Mediathek
[Zurück zur Übersicht]We do it in the road
„Why don´t we do it in the road?“, sang Paul McCartney auf dem weißen Album der Beatles 1968. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt spielten die „Fab Four“ weder auf der Straße noch in den Liverpooler Clubs, sondern füllten bereits Baseballstadien. Die Frage war also mehr rhetorischer Art und es gibt Beatles-Exegeten, die behaupten, mit diesem Titel sei etwas ganz anderes gemeint.
„He is busking“, sagt man im Englischen, wenn jemand auf der Straße spielt. Es erfordert eine besondere
künstlerische Begabung, Menschen auf dem Weg zur Arbeit oder zum nächsten Supermarkt davon zu überzeugen, nicht nur für einen Augenblick stehen zu bleiben, sondern auch noch den Geldbeutel zu ziehen. Eine anstrengende Tätigkeit. Man sieht es den Gesichtern an.
Hutgeld werden von den Künstlern die Münzen – selten Scheine – genannt, die ihr Einkommen ausmachen und es gibt unterschiedliche Meinungen darüber, ob man nun das Geld im Hut lässt und damit den Eindruck erweckt, andere hätten auch schon anerkennend reichlich gegeben, oder ob man regelmäßig leert um zu zeigen, dass man noch bedürftig ist.
„We do it in the road“, ist das, was man ´work in progress´ nennt.
Fotoformat: 40 x 60, Farbe, matt, ungerahmt.
Eine Mappe kann angefordert werden. Sie enthält eine Auswahl der vorhandenen Fotos
“Why don’t we do it in the road?” Paul McCartney sang on the white Beatles’ album in 1968. At that time the “Fab Four” no longer played in the streets nor in clubs in Liverpool; their shows filled baseball stadiums. So this question was purely rhetorical and there are critics who maintain that the title means something totally different.
“He is busking,” you say about somebody who performs in the street. You have to be a very talented artist to be able to convince passers-by on their way to work or to the nearest super-market not only to stop for a second, but even to open their purse. It is a challenging occupation. Sometimes you can tell from the strain in the artist’ faces. And there are specific artistic skills involved which can attract people you don’t find among the audience in the opera, theatre or circus.
Without these artists every day life would be less poetic.
The coins – rarely banknotes – the artists get as their income are called ‘Hutgeld’ (hat money) in German. And there are contrasting views on whether it is better strategically to leave the money in the hat to show that other people have already made a donation acknowledging the high quality of one’s performance or whether it is more profitable to empty the hat from time to time to prove one’s needs.
Since 2007 I have taken photos of street artists and musicians wherever I came across them. I have known the musician PI LEBEI from the subway in Laim, Munich for 30 years. The Oud player at Taksim Square in Istanbul almost vanished in the middle of the noise of the traffic and the construction work going on. Performing wasn’t as easy for him as for the street musicians at the Fringe Theatre Festival in Edinburgh, the Theatre Festival in Sibiu, Romania, the Vietnamese Festival in Hue or the Tollwood Festival in Munich. The man with the drums wearing a blue sweater, I discovered in a small town south of London. After having played his drums for five minutes he found himself in a long argument with a police officer about whether the sounds his percussion instruments were producing fitted the pedestrian zone of Guildford. The flautist I met at the highest point of the excavation site of ancient Petra. What I couldn’t find out was whether she performed to attract people to her tea stall or whether she offered tea because playing music didn’t pay …