Tag: New York Clown-Theatre Festival
If you perform as a clown, variety artist, physical comedian — whatever you want to call it! — you’ve no doubt taught workshops. Sometimes workshops are a more dependable source of income than performing. Such is life, but the result is that some teachers, and they may be excellent performers and instructors, never get beyond a few sure-fire hours of classroom material, guaranteed to entertain, and more often than not liberally borrowed from their own favorite teachers.
Clown is to physical comedy as what is to what?
After more than three months abroad, where work and travel left no time for blogging, I’m finally back in New York. With a whirlwind of physical comedy performance coming up this month, there should be a lot to report on.
Last month I posted a preview of the Clowns on Film evening at the NYC Clown-Theatre Festival, perhaps a shameless piece of self-promotion since I was co-hosting the event with Audrey Crabtree. I wrote that the work that evening would be great, since Audrey (festival co-director ) had told me so and I believed her, though honestly I hadn’t seen most of the films before stepping on stage. Of course my hidden agenda was to try to fill the voluminous Brick Theater to the rafters. If you’ve never been there, think Radio City Music Hall. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
Okay, let’s be honest, it would be pretty bogus of me to pretend to be objective while reviewing a show (Flocked) that stars two friends of mine (Audrey Crabtree & Gabriela Muñoz) and is directed by a third (Hilary Chaplain), now wouldn’t it? On the other hand, I did swear on the Blogopedia Bible to report on all interesting physical comedy in the known universe, so I would risk being consigned to eternal Blog Purgatory were I not to mention the show at all.
I just got back from the opening night of this century’s 6th NY Clown-Theatre Festival, a cabaret hilariously hosted by the Leroy Sisters (Aimee German & Jenny Sargent) and featuring excerpts from most of the performers we’ll be seeing in the festival. If this preview was any indication, it’s a strong and varied lineup.
Runners have a saying: the older I get, the faster I used to be. Maybe it’s the same for clowns: do our younger selves just keep getting funnier and funnier? Yep, nothing beats nostalgia, which we proved this past September 19th by staging a clown-theatre reunion in my apartment here in New York, bringing together a crowd of people who had worked together back in the day on the NY International Festival of Clown-Theatre (1983, 1985) and other creative projects. I am happy to report that all the women are still strong, all the men still good-looking, and all our children way above average.
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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