The Busking Project - Documenting Street Performance Worldwide

View of Burrard Bridge from Granville Island    In September The Busking Project filmed on Granville Island in Vancouver, Canada. Traditionally, buskers go to Granville Island to perform because of the general support for buskers there as well as for the convenience of the regulated busking system, which is managed by The Granville Island Buskers [...]

The Naked Cowboy, also known as Robert John Burck, has successfully become the iconic figure of Times Square, New York. His naked cowboy act is such a valuable commodity that other potential cowboys (and cowgirls) can licence it from Mr. Burck for a fixed sum, thereby spreading the empire of The Naked Cowboy. Creating this [...]

On the 23rd of August, in a white Volkswagen Beetle, we drove to Walterboro to meet Jim Hadley. We didn’t notice the earthquake because the car was Richter scale eight on wheels, windows rolled down and rattling in the doors. It was a surprise to hear the reports on the radio, tales of dislodged roof [...]

Tourist attractions attract tourists who attract people to sell things to tourists: street hawkers, beggars, ice cream vans, street performers, and sunglass salesmen. In some cases these hyenas of tourism have morphed from periphery entrainment and service into the main source of attraction. The fruit sellers of Pikes Place Market, Seattle; the ice cream comedians [...]

Is there such a thing as an overabundance of street performance? Does having twenty buskers in a single city block destroy the excitement and authenticity of acts? What if they all share the same jokes? The three-week Fringe Festival in Edinburgh attracts hundreds of artists from around the world. Buskers and street performers (the festival [...]

There is a small hill to the west of Vienna, at the end of the green line, from where you can see two capital cities at the same time. Bratislava lies close to the Austrian/Slovakian border and is just a short train ride away. We didn’t visit Bratislava, but felt that Bratislava visited us in [...]

We made a last minute stop in Copenhagen because buskers in Stockholm kept telling us we needed to go there, that Copenhagen had a great street performance scene, that Stroget Street attracted professional performers from all over the world, and that audiences there were receptive and willing to pay heartily for shows. They were right. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

On the side of a busy dual carriageway in Jakarta we filmed a double-act street performance. Motorcyclists stopped at the red lights of the cross junction and threw one thousand Rupiah notes, drivers glanced from air-conditioned cars, and children stared and smiled. Afterwards we were lucky enough to get an interview. Me: I’m just going [...]

- Written while stuck in traffic Jakarta will grind to a halt in 2014. Its streets barely move already, four lanes of almost stationary traffic. I wasn’t surprised that my brother (also in Indonesia at the time) refused to meet me here. While on a bus today I spoke to a local about the historical [...]

“Under the big top of Magic Wallrush, we breed circus mutants with DNA illegally purchased from around the world and across other galaxies … we decided to camp in human form from time to time on the sidewalks of the city exchanging our malicious perception for green colour bills with tingling numbers.” This is Magic [...]

When we told a performer in Istanbul that we were going to Kolkata (30 April – 8th May) her eyes widened slightly, and she began to warn us; “Saw a man with no eyes…no teeth…hole where his nose was…poverty…be ready to see horrible things…”. Instead, thanks to Couchsurfing’s powers, we stayed with the son of [...]