Street Performers as Agents

The two-year-old boy had a fever, but he was mostly quiet. He and his big brother – a four-year-old who sat with his legs dangling off the side of the couch – had been pacified with some late morning cartoons. Anyway, their father had told them to be good so that he could answer some questions, and they obliged. A fortuitous fever for the younger one had pulled them both out of daycare for the chance to spend some quality time with their daddy. That was their plan all along. Unfortunately, someone had co-opted that plan: In the room adjacent to the living room, their father sat at a dining table, embroiled in a boring adult conversation.

Their father, 30-years-old at the time, commented that this would be his fourth interview in a month. I had seen him several times before, but I had never seen him like this: his face, hands, and clothes had lost the silver hue that so defined him. If it weren't for the fact that his naturally jet-black hair had been dyed bright red, I probably wouldn't have recognized him. Here was a man who had a real name, one that his family and friends all knew and used. But for us, and for the thousands of pedestrians who have seen him working on the streets, he is known simply as the Tin Man. That, actually, was how he introduced himself to me when I first approached him for this study.

The Tin Man, in this case, was being interviewed as a public figure in the privacy of his home. He spoke reflexively on the matter as our first interview slowly began:

TM: "Apparently there’s an influx of either students or people making documentaries or something like that, but um… I noticed – well, while I was in school, I know that homeless people and street performers are like the popular ‘Let’s make a documentary!’ subject in school, you know, especially downtown. Cuz schools are downtown."
H*: "Like DePaul? Yeah, you’re right."
TM: 'Yep […]. Cuz I guess I – they’re easy to approach. They’re not like a business or something, or people don’t seem ‘em that way. They’re like 'Hey! Let me… interview you!'"

Here, very early on in my research, I had stumbled upon the question of who, exactly, a street performer is. In one breath, Tin Man brought up “homeless people” and “street performers.” In the next, he contrasts them to “a business or something.”

Street performers have to ask for money, but asking for money is not the same as begging for it. Ron Swanson knows the difference:

Asking for business - getting people to see their worth as performers - is a large part of what goes into every show.

I've spoken a bit before about the discomfort some buskers have with being compared to panhanders. I have spoken many times - through the Tin Man, through Jeremy the Magician, and a bit more generally - of street performers speaking of their work as... work. Juxtaposing these perspectives together, however, reveals an interesting tension that I haven't really yet articulated.

I would like to speak of street performers as agents.

Not this kind of agent...
Yeah, yeah... I am still watching this.

The most extreme of these examples would be that of GoldGrrl who was arrested while standing absolutely still in a public space.

A noise complaint brought the initial police officer over, but, in the end, she was arrested for and charged with "misdemeanor, resisting arrest, [and] interfering with a police officer" - none of which had to do with the original complaint. In her account, GoldGrrl noted that after an initial interaction with the police officer on scene, she decided to focus on her performance and ignore the officer's further attempts at interaction.

The situation quickly escalated. As she said, "The cops are talking to me, I'm being stubborn, so they send out black lady cop. You know, to try and deal with me. But at this point, I've already made the decision that I'm not gonna move. And I can't, I can't give in now."

*Photo courtesy of Gold Grrl

She asserted her right to perform in a public space through the ultimate act of civil disobedience: she stood still. And when the officer bristled at being unacknowledged and called for backup, the everyday frustration of needing to deal with the same police officers transformed into an ideological stance - she would not "give in."

Maybe street performers are secret agents after all.
See? This is my secret agent badge.

GoldGrrl's example is an extreme one. But everyday acts of self-expression come through in other moments of not moving. The Tin Man, another living statue, has a sign that says "Donations make me move!" Yet, despite that sign, he doesn't always move when people pay him. He moves when he has stayed still long enough to have gained donations from most of his audience members - when, as he says, he has gained their "respect."

Maybe that's why it's so hard for street performers to gain the status of businesses; they are human beings who refuse to be objectified, to have their art unlinked from the labor that they put into it. The choice of busking as a career is itself a critique of the lack of viable alternatives for meaningful middle-class work.

It is in the street performer's ability to decide when and whether to perform that she is empowered as an agent against the crowds of shoppers who ultimately pay her. This agency is partially granted to her through the ways that the city is organized physically and socially. Regardless of how much buskers try to claim for themselves (in the eyes of the public) the status of businesses, this freedom is also, perhaps, the very thing that makes that status impossible to achieve.

*H is the videographer who helped me record footage from this interview.