Southgate’s sights and sounds

Even as winter approaches entertaining street performers continue to charm our Southbank neighbourhood.

Last month I expressed thanks for the cleaners who safeguard our living and gathering spaces. This month I want to highlight our street entertainers.

Their talents are vast. They include vocalists and instrumentalists, cartoonists, magicians, gymnasts, balloon sculptors, and comedians. Equally as vast are their ages, genders and ethnic and cultural backgrounds and they all, to a performer, do what they do out of love.

While any income might be appreciated, our street performers act from a love for their crafts to colour the world for the rest of us. They invite us to love what they love. To love with them, unshackled from the often-bland worlds of screens and ear buds.

The sights and sounds of their performances derive from and transport us into the wild wonders of theirs and our native worlds. Their performances offer countless sensual, ironic, breathtaking, beautiful and humorously absurd faces of joy to us.

Some are seasoned performers. They have honed their abilities and grown their repertoire over decades. Far from being second-rate, as the term amateur is often used, they match it with the best.

Others are starting out. They are often children who want to show us who they are. That’s how children make themselves known. Not by creating fanciful stories but through the performances that they offer.

Through their performances they discover, test, impact and own their places in the world, and they invite us to look beyond ourselves to stop and witness it all. Our applause and donations are our encouragement to “keep going!”

I have my own favourite performers. There’s the dazzling gentleman who sings 1980s disco standards outside Hamer Hall on many Saturday nights, and the incredibly dexterous musician who is often seen and heard playing a Kora-Annan along St Kilda Rd. Each artist is there performing from deep within their own souls, to move and inspire our hearts to joy.

To experience that joy you have to stop, park the atmosphere that you have brought with you, to witness and receive the heartfelt wonder of all that is offered to you on our kerbs and promenades. Good things happen there.

St Johns Southgate also contributes to Southbank’s rich environment through its free Bach Cantata performances. These are also opportunities for gifted instrumentalists and vocalists to perform and inspire the rest of us, heart to heart, purely for love and joy. Our next Cantata (BWV 177) will be performed at St Johns from 9am on June 28.

Thank God for our street performers. Every single one of them. It’s good to encounter them. Their art connects us with the world and even reconnects us with worlds we might have long forgotten. Worlds of sights, sounds, textures, aromas and surprise. •