Nobody Minds Until You Start Making Money.

-building respect and a video for instant crowds and enlarging your show.

When you go out to a spot and set up, nobody minds if you're failing.

If you are struggling and you can’t get a show together, all the other buskers, the shops, and the cops, are all your friends.

But, as soon as you start making good shows and good money, everybody jumps in to shut you down.

It's as if they want to punish you now for being a success.

This is going to happen a lot in your busking career.

Get used to it.

But stay focused. If you find a good spot, you should get everything you can out of it, and you should be bigger than you are.

When you’re doing a close up show, do parlor.

When you're doing a parlor show, do stage.

When you're doing a stage show, do stadium!

The reason being, is you should maximize your pitch for money, art, and public interest. If you do this, The people walking by don't have any choice, but to stare in awe and be involved.

Think about it, if you're a big enough nuisance, they'll stop, ha.

When I'm doing a close up show on the sidewalk, I’m really doing a half circle show. I want to fill up that space and give them a good show. The problem is of course, the cops and the shops don't like that.

But if they let me work that’s my goal.

My job as a street performer, is to congest the sidewalk. In turn the cop's job is to uncongested the sidewalk.

Somewhere in the middle, we try and find a happy medium.

In certain places you're gonna want to keep your crowds in an orderly fashion. you don't want your people spilling into the street where they could get hit by a car.

The cops will tell you to control your crowd. If you want to keep working, I would urge you to listen to them. After all you need to bring your audience in anyway, to build commitment and get paid.

It's your job.

Do your job, control your crowds, your audience expects it from you.

If you're professional, the cops and shops will respect you, even if they don't like you.

In life, you can't get everyone to like you, but you can get everyone to respect you.

You do this by being professional.

They may not like you, but it gives them comfort to know you have a code that you live by, and that makes you predictable and reliable, and people can work with that, even if they don't like it.

I remember working a pitch in Atlantic city. It was a legal pitch by The Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum and the manager didn't like me, but he couldn't stop me from working in the area, because the law was on my side.

After a few words and a few weeks, the manager came out one day and was just hanging out with me.

He said,

"I work bell to bell every day, I’m the highest paid here, and on breaks I come out and watch you make in a couple of hours what I make all day, And more, I might as well come out here. Why am I killing myself with this real job anyway? You aren’t even paying rent here!"

My response to that was,

"Hey I see a pattern emerging here, do you?"

I told him he was more than welcome to come out and share a spot with me any time he wanted to.

With all that said, it is my opinion, that one should not work on a spot where one is not wanted, but sometimes we simply have no choice.

So we must be shrewd and stealthy.

The best way to be stealthy on spots that don't want you there, is to build a crowd instantly, do a very quick show, get paid, and dip out to another location before they can find you, or at the very least before anyone has time to complain or do something about it.

In the video below I will give a very important demonstration on how build an instant crowd and to enlarge even the smallest close up act to a parlor, stage, or even stadium size show, in seconds, with only a small ball.

By using these techniques, as a close up performer, you can finally compete with jugglers and big physical acts. You'll finally be in the game with the other street performers and be a force to be reckoned with.

Remember.

Your prop is not the show!

The show is you.

It’s your entire body, from head to toe.

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This little video lesson has always been reserved for our students, but I’m hoping that since you are here, you are planning on being a serious student of our art.

Thanks for your interest.

Your Pal Jimmy

If you got a kick out of this, you can help an old man and his family out with a tip HERE.