When tourists think of New York, they might think of Times Square and Broadway. Time Square with its lights and Broadway with its musicals, both which define New York as the city that never sleeps. But the entertainment isn’t only available past a ticket booth. There are many performers on the streets, in the parks, and especially in the trains.
How often are you on the platform, and there’s background music to the music already playing through your headphones? How often are you on the train, and a group of performers enter in between the cars? Do you ever wonder why they’re performing for donations? Have you ever taken notice of the types of people performing and/or what they’re performing? I think train performances are worth exploration.
Anyone is allowed to perform in the subway as long as they follow NYC Transit rules and regulations. Under the MUNY program, members are scheduled for a spot where they can perform. They get priority at locations designated for MUNY members when non-members, called freelance performers, are in their spot. And as members, they are legally allowed to sell their CDs whereas freelancers are not.
For our final project, we can divide into groups and explore different train lines. Depending on the train lines, we are brought into different ethnic communities. We can focus on a certain community on each line, or the lines as a whole. We can build charts and graphs showing what sort of performers and performances are in which lines depending on location of the performance, the amount of human movement at the location, etc. We can interview the performers on why they perform what they perform, at where they perform, etc.
For the multimedia, we can incorporate videos, audios, and pictures of the performances. We can use maps as a way of outlining the train lines, and pointing out where the performances were located. We can also design the website as a sort of artist feature display to get their names and usual locations out.
For more information on performance regulations and MUNY: here.
