Our last night in Athens we found something special in a small pavestoned square in the middle of town: two interviews with non-buskers, both who had their lives radically improved by street performers.
On one side, the Kapnikarea, an 11th century brick church now sunk below ground level, on the other, fluorescent-lit storefronts offering the latest material necessities.
In the center of the square, jugglers shared tricks with each other, friends sat and chatted, a few onlookers sipped cans of beer. I walked up to a girl nicknamed “Margarita” who, I’d been told, often hung out with these buskers. She was not one herself, but was a sort of busker-groupie. I asked her why she was there.
“I hate Greece, I don’t know why I’m still here.” She was a Polish blond, happy, but smiling nervously. “I’ve been here for four years-” she motioned towards my camera. “That’s not on, is it?” “No,” I replied, “but it could be. Would you mind if I interviewed you?” Her eyes widened, and she shook her head a little. I told her I’d keep it off, and continued. “What I meant was ‘why are you here tonight?’”
She looked down to her left side and paused for a moment. “Last Christmas,” she said, “I was walking past here, and I saw some of these people.” She looked around. Club jugglers were throwing in tandem, others were practicing foot tosses and double spins. Two guitarists were playing uplifting cover songs. “I didn’t have many friends. I’d been here a long time, but was finding it difficult to meet people.”
“I lived near here, and I’d see them getting together. So,” she said, straightening her back a little, “I sat here to watch, and one of them talked to me, and we hung out. Since then I must have met eighty people, I have a lot more friends now. I can hang out with people every night, I’m not lonely in Athens anymore. They have changed how I see this city.”
Forget pro-busking arguments—like it teaches culture, or adds joy to a city. Here was someone who had her life radically improved by the presence of street performers, and the community they had built. Margarita wasn’t theorizing, she was personally and directly cheered by these buskers.
I thanked her for her time and returned to Chris and Belle to tell them Margarita’s story. Looking back at her, she was smiling again, rolling a cigarette, and speaking to two handsome jugglers that had sat down on either side of her.
She wasn’t the only person that night that gave us a great interview. A little while later, Chris and I asked Scott, a street performer we’d filmed earlier in the day, if we could use his equipment. After an hour or so bouncing on stilts and juggling clubs, we invited Scott to join our little group for a chat. He told us that his girlfriend was on her way; she was a reporter, and he thought she would be a good subject for our documentary. He was right; Stamatia completely changed my perception of how stable a busker’s life is.
Scott and Stamatia live together in a van. They park wherever they feel like: beaches, mountainsides, fields. Stamatia had been a manager, a job that she said required her to lie, to be mean—“they called me Hitler,” she laughed. After breaking up from another relationship, her friends suggested she meet Scott, an American. “I don’t want to meet a fucking American,” she told them, but the two soon fell in love. Although they are now thinking of a farm, children, and a more regular life, she has quit her job to travel from one city to the next with Scott as he performs. We asked her a usual question; “how do you deal with the insecurity of making a living from street performing?” She gave a surprising answer:
I disagree with you, I totally disagree with you. It is more secure , his job, than any other job, because if you lose your job you won’t change city or town because you are not used to changing cities or towns. So you will stay there, with the problems that place has, and you will try to find something similar to what you were doing.
If Scott cannot work here he will go to the next town, or go to another town. People will always have time to see a good street performer. And even if you don’t have money to spend, you will always spend money on a good street performer. So it’s more stable, I think, than anything else.
Scott chimed in: “We got lucky that she’s trying out street life for the first time at the same time as there’s a financial crisis and people are losing their jobs, they’re getting cut back, the old people are getting their pensions cut, medicines cut back. What I call the illusion of stability that was there is being shaken up right now, and people can’t anymore say that this is more stable than this. My job has proven even more stable than many others.”
And just like that, I could see how non-traditional lifestyles are not any less safe than traditional ones. Jobs are being eliminated. Pensions lost. Welfare cut back. And here was Scott, a street performer absolutely as secure as he ever was.
We might not have gotten the best footage in Athens, but that night I heard two compelling and unexpected stories that gave busking a new flavour for me—I can now see how it can offer someone who has the skills, passion and a willingness to risk everything a secure and enjoyable means to survive. And by doing that, they have the chance to drastically improve the lives of those who live near them.