Saturday, November 28, 2009

MYSTERY CLOWNS:How Many Can You Identify?

Courtesy of Dean "Elmo Gibb" Chambers


Pat-- See if you can identify all the clowns in this picture. Two clowns have both first and last names starting with the same letter (ie: Billy Baker).

Only one clown clowned on only one circus. Two clowns were considered legally married in Massachusetts. One clown wrote a book. Two clowns have owned circuses. Three clowns have trained dogs. One clown's grandfather was chief booking agent for Keith-Albee. Four clowns all lived in the same town at the same time.

One clown can only use left-handed chopsticks while eating rice.


-Elmo



HAHAHA



DAREDEVIL OPERA COMPANY: Cirkus Inferno



Mr. Jonah Logan and Ms. Amy Gordon

Friday, November 27, 2009

JON DAVISON: "What Do Clowns Do?"

This is the transcript of a paper I delivered in London at the "Festival Of..." at Central School of Speech and Drama in September 2009. It formed the final reflection on the previous year's research. Contemporary clowning over the last 50 years has largely rejected the notion that we can know what clowns do, claiming clown to be an authentic experience above all. I attempt to demonstrate such a position as false, and to reveal that clowning can be seen as a highly structured and ordered activity that owes little to the concepts of spontaneity, improvisation or play, and is therefore open to analysis of "how clowning works".


John Wright, in his study of comedy “Why Is That So Funny” brusquely rejected the notion that we can know what clowns do:

"Asking ‘How do clowns walk?’ or ‘What do clowns wear?’ are inane questions. But to ask ‘How do clowns make us laugh?’ and, more importantly, ‘What physical impulses inspire that comedy’ will take you to a place where you can find a personal ownership of ‘clown’ as a level of play." (Wright 2006: 180)

It only takes someone to state something categorically, and the clown who loves to contradict surges up inside me and speaks up with a “Why?” delivered with the intonation of a 6-year-old who just loves to contradict. Much of my research method is in fact based on such clown philosophy, which you might simplify as a kind of scientific scepticism, or instinct not to believe, to keep questioning, especially when three or more people agree on something, until there are no more questions left to ask or we are all exhausted from the attempt.

Wright’s policing of this no-go area for contemporary clowns sums up the now old-school, post-68 view that we are all better off since we did away with those nasty texts, authors, and anything that admits to being thought out beforehand, and ushered in a new era of spontaneity, improvisation and authenticity.

“Clowning takes us back to basics….it's not about routines, or structured material of any kind. “(Wright 2006: 184)

Wright does offer significant analysis of how his notions of play relate to clown, and I find much to agree with, particularly on the practical dynamics of the presence of the clown in the performer, but ultimately his position is a merely ideological one, in my opinion.

Most clown-as-play advocates lack the depth of thought that Wright brings to the matter, however. Louise Peacock, in her recently published Serious Play - Modern Clown Performance, talks of “the intensely personal nature of clowning which generates play from within the performer” (Peacock 2009: 13). Unfortunately, though, her main example is Slava Polunin, whose Snowshow is now a kind of clown franchise, the roles passed on to a list of performers operating around the globe. Not very personal, then!

Peacock offers no serious analysis of why we should continue to believe in the mantra of clown=play=authenticity. This simply stating of one’s faith in the authenticity or truth of the self is a key feature of much, though not all, contemporary clowning.

But let us leave aside debates about faith and scepticism, for I wish to turn my attention instead to another old discussion which should really interest us more as performers, as it is that question which has vexed actors, directors and actor trainers since at least Stanislavsky, and in truth since we began thinking about acting: “Is the actor pretending, or is it for real?” Or, to place a moral burden on the issue: “Should the actor pretend or should the actor create reality?”

Peacock and others, in their bland talk of truth - “the concept of performing truthfully is common in clowning” (Peacock 2009: 107) - more often than not end up talking about the “inner clown” (Peacock 2009: 34) and invoke the heritage of Philippe Gaulier along the way. Yet Gaulier has no recourse to concepts of “inner” anything. In The Tormentor, he writes: “The actor enjoys suggesting feelings. The audience enjoys feeling them. Nothing is true. Everything is false, except for our imagination“(Gaulier 2006: 174). Of course, the great clown guru is here talking about the nonsense involved in believing that characters are real. “A huge error is the confusion between the actor and his character” (Gaulier 2006: 175). If we follow Gaulier, rather than waffling about “inner clowns”, we can say that the actor, and especially the clown, is pretending for real. The pretence is authentic. That’s the best we can do to keep the faith, in my view.

Of course, such claims for a new age of acting that is more authentic, more true, more real, have been seen time and again throughout history. Soviet clowns in the 1960s, backed up by the Party, pushed away from the grotesque and towards the natural, the realistic. Oleg Popov, in his autobiography, was quite happy to break with the past:

"Let us move on to the Fratellini. Wonderful artistes, they perform in the age-old manner of buffoons, a thick layer of make-up on their faces. They are perfect connoisseurs of human nature, sharp and intelligent. But they do not try to reflect anything in their performance except such faults as stupidity, clumsiness, absent-mindedness. As a result it is hardly surprising if the most common outcome of their conflicts is a slap in the face. And the spectator hears a positive deluge of slaps. Certainly I understand that the Fratellini are the guardians of an old circus tradition, a tradition respected down the centuries. But the times demand that this tradition should be broken and it is this that accounts for the appearance of the realistic clown." (Popov 1970: 93)

A familiar argument? Well, we need only look back to the great shift from Melodrama to Naturalism at the end of the 19th century to find a similar ideological stance, one which dismissed the past as untruthful, deceitful, grotesque, false, in favour of a present which is authentic, true and, most importantly, ART.

Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack state that “drama written by the ‘emancipated dramatist’ stages its own seriousness as art. To see a play as ‘dramatic genius’ is to insist it is something more than a vehicle for the resident acrobat” (Shepherd and Womack 1996: 286).

This pretence to create performance that does not pretend, but instead is somehow “true”, finds its own kind of actor training:

"The “Method” appears to offer a uniquely modern solution to the supposedly age-old problem of repeatedly making it real. But the notion that the problem here is a problem is fairly recent. It dates from a period which has learnt to think that in a person’s head social rules conflict with instinctual drives, where intellect represses desire… The Method, designed initially to solve a rhetorical problem – how to produce truth-effects on a stage – comes, in a culture inhabited by psychoanalysis, to be a method for liberating the truths of the person." (Shepherd and Womack 1996: 286)

Correspondingly, the Naturalist ideology refuses to accept artifice: “Plot smacks too much of deceitful artifice, of hidden control” (Shepherd and Womack 1996: 283). “The good naturalist author doesn’t interfere by plotting: he just allows people to be people” (Shepherd and Womack: 284).

This is the same rejection of artifice, the grotesque and theatricality, together with a blind faith in truths, humanity, and liberating the self that we find contemporary clowning desperately trying to reinvent, a whole century on. Such a laissez-faire attitude of “don’t think, just be yourself” has become a dangerous disease in contemporary clowning. But let us not be shy of digging up clown authorship. It is lying around like unharvested potatoes. Clowns DO think!

It is worth pointing out a few of the places where these clown authors might be hiding. Isabelle Baugé, prefacing her edition of collected Pantomimes (French silent theatre of the early 19th century with Pierrot as the star), notes how one author of pantomimes, Champfleury, deviated from the norm:

"the style is remarkable and … the author does not respect the norms of writing which habitually ruled the practice of mime authorship… they generally composed in the present indicative …they avoided metaphors, comparisons and other rhetorical forms, which were difficult to translate onto the silent stage. Now, Champfleury… : the use of the past tense, figures of speech, ironical proverbs, visual descriptions of characters… "(Baugé 1995: 17).

It is evident here that the rules about how to write for Pierrot the clown are so clear that it is obvious when one breaks them.

Authors and performers have, of course, a noble history of collaborating, competing, one-upping or even trying to eliminate each other, or otherwise being chained together. Such parings abound in the field of clown: Shakespeare and Kempe (who came out on top of that one?), Irving Thalberg and The Marx Brothers, or Eric Chappell and Leonard Rossiter, whose rate of delivery as Rigsby in Rising Damp was such that “Eric had to pen extra pages of script because he devoured the dialogue at rapid speed” (Webber 2001: xi).

Scott Sedita, in The Eight Characters of Comedy, (2006) has a succinct chapter on how to act in short-form TV comedy:

The complexity and great attention to detail in sitcom writing is something that actors new comedy take for granted. They will add words, drop words, or just paraphrase. Although there might be more leniency in the world of drama to play with he dialogue (I odn’t recommend it), it CANNOT be done in half hour comedy…. DON’T CHANGE A WORD! … writers are an obsessive bunch, especially about their words…
Actors… will add words or “handles” as they’re called in the industry, thinking they’re making the dialogue more conversational, when really they’re messing up the rhythm" (Sedita 2006: 14-5).

Even those comic performers who present themselves to the audience as themselves lean just as much as anyone on their own or others’ writing. Ronnie Corbett, in his autobiography, describes his own performance as “me being me playing me” (Corbett 206: 79), but relied on only two writers in over 80 Episodes of The Two Ronnies for his cameo ramble in the chair. It is a complex question as to just how different this is to Ronnie Barker, who “found it almost impossible to talk directly, as himself, to an audience. He had to be in character” (Corbett 206: 79).

Coming back to contemporary clown training, I believe the great failure of Lecoquian teaching has been to abandon students without the resources to create material or to understand someone else’s creation. Trapped in their own collaborative love-in, companies of performers idle away the audience’s time with democracy on stage. And the clowns are the worst of the lot. Many is the full-length clown show that entertains somewhat, admittedly, but heroes of contemporary clowning such as Slava, Litsedei et al. have created works that do not stretch much further than that. Shapeless, devoid of meaning, lacking significance. Shakespeare they ain’t.

But the door into Clown Writing is wide open, and we can enter freely. If we care to look, observe and reflect, a vast array of knowledge on what clowns do is there to be had. That is what I and my workshop collaborators in London and Barcelona have been doing all this year.

And what is the result of our digging? A treasure of 50 ways to understand how clown works. Not how it feels. Many of those ways also serve to generate material. We also made strides towards a kind of universal unified theorem of clown, that might encompass a range of seemingly disparate definitions in vogue. And I would also hypothesise great steps towards the elimination of game playing from the clown devising process, a huge debt to Avner the Eccentric, one of the principal non-play clown teachers in the world today.

We have also used the 50 elements (a kind of clown periodic table perhaps?) to devise a short demonstration show, The Encyclopaedia of Clown, premiered at the Festival Of… at CSSD in September 2009. It is designed to test, compare and demonstrate the wide variety of forms and structures in clown performance.

What are my sources for the 50 entries in this encyclopaedia? Much teaching, devising and performing, first and foremost. Personally, after finishing my training with Gaulier, I was clear about what clown was, but not about how to make a show. Much of what I am now teaching in clown devising courses is a crystallisation of those early years of fumbling in the dark rehearsing shows together with Clara Cenoz, as Companyia d’Idiotes, for years before they were ready.

Secondly, as sources, there are the performances of others, live and preserved on film or video. I have sacrificed my enjoyment of a large number of clown shows over the past year in order to be able to write a decent review on each one, some of which are published on my website and blog. Inevitably cinema clowns have drawn more attention. You cannot compare the flatness of a DVD of a live show with the art of Chaplin, Langdon or Tati.

Thirdly, as already touched on, are the words of the clowns themselves. The long careers of the last three in particular have provided me with useful data for analysis of clown dramaturgy via their (auto-)biographies (Chaplin 1964, Rheuban 1983, Bellos 1999). But clowns do not usually give away many secrets. Perhaps they assume no one is interested. Coco (Nikolai Poliakoff) spends pages describing the mounting of a circus tent, but only hints at his number performed at a children’s hospital: “I tried to think of all the things I could do to make the children laugh” (Poliakoff 1941: 56). Harpo Marx, the clown of no words, spends tens of thousands of them on high society anecdotes, but only a handful on a routine (the 200 knives), though his advice is invaluable (Marx 1962: 316-7).

Fourthly, there are related fields of comedy which are not so in-bred as clowning and are happy to trade in secrets. Numerous books are on the market on sitcoms and how to write and act in them, as too on cartooning, Even stand-up comedy has stolen a march on us. Olly Double’s books are exemplary, and then there is perhaps the best autobiography from a professional’s point of view, Steve Martin’s. All these fields also boast of university level studies. In clowning I only know of two short course modules accredited by universities, at Lyon (France) and Girona (Spain).

Still, I must say I am proud to be part of a genre that continually lags behind everyone else. Always the last!


Works referred to:

Baugé, Isabelle (1995) Pantomimes, Cahors : Cicéro Éditions.

Bellos, David (1999) Jacques Tati, London : The Harvill Press.

Chaplin, Charlie (1964) My Autobiography, London : The Bodley Head.

Corbett, Ronnie (2006) And It’s Goodnight From Him…, London: Penguin.

Double, Oliver (1997) Stand-Up: On Being a Comedian, London: Methuen.

Double, Oliver (2005) Getting The Joke, London: Methuen.

Gaulier, Philippe (2006) The Tormentor, Paris: Éditions Filmichko.

Martin, Steve (2007) Born Standing Up, London: Simon and Shuster.

Marx, Harpo (1962) Harpo Speaks! New York : Limelight Editions.

Peacock, Louise (2009) Serious Play - Modern Clown Performance, Bristol: Intellect.

Poliakoff, Nikolai (1941) Coco the Clown, London: J. M. Dent and Sons.

Popov, Oleg (1970) Russian Clown, London: Macdonald.

Rheuban, Joyce (1983) Harry Langdon: the Comedian as Metteur-en-Scene, London: AUP.

Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack (1996) English Drama, a Social History, Oxford: Blackwell.

Sedita, Scott (2006) The Eight Characters of Comedy, Los Angeles: Atides Publishing.

Webber, Richard (2001) Rising Damp, a Celebration, London: Boxtree.

Wright, John (2006) Why Is That So Funny? London: Nick Herne Books.

Posted by Jon Davison

JON DAVISON: "What Do Clowns Do?"



This is the transcript of a paper I delivered in London at the "Festival Of..." at Central School of Speech and Drama in September 2009. It formed the final reflection on the previous year's research. Contemporary clowning over the last 50 years has largely rejected the notion that we can know what clowns do, claiming clown to be an authentic experience above all. I attempt to demonstrate such a position as false, and to reveal that clowning can be seen as a highly structured and ordered activity that owes little to the concepts of spontaneity, improvisation or play, and is therefore open to analysis of "how clowning works".



John Wright, in his study of comedy “Why Is That So Funny” brusquely rejected the notion that we can know what clowns do:

"Asking ‘How do clowns walk?’ or ‘What do clowns wear?’ are inane questions. But to ask ‘How do clowns make us laugh?’ and, more importantly, ‘What physical impulses inspire that comedy’ will take you to a place where you can find a personal ownership of ‘clown’ as a level of play." (Wright 2006: 180)


It only takes someone to state something categorically, and the clown who loves to contradict surges up inside me and speaks up with a “Why?” delivered with the intonation of a 6-year-old who just loves to contradict. Much of my research method is in fact based on such clown philosophy, which you might simplify as a kind of scientific scepticism, or instinct not to believe, to keep questioning, especially when three or more people agree on something, until there are no more questions left to ask or we are all exhausted from the attempt.

Wright’s policing of this no-go area for contemporary clowns sums up the now old-school, post-68 view that we are all better off since we did away with those nasty texts, authors, and anything that admits to being thought out beforehand, and ushered in a new era of spontaneity, improvisation and authenticity.

“Clowning takes us back to basics….it's not about routines, or structured material of any kind. “(Wright 2006: 184)

Wright does offer significant analysis of how his notions of play relate to clown, and I find much to agree with, particularly on the practical dynamics of the presence of the clown in the performer, but ultimately his position is a merely ideological one, in my opinion.

Most clown-as-play advocates lack the depth of thought that Wright brings to the matter, however. Louise Peacock, in her recently published Serious Play - Modern Clown Performance, talks of “the intensely personal nature of clowning which generates play from within the performer” (Peacock 2009: 13). Unfortunately, though, her main example is Slava Polunin, whose Snowshow is now a kind of clown franchise, the roles passed on to a list of performers operating around the globe. Not very personal, then!

Peacock offers no serious analysis of why we should continue to believe in the mantra of clown=play=authenticity. This simply stating of one’s faith in the authenticity or truth of the self is a key feature of much, though not all, contemporary clowning.

But let us leave aside debates about faith and scepticism, for I wish to turn my attention instead to another old discussion which should really interest us more as performers, as it is that question which has vexed actors, directors and actor trainers since at least Stanislavsky, and in truth since we began thinking about acting: “Is the actor pretending, or is it for real?” Or, to place a moral burden on the issue: “Should the actor pretend or should the actor create reality?”

Peacock and others, in their bland talk of truth - “the concept of performing truthfully is common in clowning” (Peacock 2009: 107) - more often than not end up talking about the “inner clown” (Peacock 2009: 34) and invoke the heritage of Philippe Gaulier along the way. Yet Gaulier has no recourse to concepts of “inner” anything. In The Tormentor, he writes: “The actor enjoys suggesting feelings. The audience enjoys feeling them. Nothing is true. Everything is false, except for our imagination“(Gaulier 2006: 174). Of course, the great clown guru is here talking about the nonsense involved in believing that characters are real. “A huge error is the confusion between the actor and his character” (Gaulier 2006: 175). If we follow Gaulier, rather than waffling about “inner clowns”, we can say that the actor, and especially the clown, is pretending for real. The pretence is authentic. That’s the best we can do to keep the faith, in my view.

Of course, such claims for a new age of acting that is more authentic, more true, more real, have been seen time and again throughout history. Soviet clowns in the 1960s, backed up by the Party, pushed away from the grotesque and towards the natural, the realistic. Oleg Popov, in his autobiography, was quite happy to break with the past:

"Let us move on to the Fratellini. Wonderful artistes, they perform in the age-old manner of buffoons, a thick layer of make-up on their faces. They are perfect connoisseurs of human nature, sharp and intelligent. But they do not try to reflect anything in their performance except such faults as stupidity, clumsiness, absent-mindedness. As a result it is hardly surprising if the most common outcome of their conflicts is a slap in the face. And the spectator hears a positive deluge of slaps. Certainly I understand that the Fratellini are the guardians of an old circus tradition, a tradition respected down the centuries. But the times demand that this tradition should be broken and it is this that accounts for the appearance of the realistic clown." (Popov 1970: 93)


A familiar argument? Well, we need only look back to the great shift from Melodrama to Naturalism at the end of the 19th century to find a similar ideological stance, one which dismissed the past as untruthful, deceitful, grotesque, false, in favour of a present which is authentic, true and, most importantly, ART.

Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack state that “drama written by the ‘emancipated dramatist’ stages its own seriousness as art. To see a play as ‘dramatic genius’ is to insist it is something more than a vehicle for the resident acrobat” (Shepherd and Womack 1996: 286).

This pretence to create performance that does not pretend, but instead is somehow “true”, finds its own kind of actor training:

"The “Method” appears to offer a uniquely modern solution to the supposedly age-old problem of repeatedly making it real. But the notion that the problem here is a problem is fairly recent. It dates from a period which has learnt to think that in a person’s head social rules conflict with instinctual drives, where intellect represses desire… The Method, designed initially to solve a rhetorical problem – how to produce truth-effects on a stage – comes, in a culture inhabited by psychoanalysis, to be a method for liberating the truths of the person." (Shepherd and Womack 1996: 286)


Correspondingly, the Naturalist ideology refuses to accept artifice: “Plot smacks too much of deceitful artifice, of hidden control” (Shepherd and Womack 1996: 283). “The good naturalist author doesn’t interfere by plotting: he just allows people to be people” (Shepherd and Womack: 284).

This is the same rejection of artifice, the grotesque and theatricality, together with a blind faith in truths, humanity, and liberating the self that we find contemporary clowning desperately trying to reinvent, a whole century on. Such a laissez-faire attitude of “don’t think, just be yourself” has become a dangerous disease in contemporary clowning. But let us not be shy of digging up clown authorship. It is lying around like unharvested potatoes. Clowns DO think!

It is worth pointing out a few of the places where these clown authors might be hiding. Isabelle Baugé, prefacing her edition of collected Pantomimes (French silent theatre of the early 19th century with Pierrot as the star), notes how one author of pantomimes, Champfleury, deviated from the norm:

"the style is remarkable and … the author does not respect the norms of writing which habitually ruled the practice of mime authorship… they generally composed in the present indicative …they avoided metaphors, comparisons and other rhetorical forms, which were difficult to translate onto the silent stage. Now, Champfleury… : the use of the past tense, figures of speech, ironical proverbs, visual descriptions of characters… "(Baugé 1995: 17).


It is evident here that the rules about how to write for Pierrot the clown are so clear that it is obvious when one breaks them.

Authors and performers have, of course, a noble history of collaborating, competing, one-upping or even trying to eliminate each other, or otherwise being chained together. Such parings abound in the field of clown: Shakespeare and Kempe (who came out on top of that one?), Irving Thalberg and The Marx Brothers, or Eric Chappell and Leonard Rossiter, whose rate of delivery as Rigsby in Rising Damp was such that “Eric had to pen extra pages of script because he devoured the dialogue at rapid speed” (Webber 2001: xi).

Scott Sedita, in The Eight Characters of Comedy, (2006) has a succinct chapter on how to act in short-form TV comedy:

The complexity and great attention to detail in sitcom writing is something that actors new comedy take for granted. They will add words, drop words, or just paraphrase. Although there might be more leniency in the world of drama to play with he dialogue (I odn’t recommend it), it CANNOT be done in half hour comedy…. DON’T CHANGE A WORD! … writers are an obsessive bunch, especially about their words…

Actors… will add words or “handles” as they’re called in the industry, thinking they’re making the dialogue more conversational, when really they’re messing up the rhythm" (Sedita 2006: 14-5).


Even those comic performers who present themselves to the audience as themselves lean just as much as anyone on their own or others’ writing. Ronnie Corbett, in his autobiography, describes his own performance as “me being me playing me” (Corbett 206: 79), but relied on only two writers in over 80 Episodes of The Two Ronnies for his cameo ramble in the chair. It is a complex question as to just how different this is to Ronnie Barker, who “found it almost impossible to talk directly, as himself, to an audience. He had to be in character” (Corbett 206: 79).

Coming back to contemporary clown training, I believe the great failure of Lecoquian teaching has been to abandon students without the resources to create material or to understand someone else’s creation. Trapped in their own collaborative love-in, companies of performers idle away the audience’s time with democracy on stage. And the clowns are the worst of the lot. Many is the full-length clown show that entertains somewhat, admittedly, but heroes of contemporary clowning such as Slava, Litsedei et al. have created works that do not stretch much further than that. Shapeless, devoid of meaning, lacking significance. Shakespeare they ain’t.

But the door into Clown Writing is wide open, and we can enter freely. If we care to look, observe and reflect, a vast array of knowledge on what clowns do is there to be had. That is what I and my workshop collaborators in London and Barcelona have been doing all this year.

And what is the result of our digging? A treasure of 50 ways to understand how clown works. Not how it feels. Many of those ways also serve to generate material. We also made strides towards a kind of universal unified theorem of clown, that might encompass a range of seemingly disparate definitions in vogue. And I would also hypothesise great steps towards the elimination of game playing from the clown devising process, a huge debt to Avner the Eccentric, one of the principal non-play clown teachers in the world today.

We have also used the 50 elements (a kind of clown periodic table perhaps?) to devise a short demonstration show, The Encyclopaedia of Clown, premiered at the Festival Of… at CSSD in September 2009. It is designed to test, compare and demonstrate the wide variety of forms and structures in clown performance.

What are my sources for the 50 entries in this encyclopaedia? Much teaching, devising and performing, first and foremost. Personally, after finishing my training with Gaulier, I was clear about what clown was, but not about how to make a show. Much of what I am now teaching in clown devising courses is a crystallisation of those early years of fumbling in the dark rehearsing shows together with Clara Cenoz, as Companyia d’Idiotes, for years before they were ready.

Secondly, as sources, there are the performances of others, live and preserved on film or video. I have sacrificed my enjoyment of a large number of clown shows over the past year in order to be able to write a decent review on each one, some of which are published on my website and blog. Inevitably cinema clowns have drawn more attention. You cannot compare the flatness of a DVD of a live show with the art of Chaplin, Langdon or Tati.

Thirdly, as already touched on, are the words of the clowns themselves. The long careers of the last three in particular have provided me with useful data for analysis of clown dramaturgy via their (auto-)biographies (Chaplin 1964, Rheuban 1983, Bellos 1999). But clowns do not usually give away many secrets. Perhaps they assume no one is interested. Coco (Nikolai Poliakoff) spends pages describing the mounting of a circus tent, but only hints at his number performed at a children’s hospital: “I tried to think of all the things I could do to make the children laugh” (Poliakoff 1941: 56). Harpo Marx, the clown of no words, spends tens of thousands of them on high society anecdotes, but only a handful on a routine (the 200 knives), though his advice is invaluable (Marx 1962: 316-7).

Fourthly, there are related fields of comedy which are not so in-bred as clowning and are happy to trade in secrets. Numerous books are on the market on sitcoms and how to write and act in them, as too on cartooning, Even stand-up comedy has stolen a march on us. Olly Double’s books are exemplary, and then there is perhaps the best autobiography from a professional’s point of view, Steve Martin’s. All these fields also boast of university level studies. In clowning I only know of two short course modules accredited by universities, at Lyon (France) and Girona (Spain).

Still, I must say I am proud to be part of a genre that continually lags behind everyone else. Always the last!


Works referred to:

Baugé, Isabelle (1995) Pantomimes, Cahors : Cicéro Éditions.

Bellos, David (1999) Jacques Tati, London : The Harvill Press.

Chaplin, Charlie (1964) My Autobiography, London : The Bodley Head.

Corbett, Ronnie (2006) And It’s Goodnight From Him…, London: Penguin.

Double, Oliver (1997) Stand-Up: On Being a Comedian, London: Methuen.

Double, Oliver (2005) Getting The Joke, London: Methuen.

Gaulier, Philippe (2006) The Tormentor, Paris: Éditions Filmichko.

Martin, Steve (2007) Born Standing Up, London: Simon and Shuster.

Marx, Harpo (1962) Harpo Speaks! New York : Limelight Editions.

Peacock, Louise (2009) Serious Play - Modern Clown Performance, Bristol: Intellect.

Poliakoff, Nikolai (1941) Coco the Clown, London: J. M. Dent and Sons.

Popov, Oleg (1970) Russian Clown, London: Macdonald.

Rheuban, Joyce (1983) Harry Langdon: the Comedian as Metteur-en-Scene, London: AUP.

Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack (1996) English Drama, a Social History, Oxford: Blackwell.

Sedita, Scott (2006) The Eight Characters of Comedy, Los Angeles: Atides Publishing.

Webber, Richard (2001) Rising Damp, a Celebration, London: Boxtree.

Wright, John (2006) Why Is That So Funny? London: Nick Herne Books.

Posted by Jon Davison


JOHN AND HARRY NELSON: Courtesy of Sandy Weber and Patricia Barlow

Harry and John Nelson


John (bottom) and Harry (top) Nelson




Harry Nelson and Rita, by Ray Wolfe (1947)



Heya Pat!

I received a couple of nice notes from Patricia Barlow who, it turns out, is the grand-niece of Ringling clowns John and Harry Nelson (I don't know how she found that page of photos and videos I have online)!

Anyway, she sent a couple of photos of the Nelsons which I thought were very interesting.

This is what she has to say:

Clown stiltwalkers, John and Harry Nelson (in the photo) were my Great Uncles! They were a great part of my life, as a young girl (I am now 71)- when they were home from the Show periodically, they lived next door, with their sister - my Grandmother.

Also, around 1947-49, my cousin Raquel Nelson was with the Ringling circus. She was featured side ring foot juggler.

The Nelson Family Circus started in England....went to South America and ultimately returned to live in Brooklyn N.Y.

The 6 daughters were acrobats and bareback riders - 2 sons acrobats, stiltwalkers and clowns and the oldest son was manager with his Father.

The Nelson Circus started in England and then South America...never performed as a family in the US-But the family members all continued, in other circuses, throughout the US - all in acrobatics.

John and Harry were the only full-time clowns.

As the other family members married and started raising families, they left circus life.

With Thanks,
Patricia Barlow


Anyway, take care and my best to you and your family!

Your Pal,
Sandy Weber

JERRY BANGS: Help Wanted

I need a scan of the Jerry Bangs articles from The White Tops:

1976 49 No. 4 p. 19

1976 49 No. 6 p. 19


Any help would be very greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
~P

Thursday, November 26, 2009

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Scan courtesy of Beth Grimes



1. “At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.” — Albert Schweitzer

2. “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” — G. K. Chesterton

3. “No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks”. — Unknown

4. “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” — Marcel Proust

5. “He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.” — Epictetus

6. “You simply will not be the same person two months from now after consciously giving thanks each day for the abundance that exists in your life. And you will have set in motion an ancient spiritual law: the more you have and are grateful for, the more will be given you.” — Sarah Ban Breathnach

7. “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” — Thornton Wilder

8. “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein

9. “Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.” — William Arthur Ward

10. “Take full account of the excellencies which you possess, and in gratitude remember how you would hanker after them, if you had them not.” — Marcus Aurelius

11. “Real life isn’t always going to be perfect or go our way, but the recurring acknowledgement of what is working in our lives can help us not only to survive but surmount our difficulties.” — Sarah Ban Breathnach

12. “We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.” — Cynthia Ozick

13. “Can you see the holiness in those things you take for granted–a paved road or a washing machine? If you concentrate on finding what is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.” — Rabbi Harold Kushner

14. “We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.” — Marcus Annaeus Seneca

15. “When we become more fully aware that our success is due in large measure to the loyalty, helpfulness, and encouragement we have received from others, our desire grows to pass on similar gifts. Gratitude spurs us on to prove ourselves worthy of what others have done for us. The spirit of gratitude is a powerful energizer.” — Wilferd A. Peterson

16. “Whatever our individual troubles and challenges may be, it’s important to pause every now and then to appreciate all that we have, on every level. We need to literally “count our blessings,” give thanks for them, allow ourselves to enjoy them, and relish the experience of prosperity we already have.” — Shakti Gawain

17. “Thou that has given so much to me,
Give one thing more–a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if thy blessings had spare days;
But such a heart, whose pulse may be
Thy praise.”

– George Herbert

18. “(Some people) have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.” — A.H. Maslow

19. “If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice.” — Meister Eckhart

20. “Find the good and praise it.” — Alex Haley

21. “Give thanks for a little and you will find a lot.” — The Hausa of Nigeria

22. “What if you gave someone a gift, and they neglected to thank you for it-would you be likely to give them another? Life is the same way. In order to attract more of the blessings that life has to offer, you must truly appreciate what you already have.” — Ralph Marston

23. “Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.” — Joseph Wood Krutch

24. “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” — Henry Miller

25. “There is a calmness to a life lived in gratitude, a quiet joy.” — Ralph H. Blum

26. “Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy — because we will always want to have something else or something more.” — Brother David Steindl-Rast

27. “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.” — Denis Waitley

28. “As each day comes to us refreshed and anew, so does my gratitude renew itself daily. The breaking of the sun over the horizon is my grateful heart dawning upon a blessed world. ” — Adabella Radici

29. “For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

30. “Grace isn’t a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal. It’s a way to live. ” — Attributed to Jacqueline Winspear

31. “When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them.” — Chinese Proverb

32. “Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.” — Horace

33. “But the value of gratitude does not consist solely in getting you more blessings in the future. Without gratitude you cannot long keep from dissatisfied thought regarding things as they are.” — Wallace Wattles

34. “Blessed are those that can give without remembering and receive without forgetting.” — Author Unknown

35. “If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.” — Rabbi Harold Kushner

36. “Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.” — Albert Schweitzer

37. “God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say “thank you?” — William A. Ward

38. “Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic.” — John Henry Jowett

39. “Feeling grateful or appreciative of someone or something in your life actually attracts more of the things that you appreciate and value into your life.” — Christiane Northrup

40.”The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.” — Richard Bach

41. “Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes of which all men have some.” — Charles Dickens

42. “Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend… when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present — love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure — the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth.” –Sarah Ban Breathnach

43. “Whenever we are appreciative, we are filled with a sense of well-being and swept up by the feeling of joy.” — M.J. Ryan

44. “Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.” –Doris Day

45. “Many people who order their lives rightly in all other ways are kept in poverty by their lack of gratitude.” — Wallace Wattles

46. “Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.” — Buddha

47. “Two kinds of gratitude: The sudden kind we feel for what we take; the larger kind we feel for what we give.” — Edwin Arlington Robinson

48. “There is a law of gratitude, and it is . . . the natural principle that action and reaction are always equal and in opposite directions. The grateful outreaching of your mind in thankful praise to supreme intelligence is a liberation or expenditure of force. It cannot fail to reach that to which it is addressed, and the reaction is an instantaneous movement toward you.” — Wally Wattles

49. “Gratitude should not be just a reaction to getting what you want, but an all-the-time gratitude, the kind where you notice the little things and where you constantly look for the good, even in unpleasant situations. Start bringing gratitude to your experiences, instead of waiting for a positive experience in order to feel grateful.” — Marelisa Fábrega




Be Thankful

Be thankful that you don’t already have everything you desire,
If you did, what would there be to look forward to?

Be thankful when you don’t know something
For it gives you the opportunity to learn.

Be thankful for the difficult times.
During those times you grow.

Be thankful for your limitations
Because they give you opportunities for improvement.

Be thankful for each new challenge
Because it will build your strength and character.

Be thankful for your mistakes
They will teach you valuable lessons.

Be thankful when you’re tired and weary
Because it means you’ve made a difference.

It is easy to be thankful for the good things.
A life of rich fulfillment comes to those who are
also thankful for the setbacks.

GRATITUDE can turn a negative into a positive.
Find a way to be thankful for your troubles
and they can become your blessings.

Author Unknown


Tuesday, November 24, 2009

HARRY STEPPE


HARRY STEPPE

Harry Steppe (born Abraham Stepner, March 1888 – November 22, 1934) was a Jewish-American actor, comedian, writer, director and producer, who toured North America working in Vaudeville and Burlesque. Harry claimed to have coined such terms as "top banana" (the headliner or top act on the bill), and "second banana." As one of Bud Abbott's first partners, Harry introduced Bud to Lou Costello in 1934.

Born in Moscow to Russian immigrant Orthodox Jewish parents, Steppe was billed as a Hebrew, Jewish-dialect or Yiddish character comedian. His gags and skits were also performed by such well-known comedians as Phil Silvers, The Three Stooges, and Abbott and Costello. Although Steppe had penned the "Pokomoko" (aka Niagara Falls) Routine ("Slowly I Turned, step by step, inch by inch...")" and performed it with The Three Stooges, other writers, including fellow Vaudevillians Joey Faye and Samuel Goldman each laid claim to the skit, too. "Lifting" routines from another performer was standard operating procedure in the early-to-mid 20th century, and the famed routine was performed, without originator credit, by...

Phil Silvers credited Steppe with "introducing the phrase 'Top Banana' into show business jargon in 1927 as a synonym for the top comic on the bill. It rose out of a routine, full of doubletalk, in which three comics tried to share two bananas." Silvers further popularized the term "Top Banana" in his 1951 Broadway musical and 1954 film of the same name.

Steppe performed at several well-known theaters on the Orpheum Circuit. According to Loew's Weekly (a program issued free to theater patrons), in a June 18, 1928 performance at the Loew's Theater in New York, he was billed with Lola Pierce. Reportedly, Pierce was an actress he was linked to romantically. Other paramours of Harry Steppe included Vaudeville performers Victoria "Vic" Dayton (whom he apparently married), Edna Raymond and Leona St. Clair

Death

Pulmonary edema contributed to Steppe's death, according to his death certificate. He was at Bellevue Hospital in New York, New York for two days and had been ill for a month, according to a story in Variety magazine, Nov. 27, 1934. Abe Stepner's obituary appears under "Feature News," Billboard magazine, Dec. 1, 1934, pg 5.






OTTO GRIEBLING: Life Magazine (May 11, 1959)




Requiem for a Clown

A clown in greasepaint asks for a kiss and is rejected. Two weeks later Otto Griebling, one of the most famous circus clowns, is dead. An OpEd remembrance...


"I should have kissed him. I know that now. But he was after all only a clown, his face covered with grease paint and his clothes in tatters....He wooed other women that night. But, as horses and elephants followed the dogs into the rings, I saw no one kiss him. Less than a month later Otto Griebling, one of the most famous circus clowns, died....I wish I had kissed him."

The New York Times, May 20, 1972


CLOWN ALLEY: Reggie Montgomery & Michael Karp


In reference to yesterday's photo, our pal Mr. Karp replied...

Oh brother, Mr. Cashin! Where the heck did you dig that up?

As I recall, this was a "utility" walk around that Reggie and I did on a kind of on-and-off-basis...much as we did a come-in gag for a while...(Reggie switched with Louie DeJesus for that one....)

As I recall, I stood before the audience and mimed that I was about to perform a magic trick of some sort...I had a few that were really, really lame....As I reacted to the audience's lack of appreciation, Reggie stepped forward, and pulled a pinwheel out from under a silk...He worked it so it looked like a trick.

As the audience applauded him, I kicked him, and he chased me to the next stop...
upset that Reggie was clearly the better magician!

All this is recalled terribly imperfectly... Reggie was a great guy.

And Dougie???? Standing there judgemental and snide, ready to top us the moment we moved on--which, of course, brilliant performer that he was, he did!

(My face is caked with dust from nosing around the memories of the Ancient World!)

It was great seeing that photo, Pat...and an honor to be referred to as "our pal"...
Talk to you soon...

Michael

SEREBRIAKOV: (1977)

Link courtesy of Raffaele Deritis



Serebriakov is the father of Valery, (aka Val De Fun).

Monday, November 23, 2009

WALLY ON THE RUN: Trick Kelly & Steve Copeland



Steve Copeland (in Bobby Kay's makeup) and Trick Kelly in WALLY ON THE RUN, a video created for Steve Martin's video contest for his new banjo album.

JOHN HADFIELD: Robot Monkey Head

Hi Pat!

My new music video is finally complete. You'll recognize 4 Clown College grads in it. Wanted to give you a special sneak preview - we're releasing it later today!

Talk to you soon,
John H




In the remote underground laboratory of a mad scientist, a man in a shiny suit steals the head of a robot monkey. A wild chase scene on bicycles ensues - the man and the monkey head pursued by the scientist and his hunchback assistant.


Meanwhile, the headless robot monkey escapes from the lab and wreaks havoc through the town searching for his head. An angry group of townspeople with torches and pitchforks chases him to the edge of town, where he figuratively comes face to face with the man in the shiny suit. After a brief struggle, the head is returned to its rightful owner.

Or is it...

Robot Monkey Head
Copyright 2006 John Hadfield
and Geri Smith

Cast
John Hadfield - John Hadfield
Mad Scientist - Rich Potter
Hunchback Assistant - Chris Shelton
Police Officer - Mark Manniso
Woman with Broom - Wendy Lapham
Headless Monkey - Bill Champion
Stunt Monkey - John Hadfield
Monkey Head - Hilton
Girls walking dogs -
Julia Russ & Julia Bosso
Dogs - Kenny and Ozzie
Little Boy - Rohan Mandayam

Angry Mob -
Bill Champion
Rosella Champion
Julie Hadfield
Carolyn Bitzer
Suraj Mandayam
Sandy Urban
Chris Shelton
Rich Potter

Executive Producer - John Hadfield
Producer and Director - Nic Beery

Additional Music
Jay Manley

Crew
Nic Beery &
Ismail Abdelkhalek

Caterer - Wendy Lapham

Produced for John Hadfield by
BeeryMedia.com

Special thanks to Nic Beery and Ismail Abdelkhalek

No real monkeys were harmed in the filming of this video

More about John Hadfield, Robot Monkey Head music and merchandise can be found at:

CIRQUE DU SOLEIL: Banana Shpeel

Article courtesy of Don Covington

'Banana Shpeel': Cirque du Soleil
slides into world of legitimate theater

By Chris Jones, Tribune Theater Critic


“Banana Shpeel” grew out of a desire of Cirque founder Guy Laliberte’s to create a vaudeville show. It comes to the Chicago Theatre on Dec. 2. (Scott Strazzante/Tribune photo)



From “Ka” to “Kooza” and “Alegria” to “Zumanity,” the Cirque du Soleil has conquered tents, casinos, theme parks and arenas in almost every corner of the world. It has achieved total dominance of the high-stakes world of Las Vegas entertainment. It has wrestled with the music of the Beatles and the infamous personality of Criss Angel. Come January in Vegas, it will even take on the biggest entertainment icon of them all: Elvis.

But even as it has cut its extraordinary swath through global culture over the past quarter century, Cirque has assiduously stayed away from one huge segment of the live entertainment industry.

Cirque has ignored these mostly historic, occasionally iconic jewels that pepper American downtowns, make up the chain of Broadway and, in the case of the beloved Chicago Theatre, emotionally embody a night on the town.

It is a gap Cirque’s derivative competitors have shrewdly exploited, creating an endless array of Euro-style, animal-free shows such as “Cirque Dreams,” “Cirque Ingenieux,” “Cirque Imagination” and (coming to Skokie beginning Nov. 28) “Cirque Le Masque.”
But with the arrival of Cirque du Soleil’s new “Banana Shpeel” at the Chicago Theatre (it moves to New York’s New Beacon Theatre in February), it is a gap that exists no more. “Banana Shpeel” — originally billed as a distinctive fusion of vaudeville, clowning and musical comedy — will be Cirque’s first foray into the world of legitimate theater. Or will it?

For commercial theater is a byzantine world dominated by rules, agents, unions, writers, composers, star names and ways of operating very foreign to the famously esoteric, famously creative and famously confidential Cirque process of “création.” It is a less-than-controllable world in which Cirque, for all its sophistication, lacks experience. By its own admission.
“Banana Shpeel” will officially be unpeeled Dec. 2 in Chicago. And those who have bet against Cirque in the past have usually found themselves stuck on black with the wheel showing red. But the story so far of “Banana Shpeel” has included some slip-ups.

“We had a lot of good stuff right from the start,” says Serge Roy, the cheerfully frank Cirque producer in charge of “Banana Shpeel.” The ebullient Roy is sitting in the balcony of the Chicago Theatre, even as the remarkably calm and focused director, David Shiner, forges (and re-forges) the high-stakes show on the stage below. “The problems came,” says Roy, unperturbed by the admission, “when we started to put everything together. We were getting into a world in which we are not at ease.”

Those problems were, in essence, the hiring and firing of the show’s two stars: Annaleigh Ashford (who was a longtime Glinda in the Chicago production of “Wicked”) and Michael Longoria (who performed as Frankie Valli in “Jersey Boys” on Broadway). In September, both were seen (and can still be seen via YouTube) on the season finale of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” performing a signature number from “Banana Shpeel.”

They are now gone, their characters written out of the show. The number they were singing is gone too. The original composer, Laurence O’Keefe (another big Broadway name who penned the score to “Legally Blonde: The Musical”), has also come and gone from the project. All of his music has been cut from “Shpeel.”

“We make changes like that all the time during our creation process,” Roy says. “The only difference is that, usually, nobody hears about them.”

Indeed not. Internal creative decisions at Cirque typically have stayed internal, which is the way most businesses, creative and otherwise, like to keep things. And (with the notable exception of its “Criss Angel Believe” show in Vegas) Cirque has always de-emphasized individuals and emphasized the creative whole.

Millions of people have seen “O” in Las Vegas. Very few of them would remember the names of any of the performers they saw. It’s the same with “Ka,” “Mystere,” “Quidam,” you name it.

But unfair as it may be, the firing of a troupe of unknown Ukrainian acrobats in Montreal is a very different matter from nixing three respected Broadway names before rehearsals in Chicago.

When Cirque went to agents in New York, seeking top music-theater talent for a show widely described as Cirque’s first foray into musical theater, the presence of those stars was a legitimizing factor. And when they were removed prior to the process of moving to Chicago, the news spread quickly through the New York theater community (and reached this reporter).

Initially, at least, Cirque seemed surprised by all the fuss. But they are now talking about it openly.

Roy and Shiner are at pains to say that the decision to write out Ashford and Longoria had nothing to do with their work or talent. It was simply a decision to move in a new creative direction. In a one-word statement issued through her representative, Ashford said she was “shocked” by the turn of events that removed her from the show.

“Banana Shpeel” had grown out of a desire of Cirque founder Guy Laliberte’s to create a vaudeville show. Partially as a response to the economic troubles in its core Vegas market, Cirque has been doing a lot of brand extension recently, including a foray into magic. Because high-end magic tends to be dominated by individuals who guard their tricks and their personal brand, that meant Cirque had to break its no-star rule and get into creative bed with Angel.

Longtime Cirque watchers have also noticed its Vegas portfolio is now shrewdly segmented so that there are shows appealing to many sections of the market. “Ka,” an operatic show created by Robert Lepage, holds down the arty high end, while “Criss Angel Believe” attracts a much younger, more blue-collar crowd. But although its tent shows are now slotted into arenas after exhausting the markets that can support the big tops (Sears Centre Arena in Hoffman Estates has announced a booking of the old tent show “Alegria”), Cirque has never had the kind of show that could tour to actual theaters.

So why not create such a show? Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which owns the Chicago and the Beacon, became an enthusiastic partner. Shiner, a highly regarded clowning and physical-theater expert and the creative force behind the hugely successful tent-show “Kooza,” was called in. Shiner put together a conceptual outline. The initial show-within-a-show concept involved a colorful producer, one Marty Schmelky (played by Jerry Kernion), who is auditioning for his ongoing contemporary vaudeville show, “Schmelky’s Spectacular.” Ashford was to play the producer’s singing-and-dancing daughter. Longoria was to play an aspiring actor. The two were to fall in love. Also included: clowning, circus, variety, vaudeville and a Broadway-style love story, replete with much singing and dancing to original O’Keefe numbers.

But once “Banana Shpeel” went into rehearsals in Montreal, it became clear that it could not be or do all of those things at once. According to several of the people involved, there were just too many characters requiring too much exposition.

“The show was becoming too story-based,” Shiner says. “We also wanted to include clowning and variety. But the story element was outweighing everything else. There just wasn’t enough time. … So we would have needed to diminish the roles played by Annaleigh and Michael. And we decided that would have been a waste of their huge talents. It all was a learning process for everybody.”

“It was dragging,” says Roy. “We wanted to do a show with humor and fun. We never wanted to do a Broadway-type show. We found we weren’t comfortable with that. We like to improvise. We like people to have a good time. So we asked ourselves, what would happen if we didn’t try to tell all that story? And once we weren’t telling that story, many of the songs were not needed.”

So Ashford, Longoria and the song stylings of O’Keefe were out. And Cirque, in essence, went back to a world in which it is more comfortable. And within which it has never failed.

“We wanted to revisit the world of our show,” Shiner says. “And we wanted to get our arms around it.”

For sure, Cirque fans will likely notice some new-to-Cirque elements in “Banana Shpeel,” including dialogue and hard-edged slapstick (and, of course, the proscenium setting). But, at least as Shiner describes it, the “Shpeel” that will open Dec. 2 has been shorn of its narrative clutter, and now has a very simple plot.

Various circus acts audition (or are already in Schmelky’s show). A core clutch of five clowns (two of whom are Schmelky’s assistants) alternately aid and disrupt the auditions. A live band, clowning, comedy, variety, tap-dancing and hip-hop are all included. The style is modern and hard-edged. There is a foot juggler. But there is no Broadway-style book. Not any more.

Shiner says the clown routines were created from scratch in the studio — very much in the European theatrical tradition — and were always intended to be at the core of “Banana Shpeel.”

“Our show,” Shiner says, “is based in comedy and dance.”

It will be as simple as that. Cirque has never claimed to have a pretty process. Even during technical rehearsals, Roy continued to tinker. He talked about adding a few more performers, perhaps. He had plans to restage one of the biggest set-pieces. “I’d wish I had a turntable for that,” he said, wistfully, as the remarkable foot juggler works below.

For his part, Shiner says he plans to keep creating long after Dec. 2. “For me, the work is never done until the producers say I can’t come back,” he says.

Unlike on Broadway, nothing (and nobody) is frozen in a Cirque production. Its creations change all the time, even decades after their “création,” and the people who create them say there is no need to change that modus operandi, just because they happen to now be behind a proscenium arch.

A few days before the first preview, Daniel Ross, another of the creatives involved in the production, was standing in the lobby of the Chicago Theatre. Once Shiner and Roy leave, Ross will be the one charged with maintaining the show, which Cirque hopes will tour nationally, maybe internationally, after its New York stand. For years to come. Ross was asked how things were going.

“It’s always the last crunch,” he said, raising his eyebrows and smiling broadly. “I guess we thrive on that.”


CLOWN ALLEY: Reggie Montgomery, Michael Karp & Dougie Ashton; RBB&B

Our pal Michael Karp prepares to kick Reggie Montgomery's behind for wearing penny loafers on the track while Dougie "The Lord of Misrule" Ashton looks on in approval.

IN MEMORIAM: David Mark Slusser


It is my sad duty to inform you of the untimely death of David Mark Slusser, former HI-HO the Clown on the Big John Strong Circus in the early 70s. Dave was the son of Chester and Marylu Slusser, long time Circus fans, historians and model builders.

Ken Slusser

David Mark Slusser

November 19, 2009 5:44 PM
THE PORTERVILLE RECORDER

David Mark Slusser, a long time resident of Porterville passed away on November 3, 2009.


A graduate of Porterville Union High School who completed early to join the John Strong Circus as a professional entertainer performing magic tricks as HI-HO the Clown and working as an advance man for the show. He joined the US Army and was assigned to the 101's Airborne obtaining the rank of Sergeant and served as a trainer at Fort Benning, Georgia and as a recruiter in Virginia. He received an Honorable Discharge in 1979 before coming home to Porterville to take care of his aging parents.


A lifelong circus fan, he was an accomplished wood carver and carpenter, he frequently collaborated with his friend Bill Melton on wagon restoration. For many years he has been a regular exhibitor at the Tulare Antique Farm Show, Five Dogs, and Draft Horse Shows.


Dave was preceded in death by his parents Chester and MaryLu Slusser and is survived by his older brother and sister-in- law, Ken and Christine Slusser of Santa Margarita, CA and his younger brother Clyde Slusser of Porterville.
A dedicated artisan who loved his craft and life, he will be missed dearly by his many friends and family.
He will be laid to rest at the Veteran's Cemetery in Bakersfield.


Donations in his honor may be made to your favorite charity.

Service under the direction of Whitehurst-Peters-Loyd Funeral & Cremation Service.


Sunday, November 22, 2009

MINI & MAXI

If anyone can translate their Wikipedia bio (in Dutch), please forward it so that I can add it to this post.