London’s Covent Garden and its first street performer casting call of the year threw up its fair share of talent – as well as surprises.
It’s a freezing morning but that hasn’t stopped a crowd of hardy wannabes from showing up at Covent Garden for its street performer auditions. It’s a mixed bag; there are jugglers, vocal trios, acting troupes and instrumentalists.
First cab off the rank is Norm – he auditions every time, with the same material. It’s tradition. Norm, in his 50s and sporting an old felt flatcap, steps into the middle of the horseshoe-shaped space, and, after some opening pleasantries, belts out a rousing version of You’ll Never Walk Alone, no less passionate for the handful of false notes.
Norm bows to polite applause and Covent Garden’s version of Britain’s Got Talent is under way.
The itinerant life
Andy Christie has been working as a street performer for 19 years and is so much a fixture at Covent Garden that he’s now on the judging panel.
A ‘comedy juggler’, Christie is familiar with the life of a travelling performer, although he’s more settled these days.
“What tends to happen is they’re more or less travelling,” he says. “A lot of them come over in May or June to work Europe – it’s a bit of a circuit. They follow the sun, basically.”
Street performers earn their money; Covent Garden is busy, but competitive.
“It’s possible to finish at the end of the day with a few hundred quid but it’s also possible to get nothing,” Christie says.
“Most street performers do something else as well – maybe gigs where they do their usual routine but get paid upfront.
A lot of actors become street performers as well, because it beats waiting tables.”
A mixed bag
One of the early candidates is a tall, 30-something guy with long black hair and a goatee, dressed in black, who, wearing a hooded cape, takes to the stage with his cello.
Accompanied by a keyboardist, he belts out a particularly angsty number, while singing along: “I’ve been in darkness all my life, you’re the only thing that lets me see.”
Probably not the kind of feel-good, family fun material you’d expect from a street performer.
The next man up is closer to the mark. Carlos, after introducing himself in a thick Spanish accent, is a juggler.
After some impressive warm-ups – he juggles balls by running them along his shoulders and bowling skittles by tossing them behind his back – Carlos prepares for the pièce de résistance.
Standing on one leg, he starts spinning a water polo ball on the upper spoke of an umbrella before looping an Aerobie disc around and around on his back heel. He then starts to juggle two balls as well. And then he opens the umbrella.
Selling it
As a fellow juggler, Christie is as impressed by Carlos’s display as the rest of the crowd. “From my point of view, he would have been straight in,” he says. “He was a better juggler than me, and had a nice bit of skill to finish off at the end.”
Technical skill are not the only criteria for judging street performers. If they lack the presentation and salesmanship required to make a living out of it, they won’t stick around, and this is taken into consideration.
“We look for a stage presence – the way the pitches are set up, we have circular shows so you have to gather a crowd and then ask for money,” Christie says.
“It’s no good just doing tricks and looking at the ground the whole time. So these people have three minutes to show that, to show that they can develop that relationship with an audience quickly.”
The next round of auditions will be held on March 28 and will, as ever, open with Norm’s rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone.
Market value
Covent Garden is one of London’s liveliest locations for shopping, dining and entertainment, with fashionable boutiques and open-air bars spilling out onto a cobbled piazza.
Back in the 1700s, Covent Garden was one of London’s dodgiest areas, with a well-deserved reputations for vice. It was once stacked with taverns and was home to so many prostitutes that a guidebook, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, became a bestseller. Talk about lucrative niche markets.
These days, though, it’s far more cosmopolitan, and is home to the Transport Museum as well as the Royal Opera House.
For an afternoon or night out in central London that ticks all the boxes, Covent Garden makes a pretty persuasive pitch.
