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Women on the StreetsDateline: 15th August, 2008Street theatre is as vibrant as ever in Edinburgh this year, but women street performers are few and far between. Lucy Ribchester talks to three of the Fringe’s five registered female buskers.Amid the expansion of venues, breakaway festivals and ticketing troubles, street theatre is one thing that can be relied on to keep alive the spirit of the Edinburgh Fringe. This year, as ever, jugglers, acrobats, fire-eaters, escapologists and comedians are, in spite of the awful weather, risking their lungs to entertain the troops up and down the Royal Mile. But of the sixty registered street performers turning Edinburgh’s cobbles into their theatre, only five are women that’s less that 10% - and even fewer have their own solo show. "I guess sometimes it does feel a little bit like a boys’ club," says Skye Broberg, a 30-year-old aerialist and acrobat originally from Australia but now based in New Zealand. Broberg is performing here both in a solo street act and in a show with a friend. Her solo show, involving contortion, hula-hoops and acro-balance, is performed most days on one of the five pitches allocated by the Fringe office for street performers. Every morning at 10am, the 45-minute slots for the day are drawn in a ballot, and it’s a lucky dip as to who gets the best time and pitch. Broberg came to street theatre from a background studying aerial skills in Christchurch, New Zealand. When she found that jobs in the circus were thin on the ground, street theatre became a way of making some extra money in between shows. This year she has been travelling around Europe, fitting in a trip to Edinburgh between Iceland and Finland. Despite the drawbacks of weather and the invariable queuing system for pitches, which is roughly the same from festival to festival, the freedom of the lifestyle makes it worthwhile."‘I’d like to think that there’s a certain amount of autonomy: you can change the show if you’d like to, and tweak it. You’ve got nobody there to tell you what to do or how to do it, so it’s an ongoing learning process I guess, with a certain amount of freedom." She adds that while the male street performers are usually supportive of their lesser-numbered female counterparts, that doesn’t account for obnoxious audience members. "I haven’t had any really bad experiences, but I have had, basically, people just being slightly lewd afterwards, or just making rudely suggestive comments, which I don’t think the boys tend to get." Meanwhile Australian busker Tahmour Bloomfield has her own candid theory on why there are so few women in the job. "It’s fucking hard. They say to be a good busker you have to die 100 times, to be a really good busker you have to get punched in the face by a volunteer …I’m hopefully never going to have to look out for that." Bloomfield’s act is a showcase for her hula-hoop skills, but she also juggles, contorts and strips. "I do a comedy strip. I try not to use sex to sell, but at the end of the day that’s something that everyone has in common." One of the draws to street theatre for her was the lack of women in the industry, and it’s something she thinks her audiences appreciate. "‘I get a lot of women in my front row, and I get a lot of women who come up at the end and thank me and pay me. And I do push that kind of a rhetoric, that I’m a chick and there’s not a lot of us. Sometimes I feel like it’s a bit women’s lib, and I think that puts the guys off, and I know men can be intimidated by solo female street performers." The drawbacks of her profession, according to Bloomfield, include a culture in which the odds are often stacked in favour of the male majority. "There’s no sexual discrimination laws, you know: we don’t have any kind of that policy on pitch. So if you can put up with the bullying, and… you know, most of them are really nice, don’t get me wrong. There’s a couple though who can be total arseholes, and who’ll try to intimidate you off pitch." One of the problems both Broberg and German performer Nora Bucher, originally from Heidelberg, mention, is that of vocal projection. Bucher, who came to street theatre after ten years as an indoor actress, does a double-act magic show without amplification. She makes a slick close-up magician, turning a signed fiver into €50, and pulling the original out of a fresh lemon that’s been sitting under the watchful eye of an audience member for the whole show. But with flyering-armies and other buskers to compete against in West Parliament Square, just off the Mile, keeping a crowd’s attention is a tough call. On the afternoon I watched, many left without paying. Edinburgh, says Bucher, is a tough audience to sell to. "It’s different than on the street in Heidelberg. Heidelberg is a smaller town and everyone is interested, in something new, and here are so many street performers and it’s more difficult to get attention…The worst thing is when nobody stays, and you stay alone." There are also the issues that affect every performer regardless of gender. Here, that’s the small matter of rain. "There’s been a few times that I haven’t been able to do shows, due to the rain," says Broberg. "I’m not really one for getting soaking wet and having equipment ruined and that sort of thing, especially with the amp and headsets. And I’ve only got a small voice, so I find it tricky to do shows without a headset." The balloting system doesn’t make allowances for changes in the weather, and if the heavens open during your allocated slot, there is no waiting around to continue after the rain stops. The schedule of acts is run as a tight ship, and as Bloomfield puts it, when she can’t perform "that’s my tough luck, and I don’t earn any money that day." The financial uncertainty of street theatre is a double-edged sword for performers. On the one-hand, as performer Ben Danger puts it during his show, street performing is the most honest form of theatre audiences pay afterwards. This means that if everyone agrees to play along, an egalitarian balance will be reached between those who can afford a little more or a little less. "And sometimes you get people who can afford a little bit more, and they can give twenty quid," says Broberg with a grin, "but five pounds is probably a good donation - even just a couple of pounds is good: two or three, whatever you can afford realistically. You know, people have got a full-time job, and they’d go and pay however much to see a show, so if they spend 45 minutes watching a show, and they enjoy it, to give five pounds is really not that much." With most Fringe shows coming in at well over a tenner this year, many of which will be chosen on blind luck, it’s hard to disagree. Of course one of the drawbacks of shifting times and pitches is not being able to find the particular street show you want to see. When it comes to trying to catch a show by one of five women out of sixty performers, the odds are not favourable. Lucy Ribchester
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