Street art has been present throughout the years, and all over the world. People who are in this line of work are often ridiculed and treated as hobos or beggars, which cannot be further from the truth. Most of these people have their own jobs, and they make a nice living, but they just want their various talents appreciated. There are musicians, actors, dancers, photographers, painters and even magicians who started their successful careers right there, on the streets. Almost any talent can be relevant on the street, what you need is a little imagination to find a way of using your talent and adapting it to a certain street art form. After you’ve done that, it’s up to the people around you to record it, and the internet can do miracles.
Street Musicians
Street musicians are the first thing that pops into mind when talking about street performers. Every city has them, and they are what brings light and joy to their streets. Many of the now well known musicians have started from just busking on the street and making money from willing people passing by. This kind of artistic expression is especially widespread in the UK and in the western civilization in general. The names which immediately come to mind are, of course, Mic Christopher and Glen Hansard, both of whom lived to become accomplished musicians, well-known worldwide, and Glen still enjoys playing on the street. And so would Mic, but he died tragically, while touring. You can see Glen in street action with none other than Bono from U2 right here. Besides them, the busking “lot” involves names such as Bon Jovi, Tracy Chapman, Sting, KT Tunstall and many, many more, who have been and are known to hit the streets every once in a while, just for the fun of it, if not for the money. If you take a closer look at the photo above, you can recognize a couple of our own team members engaged in this very activity, and as one of them, I can guarantee that it is probably the best way of making money with music, and making it heard by a wider audience, unless you already are a rock star, or something similar. Maybe the most interesting form of playing music on the street are those famous one man bands. Those people have many different instruments which they play all at once, thus creating the sound of a whole band, rather than just playing guitar and singing.
Street actors and mimes
This kind of street performance has been around since the ancient Greeks. They then had groups of people traveling together and doing street shows in different towns, which is a popular way of promotion even today. Same as musicians, some of these people rose to become popular theater actors and mimes, both historically and nowadays. There is one performance which shows the various motives socially active performance artists have when choosing to take their art to the streets. Namely, the multimedia artist Caeser Pink and his group – The Imperial Orgy, staged a piece titled Our Daily Bread, when they ceremoniously put loaves of Wonder Bread on the street with notes from “Satan” saying that he is willing to buy people’s souls in exchange for material possessions. It’s an obvious allusion to the clearly visible and omnipresent state of materialism in today’s society. The funny thing about it was when the police brought out sniffing dogs to inspect the bread for explosives. I’ll be bold enough to state that the author was probably amused by that act of extreme caution.
Street Dancers
A category similar to both street music and street acting and mimes, and it makes for a certain fusion of both of those types of street performance. Although there are traveling dancing groups, busking all over the world, you mostly see people dancing in the streets in an organized fashion as a part of a larger organization, namely a festival or something similar, whereas independent groups of busking dancers are getting more and more rare. The styles seen here can vary from classical dances such as a group waltz, or foxtrot, to the much more modern street-style hip-hop dance, with everything in between. Hip-hop, and all its variations are the most popular ones today, and they can be viewed as the style which keeps street dance performances and performers in business, since hip-hop is the dominant genre of music today.
Visual arts in the streets
This is a nice way to show off your mad painting or drawing skills. Painting a portrait on the spot can look very impressive, especially if you do it well, and swiftly, not to mention that you can charge a good penny for it. Street-made paintings and pictures, even photos are known to be sold for 50€ or more a piece. There is one more approach to visual arts in the streets, which is painting on the very pavement. This is the approach most accepted by artists worldwide, although it doesn’t pay off immediately, but it guarantees a certain degree of virality on the internet, and that brings your work into the direct spotlight of the public at large. Every time I saw a person drawing or painting on the street, there were dozens of curious citizens watching, and that can be treated as free marketing.
Street Magicians
The street may be the most appropriate place to perform magic tricks, since it offers a large quantity of possible volunteers. It is also quite rewarding when you see the amazed faces of the people watching you when you pull the “prestige” of your trick. Although collecting money for such a performance can prove to be tricky, you might just be imaginative enough to incorporate the taking of their money in your tricks. If the trick is any good, who knows, they might even end up giving you the money!
The name that pops into mind is, of course, the amazing Dynamo. That guy is absolutely incredible, and he enjoys hitting the streets very often. Most of the time he does a trick, and leaves immediately, leaving the public confused by the trick, as well as by the fact that he seems to have disappeared into thin air. His famous street tricks include “magically” putting a random person’s phone into another person’s beer bottle by just smashing them together, or simply walking across the Thames on a nice afternoon to the awe of the people passing by. He is now a well known illusionist, but he still loves performing on the street, and staying in touch with his audience, which is not possible in such a way when he performs in a theater.
Street art is, whatever the medium of your expression is, one of the best ways to make your art seen or heard, without having to invest huge amounts of money for marketing. All across the world, people are sharing their art with the public, and cities worldwide have laws governing the subject of street performances. In most of them, you just have to go to City Hall, report your future street activities, and, with a small fee, you can receive a permit, so that nobody can remove you from your spot forcefully.