Tag: Training
Hey, I’m 63 and still going strong, still doing triathlons and still teaching physical comedy, but I’m nothing compared to this grand dame, Johanna Quaas.
These look great, especially that last one!
The notion that physical comedians and other movement artists might have something to teach traditional actors goes back at least a century, when such innovative directors as Jacques Copeau in France and Vsevolod Meyerhold in Russia hired accomplished clowns and variety performers as guest instructors. In the United States, this became a trend in the 60s and 70s as “experimental” theatres sought to break the confines of the fourth wall and Stanislavski method acting to forge more theatrical performance styles.
A Message from Reid Gilbert
[For many of us old-timers, the Valley Studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin was a formative part of our movement theatre education back in the late 1970s. Under the all-embracing leadership of Reid Gilbert, it brought together teachers and performers of mime, clowning, circus, dance, and physical theatre in a beautiful setting and supportive atmosphere. It is probably no accident that the two festivals that introduced American audiences to international movement theatre artists were also in Wisconsin: Lou Campbell’s International Mime Festivalat Viterbo College in Lacrosse (July, 1974) and FOAM, the Festival of American Mime, in Milwaukee (August, 1978). Now Reid is in New York for a reunion (see below) but also to help launch a web site recording the history and many individual stories of Valley Studio participants. You can check out the alpha version of the site here. And here is Reid’s letter explaining these plans in greater detail… —jt]
Pure acrobatics operates in a precise world where time and 3D space intersect in ways even Einstein could not have imagined without vaudeville. As my old Russian circus teacher Gregory Fedin put it, “if you are able to see space, the acrobat has to go through it… go with the curves, like the tracks of a railway.”
Greetings from Barcelona, I mean Barthelona, by many reports the coolest city in Europe. And arguably cooler now that it is the home of the b>Nouveau Clown Institute, an international clown school started just this past year by Jango Edwards, who is amazingly energetic for someone who may or may not be as old as me. I’m running away from administration and he’s starting a school. Go figure.
I don’t know much about this, but it might be right up your clown alley. The Manege Center for Circus, Music Hall and Street Performance, in collaboration with the Swedish branch of Clowns Without Borders and the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts, is offering a one-year master’s degree program in Physical Comedy. Classes are in English and start January 2011. “Upon completion of the programme students will be qualified to work with Clowns without Borders internationally.” You might want to ask if “qualified” means “offered a job,” but certainly worth looking into.
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.
About a month ago I wrote about Jon Davison’s clown research project over in the UK. Today I want to report another such effort, this one here in New York City by Brian A. Bernhard.
I had the pleasure to meet British clown performer and teacher Jon Davison this summer in London and to speak with him about his research into the workings of the performing clown. For the past couple of years he has been undertaking an International Clown Research Project, in residency at London University and at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona. He is in the process of compiling a sort of Encyclopaedia of Clown. I say sort of encyclopaedia, because part of what he’s doing is analytic writing and part of it is “a performance designed to test, compare and demonstrate the wide variety of forms and structures in clown performance.”
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.
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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