Busking Pitches

[Zanzibar]

hi,

for paris, there will be more performers in september than in august : you can check sarlat in the dordogne area of france, this is a big summer pitch , and 'le festival d'Aurillac' 16-20 august (www.aurillac.net Tel: 04 71 43 43 70) will have a lot of french street performers.

for london :

covent garden street performers association new website:

http://coventgardenstreetperformers.com

the main pitches are covent garden, south bank (near london eye), trafalgar sq

let me know if you want more info for france...

[kennethkahn]

If you decide to come to San Francisco, please look me up. I go by Kenny the Clown.
(510)289-2323.

Thank you.

[martin ewen]

These are my questions.

What is your definition of a fiscal agent?

What do you think qualifies you to recognize the qualities, definitions and cultural significance of street performance? Given the answer to the previous question I'd like to follow with; what prior work have you done in this area and for how long.

Other questions.


"a book, a DVD, a webite, a community, and a comprehensive look at street performance worldwide."

Please if you could elaborate on what you mean by " a community"
We both know this community already exists unlike say your DVD or book.
In what way will the community you refer to differ from essentially two lists, possibly three. One,a customer base, two, free content providers and three, unpaid techs (local film school input)

You will have to forgive us but having spent collectively a couple of hundred years interacting with those curious about our cultural relevance one thing has been predictably uniform. There is always more in it for the protagonists than their subject matter.

Accepting this, what does anyone associated with your project have to gain?

Thanks. Oh and I don't mean this to appear adversarial . Not like that out and out bruiser Lee nelson.

No I'm just asking you the questions that I know we collectively would enjoy you answering.

Here is some background content for free that is very relevant.
Nick, myself, and I suspect lee as well as many of our tribe have a definition of ourselves a celebration of that definition and it is that we are 49% full of bullshit. Why we celebrate that is that our audiences and everyone not us is 51%.

We don't exploit this difference so much as spend our lives selflessly conscious of our own bullshit while in short bursts distracting our audiences from theirs.

We have our detectors pointed your way and I have asked you questions that will test your quotient . Because if nothing else we know how to keep each other amused.

[Scot Free]

These are my questions.

What is your definition of a fiscal agent?

What do you think qualifies you to recognize the qualities, definitions and cultural significance of street performance? Given the answer to the previous question I'd like to follow with; what prior work have you done in this area and for how long.

Other questions.


"a book, a DVD, a webite, a community, and a comprehensive look at street performance worldwide."

Please if you could elaborate on what you mean by " a community"
We both know this community already exists unlike say your DVD or book.
In what way will the community you refer to differ from essentially two lists, possibly three. One,a customer base, two, free content providers and three, unpaid techs (local film school input)

You will have to forgive us but having spent collectively a couple of hundred years interacting with those curious about our cultural relevance one thing has been predictably uniform. There is always more in it for the protagonists than their subject matter.

Accepting this, what does anyone associated with your project have to gain?

Thanks. Oh and I don't mean this to appear adversarial . Not like that out and out bruiser Lee nelson.

No I'm just asking you the questions that I know we collectively would enjoy you answering.

Here is some background content for free that is very relevant.
Nick, myself, and I suspect lee as well as many of our tribe have a definition of ourselves a celebration of that definition and it is that we are 49% full of bullshit. Why we celebrate that is that our audiences and everyone not us is 51%.

We don't exploit this difference so much as spend our lives selflessly conscious of our own bullshit while in short bursts distracting our audiences from theirs.

We have our detectors pointed your way and I have asked you questions that will test your quotient . Because if nothing else we know how to keep each other amused.

What he said.

[martin ewen]

What he said I said.

[Scot Free]

Ya,

What he said i said he said.

[martin ewen]

Yeah what he said, I said, he said, I said.

[Scot Free]

That's what he said, i said, he said, i said, he said.

[martin ewen]

Still waiting on feedback on what he said, I said, he said, I said, he said, I said.

[Scot Free]

Pardon me but

Still waiting on feedback on what he said, I said, he said, I said, he said, I said.

i don't like the way you said what he said, I said, he said, I said, he said, I said.

[harmonicakev]

?

"We don't exploit this difference so much as spend our lives selflessly conscious of our own bullshit while in short bursts distracting our audiences from theirs."

I'm not sure this is quite what I'm doing when I busk, but I find Martin's musing(s) fascinating as always.

Kevin M.

[martin ewen]

Fuck yeah!
Ive got muse out the ying-yang brother.
Sometimes I think that all I have is muse, that I'm just some rare almost afflicted super-saturation of muse with a pulse and legs. ( and even they are Muse-y , elongated unreal Muse bourne conceits.)
But I fInd for me at least if I muse right out to the borders I find I'm like at the edge of an inclosed floating paddling pool of muse bobbing on the surface of an infinite ocean of the as yet unmused.
Whoa look out muse alertspam


Strangers don't as a rule look each other in the eye long enough for much to be transmitted. It's just not safe and it doesn't feel natural. I'm impressed that performers do this as a primary part of their jobs. They might not recognize how primary it is. They might think it's about their funny lines or their skills but it's my opinion, after much observation, that it's about the eye contact or in the audiences perception and/or approximation of it they can amplify and personalize .spam

I'm working on the theory that more is communicated in a profound glance than in any singular verbal or written statement. Tale your significant other for example. Sometimes a shared look conveys as much as a book written by each about the other.

And whether an audience member receives what you design your gaze to transmit or simply uses the contact like an empty palate to invent what they need to hear the point is more or less the same.

Communion

That is why theatre will never die. Every chattering ego in the room or street corner focuses on something outside itself and in so doing rests it's elbow on the shovel of it's own self regard.

I've got to a point in my mimehood where I risk simply looking at people trusting that given what you perceive is what you want/need to, that they will see in my interaction with them and others what they need.

Communion.

I don't know how many people would agree with this but it's my muse and I'm sticking to it and a lot of what I do is this very experiment.

These musi are the property of Martin ewen and may not be reproduced for profit without his expressed permission.

Heh heh

[omnigut]

Martin, Scot,
Hello, and sorry about the long delay, but on the road. I don't know whether I can properly answer your questions, but here goes...

Fiscal Agent: After talking in length to Stephen Baird, Busker Advocates is taking donations in our name (for a small fee), making them tax deductible. He has been a big influence in setting this up.

Qualifications: I ran Undercover New York (UNY) for 3 years, lived with a busker for a year, was inspired by a Covent Garden busker at age 8 to learn how to juggle, and have since gone busking a few times. I've not done any academic writing on the subject, but have done academic research. Not sure whether any of that qualifies me (I've hardly lived the life), but I am definitely a busker fanboy. Hope my perspective grows as I travel.

Community: This is probably the weakest link in our project, but yeah, we do hope to build a bit of an international community. Performers.net and others already do this job, but I'm not sure they so actively hunt down buskers in foreign countries. In my over-stimulated head, I see quite a global space with little flags to translate the site into various languages.

As for how it would differ from the customer base, free content provider and unpaid techs, I don't know if it does. But I'm not sure I totally understand the question — I'll try to give a better answer if you could clarify

What's in it for us? I ran UNY for three years out-of-pocket, with no adverts, no attempt to sell it, or to get funds from the people I put on the site. I know that some of them did get business from me, (probably more than I knew) which I did not take a part of. It was just a way of making my days more fun on the cheap. This time, I'm hoping to get a film and book out of this.

As for what you get; I'm just hoping that aside from the odd job or two, buskers that we meet and promote will enjoy a little more recognition for what they do and who they are. Maybe our audience will treat their local buskers a bit better too.

As for the bullshit, it's why I like you.

I've got to go (36 hour trip to Barcelona, where we've got a few more performers lined up and lots more to meet), but hopefully this answers a bit. If you ask more questions I'll get to them ASAP. Thanks,

Nick x

[martin ewen]

Well good luck to you.

This concept of 'curation' might amount to something in a general sense. It's certainly a popular new buzzword.

Conceptually it might gain traction or may be discarded as overambitious. Time will tell.

Written elsewhere, my thoughts on curation.
winsome cowboy 3:20 am
Curation is an elastic concept in a world where new 'galleries' are digital.

My initial knee-jerk feeling is that it's merely a pretentious term for content middle management with the emphasis in status away from the content provider and weighted towards the venue provider. I have to watch my reactionary nature because as age deflates my self importance and provides cumulative data I must recognise I'm only right 70% of the time. : )

Curator as trusted digital magpie, a personal shopper for the digerati perhaps?

One, opinion of mine that I would state as a truth if I wasn't so damn scared of dropping into the 60 percentiles is that the interconnectivity of and availability of venues for content erodes the very concept of curation.

The fact that you have buttons that allow linkages to facebook and various other galleries is an accepted tactic and defense against the almost limitless propagation of content on it's own merits irrespective of your curation of it.

In my limited experience curators are people who historically exploited artists given that real-estate for art buyers was finite.
Now it's digitally infinite. Maybe I need to check a dictionary. maybe curators are more than agents for products.

My understanding is that a curator is a gatekeeper for an intellectual nieche market?

Like a madam in any cerebral whorehouse for which a clientele can be found.

People sometimes say I have a problem with authority and I really have no idea what they mean. : )

[omnigut]

Love it.

"Like a madam in any cerebral whorehouse for which a clientele can be found."

Absolutely. Facebook, youtube, twitter et al are just more middlemen. As is Undercover New York and part of The Busking Project.

However, if we extended your metaphor, I'd be a madam in a whorehouse who doesn't take a direct cut of sales, does not charge entry, does not sell alcohol, claims no control over the whores in my service, and merely plans on bringing to prospective employers (hotel owners?) evidence that I'd directly increased the clientele of my whorehouse during my stay.

I think I'm going to go open up a nudist buskers emporium on 2nd Life. You heard it here first!