Thing I Learned (briefly) Street Performing

I spend a decade "in the arts," acting, making a couple one-hour solo shows, and helping friends produce their stuff.

The one time I was in the paper

At one point in all this, I gave a go at making a street performance act. I heard anecdotally that with a tight street act you could actually make decent money, and also the idea of it all kind of romantically appealed to me, so I learned to juggle.

Notice that I've palmed two of the juggling beanbags momentarily while I do the shoe flip. If you're watching uncritically it happens fast enough that the idea is it looks like its all one fluid motion one moment I'm juggling three bean bags the next three bean bags plus my shoe but its two discrete steps.

I got kinda decent at juggling. My favorite things I could do were a five-ball pattern, and a couple silly things like above at one point I could somewhat consistently kick my shoe up into a pattern of three balls, and then juggle the three balls and my shoe.

I did not, however, develop a street act.

First Lesson: unbelievably hard to capture and keep attention in a chaotic environment

I came to street performing as fairly experienced stage actor.

What I learned from my brief foray was that unlike in a theatre where you have people's attention by default, in a chaotic environment basically at any moment if you let the energy drop people will literally walk away from you.

I didn't stick with it long enough to ever learn how to hold crowd because...

Second Lesson: The street acts that do work all rely on the same tricks (and its IMO joyless)

Watch three dialed-in street acts and you'll see what I mean. Taking nothing away from these sorts of things! I, after all, couldn't hack it. But there's a formula and the successful acts all follow it.

And the formula is just:

spectacle + promise an even bigger spectacle

So at the very start, the performer does something BIG and unsubtle and impressive but that only uses a few of the props they have out. And then they interact with the audience a bunch. Use those interactions to get more people to stop and see what's going on. Begin to promise an even bigger spectacle. And thru it all, with an almost Pavlovian insistence, drill home that what's about to happen is the performer will do something INCREDIBLE and then you're gonna throw them a fiver or whatever.

It's all about the build up. Which goes on for a while, though it always seems like the MASSIVE spectacle is just about to happen. Do that for 10 minutes and then...I don't know, I was never able to do it but you build something up in the audience so they feel maybe that since they've been watching for 10 minutes, and since what they just saw was genuinely impressive, they fork over five bucks or whatever.

Hey wait, I thought this was a technical blog?

It is. I'm trying to make an embarrassingly unsubtle parallel between street performing and LinkedIn-ese and AI twitter.

The great thing about theatre, why I spent a decade of my life basically for free hanging out in that world is that when you create a space where everyone pays attention to the same thing and is generous with their time and attention its really nice.

Where is that space, in the digital world? If you know please tell me.

One last thing(ridiculous rant time)

Not me.

If a person can competently ride a giraffe-unicycle in front of a crowd, I guarantee they can competently mount said giraffe-unicycle quickly and undramatically.

It's pretty cool to see, actually. When they do it.

But if you've ever seen a street act with a giraffe unicycle there's a good chance 7 minutes of it was a ridiculous charade of the performer getting an audience member (who they don't need) to help them.

They know how to get on the dang unicycle.

Memorable street acts I saw while trying to learn about it/anecdotes

In New Orleans I saw a guy who gave Mumford and Sons energy do a surprisingly charming routine that is memorable in retrospect for the fact that he really didn't display any memorable real spectacle but the payoff was a pun on "barefoot", which I think he was was not wearing any shoes, and when he said "barefoot" he pulled a bottle of "barefoot" brand wine out from behind his back (like, as a magic trick) and it was very random but kinda cool.

Not my personal anecdote, but a friend told me they got disenchanted with street performance when they were performing in Edinburgh during the fringe and there was some theatre backstage common space where performers could leave their gear, and there were like 30 giraffe unicycles (its like how a bunch of animals independently have evolved to look like crabs. The giraffe unicycle is a natural local maximum of the successful-street-performance manifold.)

A friend and myself were juggling in downtown Portland, OR, by the waterfront, and a family rock band set up down the sidewalk from us...and then proceed to just totally kill it to the point that their crowd grew to the point where we were in their crowd. It was super cute, a dad and two kids, one of the kids sang and I think the other one played drums. Played covers. You can't compete with that.

Anecdote: to eat glass, what you apparently do is you eat a bunch of bread beforehand, and then you also pre-process the glass by shattering some glass and then with sandpaper or you take the edges off and it still looks sharp but it's not so (apparently) you can digest it fine? (DISCLAIMER: I was told this, can't verify. Please don't try yourself and then blame me)