Tag: Juggling
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.
I grew up in show business — as a child actor in New York City television in the late 50s — and my first performance ever was in a skit with Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason on the Red Skelton Show on CBS a few days after my 7th birthday. Lorenzo Pisoni also grew up in show business — in the San Francisco-based Pickle Family Circus, to be precise — hanging out in company that included clowns Geoff Hoyle and Bill Irwin, and performing and touring widely in an act with his father, Larry Pisoni.
Chapter 5 from my book, Clowns: A Panoramic History
One more background piece. This chapter from my 1976 history of clowns dealt in detail with the development of physical comedy in the nineteenth century and, ultimately, its influence on American silent film comedy. Good stuff!
TRANSLATE THIS PAGE
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