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Baling
Baling; to bale,
--The act of abruptly canceling a show during the performance itself--
Street theater creates audiences in public through a variety of means and for a variety of reasons those same audiences can be abruptly dismissed.
It's relatively rare and understandably disconcerting from an audiences point of view. Whatever trust they have lent is summarily shattered as they come to realize that they are just part of a mob that up to that point was merely useful to the performer before he or she simply changed their mind and deemed them useless.
I'd suggest everyone's baled at least once but would be interested to see if there were indeed performers who have finished every street-show they have ever started.
Here are some examples. Ends of the spectrum.
Pompedu center Paris, a French mime is articulating something so vague and French that only he has any clue whatsoever of what any of his esoteric arm waving and face-pulling represents.
Some well meaning citizen steps forward and drops a coin into his hat but unfortunately the small coin in question is the final straw.
The mime exploded, stomping off his small plinth uttering a long string of patented French verbal indignance. Reaching into his hat, grabbing small handfuls of currency he threw them away in disgust on the pavement. Glaring at the audience, mostly bemused, he packed up furiously, muttering venomously before stamping off, in his own self indulgent mind his dignity intact. A perfect example of a dramatic beggar with a superiority complex.
I laughed at him, silly french dickhead, throwing a hissy fit, spitting the dummy and presumably actually setting out that morning to do street theater with the expectation that by days end he'd be carried around on the shoulders of an adoring public based entirely on the strength of his painfully enormous and demonstratively brittle ego. Clueless to his true function, which to my mind is the dramatic seduction of strangers.
Instead he merely exposed his tiny metaphoric artistic dick and was outraged, OUTRAGED!! That the world had not immediately formed a line to suck on it.
He chose to blame strangers for his own failings because simply being pathetic in public was a truth he could not bear. I know this because I've employed a similar mindset in times before I was prepared to take responsibility for my failures as well as my successes.
On the other end of the scale.....
Fly-pitching out of Covent garden at the corner of the Opera-house across from the Shakespeare Pub I had a focused crowd when three guys stage right exited the pub arm in arm. What it was an ambush. The two on the ends grabbed the guy in the middle and began their assault . They were actually in my circle. I and my audience could only watch as the victim took a few before being beaten to the ground. He was then dragged to the gutter only feet from me and in front of my mixed late afternoon audience.
They wedged his head into the gutter itself so there was nowhere for the incoming force to be dispersed and then both beefy guys lay-ed into his head with their boots like they were chopping wood, alternating well aimed boot after boot into his head before running off leaving the guy howling with the lose vocal cord pitch and timbre only a traumatized person in a coma can emit, the kind of sound that raises your primate hackles the kind of sound unique and rare and truly literally spine-chilling.
I baled. I sat down without explanation, it wasn't required. I had no more defense against this horror than anyone else. What audience remained were in deep shock and even those who had fled earlier had enough brutality added to their worlds to make my small role and laughter itself irrelevant and redundant. They drifted away as police ran up far too late to do anything but stand guard over this guttural howling brutally damaged man until an ambulance could arrive.
These are the extremes. You bale because you simply on the day accept defeat and sometimes that defeat, if you look honestly, is yours and other times it's simply circumstantial. Mostly I've noted it's simply a defense against sucking any more than you know, on the day, you already do.
--The act of abruptly canceling a show during the performance itself--
Street theater creates audiences in public through a variety of means and for a variety of reasons those same audiences can be abruptly dismissed.
It's relatively rare and understandably disconcerting from an audiences point of view. Whatever trust they have lent is summarily shattered as they come to realize that they are just part of a mob that up to that point was merely useful to the performer before he or she simply changed their mind and deemed them useless.
I'd suggest everyone's baled at least once but would be interested to see if there were indeed performers who have finished every street-show they have ever started.
Here are some examples. Ends of the spectrum.
Pompedu center Paris, a French mime is articulating something so vague and French that only he has any clue whatsoever of what any of his esoteric arm waving and face-pulling represents.
Some well meaning citizen steps forward and drops a coin into his hat but unfortunately the small coin in question is the final straw.
The mime exploded, stomping off his small plinth uttering a long string of patented French verbal indignance. Reaching into his hat, grabbing small handfuls of currency he threw them away in disgust on the pavement. Glaring at the audience, mostly bemused, he packed up furiously, muttering venomously before stamping off, in his own self indulgent mind his dignity intact. A perfect example of a dramatic beggar with a superiority complex.
I laughed at him, silly french dickhead, throwing a hissy fit, spitting the dummy and presumably actually setting out that morning to do street theater with the expectation that by days end he'd be carried around on the shoulders of an adoring public based entirely on the strength of his painfully enormous and demonstratively brittle ego. Clueless to his true function, which to my mind is the dramatic seduction of strangers.
Instead he merely exposed his tiny metaphoric artistic dick and was outraged, OUTRAGED!! That the world had not immediately formed a line to suck on it.
He chose to blame strangers for his own failings because simply being pathetic in public was a truth he could not bear. I know this because I've employed a similar mindset in times before I was prepared to take responsibility for my failures as well as my successes.
On the other end of the scale.....
Fly-pitching out of Covent garden at the corner of the Opera-house across from the Shakespeare Pub I had a focused crowd when three guys stage right exited the pub arm in arm. What it was an ambush. The two on the ends grabbed the guy in the middle and began their assault . They were actually in my circle. I and my audience could only watch as the victim took a few before being beaten to the ground. He was then dragged to the gutter only feet from me and in front of my mixed late afternoon audience.
They wedged his head into the gutter itself so there was nowhere for the incoming force to be dispersed and then both beefy guys lay-ed into his head with their boots like they were chopping wood, alternating well aimed boot after boot into his head before running off leaving the guy howling with the lose vocal cord pitch and timbre only a traumatized person in a coma can emit, the kind of sound that raises your primate hackles the kind of sound unique and rare and truly literally spine-chilling.
I baled. I sat down without explanation, it wasn't required. I had no more defense against this horror than anyone else. What audience remained were in deep shock and even those who had fled earlier had enough brutality added to their worlds to make my small role and laughter itself irrelevant and redundant. They drifted away as police ran up far too late to do anything but stand guard over this guttural howling brutally damaged man until an ambulance could arrive.
These are the extremes. You bale because you simply on the day accept defeat and sometimes that defeat, if you look honestly, is yours and other times it's simply circumstantial. Mostly I've noted it's simply a defense against sucking any more than you know, on the day, you already do.
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