Rick Lewis: I began performing on the street in 1987. My main living nowadays is as a speaker and entertainer for corporate events (www.breakarule.com), but I still work the street when I can for the love of it.

I’ve rolled much of what I learned about people, human behaviour and performance into a message for organisations and it’s been very successful, mostly because there is so much juice in interactive and street style performance and corporate culture is dying for something real. I see myself as a bridge between the sanity of the street view and today’s business world.

I have authored a book that is regularly used in corporate development work that sums up what I learned and the insight I gained on the street. The title is 7 Rules You Were Born to Break. There are hidden rules in our culture that undermine the possibility of excellence. My mission is to champion the need for Intelligent Misbehaviour in the world.

Nick Broad: And busking has given you the insights needed for that mission?

RL: Busking is the most honourable form of business there is, where the product and service is generously given away and the customer is free to give back exactly what they have received in value.

There is no form of profession with a more demanding skill base. It requires the busker to be proficient in sales, marketing, branding, theatre, psychology (how individuals think), sociology (how individuals think and behave when in groups), customer service, risk management…the list goes on. People think of buskers as beggars rather than understanding that a skilled busker uses a public pitch out of choice, and that the ability to draw, hold and please a crowd necessitates mastery in a broad range of skill sets.

Street performing ought to be part of post-secondary curriculums, especially for business degrees. Busking operates as a meritocracy – if you don’t have the skills you don’t last in the profession, no matter what kind of politics you play. I love that about the profession, you can’t hide, you can’t fake it, you can’t get paid if you don’t show up and provide value to others. I wish every job operated by the same built in ethics.

And busking is culturally important, too. It is a public forum to consider society’s danger points, imbalances of attitude, behaviour, thought, habit, politics — and these are addressed through the most gentle form of necessary feedback and mirroring: humour. While digital advances abound people’s need to be directly addressed, inspired, entertained, informed and touched is only growing.

The busker reminds us of this, of the need for relationship, for spontaneity, for group experience, for team play between strangers, for laughter, for basic respect, and for doing the right thing.

NB: I love that idea — street performance taught to business students. We once had a reporter for the Wall Street Journal interview us for an article on NYC subway busking. I thought it might start a neo-liberal cultural revolution…

Anyway, playing devil’s advocate: circle shows might need all of the skills you’ve mentioned, but most buskers are musicians or statues who do little of that. Some are highly skilled and passionate, but others aren’t, barely interacting with their audience. Is that removed, bland style of performance so distant from begging? Do you see regular busking and circle shows as being in two different groups? Or should they be thought of (and treated) the same?

RL: I have seen street musicians who have moved me to tears based on the passion and feeling in their expression. I have also seen circle shows that have bored me to tears based on their lack of originality, authenticity, and willingness to risk anything of themselves. To quote the bard, “Full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing.”

So to answer your question, yes, there are two separate categories of buskers. However, they’re not divided by circle shows and non-circle shows, but by those who are doing what they love and those who are doing what they hope somebody will give them money for.

NB: Okay, let’s move on. Gigs have been largely replaced by technology: the radio, the TV, records, CDs, youtube, file shares, and who knows what’s next. People aren’t as motivated as they once were to see “live” shows. Add to this the increasingly bland products of commercial success, and you get an idea of how important the streets are, both as a venue for artists otherwise looking for somewhere to create art, and as a vibrant, edgy space in which audiences can see “real” content, not made-for-TV rubbish.

I guess my question is: “Intelligent Misbehaviour seems as important now as it was in the 50s. Occupy everything seems like a step in the right direction. Could buskers, too, unite in some fashion, and bring on an arts revolution?”

RL: It seems to me the revolution is one performer at a time standing for his or her vision and offering the finest art they can to public audiences. Organise or unite? It’s one of the beauties of busking, that the artist trades paperwork, meetings, red tape, permissions, schedules, and organisation for the chance to focus on their art and spontaneously share it.

Organisations and organising can work wonderfully for some things, but I’m not so sure it suits the heart of the busking tradition. I guess the question is, “Do we really need an organisation to make a difference?” I think most people want to make a difference, but it’s also a scary proposition. Unfortunately, I think there is a tendency to turn to organising as a way of avoiding what we are already free to do and to accomplish as an individual.

NB: But in a world that’s organising daily in favour of commercial interests, what’s the buskers’ best defence, if not to organise themselves?

RL: Sure, we can throw out the word “organise” and say “Yes, let’s do it” but the problem is that there is not going to be agreement on what that would look like. Then who is going to decide what we are organising for exactly, what the core issues are, who we’ll elect to represent those issues to the public, and who stands to gain in what way from the organising? So then you suddenly you have a political body and to run it you need a leader, but that leader ought to be a true artist who is passionately dedicated to the essence of what busking is, but the true artist doesn’t want that desk job, they just want to do their art, and the person who takes the job (not such an artist) then winds up misrepresenting his or her constituents. Just look at any political system, the more “organised” it gets the more removed it is from the purpose of its inception.

My vote is to stay unorganised, or as loosely organised as possible. Your project is a great start to that as long as it remains a celebration of diversity and not a call to standardise approaches. We need to diversify our approaches rather than agree on them, because that puts every artist out there on a different front, attempting to reach through a different gap or loophole that the establishment of “commercial interests” as you have called them hasn’t closed yet. If we pool our approaches, agree on a focus, then its too easy to shut us down, because we’re all standing in one place when the corporate bomb hits.

The power of our movement, if we can call it that, is that we aligned in spirit, not in practice. Busking is an underground movement, if we try to surface it, we’ll just be snuffed out. We are organised when we each individually take responsibility for finding, creating, stealing, sneaking, negotiating, charming our way into a pitch – somewhere, anywhere, and just keep offering what we have on an individual basis.