Tag: Street Performance
First we had this post about mimes directing traffic in Caracas, Venezuela, and now by way of my old friend Jim Jackson comes news that the mayor of Paris is employing “nocturnal artistic intervention squads” to help quiet down rowdy late-night partiers.
Here’s a riddle for you: what do the sticky floors of New York City subway cars and dusty, musty books on Elizabethan drama have in common? For the answer, just read on….
Here I go again with another old-man story (stop rolling your eyes):
Guy Laliberté, co-founder and owner of Cirque du Soleil, has done well enough for himself to afford to pay $35 million to be a space tourist. Yes, you read that right; yes, out of his own pocket. Not bad for someone who started as an accordion-playing street performer!
“Washington Square Park is the entertainment capital of the world.”
— Tic and/or Tac
(Hey, they’re twins, they speak in unison; how am I supposed to know which one said it?)
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.
Joshua Allen Harris is a very clever guy. This may or may not be physical comedy, but I’m guessing you’ll like it.
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.
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