(NEW ZEALAND) Often it's happenstance. Every now and then, though, you've become part of something more organised. Invercargill this weekend has a welcome taste of that, with the inaugural Southland Buskers Festival, a satellite event from the recently concluded World Buskers Festival in Christchurch.

In Queens Park, Wachner Place, and a raft of other venues, world-class performers, are disporting themselves in a host of implausible entertainments.

We have a contortionists and escapologists, acrobats, a strong-woman, a slackrope master, a guy who torments his face with rubber bands, a living angel statue, and we shudder to think what else.

Check it out

BRISTOL, Tenn. – The city has launched a program to encourage performers to display their talents at designated downtown spots billed as “busk stops.”

Known as “Busk Stop Central,” the program will allow performers – including jug musicians, avant-garde mimes, tap-dancers, orange jugglers, rubber-band pluckers, bongo players, Flamenco guitarists, spoken-verse poets, Austin Powers imitators, Renaissance Fair re-enactors and other artists – to legally do their thing at specified downtown locations and receive donations from passers-by.

“Busk” refers to an old English term for street performers, known as “buskers.”

A performer must apply for a free city permit to perform at one of three designated areas, all on State Street. The busk stops are marked with medallions in the sidewalk.

For details, contact the Bristol D...

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(GERMANY) Behold the best busker in the world...or is he? We'll let you be the judge as they say. What we have here is Schrotti, possibly the largest one-man band in the universe. Along the Rhine in Düsseldorf plays this extraordinary busker...but is he the best?Full Story & Video

(SWITZERLAND) An interesting page at Swiss Info has many busking attractions, pictures, and related stories starting in the nation's capital with the Berne Buskers Festival.Celebrating its 12th year this summer, the three-day event featured 42 acts with 145 performers from 18 countries. Half of the acts were musical with the rest involving clowns, dancers, human statues, and other artists.

Related busking stories and pictures take us around Switzerland to Basel, Biel, and Montreux as well as podcast on what it's like to be a busker in Berne.

A reporter for Busker Central entered a Buskerfest contest in Luzern back in 1992. Unfortunately, the city was given a bad reputation when the contest was found to be "won" by a professional opera singer who had stumbled outside. Her father also happened...

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(LIAM MURRAY BELL) Three cities, two years, one chance - a story of a young man determined to find his voice in this world. Plucked from obscurity in Glasgow, Rab Dillon is about to become the next great protest singer.Seduced by promises of stardom and carrying only the guitar given to him by the girl who broke his heart, he travels down the road to London. There, he records his debut album that will speak to the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, and the disheartened. But one year later, he is sleeping rough on the streets of Brighton.

A modern-day ballad set across three cities and two years, The Busker is a rich comic exposé of the music industry, the Occupy movement, homelessness, squatting - and failing to live up to the name you share with your hero, Bob Dylan. It is also the story of what survives ...

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