Over the last few months I’ve been looking at street performers and trying to understand their acts both artistically and technically as I suspect I will also be doing some of my performances outdoors. While I very much doubt I will be juggling or doing Beatles covers I think there is much to learn from watching street performers, both in terms of what to do and how to do it and just as much in terms of what to avoid.
Yesterday I saw my first street performers in Xiamen. It was a free, outdoor musical comedy act performed by and largely for older people. From a technical point of view I was immediately attracted to it, they had placed loudspeakers in the trees and had arranged plastic chairs for the spectators. The location was ideal, it was a park by the ferry terminal and it was full of older people playing cards, drinking tea, chatting and waiting to be entertained. Much as I like the space, I doubt I will do a show here as I suspect I would be perceived as an intrusion, being both Western and under 40.
While not exactly a performer in the same sense, I also saw a man begging for money who had an extremely simple and efficient technical set up and an incredibly dramatic ‘act’. I am nervous of aestheticising away his desperate reality but I do have to note how well he was doing what he was doing from a purely visual point of view.
