Search Results for: label/Hovey Burgess
Hovey Burgess is a circus performer, educator, and historian no doubt known to many of you. American performers mining the circus/commedia tradition who do not hail from traditional circus families can usually trace some portion of their training directly or indirectly to Hovey’s classes, myself included. Author of the how-to guide, Circus Techniques, Hovey is also one of the top authorities on the history of the circus. He was an indispensable resource for me when I was writing Clowns back in the 70s, and has continued to be so today in the writing of this blog. It is therefore a great honor to have him share his erudition with my readers as an example of the kind of writing and research the art of circus truly deserves.
Back in November 2009, I wrote a blog post on Sweden’s Cirkus Cirkör when they appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I tried to limit myself to covering some physical comedy elements that I thought worth reporting, but I could not help but take issue with a negative review of the show that had appeared in The New York Times. Because I found their critic to be uninformed and therefore unqualified, I wrote the following: “It’s perfectly fine for someone not to have liked this show. I’m not at all opposed to the idea of serious circus criticism, but I think the “paper of record” might want to apply the same standards to all circuses, and find a writer with real expertise in the area. As my friend Dave Carlyon pointed out, if you’re going to write about opera, it’s not enough just to know about the performing arts, you actually have to know about music. Likewise… well, you get the point. Hmm… maybe the Times should hire Hovey as their circus reviewer.”
The notion that physical comedians and other movement artists might have something to teach traditional actors goes back at least a century, when such innovative directors as Jacques Copeau in France and Vsevolod Meyerhold in Russia hired accomplished clowns and variety performers as guest instructors. In the United States, this became a trend in the 60s and 70s as “experimental” theatres sought to break the confines of the fourth wall and Stanislavski method acting to forge more theatrical performance styles.
It is my last night in Barcelona and Jango Edwards brought together for dinner all of the clown / circus /variety historians he could muster in the person of Raffaele De Ritis, whose blog, Novelties and Wonders, is indeed full of wonders; Pat Cashin, whose Clown Alley blog is the place to go for all things clown; Greg DeSanto, director of the International Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center; and yours truly. Or to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, there hasn’t been a greater concentration of clown knowledge at one table since Tristan Rémy dined alone.
This January I finally got back to San Francisco for a week, my first visit to the west coast in something like seven years; always flying out of the country instead of across it.
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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