Ad-free living in Havana, Cuba, makes that city seem like a thinker’s paradise, unsullied by toothpaste smiles, lingerie legs or fast food figures. Relaxed, colourful, healthy…a week in Cuba made my 6 years navigating the hive of New York City seem like complete madness.
Amerika Psycho, a book I just picked up in a Havanan internet cafe (nestled amongst biographies of the late Che Guevara) gives this summation of New York life:
People pound pavements shouting into mobiles; the skyscrapers double as billboards, the cafe dockets are emblazoned with bold reminders, ‘gratuity not included’…[and] don’t imagine you can counter the vibe by cruising the Museum of Modern Art, where the ‘voluntary donation’ is compulsory and the marketing relentless.
Art and money, culture and commerce, audience and finance; nowhere else that I have been have these links been so obvious and absolute.
Culture in Conflict
It is in this atmosphere that the street performers of New York compete for cash. Busking is both perfectly suited and completely out of place. There’s a shameful amount of wealth in Manhattan, millions of tourists, the potential to make hundred-dollar hats. Working those streets can be glorious or devastating. Ambitious performers combine the pizazz of Broadway with the entrepreneurial spirit of Wall Street, using street smarts and tight routines to get big hats and avoid arrest. They shout loud.
And yet their audience, New Yorkers, are a ruthless bunch. It is tough to catch the attention of the city’s mp3-wearing, instantly suspicious, seen-it-all-before locals. To strive to be noticed is to strive to be crazy: you have to be unhinged if you are not to blend in amongst all the other talented and ambitious millions. To be able to cope with that pressure, to own it, and to create a cultural experience for your audience is as tough in New York as anywhere else.
The Locations
And yet shared cultural experiences, in the form of acrobats, singers, dancers, jugglers, musicians and misfits, are plentiful in New York. Central Park is teeming with performers on every path and under every bridge. The steps of the MET look like an amphitheatre on most days, covered in people being entertained. The Naked Cowboy prowls Times Square with increasing fame each year. The Washington Square Park musicians create clusters of crowds well into the night. And underground, the city’s subway stations boast a range and quality of talent unknown to nine tenths of the cities we’ve travelled to so far.
I can only imagine how many people have tried to make it by busking in New York. Heth and Jed give a good description of what faces a new busker entering the scene:
“They weren’t aware of what one has to endure before playing even a single note: hassles like transporting massive amounts of equipment up and down a shit-load of staircases and cramming into overcrowded trains brimming with severely pissed-off commuters. Then there’s the difficulty of making a buck in freezing temps or stifling hundred-degree heat. On broiling summer days, there’s no breeze and the air is so muggy that within minutes your clothes are completely soaked with perspiration. Couple this with bad money days and deafening train screeches, and you get a dropout rate of titanic proportions.”
And if you’re immune to that? You still have the police to deal with. Much of a performer’s feedback comes, in fact, in the form of fresh-faced rent-a-cops who believe (wrongly) that you need a permit to perform on New York’s streets. After 20 years of performing in New York’s subways, my favourite performer, a Chinese violinist who literally makes people cry with emotions when he plays, is leaving town: the police are ticketing him so much he can’t make a living anymore. We’ve heard the same is true for many more. New York is at risk of losing its street scene.
Flow, addiction and scaling the mountain
So why are there still so many street performers in New York? I believe the answer lies in the idea of flow:
Every pause, every joke, every nuance is responded to. And it reaches a point where everything I say is funny. The timing is crisp and I can just ride the laughs….
This chemistry is just somehow produced….I? It is almost as if I’m not doing it, they are doing it. They are getting it out of me…. It’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful.
And then at the end, the climax is a real climax, a whole purgative and catharsis for everybody—which of course is the crux of why people perform. That is the reward. — Turtle Racer Mitchell Cohen, Washington Square Park. [quote from Drawing a Circle in the Square]
Like a drug, that pure state of flow is addictive for street performers. Flow is what they strive for in each performance. And like a drug, the bigger the hit, the better. The more eccentric the crowd, the more refreshing. The larger the crowd, the more profitable. The harder the crowd, the more rewarding. Not only surviving there, but being successful in New York? Unbeatable.
On the side of the swarm
They climb the mountain because it is there. It is little wonder that street performer Philippe Petit, the Man on a Wire tightrope walker who traversed between the two World Trade Centre buildings, had been a street performer in Washington Square Park. For this city provides the utmost in street-performer challenges, and therefore the biggest rewards. Sinatra was right — if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, something that street performers—those who have stuck it out here for years—take pride in.
Also unsurprisingly, the idea for The Busking Project was born in New York. I was so impressed by these performers’ ability to freeze time, to burst bubbles, to interrupt the busy bees and worker ants, “transforming public places into social spaces,” in this, of all cities. Hailing (and performing to people) from all over the world, they had power, beauty, vibrancy, talent and a universality that could — no, should be seen by everyone, appreciated and cherished for what it is, what they do, and who they are.
We must praise them for sticking it out:
It is far more cogent to attract people in the public way (e.g. when art walks down the streets and actually competes with the common hustle-bustle) than in the arid, austere space of an art emporium. Not only does it force a closer understanding between artist and audience, but it also forces the art to be tougher, more demanding of itself. Street performance affects 90% of the population that may never view art except through the T.V., which God knows is something vaguely akin to using Milk Duds to lighten your coffee. — Pat Oleszko, 1970s street performer [quote from Drawing a Circle in the Square]