This month's festival pick...

World Busker's Festival

By Patrick Totty

Christchurch Throws Its Buskers into the Streets

Buskers – street performers – are as old as civilization itself. As soon as the first farmers began building permanent settlements 11,000 years ago, people with a talent for song, dance, comedy and sleight of hand soon found their way to entertain town dwellers in the streets. These days almost any city with more than 100,000 inhabitants has its share of itinerant performers and particular places where they can be found.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that buskers have competitions and festivals, places where the best of them can gather to entertain, cross-pollinate and even compete for the favors of judges and crowds. Halifax and Kingston in Canada have major annual busker festivals, as well as Denver.

One of the biggest and best is the World Buskers Festival held every summer in Christchurch, on New Zealand’s South Island. Billed as the largest buskers festival in Australia, Asia and New Zealand, the next edition will take place in mid-January, 2003. Next year’s event is expected to outdraw the150,000 who came to Christchurch in 2002  view 20 of the world’s best street performers.

As with all good busker fests, Christchurch simply puts its guest buskers on the street and lets them perform. Starting in the morning and going into the late night, each busker gives several performances throughout the day, assuring visitors a good chance to see the best performers at some point.

All performances are free. As they do in their regular lives, the buskers who perform in Christchurch, no matter how mighty their hometown reputations, live and die on their own merits. Spectators are free to toss some bills or coins into the buskers’ hats – or not.

Beyond mere buskery, though, is Christchurch itself, a green oceanside city of 350,000 that many travelers consider the most English of all the overseas cities in the British Commonwealth. It’s not hard to see why. The city is noted for its pleasant climate (summer temperatures average 72° F; winter temperatures 54° F), and is much like Seattle but with far less rain. That moderate range has inspired a city of botanists and gardeners, and the establishment of a municipal botanical garden that's considered the best in New Zealand.

Visitors can even go punting on the Avon River, which runs through the heart of the city, and is lined with willows and oaks from seedlings brought over from Britain many years ago.

You can eat well in Christchurch. The farming country around it is much like Sonoma County in California – a seemingly endless provider of cheeses, seasonal fresh vegetables, lamb, fish and fine white wines that are beginning to attract international notice. Christchurch has two restaurants that take advantage of this bounty, one of them among the top 10 in the country. Upscale Pescatore offers fresh crayfish, tuna, salmon, oysters and scallops, matched with local cheeses and wines. The more casual  50 on Park offers meat and fish dishes with Chinese, Pacific and even Southwestern U.S.-influenced sauces, seasonings and side dishes. The microbrewery movement has descended here with a vengeance – New Zealand has more of them per capita than any other nation, and Christchurch and its environs have nine of the country's 55 microbreweries.

Ninety minutes’ drive west of Christchurch are the Southern Alps, New Zealand’s jagged, snow-covered main range that dominates so much of South Island. As with California’s Sierra Nevada or the European Alps, there is no limit to the outdoor activities people can enjoy there – hiking, fishing, mountain climbing, wildlife photography, river running, camping, skiing, snowboarding and mountain biking.

Some handy URLs:
http://backstage.festivals.com/interview/010621/index.cfm
http://www.worldbuskersfestival.com