometown in Canada, sometime in 2006. At 11:00 at
night, she stood in a spot that was too narrow for a full show and performed
for locals – locals, she says, who were also drunk. Soon after that, she says,
“I was taught not to perform for drunk people, and I’ve never done it since.”
Living
statue and contact juggler Dawn Monette (long before she developed her living
statue character, Goldie) dressed herself up all in green. She went to English
Bay in Vancouver, juggled on the side of the path for three hours back in 2005,
and made ten bucks. “There were a few people who thought I was pretty cool,”
she recalls with a laugh, “And there were a couple people who felt I should get
a job.”
And Kiwi
Louise Kerr (aka Sport Suzie) donned a red nose along with a “dark, black punky
costume” when she headed out to Cathedral Square in Christchurch, New Zealand. She
put on some Lemon Tree and “probably
some Eminem, God forbid,” then proceeded to juggle knives. “[I] did some pretty
terrible juggling, probably made a balloon for a kid I got to help, then tried
to con some poor guy into holding my unicycle while I, this strange-looking
clown, climbed all over him to get to the top” where she proceeded to stick a
bucket onto her head and get him to throw a ball in. “Then [I] jumped down and
awkwardly held out my hat without uttering a word. It was fun, scary, and to be
honest, I was happy it was over. I think I made $13.”
Louise
Clarke (whose street performing character Pandora Pink juggles cigar boxes,
manipulates a hat, and cracks her audiences up) was a veteran performer when
she started her street show. Even then, she says bluntly, “When I started my
solo show, it was really terrifying…. You’ll be the only person there – nobody
else to rely on or fall back on. Obviously, it’s confrontational. They don’t
have to watch you if they don’t want to. They just walk away.”
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| Pandora Pink |
As
magicians, we have all heard these “first-time-out-busking” stories in various
forms from different sources. This time, though, all of these buskers share one
thing in common that few other buskers share: We are all women.
Just How Safe Is
It?
According to Kirsten Anderberg, author of The Busker Book: 30 Years as a Solo Woman
Performer, there is one female career busker for every nine male one. In
magic, that gap, surely, is even wider. Why are there so few female solo
performers out on the streets?
There
are plenty of female performers in general. Dancers, singers, and actors… women
in these various art forms work side by side with their male counterparts. In
magic, the disparity of male to female magicians is troublesome. In street
performance, that disparity is just as glaring.
For me, I have been interested
in magic since I was a little girl, thanks to the gift of a magic kit after my
older brother taught me how to pull off my thumb. From there, after practicing
the French Drop for years with three plastic quarters and holding little shows
for my thankfully supportive family (who, by the way, got quite tired of watching
a seven-year-old make a fake quarter disappear), it turned from an occasional
interest to a full-fledged hobby in high school. Performances for my family
transformed into performances for my classmates and, in college, a way for me
to earn some extra money as well as a means through which I could contribute to
the community. I wasn’t afraid to perform, and yet… there was always something
holding me back from taking my act out to the rough-and-tumble world of street
theater.
Why?
As the youngest and the most novice of the performers described here, my
insecurities and fears come out the most clearly. My first excuse? Safety.
Simply put, I was afraid.
I first performed in Memphis,
Tennessee. Despite a lack of pedestrian traffic in the city (which is usually
the case, except for holidays and festivals), audiences were friendly and
receptive. There are plenty of musicians and a few times, I was able to perform
near the Beale Street Flippers. That said, when I first started, I was the only
circle show out there. I felt dangerously alone.
Once, my inner-alarm system was set
off when a stranger sat on a bench opposite my pitch and stayed there all
through my show. When I packed up to leave before the sun set, he started
following me from across the street. I stopped at the corner to chat with a
vendor until he was gone.
This was the only time that I
ever felt unsafe while performing. Soon after, I stopped choosing spots
randomly in the city and started working more at local fairs and festivals that
I found with the help of another Memphis magician. Still, this event stands out
starkly in my busking memory.
Thus, imagine my surprise when I
asked other performers if they ever felt unsafe while street performing. When I asked Pandora Pink, she said at first
tentatively – then later, firmly – “No…? No. No. Maybe a little bit, but that’s
because there were some drunk men around. But then, they weren’t going to punch
me out or anything. I don’t think I’m going to be physically abused.” She went
on, “I just don’t want anybody to push me off or anything like that. So I don’t
think I’ve ever felt particularly unsafe, but of course there’s situations
where I had to monitor… drunk people.”
So I decided to ask Billy Kidd,
who actually was pushed off of her
platform at a street show festival in Edinburgh, Scotland; a man with a beer in
his hands walked up behind her, gave her a shove, and walked off. Billy Kidd
spun around, played it off with a joke, and pushed forward with her show. “That
was the first time that that happened
to me. I’m trying to think of something similar.” After a pause, I could almost
hear her shaking her head on the other side of the phone. “I would say no,
nothing like that has ever happened.” Mainly, she notes, the trick is to stay
away from drunk people. Never perform for them, and you’ll be okay.
 |
| Billy Kidd - Photo by Tata Tuviera |
Only contact juggler Dawn
Monette, under the guise of her living statue persona Goldie, has had to face
down heckling that verged on the edge of physical abuse. Passersby, in an
attempt to get her to break character and move, have touched and pushed her.
Monette explains how she had one woman “come up and grind her butt into me to
try and get a reaction.” She also talked about how some spectators would
pretend to punch her – only to stop an inch or so away from her face – just to
get a rise out of her. The worst night for her was just prior to the 2011 Stanley
Cup riot in Vancouver. While most spectators were great, she says, a couple
rowdy onlookers attempted to blow vuvuzelas (a kind of horn) directly into her
ear. As a result of this incident, Monette is partially deaf in her right ear.
“The following ten people who did that got a ball stuffed into… the base of
their horn.” The next night – the actual night of the riot – she stayed home.
Hecklers
Performers get heckled. In the honest, seemingly
free-for-all venue of street theater, facing down hecklers goes with the job.
For me, heckling has never been a big problem – maybe partially because people
in general don’t feel threatened by me, and partially because I haven’t
performed on the streets long enough. When it does happen, I ignore it, and the
rest of the audience usually tells the heckler to shut up, enjoy the show, or
shove off.
Sport
Suzie (a character, she notes, that is not “stereotypically female”) agrees
that heckling isn’t a big problem for her. “Sometimes there might be the odd
sexual reference but very rarely, and I find if the audience is on your side
they will shut them down before you have to do anything.” She goes on to
explain, “It’s odd for me to get a heckler because I’m a woman. I do more
skills that a typical male performer would do, so maybe that’s why, or it could
just be that my big biceps scare hecklers away.”
 |
| Sport Suzie - Photo by Delphine Ducaruge |
Pandora
Pink’s character is also one that is “high-status… not low status.” She has
hecklers, but they rarely create big problems for her. “I think I probably get
heckled less maybe… [as] a female street performer.” In addition to that, she
points out, “Some men find me a bit intimidating, so I don’t get too many
problems. And I don’t get any problems because I’m a woman.”
Dawn
Monette’s Goldie does get heckled, but the kind of heckling she faces is less
verbal than the kind that the other performers get as circle shows.
“Particularly as a statue, you can become pretty vulnerable because you’re
supposed to stay still.” She describes her kind of heckling as “more playful.
They try to get into a staring contest, or they try to scare me so I’ll react,
or make me laugh and make me move because they want to break the illusion of
the statue. And I find that playful. Otherwise,” she says, “you get people
heckling you. ‘Get a job’ or ‘She’s not that still!’ or ‘Oh my God, she’s
blinking.’ Or people just generally putting you down. But for the most part, I
get more positive responses and more happy people and most of the time the
people who don’t like you will ignore you.”
 |
| Dawn Dreams' character 'Goldie' - Photo by Pierre D |
Billy
Kidd sums up her experiences with hecklers nicely: “Oh yeah. There are hecklers
out there. Not always, but there are. They come and go. If the whole audience
can hear them, I respond to them. I just handle them the way I handle them. I
just handle them so that they know I have control, and there’s nothing they can
do about it.”
A Male-Dominated
World
The stories of female street performers facing down
hecklers sound, more or less, the same to me as the stories that I have heard
from other male magicians in the busking world. The difference lies not so much
in what Pandora Pink calls “the odd idiot,” but in the audience as a whole.
Billy
Kidd states that female street performers probably all agree on one thing: “We
all know how much we have to compete in a very male-dominated industry.
“If a woman’s performing, you kinda have to
win everybody over. I mean, you win over the women quite easily. But the men,
they’ll be a bit like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty nice,’ but you know, they don’t take
it necessarily that seriously…. You have to be really, in a way, better.”
Pandora Pink says that women have to be stronger in their performances. Sport
Suzie, however, only partially agrees. She’s gotten “maybe a little bit of ‘Is
she gonna be good?’ from the audience,” but, she says she believes “that’s not
because I’m a woman but because I have lacked belief in myself or show in those
situations.”
Goldie does note that some
street acts require a more aggressive approach – which is a problem, especially
when “our society doesn’t always accept aggressive female characters.”
It is hard and confrontational
out on the street. Performers have to be confident. “You have to really grab
everybody’s attention, and you got to be funny and quick, witty, and clever,
and skillful, and – and, you know, some women [are] just kinda like ‘Oh, I
can’t be bothered to do that,’” suggests Pandora Pink. “They’re not interested
in being so overtly aggressive, maybe, on that level. So it’s quite
challenging, you know.”
What does this acceptance
actually mean, when it comes down to the street show? Kidd says, “I think
because there are not a lot of females in street performing in general – you
know, whether it’s magic or juggling – I think, and this is just my theory: When
people walk by a female street performer, I think they’d rather go watch a guy
do it. In fact, I kind of feel that
way when I see a street performer. And I think that’s just society and culturally
how we’ve been brought up. So there is that struggle. I do have to convince
people that I’m good enough to watch. And it’s actually only when I tell people
that, oh yeah, there’s not a lot of female street performers or magicians that the
lay public realize that. But I don’t think that’s the first thing that’s on
their mind. I think for artists, though – ‘Oh yeah! There’s not a lot of female
magicians, or there’s not a lot of female magician street performers.’ I think
for laypeople, I don’t think they think like that.”
 |
| Billy Kidd: Photo by Paulo Abrantes |
Pandora
Pink points out that male street performers always earn more money than their
female counterparts. She knows this because, she says, while she definitely has
done better than some boys, “when it comes to the big mega shows, the big
really really really successful street performances, the people who are earning
the most money would be the boys.” She uses the example of her partner: “I
don’t earn the same amount of money as Nigel, my partner. I have never done,
and probably never will do.”
Getting Away with
Some Jokes
Some things, though, female street performers can do that
the guys cannot. These advantages amount to jokes that women can get away with
– jokes that men would get into trouble for attempting.
Pandora
Pink says these jokes are a result of “how women… how we’ve been sexualized
more than men. We’re sexualized by men, so you can sexualize something a lot
more and get away with it, whereas a man wouldn’t be able to necessarily.” I
was a little confused with this statement; there are plenty of male street
performers who make blatantly lewd jokes – jokes, of course, that work well on
the street. But she explains, “That’s how a lot of women climb all over the
men, you know. Shove their fanny in their face, and there’s a lot of physical
contact. Whereas I don’t think a man would be able to do that with a woman,
for instance.”
The Rewards of the
Streets
“Magic is terrifying I think, initially when you’re
learning it and you perform. And on the street, yeah, it’s very vulnerable on
the street, which is what I like about it. It’s very challenging.”
It’s
the challenge and the thrill of the show, and the freedom of it all, that makes
it all worth it for magician Billy Kidd. Street performers value their freedom,
and women street performers value it so much that they still go out there and
do it, despite the fact that their peers are few, and that they know they have
to hold their own – be as good as, or even much better than the other guys out
there – in a male-dominated industry. “I love what I do! If you don’t like what you do as a profession,
whether it be performing or an office job… then get out of it! Why do something
you don’t like? I have never understood people who hate their jobs or who wait
for retirement to enjoy their life. I would never want to retire. I had never
had another job besides being a performer and I will keep it that way.”
Sport Suzie values the street
for its freedom as well. “It was a challenging place to try new material, push
yourself, and have the opportunity to experience creating a show from nothing.”
Besides, she points out, “It was also a place to make money when I didn’t have
a gig on, so I could work regardless of bookings.”
 |
| Sport Suzie - Photo by Delphine Ducaruge |
All of these performers –
strong, confident women (you have to be, to brave the streets) – are clearly
passionate of their art. This passion comes out, especially, for Billy Kidd
when she talks about her identity – not just as a female street performer, but,
simply, as a street performer. “There’s this stigma about street performing
anyway with the fact that a lot of people have a concept that [street
performers] are like beggars. But I think the most professional ones: We know
who we are, and we are not beggars. We’re entertaining people.”
And for those who are thinking
about taking their acts out onto the streets, all of these performers have one
thing to say: Just do it!
