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Street Wise Theater
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20021 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
2,067 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Busker is an English word that once meant "pirate." Today it means the itinerant street performer who punctuates the city's noise with music, or poetry, or a sidewalk spectacle of mime, or even the older arts of fire eating, sword swallowing, acrobatics, or dancing. In America and Britain, busking is expressed mostly as music of one kind or another. But in the pedestrian walkways and the open place by the Centre Pompidou in Paris it provides a gaudy spectrum of artistry such as Europe has not seen since the Middle Ages.
The métier of busking--older than the theater in western Europe--lowered in medieval times, when almost all entertainers were itinerant. Minstrels--or "glewmene," "harpurs," "gigours (dancers)," "jugelours," and others--provided the bulk of entertainment at court and on public occasions like fairs. They were respectable vagabonds, and they appear in many accounts of those times, both in poetry and prose. Some of them performed remarkable feats, like handstands on the points of swords, while others used ribald material that attracted the censure of priests and lay moralists like William Langland.
In later centuries, with competition from theater, circuses, and other organized entertainment, the strolling players and singers fell into general disrepute.
In the sixteenth century, English Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbes saw:
Such drunken sockets and bawdy parasites as range the cuntreyes, ryming and singing of vncleane, corrupt, and filthie songs in taverns, ale-houses, innes, and other publique assemblies . . . every towne, citie, and country is full of these minstrels to pipe up a dance to the deuill."
Busker Evolution
During the last two centuries most of these barnstormers worked in circuses or cheap theaters, while the tradition of solo street singing dwindled to ballad hawking and the tattier fringes of the music hall. After the Second World War in London and other big cities you might see a fiddler, accordionist, or singer working up and down the theater queues or in pubs for a few coins and a drink.
About the end of the fifties the "folk" movement gave itinerant singers a new respectability. Especially in America, some of the "bums" became recording artists and even stars. Few now remember that Burl Ives began as a
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