Street performance
[1][2] Performances are anything that people find entertaining, including acrobatics, animal tricks, balloon twisting, caricatures, clowning, comedy, contortions, escapology, dance, singing, fire skills, flea circus, fortune-telling, juggling, magic, mime, living statue, musical performance, one man band, puppeteering, snake charming, storytelling or reciting poetry or prose, street art such as sketching and painting, street theatre, sword swallowing, ventriloquism, weightlifting and washboarding.
Today, the word is still used in Spanish but mostly reserved for female street sex workers, or mistresses of married men.
[citation needed] There have been performances in public places for gratuities in every major culture in the world, dating back to antiquity.
For many musicians, street performance was the most common means of employment before the advent of recording and personal electronics.
Romantic mention of Romani music, dancers and fortune tellers are found in all forms of song poetry, prose and lore.
[citation needed] Mariachis, Mexican bands that play a style of music by the same name, frequently busk when they perform while traveling through streets and plazas, as well as in restaurants and bars.
[7] Around the mid-19th century Japanese Chindonya started to be seen using their skills for advertising, and these street performers are still occasionally seen in Japan.
In the 19th century, Italian street musicians (mainly from Liguria, Emilia Romagna, Basilicata) began to roam worldwide in search of fortune.
[citation needed] One-man bands have historically performed as buskers playing a variety of instruments simultaneously.
A current one-man band plays all their instruments acoustically usually combining a guitar, a harmonica, a drum and a tambourine.
[citation needed] The counterculture of the hippies of the 1960s occasionally staged "be-ins", which resembled some present-day buskers festivals.
Some of the bands that performed in this manner were Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, Moby Grape and Jimi Hendrix.
Buskers collect donations and tips from the public in a variety of containers and by different methods depending on the type of busking they are performing.
The first use of such contrivances was recorded by the famous Punch and Judy troupe of puppeteers in early Victorian times.
Popular pitches tend to be public places with large volumes of pedestrian traffic, high visibility, low background noise and as few elements of interference as possible.
Good locations may include tourist spots, popular parks, entertainment districts including many restaurants, cafés, bars and pubs and theaters, subways and bus stops, outside the entrances to large concerts and sporting events, almost any plaza or town square as well as zócalos in Latin America and piazzas in other regions.
Performers are found at many locations like Mallory Square in Key West, in New Orleans, in New York around Central Park, Washington Square, and the subway systems, in San Francisco, in Washington, D.C. around the transit centers, in Los Angeles around Venice Beach, the Santa Monica Third Street Promenade, and the Hollywood area, in Chicago on Maxwell Street, in the Delmar Loop district of St. Louis, and many other locations throughout the US.
The Law of the Twelve Tables made it a crime to sing about or make parodies of the government or its officials in public places; the penalty was death.
[16][17] Louis the Pious "excluded histriones and scurrae, which included all entertainers without noble protection, from the privilege of justice".
[18] In 1530 Henry VIII ordered the licensing of minstrels and players, fortune-tellers, pardoners and fencers, as well as beggars who could not work.
In the U.S. and many countries, the designated places for free speech behavior are the public parks, streets, sidewalks, thoroughfares and town squares or plazas.
[citation needed] Oxford City Council have decided to enact a public spaces protection order.
[22] It is common law that buskers or others should not impede pedestrian traffic flow, block or otherwise obstruct entrances or exits, or do things that endanger the public.
Camden Council is currently looking into further options to control the problem of nuisance buskers and the playing of amplified music to the detriment of local residents and businesses.
One particular technique that thieves use against buskers is to pretend to make a donation while actually taking money out instead, a practice known as "dipping" or "skimming".
