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Street Wise Theater |
| Section: THE ARTS / THEATER |
| Author: Herb Greer |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1992 |
| Size: 2,067 Words, 12,062 Characters |
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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 ...
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...ver and appropriate the hard-earned cash. Today, with the recession in Europe and America, there is less cash to earn. But busking remains one of the few jobs in which talented people can, literally, go their own way, in their own time, and follow the lead of their own spirits. That may be why the profession has lasted more than a thousand years, and will probably last at least as long again.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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