Tag: Leonard Pitt
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!
I am honored to have Leonard Pitt contribute his voice to this blog. Leonard Pitt is a world-renown performer and teacher, not to mention being the author of several books on historical Paris. Please allow me to quote from his bio at length: “Leonard Pitt was born in Detroit in 1941. He attended The Art Center School in Los Angeles and at age twenty got a lucrative job in an advertising agency as a graphic designer. Staring into a creative dead end he quit his job and traveled to Europe. He landed in Paris in 1963 and took a few mime classes with Etienne Decroux. After a few days he was hooked. He spent four years with Decroux and seven years in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1970 and settled in Berkeley, California where he opened a school of physical theatre, attracting students from around the world. Leonard’s one-man shows have received critical acclaim. He has performed and taught at theatres and festivals throughout the United States, in Europe, Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia. In 1973 he attended a concert of Balinese dance and music. Turning to his friend before the curtain went up, he whispered, “If this is boring, let’s leave in the middle.” Stunned by what he saw, he closed his school and traveled to Bali to study mask theatre. While there he performed with the Balinese in their village and temple festivals. He returned to Bali in 1978 to study mask carving. In 1986 he co-founded Life On The Water, a contemporary theatre in San Francisco presenting new work.
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.
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