Professional music, as most people assume, belongs to grand stages under the spotlight. But for Natalia Paruz, a Guinness World Record-holding musician dedicated to an unusual craft, the stage is underground. Her concert hall is a subway platform, where her audience is distracted, hurried, sometimes generous, but most often indifferent. In telling Natalia’s story, we are invited to reflect, uncomfortably and yet gratefully, on the countless others who inhabit the margins: street artists, laborers, caregivers, the invisible threads of community whose contributions sustain public spaces yet whose existence is often disregarded.
Before Natalia started playing the musical saw, she was a trainee at the Martha Graham Dance Company. But just as she approached the brink of a very promising career as a professional dancer, fate intervened, and a taxi struck her. The spinal injury she sustained closed that career door forever, leaving her devastated and lost as the dream she had spent years shaping was destroyed overnight.
Natalia tried to find other paths, even learning computer programming, until one day during a trip in Austria, she stumbled upon a musical saw performance.
“All of a sudden I felt this vibration inside of me,” she recalls. “Like yes, I want to do this. I need this.”
Natalia immediately rushed home to try this instrument out for herself. What followed was not only the discovery of a new voice that changed her life, but also a never-ending battle against the misconceptions that have long shrouded street performers. She spent years correcting the same assumptions: no, subway musicians are not homeless; no, we are not failed performers who couldn’t make it elsewhere. In truth, many, like Natalia, are highly trained, accomplished artists who teach and perform in concert halls. They choose to play in the subway out of a devotion to an artform that is public and accessible, and also because they want to and love to.
“Every street musician can be a stage musician,” she says, “but not every stage musician can perform in the streets.”
In time, Natalia learned that her advocacy mattered. A stranger once came up to her and said she had read about Natalia in an encyclopedia of American culture, detailing how she changed the world's concept about street performing. Natalia was stunned. She never set out to change the world, but Natalia realized that in every correction and argument in defense for her art (and she had many), she was chipping away at the prejudices that made artists like her invisible in the very city whose vibrant soul relied on them.
Natalia also brings up that the precariousness of being a street artist in America comes not only from public perception but also from systemic failure of support. Access to healthcare, she says, is “the number one problem.” The costs are so high that many artists she knows refrain from seeing a doctor until their illness becomes so dire that they end up in the emergency room. Natalia is scared that continued threats of cuts to welfare and healthcare will further exacerbate this problem. Society’s lack of structural nets, indeed, leaves street artists further exposed.
Funds to art organizations and grants are also essential to sustaining an artist’s career. Natalia mentions that it’s much more difficult nowadays to receive grants, while arts institutions too, with their funds slashed, are now less likely to be able to invite artists like her to perform. She fears that soon, being an artist is going to shift from a profession to a hobby reserved for those with independent wealth, as fewer and fewer people can afford to dedicate their lives to creating. This loss will not only be felt by artists, but by everyone, in the quantity and quality of art being created that enriches our shared lives.
And yet, even with these struggles, Natalia looks upon her path with joy and gratitude.
“I couldn’t have chosen a better life,” she declares. She feels immensely fortunate for her family and friends who embraced and wholeheartedly supported her unusual pursuit. Today, she continues to spread the sound of the saw, sharing its beauty with people from across the world. She has even received a Guinness World Record for organizing the largest musical saw ensemble, but her dream reaches further still: to build a museum for the musical saw.
In the end, Natalia keeps playing. Down in the tiled tunnels of New York, her saw sings over the rush of footsteps and trains. Her journey is not just about one musician or one instrument. To stop and appreciate her music is to acknowledge that value is not only created by the prestigious, but also (and perhaps even more so) by those whose labor and art live in the margins, sustaining a brilliantly diverse humanity. We simply have to listen.