Tag: Etienne Decroux
There are professional clowns today who have never even heard of the great Swiss clown Dimitri, though they owe him a big debt. Dimitri died this week at the age of 80 in the Italian region of Switzerland, where he lived and, since 1975, operated the still-thriving Scuola Teatro Dimitri. But he sure should be remembered, because he played a major role in elevating the status of the clown as a performing artist. And I’ll tell you why…
On my last post I welcomed Leonard Pitt to the blog as he introduced us to a great documentary on Mel Blanc. The 20-minute video below is How I Learned to Write by Learning How to Move my Body, which he performed at a monthly conference called (coincidentally) Leonardo, an evening of art and science presentations. In it Leonard touches on different aspects of physical theatre, with topics ranging from the work of Etienne Decroux, to poetry, to Balinese masks. A special delight is an excerpt from his widely-acclaimed show, Doppo, Clown of Yesteryear. Truly a must-see!
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.
Chapter two (previous post) covered a lot of ground — about twenty centuries and at least four continents — so there’s a ton of potential supplementary material. I’ll just throw a few at you here, and then follow up in my next posts with some free books.
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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