(LAWRENCE, KANSAS) It's hard to believe the Lawrence Busker Festival is celebrating it's tenth year keeping Lawrence weird. The festival will host over 50 difference acts on it's five downtown pitches. Included are fire displays, pogo stick acrobatics, break dancers, aerial artists, rubber chicken tricks, musicians and much more.The Great Escape will kick off the festivities where an escape artist will replicate Harry Houdini's feat of escaping from a strait jacket while hanging upside down two stories above the crowd. Other events include an attempt to to set the Guinness World Record for the most people attempting a water bottle flip. And it gets even better.

Street performers will soon become a regular sight in Lawrence. Thanks to a $5,000 City Hall grant, the city's Community Arts Grant Competition's...

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(WWW) Our Founding Fathers...who art in Heaven...
Explore the History and Cultural Impact of Street Performing in America.Ben Franklin on the Streets of Boston in 1718 and Patrick Henry and Sam Adams on the Revolutionary Streets are just a few that used their talents to influence the making of a nation. Street performances were a part of colonial American life as evidenced by these observations of Hanover and Williamsburg, Virginia and Boston. Nathaniel Hawthorne, anyone? Here's a history of busking in the new world.

Americana at it's finest.

Follow the link below for edification.

American Street Performing

Gatecrashers: The World Buskers Festival is being gatecrashed by street performers eager to cash in on the crowds attracted by the popular Christchurch event.

Heymoonshaker, a guitar and beatboxing act, set themselves up on a street corner yesterday afternoon to take advantage of the crowds.

"If the festival is a boat, then we are on skis behind it trying to get as much out of it as we can," gatecrashing British beatboxer Crowe said.

British travellers Crowe and guitarist Andrew Balcon met in Nelson and decided to perform in Christchurch to raise money for their world travels.

"We thought we would be able to perform in between sets in the Square, but they wouldn't let us," Balcon said.

Festival director Jodi Wright has taken a liberal approach to the busker pilot fish cruising in the wake of the festival shark.

"It is too hard to try to police them. Unless...

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(SWITZERLAND) An interesting page at Swiss Info has many busking attractions, pictures, and related stories starting in the nation's capital with the Berne Buskers Festival.Celebrating its 12th year this summer, the three-day event featured 42 acts with 145 performers from 18 countries. Half of the acts were musical with the rest involving clowns, dancers, human statues, and other artists.

Related busking stories and pictures take us around Switzerland to Basel, Biel, and Montreux as well as podcast on what it's like to be a busker in Berne.

A reporter for Busker Central entered a Buskerfest contest in Luzern back in 1992. Unfortunately, the city was given a bad reputation when the contest was found to be "won" by a professional opera singer who had stumbled outside. Her father also happened...

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(ST. LOUIS) Remember collecting baseball cards as a kid? Now you can collect busker trading cards of all the wonderful street-performers in St. Louis.Thanks to Board Bill #181, busking and street-performing is now legal in St. Louis. They are now buskers to be memorabilia-ized! And collected! And traded!

It all came about when the city raised the busker fee in order to monitor buskers. Huh? That's exactly what buskers Fred Walker and Nick Pence said - along with the ACLU when it heard of such a preposterous notion.

Now that a wrong has been righted and the laughter has subsided, the buskers may be memoralized as a collector's card. The busker game includes finding each artist performing and having them sign their card. The winner gets featured in an upcoming street-performer festival.

It's a fun idea....

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