On Every Corner

Maybe it’s unfair to lug a video camera to Downtown Pittsburgh on Memorial Day, shoot the empty sidewalks and ask aloud why there are no street performers. But that mildly snarky sequence in the new documentary On Every Corner has a point: Pittsburgh’s largely 9-to-5 Downtown can’t by itself cultivate enough foot traffic to sustain a strong busking culture.

With On Every Corner, Aaron Bernard and David Cable of Tonerwoods Productions not only document Pittsburgh’s buskers, but try to pollinate a scene. The scruffily charming documentary introduces some two dozen of the city’s street performers and attempts to unite them for a climactic concert in Market Square.

The 72-minute movie was shot mostly in 2004, just after Bernard, now 32, returned from a decade working in Orlando, Fla.’s entertainment industry. Gerry Tonti, his partner in the newly formed Tonerwoods, was making audio recordings of street musicians; On Every Corner grew from Bernard and director Cable’s impulse to add visuals.

According to Pittsburghcitypaper.ws, Bernard was struck by the contrast between Pittsburgh’s scattering of performers and the density of buskers he’d seen in New York, Los Angeles and Orlando. He, Tonti and Cable were also saddened by how the Market Square they’d often visited as kids — they grew up in Brookline together — had gone from lively to moribund, even seedy.