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Accepted Paper:

Players: Capturing the performance of street music in London  
Jude Robinson (University of Glasgow)

Paper short abstract:

In this photo essay I consider how London's street musicians temporarily transform marginal urban sites into performance spaces, and reflect on how images of hands and instruments set against fragments of urban landscape can give an insight into the phenomenon of playing to transient audiences.

Paper long abstract:

Bards, waits, minstrels and strolling players have been part of England's landscape for centuries, and are likely to have contributed to London life since the city's foundation. Often on the periphery, street musicians, or 'buskers', offer a challenge to the changing city, as while their fluid, reflexive and opportunistic ethos conforms with neoliberal values of entrepreneurialism and can be viewed as making a positive contribution to urban public life, their mobility and legitimate freedom to create spontaneous music in public places can spark darker commentaries, as being dangerous and antisocial and therefore in need of control, regulation and censorship. Through this series of images of buskers in various locations in London, I explore the act of performance and 'playing' outdoors in public places, and reflect on the use of photography to capture the transient and situated qualities of street music. The buskers briefly transform mundane urban places and spaces into performance spaces, extending beyond the footprint of the performer to the reach of the music they produce. As their audiences are mostly in motion throughout their performance and may only hear a 'snatch' of the repertoire, the performance must be 'complete' for that moment of engagement, and I reflect on the extent to which images representing the position of hands and instruments set against fragments of urban landscape can hint at a wider life narrative and relationship to music, the city, and to audience(s).

Panel P23
One City, Multiple Stories: Visual Narratives of London Urbanism
  Session 1