"Every time I performed my character it was shaped by the city and by the audiences, Queen Street has always fed me with creativity and collaborators," Peter Jarvis.
There is an intriguing story behind his gleaming facade.
The robotic shining Silver Elvis, who moves and gyrates when offered coins, is a staple outside the Eaton Centre and at the Scotiabank Buskerfest, but he is just one of many characters created and performed by west-end resident Peter Jarvis, and just one piece of a tale that is as eclectic as the characters he's created.
"I am a mime artist, a dancer, an actor, a clown, a sculptor, a mask maker and a composer of music," Jarvis said while sitting in the backyard of his home near King Street and Strachan Avenue.
Jarvis, 51, plays nearly 30 characters including a scarecrow, a leprechaun, the Grinch, Charlie Chaplin and a cube. He teaches children how to make drums, rain sticks and chimes out of found objects and he is a founding member of The Subtonic Monks. But Silver Elvis makes up about 50 per cent of his income and Jarvis estimates he dons the costume at least 200 times a year.
Silver Elvis arrived on the Toronto street performance scene in 1999 after Jarvis said he met a talented tailor in West Queen West named Samuel Jackson.
"I found this unique holographic vinyl material," Jarvis recalled.
He took it into Jackson and asked him to make a jacket. Jackson suggested a high collar and then made pants to match.
"I put it on and thought, 'Holy, I look like a holographic Elvis - the 3D King!'" Jarvis said.
But the seeds of his staple character were sown long before that holographic suit.
A native of Grimsby, Ont., Jarvis was the Canadian freestyle disco dance champion in 1979. He danced for years on a circuit that made its way around clubs in the Golden Horseshoe and into the U.S.
He taught himself to do the robot by watching the dance show Soul Train, which was piped in from Buffalo.
"I loved the music for one. And there was this one couple on there that would do robotic dancing," Jarvis said. "I would see one minute of them in the full hour, but that was enough to inspire me to want to do it."
He was 11 years old in his father's car when he first discovered his talent for doing the robot.
"I remember my dad had this Grand Marquis and it had this mirror that was given to him by the dealership, which was this 007 James Bond kind of mirror that went right across the windshield," Jarvis said, remembering sitting in the back seat perfecting the robot dance in the mirror.
From then on Jarvis said he was always an avid dancer. He won dance contests, which gained him VIP access to many clubs in the Golden Horseshoe.
"Disco was about the people dancing on the floor (who) were the stars," Jarvis said. "I was cutting lawns all day for eight hours and then I would dance all night."
Jarvis said he won some big dance contests, like Dance Fever (an American musical variety series) and between the dance contest money and lawn mowing he was able to put himself through university.
Jarvis also loved to design costumes and characters to "theatricalize" his dance routines.
"I would win because I had an edge of using theatre and telling a story through the dance," he said.
Jarvis graduated from Brock University in 1984/'85, where he studied theatre and business.
"As soon as I graduated from university I was offered a TV show in Toronto, a show called VidKids," Jarvis said. "I was using my robot in a kids stage show called Bob Schneider and the Rainbow Kids and I ended up designing a character for (VidKids) called Computer Man.
"They liked my skills of designing characters so I would write my sequences for my characters," Jarvis said.
Later, he was given a scholarship to study street performance at SUNY (State University of New York) Purchase College where he studied under famed clown Bob Berky, contact juggler Michael Moschen and clown/gymnast Fred Garbo.
"It was like a circus school, but for street theatre," he said.
However, Jarvis said his work as a street performer lacked the emotion he felt he needed to portray.
"It felt kind of shallow," he said. "The audience liked it but I felt kind of like a spinning top."
It was then that he went to study with notable Canadian clown trainer Richard Pochinko.
"It was the best move I have ever made in my career," he said.
He went on to work through the late '80s and early '90s for TVO, Sesame Street, Goosebumps and a movie called Bogus with Whoopi Goldberg, Gerard Depardieu and Haley Joel Osment.
In the end, Jarvis said he realized he didn't really love working in television and movies, and that is when he decided to take his art back to the streets.
"I was really tired of the non-reaction of performing to the cameras," Jarvis said. "And then when you create what you wrote in a script and then a producer that is heavy handed starts messing with it... so I was not proud of anything really that was being produced on television."
So when that Holographic Elvis suit came along in 1999 and sparked an idea in him, Jarvis said it was the perfect time to take his talents to the street.
He started out without music; he would pose in front of the Black Bull on Queen Street West and do his robot Elvis dance.
"It created quite a stir," he said. "I had this huge crowd and people would say, 'Wow that's trippy, it's a silver Elvis.'"
Jarvis said he railed against that silver sentiment for a short while, insisting on being a Holographic Elvis, but after enough comments from the street he relented.
"I just had to give in to my audience (who) were my writers now," he said. "The people know what they want, so listen.
"Every time I performed my character it was shaped by the city and by the audiences," Jarvis said. "Queen Street has always fed me with creativity and collaborators."
It was even the audience who insisted he start to use Elvis music or give him hints on how to improve his costume.
By his second weekend as Silver Elvis, Jarvis said he was booked for the entire summer all across Canada and the United States at festivals such as the Halifax International Busker Festival.
As Silver Elvis he has performed in New Zealand, Ireland, Hawaii and an Independence Day event in Kiev, Ukraine. Beyond geography, Silver Elvis photos and video are all over the Internet. And he has imitators all over the world.
"Silver Elvis, after 10 years, has reached kind of an iconic status," Jarvis said.