BUSKERFEST from today (Thursday, August 22) to Sunday (August 25) at various times. Yonge between Queen and College. Pwyc. torontobuskerfest.com.
If you head down to Buskerfest, keep your eyes on your fries.
Walking among the 100-plus street theatre acts, including acrobats, musicians and visual artists, are two human-sized seagulls. Polly Cameron and David Laquerre don their giant bird costumes and roam the crowd, using long fiberglass beaks to squawk at curious onlookers and then go after their snacks.
“Seagulls have this fantastic nuisance personality – they’re total mischief makers,” says Cameron, who got her start playing a gull 10 years ago in Melbourne before moving to Montreal. “They’re the perfect animal to play as a street performer, because your job is just to make a ruckus.”
The brainchild of veteran Scottish busker Mike Rowan – who founded a company called Surreal McCoy to manage his collection of strange and striking costume acts – the Giant Seagulls make three 45-minute appearances each day along the fest’s new home on Yonge between Queen and College, engaging unsuspecting audiences with their playful, coordinated antics.
“These costumes evoke a lot of different reactions,” says Cameron. “For some kids, we’re their new pet, and they grab a wing and follow us around for the next 45 minutes. Some adults treat us like real seagulls and say things like ‘Hey! Don’t poop on my car!’ Sometimes we’ll cross paths with a real seagull that’ll just give us this long quizzical stare.”
Cameron and Laquerre try to make the gulls as striking as possible, which requires lots of non-verbal coordination once they’re out working the crowd.
“To make the sight as surreal as can be, we try to mimic real seagull behaviour as closely as possible – except, of course, for flying. The beaks really work, so we can grab and eat food. We’ve found that the costumes are even more visually pleasing when we’re moving in unison, so if one of us looks in one direction, the other tries to follow suit. Being partners in real life helps. We can read each other’s moves implicitly, even from inside the costumes – and if we need to get each other’s attention, we just squawk.”
Cameron admits that her special bond with seagulls lingers even after the costumes come off.
“Seagulls are totally my spirit animal,” she says. “It’s hard sometimes after the show to shake off the gull behaviour. I embody them so much in the costume that when I take it off and am just walking around these festivals as Polly the human, I’ll catch myself making birdlike movements and eying people’s lunches!”
Cameron hopes putting a different spin on the humble gull will help people stop seeing these animals as annoying pests and start empathizing with them a bit more.
“I’m an animal lover for sure, and I hope that after seeing us people are a bit kinder to their neighbourhood gulls. I certainly feed them more than I used to.”
Even with the free snacks, Cameron says the most rewarding part of the act is basking in the responses they get.
“The best part about performing street theatre, and especially the seagulls, is the pleasure of making people laugh, which in turn makes us laugh. Usually if the audience is laughing, I’m silently laughing inside the costume.”
stage@nowtoronto.com | @jordanbimm
