Tag: Physical Comedy in the 21st Century
If you combined the physical contortions of Janik & Arnaut (post 231) with the loony inventiveness of Brooklyn’s own Rube Goldberg (post 230), the result might be Leo, the unique one-man show playing at the Harold Clurman Theatre in New York through Feb. 5th.
In the early days of modernism, conceptual artists such as Marcel Duchamp and George Grosz delighted in blurring the line between art and reality. In 1917, Duchamp submitted an upside-down urinal as a work of art, though one obviously lacking in the aesthetic appeal traditionally associated with Art with a capital A. This “found object” was unaltered except for its label. He named it “Fountain.” The piece was rejected by the show’s curator and was soon lost, yet went on to make art history.
As the lights went down at the end of the final performance of James Thiérrée’s Raoul at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this afternoon, the entire audience immediately jumped to its feet to give him a rousing standing ovation. And yet the New York Times review argued that “the charms of Raoul the show quickly wear thin.”
Right before my trip to Barcelona, I got a chance to catch Legs & All, a charming and inventive physical comedy piece, first in a short preview at the next-to-last installment of the New York Downtown Clown Monthly Revue, and then in its full-length incarnation at the Frigid New York Festival. It was inventive enough to get me thinking again about the new and innovative paths physical comedy might follow in this post-post-modern-pre-apocalypse world of ours.
Greetings from COP 15, the U.N. climate “Conference Of Parties” in Copenhagen, Denmark. In case you don’t get out much, COP 15 is considered a big deal not only because it was designed to forge an environmental treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, but because global warming trends have proven to be even worse than what the “alarmist” scientists were predicting just a few years ago. Thus not only do all the nations of the world have delegates at the conference, like it or not they have us “unofficial delegates” in town in the form of environmental activists staging their own Klimaforum, and taking to the streets with a variety of theatrics and actions intended to pressure the politicians and hopefully grab some international media attention.
I guess it’s a generational thing, but when I mention parkour to anyone over 40, I usually get a blank stare, which if nothing else makes me feel young and in the know. If you too are going “huh?” just think of those videos you’ve probably seen of ridiculously agile teenage daredevils — Spidermen without the web — jumping on, over and off walls, railings and other structures that get in their way. They are called traceurs presumably because they trace a path through space while leaving only a faint imprint.
I don’t necessarily think that performance — or any other art form — has to be avant-garde to be valid, but still I would like to showcase work that pushes boundaries. Thus this series, Physical Comedy in the 21st Century. I’m looking for all kinds of innovative work, and I’m hoping that at least half of the millions of you reading this blog will turn me on to some cool stuff. Our first piece by the Belgian comic duo Circoripopolo involves some neat digital tricks, but please don’t think that means that I’m only interested in work that involves technology. In fact, I’ve been especially excited by the nouveau cirque work I’ve seen, which has a strong emphasis on live performance. So… let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend.
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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