Students and faculty could be seen across campus Monday and Tuesday performing random acts of art as part of Augustana’s first Street Performer Days.
Professor of Music John Pfautz said the days were meant to increase creativity on campus.
“One of the ways of getting the arts out into the rest of the campus is invite them to performances and to have a display of the artwork,” said Pfautz.
Pfautz said street performing  includes all different types of art, not just music, which is common on city streets or in subways. He listed poetry, street or sidewalk chalk, stills, mimes and jugglers, on top of all different types of music. Students played music with a variety of instruments, including a student who played the bagpipes.
Junior John Whitson performed Monday with five other students. Each student sang a song they had chosen, improving by singing over each other. One student plugged a piano in outside of Olin, and Pfautz lent them African drums to play, too, which Whitson said “kept some variety and a beat.”
“Often, when I’m walking to classes, people are looking down at their phones,” said Whitson. “Hopefully that encourages people to be like, “Oh, that’s cool and there are people on this campus who are creative and have
talent.’”
The idea for Street Performer Day came about when Pfautz learned about street performers, called buskers, in Ireland, which Adam Kaul, associate professor of sociology, anthropology and social welfare, studied in Dublin while on sabbatical.
Pfautz was fascinated by the idea and wanted to try creating a buskers day on campus.
“We have a lot of people who play guitar and sing and they’re maybe not involved in the music building at all, maybe they are, and just random people that maybe don’t have an audience very often,” said Pfautz.  “We thought that would be kind of fun in a nonthreatening environment. People can walk by as they want and nobody can be offended.
He said students showed interest in street performing to him, but people would ask him what they should do and when and where they should perform. Pfautz said the whole point of street performing is that it is not regulated–it’s not meant to be organized around a schedule.
“The rules are that there really aren’t any rules except you are respectful of each other, volume level has to be controlled enough so that it’s not disturbing classes and people doing work in their offices and that if somebody else is waiting to use the space, then you don’t stay there all afternoon,” he said.
Whitson is taking voice lessons this term with Pfautz and said the class discussed performing together outside.
“We first talked about creativity and what that means in music and how we can be creative if we’re performing written notation on paper,” said Whitson. “It seems kind of regimented…how do you be creative and what can you add.”
Pfautz hopes students will be inspired to do street performing on campus more in the future, without set street performing days, necessarily.
“Because I think that’s what we want art to be, is that it is life and…it can happen in a spontaneous way—you don’t have to go to a recital hall and have your headphones on to hear music,” he said.