This section looks at how informal practices draw on people’s professional background and training and to what extent the practices are dependent on such formal training. It then discusses the extent to which they deploy informality in planning and rehearsing their practice.
5.2.1.1 Training and professional background
For a number of interviewees, their informal practice had a direct link to their professional background and training. For instance, several of the buskers had a music degree, while others had taken private lessons in guitar, piano or singing at some point. However, it is interesting to note that most of the interviewees did not feel that their formal training was necessary for street performance. This is partly because they felt that the skills that were required for busking were sometimes quite different from what they were taught in their music education, as this quote highlights:
“Imagine you were a ballet dancer and you were building this beautiful body aesthetic […]. And then you want to become a street or hip hop dancer. You need to just throw all that stuff out of the window and just develop a completely new way of expressing this.
And so I think, we’re trying to do that. It’s hard, it is hard.” (B1, interview, 2015)
In the other case studies, there were also examples where interviewees used professional skills in their informal practice, such as people with a gardening qualification being involved in guerrilla gardening, or trained architects and physical planners, worked on road and public space design as part of the Equal Streets and spot fix initiatives.
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In other cases, there was not a full overlap between their professional background and their informal practice, but their previous experience or skills benefitted an element of their work. For instance, one guerrilla gardener who set up a community gardening project as interim use of a property development site and needed to submit a planning application for this project, was only able to do it because he was a trained landscape architect who had previously worked on planning applications as part of his job.
However, there were also many interviewees who emphasised that their practice had no link whatsoever to their professional background and they rather learned informally while working on their project. For instance, there were several buskers who said that they were either completely self-taught or taught by friends and family. This includes the one busker I interviewed for whom busking is now his full-time job. He explained that he never had a singing lesson, but out of necessity to keep his voice healthy, he worked a lot on his musical skills, such as his breathing. Similarly, one of the guerrilla gardeners argued that she set up a large project by “trial and error”. She explained that she read up on a lot of things, but that ultimately it came down to doing it in practice:
“There’s this saying that if you haven’t killed something personally, then you don’t know the plants. And I’ve killed a lot of plants, but I’ve learned a lot by growing it.” (GG1, interview, 2015)
Among those interviewees who highlighted that they had no prior training or experience in the work that they were doing as part of their practice, some felt that this informal approach made their work a little bit harder, or at least progress more slowly. For instance, one book swap organisers aiming to scale up his idea and set up book swaps in all London Underground stations felt that because he did not have any background in either literature or in a campaigning organisation, he was lacking the network and the professional recognition to make his idea happen.
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5.2.1.2 Planning and rehearsal
There was a great breadth of approaches to planning and rehearsal across the different case studies and individual practices, ranging from the very formal to the very informal. The Equal Streets case study was the project where detailed planning was considered most important. Interviewees mentioned that they had started initial discussions two years prior to the event being launched, while they engaged in detailed planning for eight months. Such planning included carrying out feasibility studies for the most appropriate roads for the event, setting up emergency plans, planning for traffic flow, and entry and exit points for participants.
There were different reasons for carrying out such detailed planning. For instance, the organisers from a spot fix project felt that carrying out a survey with close to 100 residents of a neighbouring slum to really understand the problem of why so much garbage is produced was necessary in order to be taken seriously by public authorities, especially because the core organiser group was made up of young female college students (including some minors).
A few other spot fix organisers argued that advance planning helped to ensure that everyone involved is sharing the same vision and concept, but also because it made the execution much easier.
A number of buskers also talked about their advance preparation. While some regularly rehearsed at home or hired a rehearsal space to work on some new ideas and try them out with other band members, only few practiced for a street performance. Rather, many interviewees saw the busking performance as an opportunity to rehearse. The following quote sums up what several interviewees thought of busking as paid practice:
“If you are going to sit at home and practice, you might as well just sit here and sort of practice and people throw a few quid in and it just buys you a drink at the end of the day. So that's why we do it, it's fun, it's good time to practice and you get a little bit money for it.” (B10, interview, 2015)
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While not as frequently, interviewees from other case studies also mentioned that they do not prepare much in advance. For instance, one interviewee involved in one of the free book shops explained that they did not have any consistent opening times. They only opened when they wanted to open, which meant that sometimes they could be open for 24 hours and sometimes not at all. Notwithstanding the above, people who wanted to come could phone in advance and if someone was available, they would open the book shop specifically for this one person. A few of the interviewees from spot fix projects also argued that they had not engaged in much prior planning. For instance, one interviewee said that he did not have a plan for a particular theme or concept for the paintings put up on his adopted stations. Rather he left it to the volunteers involved to come up with ideas.
In terms of preparation, there is thus a real mix of interviewees who draw on their formal training and those who learn on the job, those who carry out detailed planning and those launch into the activity without rehearsal or other preparation. In some cases, the latter feel that they do not need to prepare, because their previous formal training allows them to improvise on the spot, while for others the lack of fixed planning is central to the understanding of their practice. Such different approaches and sometimes internal tensions are further discussed in the following sections.