James Thiérrée: On the Difficulty of Sitting Down

POST 360
Friday, March 7, 2014

After my post on eccentric dancer George Campo’s incredible chair routine, which came by way of Betsy Baytos, I got a link by way of Ted Shapiro to a chair piece performed by James Thiérrée. Well, sort of a chair piece, because it’s about his near-futile efforts to get his rag-doll body to somehow ooze into a proper seated position on a chair. Turns out all he really needed was for a strong woman to administer a swift kick to the seat of his pants.

For those of you unfamiliar with Thiérrée, he is a grandson of Charlie Chaplin and sister of Aurélia Thiérrée, and both of them have (separately) created and starred in numerous full-length pieces of visual theatre that are all rich in original physical comedy. See links below….

Links:
• Articles about Thiérrée reproduced on Pat Cashin’s clownalley.net blog.
• My blog post: James Thiérrée in Raoul
• My blog post:  Aurélia’s Oratorio at the Berkeley Rep

COMMENT

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

SHARE
EXPLORE FURTHER
RELATED POSTS
TRANSLATE THIS PAGE
You can e-mail me at
Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)

My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.

My second book (2015)

Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.

“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin