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Thursday 7 August 2014

Fringe Review street performers

Okay, so keeping up with all the shows that I've seen turns out to be a little difficult. Keeping up with all the street performers is even worse, because you just have to leave the house and there they are. They are everywhere and they only get 30 minutes maybe an hour for their performance so they change all the time and you get to see A LOT of them. So I have decided to so only quickly review them and to keep updating this one post. SO if you are interested in what I have to say about the buskers (street performers), keep coming back to this post, because it will be extended and extended and extended.

The first one I'd like to review was Daniel from Canada he represents a certain kind of busker. I think I joined the crowd halfway through the show. He was about to juggle with three fire clubs. After he did that, he stood on a board which he balanced on a tube, which was also balances on a tiny little table and the whole thing was standing on wet slippery cobble stones. Up there he juggled with axes and machetes and after that came his last trick. He is a rather slim person, yes. But it seemed impossible that he would fit through a tennis racket (without the strings of course). But he wiggled his way through it. And he did that while he was still balancing on the board/tube/table construction.
All in all quite impressive. Unfortunately you have a lot of these shows during the Fringe. There must be hundreds of jugglers and other circus people. He was funny, he involved the audience quite a bit and he wasn't shy about making fun of himself, but again, a lot of street performers do that. If I had seen him in another setting without all the other street performers, I would have been impressed but during the Fringe he is one of many unfortunately.

The next street performer I saw was a guy from South America, unfortunately I didn't manage to catch his name. Most of his show was basically him making fun of people trying to walk past his show. She would pretend to mop up the floor and get in people's way or walk behind them and mirror their movements. He also had a number of different sounds and songs, so he could match them either to what he or the crowd was doing. When there was a large number of people trying to get past him, he would put on sheep or cow sounds. There was a guy with a broken hand and he would play "eye of he tiger".  That guy cracked me up. I think I haven't laughed that much in a while, I had tears in my eyes. Yes, I am sure some people thought he was a little offensive, but most of the people were good sports and played along. Funniest of all was the middle aged woman, who sort of started to do strip tease while her son or nephew stood rather embarrassed on the side of the show. Too funny. The whole show was basically a build up for the performer juggling first with 5 by the very end with 7 balls. In my opinion he didn't need to do the juggling bit, the rest of the show was amazing already and rather unique, the juggling is something you see a lot during the fringe, the part of him playing with the audience, not so much.

And then I saw a really interesting couple. Interesting because they were different. He was singing and playing the guitar really well (esp considering that most of his right forearm was gone) and she was dressed up like clown and dancing and performing pantomime style to his music. Again I only saw the last 2 or 3 songs of the show, but he covered No Diggity and Stand By Me which are both songs I love and sometimes her movements would mirror the words in the songs, sometimes she would just dance and sometimes she would react to what the audience was doing. I really loved those two performers for two reasons: One them being different and doing a different type of street performance and not the usual juggling (which is an impressive skill, don't get me wrong, I know how hard it is, because I've tried and I can't juggle for shit), two because he just seems to go with the old making lemonade out of lemons phrase and that makes me realise that I have no reason what so ever to complain about life!

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