Tag: Chairs
I like parkour and I’ve already written several posts about it. I like it not only because it’s cool and acrobatic and creative, but because its use of the existing environment and everyday objects has a lot in common with physical comedy. No wonder that many parkour devotees adopt Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton as their patron saints.
Fresh on the heels of my posts on George Campo, comic acrobat and eccentric dancer, comes this clip of the clown Kotini Junior. Born in Ukraine in 1967, he won a break dancing competition there in 1986, and has toured with Cirque du Soleil and Zirkus Roncalli. In this impressive clip, he melds a frantic, madman clown character with eccentric dance—much like Campo—and with break dance, and also like Campo centering it around a stubborn chair. Enjoy!
Here’s another gem from the Pathé vaults, again courtesy of Betsy Baytos, our Eccentric Dance quadruple threat (performer, teacher, choreographer, historian). I don’t know anything about these guys, but they’re a tap-dancing knockabout team with some sharp moves with chairs, hats, and one another. There’s no audience, so this was apparently filmed in the Pathé studios. Our gratitude to that unsung hero back at Pathé who had enough sense to get acts like these recorded on film.
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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