Tag: Festivals
“Live from Paris” last April, that is, where I was already undercover on the Linder and Etaix capers when I got a coded message from one Michael Evans, an operative unknown to me but apparently a go-between for a character from the 70s who at that time went by the unassuming name of Lou Campbell. I was in Paris, I had nothing better to do (hah!), and before I could say fromage I’d been given the assignment to track down legendary Japanese pantomimist Mamako Yoneyama, rumored to be hiding out in that City of Light Mimes. Evans (if that’s his real name) had first met Yoneyama — code name Mamako— at the 1974 International Mime Festival at Viterbo College in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, organized by yet another “Lou Campbell.” Or was he in fact the same person?? Evans’ rambling confession about that festival — an event whose foreign ideas about movement theatre forever corrupted the minds of a whole generation of impressionable Americans in tights —has finally been released thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, and now the general public can view it here, including incriminating sketches and notes such as these:
Amsterdam is known more for its street performance than its variety theatres, or as Charlie Frye forewarned me,”not too much Variete, except in the windows.” I loved the city, loved biking all over the place, but in my four days there this June I didn’t find much street performance either. Maybe I went at the wrong time or to the wrong place, but several trips through Dam Square netted me only one street performer, a British juggler/contortionist.
As many of you know better than I, street theatre and circus are flourishing in Europe, thanks in no small part to government funding of the arts. The happy result is that it seems like every town has its street theatre festival, where you can spend the day or even a long weekend catching a wide variety of international performers and consuming a whole lot of calories. I think museums are okay in moderation, but hanging out at a performance festival, especially one outdoors, gives me a much better feel for a place and its people. The fact that it’s free doesn’t hurt either.
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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