The Busking Project - Documenting Street Performance Worldwide

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As a travelling salesman, losing your driving licence would be a disaster. A teacher without their blackboard might panic. An accountant without their calculator would worry. But these losses would never be the end of the world – there are many ways to travel, inventive methods to teach, and the Greeks were calculating long before [...]

Oh Arbat, oh my Arbat! You are my religion. This said by Bulat Okudzhava, Soviet-era folk singer, bard, and poet, whose name and lyrics live on in his statue on Arbat Street in Moscow. Alexander Pushkin, the great Russian poet, and his wife Natalia Goncharova also have a statue, opposite Arbat house, where they lived [...]

The Cathedral of the Protection of Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, popularly known as Saint Basil’s Cathedral, is a Russian Orthodox church erected on the Red Square in Moscow in 1555–61. Built on the order of Ivan the Terrible to commemorate the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan, it marks the geometric center of the city and the hub of its growth [...]

Six days on the trans-Siberian, from Beijing to Moscow. An opportunity to edit videos, catch-up on logging, write blogs, treatments, outlines, fund raising bids, and performer pages. But also a chance to sit, reflect, and worry. Filmmaking is an artistic process where you have to first create the tools you will later use to make [...]

A collection of photos from our studio shoot with the Percussion Brothers, Ho-Young Jeon (leader/vocalist ’84) and Wooyoung Jeon (percussionist ’85 or ’86). The rain was against us in Seoul, but we did manage to film a quick Percussion Brothers street performance in Hongdae – video coming soon. The younger brother: Wooyoung Jeon The older [...]

Grego and his musical puppets have been performing in various venues and public spaces since 1975. The following is an interview with Grego about his experiences as a performer living and busking in Tokyo, Japan. Grego as a guerilla performer circa ’90 in Ueno Park 1. What first attracted you to the form of art [...]

Charlie Caper, world renowned magician and busker, sees street performers as modern day hunter-gatherers, living in lands of plenty until conditions change (weather) or food sources (income) are depleted, then moving on with their nomadic life. Because the average city is not designed for street performers, part of a busker’s life is to adapt and [...]

Chuge juggling in Tokyo Commuting on the Metro Busking in Tokyo Chuge and Juggling Ball Cover Contact Chuge through his online Juggling Shop ‘Green.’ Share and Enjoy:

I lived in Japan for three years and visited Tokyo a number of times. Tokyo is a massive city and I certainly didn’t explore it all, but I don’t remember seeing any street performers there. Neither did I see any in Kanazawa, the biggest city in my prefecture. What I do remember were formal recitals [...]

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If they are playing an instrument well they are buskers. If they are playing it badly they are beggars. [ARROGANT AMERICAN] I have a thing. Everyone has at least one. Maybe your thing is pedestrians in cycle lanes, maybe it’s sexist jokes, maybe it’s when people say sat when they mean sitting. My thing is [...]

The Symphony of Lights takes place at 8pm every evening, proving that Hong Kong is proud of, or at least wants to show off, its bright lights and big buildings. On street level the lights do not fade. Advertisements, gigantic video screens, and a busker with an LED belt… Share and Enjoy:

Zazi Perfoming with Fire in Bangkok We were connected to a community of Thai buskers even before we arrived in Bangkok. An American woman, Christy Lee, who belongs to a community of performers in California and who lives part of the year in Bangkok, heard that we were planning to film in Bangkok and created [...]

A video of a street performer in Paris doing things with his body that look so amazing you suspect CGI! Awesome! Share and Enjoy:

On our first day in Bangkok we stood and we sweated and filmed as Mai, dressed as a crocodile, blew and twisted balloons for the children who gathered around him. Mai was street performer, local guide, and host; we were sleeping on his living room floor. But in all these capacities he was never far [...]

“What a fine place” — that’s the joke about Singapore. It’s a play on words, a double meaning; it’s both a nice place and somewhere that you’ll get fined for almost anything, including spitting, chewing gum, littering and not wearing a seatbelt. You can also be fined, like almost everywhere else in the world, for [...]

Do all documentarian filmmakers rub elbows with this sort of guilt? That sour-tasting word – EXPLOITATION – feels like a scarlet letter we’ve been forced to wear since the beginning of this trip. When does the use of someone else’s story for artistic, political, or financial goals stop being an infringement on his or her [...]

There is a long list of famous performers who started out as buskers (see below) – maybe this is reason enough to support the new street performers we see on our streets. There is a chance you might be walking past the next Leonard Cohen on your way to work. He just needs a bit [...]

During the day, we crossed walkways with people selling gun replicas (I think they were replicas) knives and other weapons with very sharp notches that would do as much damage coming out as they would going in. That night we went to Jakarta’s red light district, a network of badly lit roads and underpasses lined [...]