‘Like a PhD’ in busking
Buskers, fans crowd Waterloo street fest, as trained performers risk their necks
WATERLOO — It took Peter Sweet almost a decade of professional training to rise to the top of his field. Today, he wears a suit jacket and bow tie — and dangles on a unicycle perched on a slack rope above a parking lot.
Sweet, 41, is a busker. The San Francisco native spends nine months a year travelling the world performing his act, defying gravity for laughs and a livelihood.
“I feel a lot of gratitude. My first gigs were in Canada at busker fests, and their generosity has allowed me to make a life of this,” said Sweet, who performed the Waterloo Busker Carnival over the weekend.
The festival, which started in 1988 as a tiny gathering in Uptown Waterloo, has grown into an annual celebration that draws tens of thousands of people for its eccentric collection of live street performances. Crowds now come for people like Sweet, and performers from such far-flung locales as New Zealand, Isreal, Switzerland and beyond, with money in hand.
“That first year, nobody had a clue what a busker was,” said Randy Warren, chair of the executive committee that runs the festival.
“Now a lot of performers are shocked when they come here to set up, and they’ve already got a circle of people around them before they start their show.”
The son of two academics with PhDs, Sweet admits his parents didn’t initially understand his plans to make a career as a busker. But once they saw how much work went into his act — years of theatre school, contemporary dance classes, and formal circus training — they began to get it.
“I trained for nine years to do this. It’s kind of like I have a PhD,” he said.
Busking has long been his full-time job, and he spends his winter months training and doing theatre. It took an awful lot of professional training to build his show, he said — from mastering the slack rope to creating the alter-ego of the clown who performs it.
It’s no different than any other professional job, he said.
“There’s a lot of people out here who learn just from doing. But more and more, in the modern era, street performers actually go to school. They approach this like a career,” he said.
Sweet says he started juggling and unicycling at age 14, mostly performing at parties. Eventually, he got the idea that he could use busking as a way to see the world.
“When I graduated school, a buddy and I wanted to travel around the world. We thought it would be cool to street perform and work our way around the world,” he said.
He started street performing at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, a popular tourist destination. He earned enough for a plane ticket to Australia, then toured Indonesia, China, and Europe by finding audiences wherever he went and living off their donations.
Sweet long ago conquered any fears of falling — and standing in front of crowd of strangers, day after day, hoping you can entertain them enough they’ll open their wallets.
“Everybody thinks the worst thing would be stepping in front of a crowd and not knowing what to do,” said Sweet, who now lives in Berlin. “But actually, the worst thing is not having a crowd.”