NY Clown Theater Festival Alex

9/12/10 – The Wow Show with Special Guests, Send in the Angels – about building bridges and where to stand on them...

2010-09-24T23:24:00.000-07:00

Before The Wow Show started, the audience was graced with a visit from the two angels of Send in the Angels. It was a short numero, but well worth it. There is something spot-on about these two. They are gentle, strange, naïve. There is also something foreboding about them, like they might at any moment pull out large stiletto knives and stab us. (They did not.) Their games were simple but sometimes elusive, enigmatic, maintaining coherence through their strong relationship. The characters reminded me of some of the clowns I've seen and enjoyed very much from the Russian company, Litsedei: gentle characters played with a very strong sense of integrity who, on the clown continuum from “jokester next door” to “visitor from beyond”, are very much the latter. They were strange and delightful.

And then on to The Wow Show, which was a very different treat for the audience. This is a show for children in which a lovable man-child uses a number of dramatic conceits to showcase his variety skills. First, he discovers a number of objects in the space, including his hat. Then he finds a list telling him to clean up his mess. Through the clean-up process we go through a sort of “greatest hits” of variety acts: a few hat tricks, some ball juggling, devil sticks, club juggling, and cigar boxes.

The premise works this way: Enzo (the clown) picks up an object, realizes its trick potential, does a few tricks, and then tosses the object into a rubbish bin. This is OK as a premise, if a little repetitive. This first half of the show ends abruptly when Enzo decides that the cleanup is taking too long and clumsily piles all of the collected objects upstage right. Again, that's OK as a solution, but it very unsatisfying, like the entire premise of the cleanup was just a cheap ruse. On a structural level, one could say that is appropriate. The cleanup IS just a structural provocation for the clown to get his groove on. However, it is a provocation for the CLOWN to get his groove on, not the just the variety performer. If the dramatic premise really is nothing, then take the nose off. If the show is to be a clown show, then we have to have the cooperation of two worlds simultaneously: the fierce pursuit virtuosic feats and compelling structure, and also the fierce pursuit of the clown in his given circumstances.

Enzo starts off the show nicely with a gentle sense of discovery, marvelling at the space, the audience, his own hat, the skills he discovers, only being able to muster a drawn-out, “wow!” in many instances. But that character is shattered by the borderline disrespect he pays his objects once he's completed his tricks and decides to move on to his next structural checkpoint. It feels dramatically inconsistent.

The second part of the show is sort of a kids' version of the David Shiner “Photographer” bit from Fool Moon. (In mentioning Shiner, I am not accusing Enzo of plagiarism, or lack of originality—this is his bit—I merely use Shiner as a reference.)   Enzo's version has child audience volunteers playing princes and princesses on a quest. It's a cute bit, and the performer obviously has logged a lot of time working with young children. However, again I found Enzo's character a bit dramatically inconsistent. He has too many one-off jokes for the adults that break his character, like we can see the performer winking behind the clown to the parents, going, “I know this is stupid, but hey, they're kids.” Maybe that's a bit harsh, but somehow Enzo's texts, beyond his very nice, “wow”, seem unsupported. Sometimes worse, they seem like a disrespect for the premise he sets up, much like his disrespect for his objects. Once or twice, an uncomfortable image of a carnie, saying, “hi, boys and girls,” in one breath, and taking a piss in the next, popped into my head. Not that that would be a bad premise! It would be a great premise for an adult show, in the fine tradition of Bob Newhart's Uncle Freddie Show sketch, or the disgruntled Santa in the Jean Sheppard's A Christmas Story, or Billy Bob Thornton's Bad Santa. But in order to make this structure work, Enzo would have to go a lot farther, get a lot nastier, and that probably would put an NC-17 rating on his show. As it is, the one liners do not drive us into exquisite grotesque. Rather, they just deflate the established world.

Comparing these two shows brings me to a thought about bridges between the clown and the audience.   The first few minutes of any show are alienating, as the audience acclimates itself to the world of the particular performance. A distance exists between the two parties. The connexion between those parties is like a bridge. The performer has a choice in how far s/he chooses to walk out on to the bridge in order establish a connexion. But distance is not the only factor. The performer can also wave from the far side of the bridge, in order to get the audience's attention and slowly beckon them over.    Walking out on the bridge, three quarters of the way towards the audience is a very convex, aggressive choice. Standing one's ground and inviting people over, or being compelling enough to get them to come over, is a very concave choice. Both can work in the appropriate context. In the case of Send in the Angels, the clowns are very concave. They evoke a world from beyond and beckon us to it. In The Wow Show's case (and this is what was so frustrating about it), Enzo the clown starts off with a relatively concave choice, evoking a gentle world of discovery. But just as he gets us there, he moves his position on the bridge and brings us back closer to where we were when we walked in. A lot of this move, I think, is unintentional, and has to do with a certain lack of care for the clown world he so meticulously established. I think the kids enjoyed both shows, but (and this is presumptuous as Hell) I think the angels will stick longer in their minds.

9/10/2010 – Cirkus Luna

2010-09-12T03:08:00.000-07:00

The premise is great! A goofball circus from parts-unknown blows into town for their US debut, and proceeds to fail miserably in every conceivable way. I have done two shows using this premise. The first one, The Extreme Monster Mask Rally, a goofball circus where all the acts were creatures wearing Basel carnival masks who also somehow played live music, was quite possibly the worst show I have ever been (partly) responsible for. The best thing that came out of that show was the fact that a reviewer from Paper Magazine came one night, but because he was the only one who showed up, we sent him away. This saves me from having this miserable failure of a show documented in any sort of publication, but trust me, it was bad. You can ask Audrey Crabtree. She tekked the show. Or ask Eric Davis or Nick Trotter. They were in it.

Cirkus Luna was not as bad as that show.   In it, a band of ridiculously clad buck-toothed (all wearing identical Bubba Teeth prostheses—the same ones they wear for their signature Fools Mass), speaking in some unidentifiable Slavic pidgin English perform a series of stupid tricks stupidly. From the description thus far, if you know me, you might think this is right up my alley. And I wanted to like it. I desperately did. And I did laugh at a few things. But I was also offended, mostly aesthetically. I am not sure if this was supposed to be a bouffon show or a clown show. It was neither, although it contained semiotic signs of both.

First, just one little pet peeve. A central premise of the show is that these people are from elsewhere. They are “other”. In this case, they seem to be from some Slavic country that is backward, unhip, naïve, stupid, cretinous, full of stage fright, clumsy, and apparently bereft of orthodontists or toothbrushes. This is an old trope. We used to see it in the Wendy's commercials in the 80's, which were funny.    We saw it with Robert Smigel's bad imitations of Boris Yeltsin on Conan in the 90's. (Also funny.) But those two cases work for different reasons. The Wendy's spots worked because they were one-offs: 30-second jokes used to sell hamburgers. Smigel's short sketches worked because behind the seeming incompetence and alcoholism of the Yelstin he played was a virtuouso comedian that boiled over into the scene. More recently Sacha Baron Cohen treaded into these chauvniistic waters with Borat, a sort of backward buffoon from Kazakhstan (not a Slav, but from a former Soviet country.) And while Borat makes me bristle a bit when he is in Kazakhstan, his act makes complete sense in America, as if he is saying, “you think Borat is an asshole? Look at all these 'normal' people around him who are even bigger assholes?” Wendy's succeeds because it is short. Smigel succeeds because he makes Yeltsin merely a current events premise for great play. Baron Cohen succeeds because, as a sort of filmic buffoon, he shows us that WE are the real clowns.

Cirkus Luna succeeds in none of those ways. It seems to use Slavs as some sort of fall guy, as a reason to act stupidly and without redemption. It's like a bad black-faced minstrel show, where ineptitude is framed as funny simply because it's done by people playing negroes. (I have a suspicion that successful minstrel shows were better than this, hence their popularity, but never having seen one, I can only speculate.)    I am a Slav – part Polish, part Ukrainian, part Russified Lithuanian, part Russified Jew – and I speak my mother's maiden tongue, Russian. And I fully admit that there are many funny things about our culture, in terms of the way it manifests its own brand of global “hip” culture. (Just watch some Russian music videos sometime.) But I'm a little offended at the taking hostage of my people so you can play morons. This show is like one long pollack joke, but it is worse, because at least in the telling of the pollack joke, it is mediated through a joke teller, who may be able to guide you to the core funny of the misunderstanding that really has nothing to do with being Polish. Not that I am a big fan of pollack jokes or elephant (i.e. African American) jokes, or jokes on any ethnicity, but in the best case scenario the use of the word pollack is merely an introduction, a conditioning element that readies us to hear about a funny situation that would be funny if it happened to anyone. This show was more like the pollack joke told in Raising Arizona, (I'm paraphrasing), “how come it takes 5 Polish people to screw in a light bulb? Cuz they're so stupid!”

You wanna make fun of Slavs? Go for it! But why don't you start by doing some research at Tatiana in Brighton Beach, or at a casino in Moscow, or a nightclub in Vilnius. And once you've gotten those types down, how are you going to show us that THEY are US?

But enough about being personally offended. Let's get to the aesthetics. A great attempt has been made in this show to structure episodes of failure. It succeeds. The tricks are stupid and banal. A great attempt has also been made create a company of idiots who will continue no matter what. It succeeds. But here is the problem: why do they continue? We have a troupe of incredibly fearful proto-clowns, with almost no personality of their own, try and flail, and fail, at all times prodded by a smiling, bucked-toothed ringmaster. They have no joy, only fear and suffering. I began to wonder, was this on purpose? Am I supposed to think that there is a firing squad of FSB, or Lukashenko-sponsored agents standing behind the curtains, waiting to shoot them if the audience does not clap loudly enough? If this was the premise (and an interesting premise it would be), it should have been driven much further.

There are even structured flops, but they yield nothing. In short, these clowns have no personality. They follow orders, but they do not express desires or wants, only abject shame. In this steel trap of a structure, no one is allowed to breathe, to express themselves, to have a victory. They try very little and fail a lot, but never develop relationships with each other. There is no change, or even challenge, to hierarchy. It is as if this show has set out to impersonate Stalinism itself, an arguably humorless project.   It is odd to see this from a self-professed adherent to Jerzy Grotowski, as director/Ringmaster Matt Mittler describes himself (after all, the history of art in the Soviet Union, is, in part, a history of subversion, of subtly, sometimes humorously, raging against the machine.) But maybe there's the rub. I saw Grotowski speak in Paris in 1997, and one thing he was short on was humor. And these pitiful beings of The Realm of Suffering did make me think of descriptions of Grotowski's characters from The Constant Prince, but not in a good way.

From a technical standpoint, there are plenty of shout-outs to clown structures: lining up, group activities, repeated patterns, but there are no clowns to fill them. There is no joy, no hope, too much flailing, not enough precision, and not enough eyes. It is as if the acts and the failures are “signed” but they are not shared. This is true of most of the pieces, such as the water ballet, the human cannonball, and the I-don't-know-how-many-times-but-it-was-too-many circular march-while-singing-an-unidentifiable-anthem.

One bright spot was the moment when the clown big clown, Boron, attempted to walk the “tight rope” (really just a piece of cloth on the floor.) He succeeds in walking it where others have failed, but every step brings more terror, until he is left a crumbled mess, blubbering into the ringmaster's arms. This was well played. It also opened up a question about the relationship of the clowns to the ringmaster: is there some sort of EST, or guru groupthink going on? That could have worked as a premise to help define these characters, but this was the only moment.

Also, the group belly-flopping at the end of the water ballet made for a nice moment. For one of the few times in the show, we saw the clowns succeed in making a beautiful, ridiculous image.

The encore – Riverdance

Get rid of the intro. Whatever you have done to this poor woman who introduces this act and some others, stop it. It's like watching a person who hasn't eaten in ten years try to recite a Robert Frost poem while passing a violin she ate yesterday. Have her do something else. She's obviously a good performer. Give her character something that gives her joy, despite her ridiculousness.

A great moment was missed in the Riverdance numero. For the first time, the four clowns arrived and seemed to express some ridiculous hope and individuality. And they were charming in their dances. This was all eclipsed by Mr. Mittler's entrance, which drove things (yet again) over the top and into poorly executed camp.

As I quoted my teacher, Bob, in my last post, “start simply.” Sans teeth. Sans accents. Sans Cirkus. It's enough of a brilliant feat to have a company of six clowns just line-up in the right place. That can be a 10-minute piece! So much about character and relationship can be revealed. This is what I like so much about rehearsing in looped routines. Simple structures may not be smart, but they can allow one to go deeper. And after the depths have been plumbed, you can cleverly put them into situations.

9/5 – Ms Pretty Smart, Secret Agent

2010-09-12T00:07:00.000-07:00

In this turn, the talented Olivia Lehrmann tackles new territory with an ambitious solo cown piece.

The premise is clever: a cute, naïve personage works as a server in a restaurant for an unseen but heard fascist boss and fantasizes about being a secret agent. Sort of a “Secret Life of Walter Mitty” premise. He various fantasies give her the chance to show off her musical and acrobatic skills (Although I could've stood to see more working of acrobatics into the dramatic situation —she's got the chops, she might as well use them...)

Along the way, she gives a plastic ring to an audience member that she treats as a customer in her “restaurant”, then takes the ring back, loses it, pretends like the the audience member cares about her losing it, transforms herself into a secret agent in order to find the ring, interviews a few audience members she treats as customers in her imaginary restaurant that she imagines now are some kind of other secret agents, gets yelled at by her imaginary boss, who she sometimes pretends she imaignes to be to be a secret agent, too, and finally finds the plastic ring taped to a plunger she has placed backstage that she makes an audience member pretend to find.

Confused yet?

Perhaps this premise is a little too clever. It's already enough for a clown to pretend to be in a restaurant with the audience. That's a whole show! But to have a clown pretend to be a waitress in a restaurant with the audience and then pretend another world on top of that feels like too much setup with not enough payoff. As my teacher, Bob, liked to tell us, “start simple. If you start with something too complex, then anything you add to it will just slide right off.”

I remember, after doing a workshop with David Gaines a bunch of years ago, at the end of our two weeks, someone asked him, “how do we generate more work?” He said, “well, it's pretty simple really. One of you comes out and does something, then the other one comes and does something, and there you are...” He went on to say that the workshop had given us some small sense of where our clowns, individually, lived. In genenrating new material, we should try to put our clowns in situations where those traits we discovered about ourselves would thrive. On the most basic level, that's all a clown show is: a series of situations that work well to trigger the ridiculousness and naivete of the clown performing. Come up with enough situations and maybe a theme emerges. Just add some lights & music and there's your show!...

...OK, it's not that easy. (Nor did David suggest that it was) But maybe after you reflect on that emerging theme, others emerge. They lead you to more situations. You cut some older stuff that seems less fun or relevant, polish other things, experiment, rehearse until you start to doubt if any of it's funny, and then take the giant risk of putting it up in front of an audience. (Your first audience is preferably not your opening day.) At least that is one way of working. The benefit of working this way is that it takes the pressure off of the clown to fit through a pre-conceived narrative that may or may not be where the clown wants to play. It can also make for a structure that is more organic and satisfying, both for the audience and the performer.

Another relevant quote, this one from my good friend, Blake Montgomery, Artistic Director of The Building Stage in Chicago, and a very funny clown himself: “A clown is not a mime. A clown can only mime as a clown would mime.” Sounds a little obvious, I know, but within it is a profound truth about the clown's intentions. When a clown mimes in a clown theatre show, the performer does not do this primarily to tell a story through mime, or wow the audience with virtuousic storytelling mime skills. (We will leave that to fanatical devotees of Bip, if there are any left.) A clown may be a great mime, and may think that s/he is going to greatly impress the audience with his/her skill, but somewhere along the way, there will be a bide, a flop, and that moment of failure is where we truly see the clown. If clowns are acrobats of the soul, then it is not the acrobatic feat that should catch our focus but, rather, the horrible crash that follows the feat and the recovery that follows the crash.

Ms. Lehrmann makes her stage personage do many things. Some of them are cute, but rarely are they funny in the sense of acting as a provocation to show us the clown in failure. They are more like jokes that are supposed to succeed. Take for instance, her use of a Chinese voice (the “offstage” voice of her imaginary boss, Mrs. Chang) which she makes with her head turned away from the audience. We hear the Chinese. We see Ms. Lehrmann react to it in fear, resentment, etc. But never do we get an acknowledgment from the clown that she thinks this crappy bit of ventriloquism is funny and fun to do. In this way, she mimes like a mime and not like a clown.

Ms. Lehrmann is a skilled performer and this is an ambitious project. It's not there yet, but I have no doubt it will be. I look forward to seeing a simplified reworking of it in the future, should she choose to do so. And I hope she will.

9/5/2010 - Perhaps, Perhaps, Quizas

2010-09-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

If anyone has gotten the dosage right between a ridiculous world of fancy that pulls on the heartstrings by feeling real but saving us from heartbreak by reminding us that it is not real, it is Gabriela Munoz in this short numero.

A soft spoken clown with a hard-edged glint in her eye awaits her wedding day. With an open, relaxed face, a wedding gown that looks like it's seen better days, a squeaky voice that mostly repeats a few bars of the Wedding March, some toilet paper, and few other choice props, she takes us to some delightful emotional places while enacting her fantasy day.

And, cleverly, she gets it! Through some very nice audience participation work, she snags a groom. And then a wonderful transformation occurs where the innocent dreamer we just pitied turns into a petty dictator who will never be satisfied with her choice. It's a subtly played change that opened up a space to ponder the uglier sides of idealistic love, of wanting to be in love, and that uncomfortable encounter we sometimes face when an ideal turns into a person with his/her own wants and needs.

Love is a two way street? Love is not simple wish/nightmare fulfillment? Those thoughts, as a possible moral to the story, are there. Not sure if she planted them or I had them already planted when I walked in. It doesn't matter. The relevant point is that her strong, vulnerable, thoughtful, performance creates moments that invite both empathy and self-reflection. And she does it all while making me and rest of audience laugh out loud. Bravo!

I would love to see this short piece fleshed-out into a full-length show.

9/5/2010 - Coney Island Chris

2010-09-11T00:40:00.000-07:00

Let me start off by saying that that Geek Shows are not my thing. I am easily grossed-out, both by hardware going in places it seemingly shoudln't go, and by the usually lame, half-committed, badly enacted patter that usually accompanies the Geek act.

Well, if you're like me, (or anyone else, for that matter), GO SEE CONEY ISLAND CHRIS! THIS IS A SHOW!!

Part Harry Anderson, part Jerry Lewis, part Geek, part magician, part clown...THIS GUY ROCKS!

Over the course of an hour, Chris takes the audience through 10 well-known Geek tricks, culminating with a final act that involves a bed of nails, an egg, and a 12-pound sledge. There is never a dull moment.
This lanky, four-eyed tramp barks out an act full of tiny surprises and vulnerability, amused at his own corny jokes and occasional impromptu mistakes. He does what so many geeks fail at: he is both completely “other” and completely “us”.

And throughout his tour of tricks he has us in the palm of his hand, building up to that moment when the trap will spring (sometimes literally, as when he sticks his hand in an animal trap), and then extending the moment, backing it down, misdirecting us, and ultimately satisfying our own sadistic expectations.

This guy had me from start to finish. And there is something very “clown” about this Geek's work, in a sort of “Andy Kaufman” sense. Like Kaufman's escapades: as Intergernder Wrestling Champion, as Tony Clifton, as “the Real Andy Kaufman”, the game with Coney Island Chris is, “which Geek trick is real? And which one is a contrivance?” In this way, Chris, has elevated the deconstuction of the Geek act to a new level. Because not only did I not know which acts were “real” (for the most part), I didn't care. Coney Island Chris has managed to return the magic to the Geek act. Through the use of camp, skill, and a great sense of misdirection, he drew me in to his tricks, with a signifigant part of my brain knowing (or hoping) they were not real, but with another part of my brain believing his (sometimes) false contrivances all the way. He does tricks that are obvious put-ons. He does tricks that are seemingly “for real..” He does other tricks which allow me as a spectator to flicker in and out belief/disbelief. This reminds me of Kaufmann's Wretsling stint, of Wrestling in general: both totally real (dramatically) and totally fake. This is best exemplified in Chris' homage to that most famous of Geek weightlifters, Mr. Lifto. (I will save the details...)

Chris needs a better ending for his show. Something to tie the whole thing together. Right now, the rhythm of the piece is sustained by his personage and the escalation of his bits. It needs something more, a story, a challenge that is either overcome or not, in order to turn it into a full-fledged Clown Theatre show. I will be excited to see it again when he does that. In the meantime, I may go watch his show again, because it was so wonderfully vulnerable, skillfull, and entertaining. Bravo!

Jasp & Morro Do Puberty - 9/4/2010

2010-09-08T21:38:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of reasons why puberty would seem like a great setup for a clown show. Puberty is that horrible time of passage from child to adult, from pleasure to reality (in a Freudian sense), a time of incredible vulnerability and discovery, where the world becomes bigger, less friendly, where even your own body becomes an unpredictable enemy.

Jasp and Morro, a captivating clown duo from Canada, take on the task. Menstruation, attractiveness, rebellion, sexuality, all get get treated by these two, with great comic effect. There are some wonderful moments of vulnerability. Jasp especially has an easy way of inviting the audience into flights of fancy. And there are a couple of great moments where she gets carried away and her soft, demure side yields to a more dangerous, obsessed person.

Those obsessed moments were the ones I relished most. I wanted there to be more. The show is well-structured. Cleverly structured. There are great surprises and nicely handled moments of audience participation.

However, at some point I felt like I was not watching a clown duo play a show about puberty and two pubescent girls, but, rather, two clowns who WERE pubescent girls. The difference may seem semantic, but to me it is crucial. Clowns are not the given circumstances they play; they are beyond that. (For an example of Pochinko-influenced clowns successfully navigating this territory, check out any video you can find of Asylum-137's “Clowns in the Vagina”.)

Puberty is, arguably, a time when we are all clowns. In clowning this situation, then, we must be careful not to let the given circumstances capture the clown. This is how I felt with Jasp and Morro: while punctuated with good moments, I was not sure if these two clowns knew that this was a clown show. I saw puberty do Jasp and Morro, not the other way around.

The show is brilliantly structured. Great setups. Great audience participation. Great character arcs. But it needs the clowns to go further. More competition. More embarrassment. More surety in mission. More panic and betrayal. More bloody tampons and maxi pads and makeup and TeenPeople Magazines erupting into the space. I don't just want the absurdity of puberty, I want the absurdity of clowns doing puberty!

One nice moment that captures it right is Jasp's dance with her stuffed animal. I won't spoil the outcome, but this is one place where the absurd world of pubescent crossed over into the world of the clown. I want more of that.

This is a good show. It's more than worth seeing. They've got lots of things going for them and have done a lot of things right. It's not yet a great show. To make it so, these excellent performers and their director should take this set of ridiculous situations, transfer them into a ridiculous world, and see what happens.

Ferdinand the Magnificent- 9/4/2010 - And Now for Something Completely Different...

2010-09-08T20:19:00.000-07:00

As if reading my mind, Nick Trotter, as Ferdinand the Magnificent, seemed to say, “you want la follie, you got it!” I have never witnessed the physical embodiment of Rabelaisian clown before I saw Ferdinand. How else to describe a 6'-plus creature in a pink spandex bodysuit, a huge white diaper, hiking boots, a nose to rival that of Toucan Sam, and a tendency to pull things out of his ass?

In his 30-or-so minutes, Ferdinand plays both desperate puppy looking for a home and coquettish dandy looking to impress his new friends. He can be quite aggressive with us, but in a way that is mostly safe and charming. He also has a talent for making music with found objects, most of which he pulls out of the backside of that diaper of his. Trotter the performer manages to take his own musical skills and work them pretty seamlessly into Ferdinand's being as a sort of lovable musical savant that you'd be a little scared to piss-off.

What keeps Ferdinand with us, for all of his bigness (both literal and aesthetic) is his wonderful naivete. Ferdinand is a musical, highly functioning autistic on speed. Strange things happen to him. They're probably stranger for us than for him – I have the feeling that this is not the first time that Ferdinand found a bottle of Penzzoil in his rectum and then discovered the bottle was full of Froot-Loops.

His complete innocence allows one to float into weird sexual double-images, without him ever going there. When he pulls a bell out of his seemingly endless well of treats, he pins it to the waistband of his diaper, allowing him to ring it with his body as he discovers the sound and gyrates to a rhythm he develops. As he shakes his hips and moves his feet, smiling naively to the audience, I am reminded of some character from a Bosch painting, or an image from Rabelais – a giant with matching giant phallus-like nose, tinkling the tiny jewels in his crotch. It is weird. It is also very well executed.

Ferdinand has no problem with motivation, in terms of stakes. This weird, wingless, overgrown flamingo is motivated! He tackles it all with great appetite! (I'd like to see even more!) The small problem with his show is the first kind of motivation: why is Ferdinand here? What does he hope to accomplish? Right now, it seems like he's passing through. For a while, I don't care why he's here, because his images & games are so compelling & entertaining, I forget. But towards the end, I start to feel stuck in a loop. Ferdinand does not yet have a story that will lead either of us to transformation.

His games are great. Better than great. But I want to see this weirdo in a situation that challenges and transforms both him and us. That's the holy grail of clown shows. And it's worth Ferdinand exploring it. So, I look forward to see Ferdinand in a show with a proper beginning, middle, and end. In the meantime, you should catch it in its current incarnation, so you can say you were there.

"Clowns with Gowns" - 9/4/2010

2010-09-08T20:08:00.000-07:00

"Clowns with Gowns” is a very cute duo piece. It has a great, misdirecting opening, which I won't spoil. I might only add that the first person to appear (the one who sets everything up—I am trying not to give everything away), I think, should be even less competent. She should be the worst clown in the world, maybe with a really bad b-day gag or two—it will make that beautiful transformation into the show that much more so.

The two performers of “Clowns with Gowns” have much to be admired: precision, physical skills, a certain cute charm. They proceed with a number of numeros in which they attempt to collaborate, working out who is the real boss, with varying levels of agreement/antagonism. We even get some highs and lows when one conflict leads to an accidental murder of a partner, which is quickly followed by the ritual suicide of the other. Structurally, these numeros are well conceived, and there is an arc to the show, even if it still needs a little work. (And hey, let's face it, endings in clown shows are tough!)

All the pieces are in place, but somehow they are not quite lived-in. The moments of conflict between the two are not fierce enough. The murder & suicide moment is emblematic of this problem. A clown is constantly flickering in & out of sincere belief and naïve play of the situation s/he enacts. The situation should feel alternately real and completely like a contrivance that solely exists to make the audience laugh. That dual reality is the clown's beauty. In this show, when the accidental murderess performs her grievous suicide, we see an “indicative” suicide, but we do not for a moment believe her. And, while we should not sink into a melodrama where she actually kills herself, there have to be some flickering moments where she is engulfed in grief, drenched by grief, driven to madness and suicide by the thought of losing her partner forever and that she is to blame.

In terms of motivation, the first question of, “what are you doing here?” is pretty well answered. These two skilled, charming clowns have shown up to put on a show. The “truth” is great. But in the sense of, “do you care about how this thing goes?” these clowns need a kick in the pants. The “treatment” lacks a bit. They need to be more desperate, both as clowns and performers. Desperate enough to surprise themselves and each other. The structure is there, and it is well-conceived. Now, I want to see “la follie.”

On a note of suggestion, I might take away some of the musical score in the piece. I think some of the emotional relationships/reactions become too choreographed to the music and prevent the clowns from reacting to each other and the audience. Some speaking to each other, however minimal, might help this as well.

On "Motivation"- 9/4/2010

2010-09-08T20:01:00.000-07:00

Hey, Festival People,

I was going to post my reviews of "Clowns with Gowns" and "Ferdinand" altogether, and then felt like the whole thing was too long. So I broke it up into three parts. Below is a little commentary on a binding concept, "motivation", I use to talk about both shows. I will post my comments of those two good shows separately and shortly. The comments below may help contextualize my reviews of those shows, but feel free to skip if you want to get to more of a review.

The following is a commentary on the concept of "motivation," with a particular focus on Clown Theatre.

Motivation is one of those monumentally loaded words in the theatre. It is a sine qua non of the theatrical, in at least two senses of the word. First, dramatically speaking, characters MUST be in front of us for some reason. Even in an “absurd” text (“absurd” being a fairly loaded word in itself), characters pursue something. They may not know what it is. We may not know what it is. Motivation may not even have to come from the dramatic circumstances. It may, rather, come from a “performative” impulse, like that of a dancer or acrobat, or (I imagine) someone acting in a Robert Wilson spectacle. This is the second part of motivation, which could also be labeled “desire”, or “daring”, or “need”. It is the focused work of the performer as virtuoso, actively looking for moments, possibilities, extensions, collaborations.

Motivation is also one of the fundamental clichés of actors and egos. “What's my motivation?” the actor whines to his director in the old joke. “Your goddamn paycheck, THAT'S your motivation!” the director responds. And while this seems a little callous on the director's part, I have in the past sided with that callous director. This isn't because I find actors to be a generally whiny, temperamental lot, although as an actor I have been, at times, both whiny and temperamental. Rather, it is because the “what's my motivation?” quip can feel a lot like that much more annoying quip one gets occasionally when directing actors of, “my character wouldn't do that!” Really? Are you so sure you know exactly what you, as a person, are liable to do in the next five minutes?

Both these statements sometimes to me indicate a lack of imagination more than anything else. “You don't know what your motivation is? Figure it out. Try something. If that doesn't work, try something else! The focus is not on your little preconceived plan, but what you discover in the moment!” Of course one must find the appropriately persuasive means to get this idea across, preferably avoiding any tactic that involves shame or condescension...

Dramatic motivation in a clown show can be further broken into two parts, which could be labeled “truth” and “treatment”. (I am indebted to my teacher, Bob Berky, for this terminology) First, in terms of “truth,”: “why are we here? What has the clown arrived to accomplish?” Usually the answer to this question includes “put on a show,” in some fashion or other. But what kind of show? What would the show look like, ideally, if the clown did not proceed to screw it up in all the delicious ways s/he will?

"Treatment,” then, refers to the way the clown(s) screw it up. It is the obstacles the clown(s) encounter: the difficulties with objects, with the audience, with lighting cues and music, with their own bodies, phobias, and fears, with hierarchy, with complicite, with their own view of the discrepancy between their expectations and reality (not an exhaustive list, nor universally applicable, of course) and the ways these obstacles affect the clown(s) and their relationships.

In terms of “Treatment,” motivation becomes, in part, a discussion of stakes. In a clown show, the stakes are generally very high. Stephen Buescher once was nice enough to spend some time with me and my friends as we struggled through our first clown show, some 12 years ago. One of the things he told us what that, (I am paraphrasing now) clowns are beings who live on the edges of the continuum between terror and the sublime. I take this to mean that clowns are, fundamentally, ridiculous beings who want things so very badly that even small projects – lining up, doing the dishes, introducing a numero – can erupt into a hilarious piece that rattles around our soul. Taken this way, a clown is not the opposite of a Stanislavkiian (another loaded term) actor, obsessively scoring each beat, each objective. Rather, the clown is the literal (and therefore absurd) realization of that ideal. This doesn't mean that clowns always live in desperation. But clowns generally are funnier when they play toward desperation, when they gradually allow the stakes to grow and affect them to such an extent that they take us to higher highs and lower lows.

So now we have some terms: “Motivation,” which can be broken down into “dramatic” and “performative” aspects. And a further breakdown of “dramatic motivation” into “truth,” and “treatment.” And we can tie it all together by observing that it is in the "treatment" that "dramatic" and "performative" motivations meet together in synthesis. That is, we construct a dramatic situation (truth plus treatment) for the clown to encounter and then push the clown to "eleven out of ten" in trying to pursue a goal.

"Motivation”, albeit in two very different senses, was the word I could find to unite two very different, entertaining shows that were paired together the day I saw them, “Clowns with Gowns”, and “Ferdinand the Magnificent”. If either one is said to encounter problems, those problems go back to motivation, in different ways. Check out my separate reviews of those shows in following posts.

Moving Target--10/11

2007-10-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

Masks operate everywhere in the theatre, albeit most of of the time not literally. Character can be conceived in terms of mask, costume can be used as a mask, the space can be talked about as a mask, even the text is a kind of mask. Mask, in this sense, is the “not self,” the modality, that an actor pushes energy and intention through. Masks often literally limit sight, matched by a metaphorical shaping of a point of view—opening up proclivities and attitudes and closing down others. The red nose was described by Jacques Lecoq as the “neutral mask of comedy,” which I take to mean that it is the mask of the “pre-performative” state of comedy—the readiness, the attention, the focus, the naivete, the state of play—that must exist before we even begin talking about character or given circumstances. Does that mean that the nose is an enabler? An expander of possibilities? Well, yes and no. In regular neutral mask work, there are many wrong choices. That is part of the point of the work—to help the student build a “clean slate” from which to build character or a dynamic, as well as learn better one's relationship with his/her body, break bad habits, etc.. The neutral mask also has generic limitations—as we learned at Lecoq, sometimes getting our fragile little artist egos bruised in the process, not all themes/situations are appropriate for the neutral mask. Most obviously, a situation where language becomes a necessity would be one. One might even argue that the neutral mask doesn't belong in ANY theatrical context, that really it is a pedagogical tool, and as such it belongs not to the realm of the theatrical but to the realm of the pre-theatrical. My fellow Lecoq alum, Kirjian, a very funny man in his own right, has gone as far as to say (and I have sometimes been swayed by his argument) the same thing about the red nose: that it is best used as a pedagogical tool, not in a performance context, but you can argue that point with him. My point is that the nose allows one to go certain places that would otherwise not be possible. But the nose demands respect in return. You have to play by its rules, otherwise the content of your work comes out ill-formed, amorphous. (This is not to say that you can't break rules, but you have to follow rules first in order to break them--sort of a yin-yang thing.)

Sometimes the performer uses the nose to mine herself for material. This is often the case in director Sue Morrison's collaborations. The states invoked in the highly personal training are used to turn an introspective process inside out, as it were, into a performative act. In a sense this kind of work is shamanistic—the nose is used to express an inner self that taps into a collective unconscious that resonates both personally and to the group. (I don't know if I'm speaking in terms acceptable to Sue, so please don't take this as an accurate representation of her process—I am merely speaking of my impressions.) This kind of work is also potentially very daunting because it is so highly personal. If the audience doesn't like the show, the contents of which are made up of your life, it may feel pretty close to the audience not liking your life (something you may already be up in the air about yourself.) I like the idea of this work very much as it has the possibility for metaphysical greatness. Rather than seeing a numero treated, like the great Georgie Carl and his microphone, the numero in this kind of work is someone's life.

This approach carries significant risks, however. There is sometimes a confusion of the part of the performer about the difference between expressing something that is “in the true” and expressing the “Truth” of oneself. A red nose is a mask. It may be more interesting than the social masks we wear at work, or at cocktail parties, but the things that come out of it are no more or less “in the true” than any other mask, for the question of being “in the true” is one of context, of convention. Now arguably, the things expressed by the clown are closer to one's personal “Truth” than the ones at the cocktail party, but I make such a claim not without suspicion. However, it certainly feels more like “Truth.” When one mines so deeply into oneself for material (and this is not an argument against such work) the result not only feels like “Truth,” but hard-worn “Truth.” It feels so valuable, so “pre-social,” so “Artaudian.” My suspicion lies here: sometimes I wonder if this privileged status we are tempted to give this work obfuscates the issue that the red nose is still fundamentally a mask, and while it may be a portal to a part of our being, it is not a portal to all of it. It is not all of what we are, however un-Romantic that sounds. Yes, Clown is more than personage. It may even be more than a persona. But it is not the whole “Truth” of a person, for part of the “Truth” of that person is the one who wears the social mask at the cocktail party. Or, if the Clown is so broad as to be conceived of as a person, it has to be, somewhere, a person who is partially “not you.”

Erin Bouvvy's new show, "Moving Target," is tremendously ambitious. It is personal, it is expressive. We see a clown in thritysomething crisis asking, “is this it?” The setting begins in a refreshingly aggressive fashion, in a hospital-like environment, with Bouvvy emerging somewhat monstrously from behind a makeshift gurney to a particularly grotesque number by My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, circa 1989. (Gold star for effective use of MLTKK successfully in a clown show.) She is sick. Will someone take care of her? Where's the doctor? She takes pills throughout the show, littering the stage with empty orange bottles. (It might've been nice to see this device extended so that the show would've ended with thousands of discarded bottles covering the floor.) Or is she sick at all? Is this the latest (last?) refuge for a person trying to sort herself out? A cry for help? And if so, to whom? Herself?

Bouvvy engages in a stream-of-consciousness struggle for answers and clarity. Trying strategies, expressing despair, enacting daydreams, and then cruelly turning against herself and dashing those dreams. Her cruelty to herself becomes hard to watch at times, in a good way, as we nearly descend into the realm of the Bouffon, but with Bouvvy's clown being a shit to herself, rather than the audience.

The content of the show is Bouvvy's clown riffing on the memory-relics of her life: a job, a failed relationship, a sense of mortality, the burden of daydreaming after daydreaming has been recognized for what it is. Bouvvy finally makes an uneasy truce with herself, and her show has one of the best endings I've seen at the festival yet, involving animated a stuffed pet cat.

All of the pieces are in place for this show to be a moving, transformative experience. They are not quite well-enough glued together. And this brings me back to the demands of the nose. They were not adequately met for me on the night I attended. This was expressed in a little apprehension, a little lack of focus and precision and stillness. The highs were not high enough and the lows weren't open enough. The animal clarity that is necessary for the work was lacking in some parts. As I said earlier, the risk in this type of show is great. Because the work is so personal, and identifiably so, if it is not played through the nose (no pun intended), it seems more like therapy. And this can make the project seem selfish; after all, in therapy the expresser pays the listener, and not vice-verse.

Erin Bouvvy is not selfish, however. She is a very talented and brave performer at the beginning of a new and potentially brilliant show. You should see it when you get the chance because it will do nothing but improve.

Under the Skiff--10/10

2007-10-13T14:38:00.001-07:00

Every piece of theatre involves manipulation. Sometimes these are literally physical manipulations of the audience, like in De la Guarda. Sometimes they are manipulations of audience participants and audience—an interesting case, as many times the audience participant is actually a secret co-conspirator of the actor, complying (usually) with instructions whispered under the actor's breath. Sometimes the manipulation happens before the show begins. I remember a clown show I worked in, where we received a very favorable review, but the review just didn't quite have the perfect quote. It did, however, say, “This is clowning unplugged.” The company hotly discussed whether or not we could use the quote on posters in the following fashion: “This is clowning...”! We decided against. These are the manipulations that first come to mind. But the theatre experience itself is also a manipulation: of time, of space, of bodies, emotional states (both the actors' and the audience's) and of expectations. Ultimately, the audience wants to be manipulated. But, paradoxically, they also want to feel safe and they don't want to feel stupid, which can happen if the performer(s) manipulate too quickly or inconsiderately, or without building a base from which to deviate. This is not to say that a performance should start particularly slowly, it just means that thrills and surprises are best received from friends and not from total strangers.

“Under the Skiff” provided another variation on the theme of manipulation by virtue of a certain delicate vulnerability. I was delightfully duped a number of times by a concave quality in both of the performers that misled me to think that they were unsure of where they were going. Nobody likes a clown (or date, for that matter) who apologetically asks for too much. This was not the case in this duo show, but both Maia Bieler and Jenny Sargent exhibited such sensitivity and patience in the generating of their themes that I almost started to worry. Was the gentleness a symptom of timidity on the performers' parts? And then BAM! the theme would coalesce into a brilliant piece with great emotional depth and sublime transformations They did this to me more than once. It takes a lot of integrity to stay in that vulnerable void for so long, especially when you know what you have in store for the audience.

The topicality of the show was very interesting. It was set in an immigration office. As I said in a previous entry, topicality does not necessarily get one any closer to “meaningfulness,” but it doesn't deter one from it either, much opposed to popular belief. Oftentimes, especially for those of us who tend to wax metaphysically on our art, topicality is eschewed as sell-out, as if addressing prominent cultural or social issues was somehow antithetical to “true” artistic expression. It is true that “issue plays” are often bad. But it is equally true that theatre in general is often bad. The last gasp of of so-called “purity”: the idiosyncratic expression of the self, justified because it's “for real” is no guarantee that you get anything more present, genuine, or profound than a 30-second political TV spot. (And sometimes the TV spot is better because at least it's over in 30 seconds!) However, it is also true that sometimes an artist chooses to address a certain topical issue because s/he feels very strongly about it. It may be an issue of such importance to the artist that s/he cannot afford to conceive of the issue in anything but black and white terms. And therein lies the problem. Art is much more interesting (to me, anyway) when it asks questions rather than answers them. This might explain why those who still find the reading of plays an enjoyable pastime still read some of Brecht's plays, but many fewer have ever done so with the scripts of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. (Not that that fine company does bad work, it's just a question of priorities—are you trying to mobilize or you trying to stimulate some kind of dialectical process?)

The treatment and the topicality work very well in “Under the Skiff” Masterfully so. The double-image of the vulnerability of the immigrant in the foreign INS office and the clown in the theatre opens a huge space for contemplation. The situation allows for naïve, beautifully crafted flights of fancy to reverberate in thick, dulcet tones, and it allows for some modes of expression that I don't normally see in a clown show.

A few highlights:

There is an extended bit of business involving taking a number and waiting for it to be called. Bieler's clown enters, accustoming herself to the unwelcoming office. She discovers the ticket dispenser. She takes a ticket. Satisfied for a moment, she realizes that if one is good, multiple tickets are probably better, and soon she has exhausted the machine. Sargent's clown then enters. After she realizes there's a ticket machine, she then realizes there aren't any left. We see Bieler counting her multiple tickets, calling out the numbers. The treatment and escalation of the scene from there presents a wonderful numero between the two clowns. I wont spoil the ingenious way Sargent wins this in this numero, as you can see for yourself on Sunday at 530pm, but it is great. The give and take between the actors and the relaxed space they provide between each other allows the sequence to echo every public-anonymous experience we've had where we wait as strangers: the DMV, the doctor's office, the stalled subway, the courtroom, the government office.

There is a brilliant sequence involving “citizenship tests” which starts gently and escalates into play, and then turns into a nightmarish interrogation. This transformative moment was especially striking, as it then transformed again into an almost documentary theatre-type of piece, as Sargent's clown recounts her experience coming to the country. The sequence also has a marvelous ending, which I wont spoil.

A recurring object theme involved work with newspaper boats. It is poetic, silly, playful, full of perspective shifts, and comes to bind the show together into a sort of emotional metonymy that includes us all. The use of this boat theme might be my only point of criticism. I felt that more could have been done with the boat theme. (For example, the audience comes to understand that the setting of the show is not a landed INS office, but, rather an INS detention center on a boat.) But, perhaps that kind of an extension carries a risk. If any unifying theme gets too strong or literal, the seduction and play of the piece might well quickly evaporate.

This show is HIGHLY recommended.

2007-10-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

Dill & Digger--10/7

2007-10-12T16:06:00.000-07:00

One of the challenges of performing in a festival context is the quick turnover required. Sets must be portable and be able to set up/tear down twenty minutes, preferably ten. Often this challenge goes unanswered, as the set of a festival show fails to transform the space and rather looks like a capitulation to time and budget constraints. The show ends up looking like a “guest” in the space, and not a terribly welcome one. This is not to say that using the black stage and curtains of the Brick and just a few spare props is a faux pas, but even this can seem wonky if the space isn’t utilized by the performer(s) well, or if the few props that are placed on stage seem to be thrown on, rather than elements of the clown’s world.

The sparse set of Dill & Digger had me worried: a chair on the side of the stage, an overturned washtub center stage. The unceremonious entrance of a suspendered fisherman-looking gentleman did not grab me either, as he nodded sheepishly to the audience. And then I see that he is actually the one-man orchestra! He sets up shop on the side of the stage, turning the washtub into a bass, accompanying the “trumpet” he plays using only his lips, and keeping time with a bit of plastic taped to one of his fishing boots. A bit of “bait and switch” on the show’s part, and a nice one at that. The music begins a transformation of the space nicely, preparing us for Dill & Digger’s entrance. And boy did they raise the transformative bar! But more on that in a moment.

First of all I should say that from the very earliest moment we see Dill & Digger, they charm the audience. This is not because they are “cute” (in fact there is little that could be said to be “cute” about the goose-steeping, bee-hived, purple-booted, harsh-voiced Dill—she is cute like Clytemnestra in the Orestia—although her internal state of naivete is very charming), but rather because every action, every interaction is driven by their very well-defined relationship and is handled with breath and ease. They complement each other in a follower/leader relationship that is of the kind of closeness one can only have with a sibling, a lover, or a fellow clown. This is not to say that the relationship is always stable—we do see moments where the follower/leader role is inverted, which are delightful, as I was left wondering sometimes who was actually in charge, who was more powerful? This is not to say either that their relationship was primarily antagonistic. It wasn’t, although it did get very entertainingly antagonistic in parts.

I will not recount all of the events of the show (that would be just rubbing it in at this point, if you didn’t see it yet, since this excellent show has already returned to Norway), but I do just want to mention a few details of the opening. Dill & Digger enter to music as a team. They scout the space out. Finding it appropriate, they leave for a sec’, and return with a roll of Astroturf and a makeshift tree. All of a sudden the stage has been transformed into a picnic spot in the country. Satisfied with the setup, they leave once more, only to return a moment later, playing as if they’d just found this wonderful spot in the country by chance and celebrating at their own fortuitousness. The beautiful thing about this moment is the tension it creates between play and belief. Are they playing? Or are they actually on a picnic? This is simple make-believe that they get so caught up in, they catch me up in it. I know the grass is Astroturf. I just saw them roll it out. Logic and senses tell me this is a game, and yet the emotional commitment to their make-believe invited me to make-believe, too, in a delightful game where things both are and are-not at one and the same time.

There are some great physical bits, including one where the duo riffs on the difficulty of getting a picnic cloth spread correctly on the ground as a team. It is handled with precision and a nice sense of structure, from a comic writing perspective. Most importantly the actions of the bit are fueled by the characters and their relationship, and not the other way around, which is as it should be: the physical bit should be a means to bring out the personality of the clown, rather than having the clown bend him/herself to the bit. (We are talking about treatment here, of course. In the writing process, one might put a gag in because it feels right, or it might be cool, or whatever, but then it’s up to the performer to make the gag organic to the character and the situation.)

There is also some great work with objects by these two. Like their give & take as partners, the handling of the objects is simple, precise, easy, with appropriate moments of breath that allow actions and attitudes to visually and temporally crystallize. There is some really great stuff done with a teddy bear, which one moment is animated to dance by Digger and shortly later is cut to pieces by the two for lunch. So genius in its simplicity! Remember above how I said this show plays so well with make-believe? Here we see the two unable to open their can of food. They begin to starve. Dill figures out that the bear tastes good. She is caught by Digger eating her (Digger’s) bear. But in taking the bear back, Digger discovers that the bear tastes good, too. So she cuts off a big piece of the bear (the head, actually) and serves it to Dill. She puts the rest of the bear on her plate. We watch them carve into the bear and lift empty forks to their mouths, savoring every bite. And when they are full, Digger carefully collects the pieces of the bear and they go back into her dress, safely guarded. They are both eating the bear and not eating the bear. The bear is at once a stuffed bear and a living bear and a dead bear, and all these states seem to flicker in and out as I watch. There is something enchanting and sublime about this level of childlike naïveté.

Their sense of ease, play, and time allows for some very poignant resonating moments. There is a great bit done as the two sit down to start the picnic and they begin to clean the plates before eating. Dill takes a swig of water, spits it onto the plate and then polishes the plate with a rag. Seeing this, Digger follows suit, but in the spitting process manages to get a good part of her water on Dill without noticing. Dill thinks this has been done on purpose. She now takes another swig and spits it on Digger. Digger has no idea why she’s been spit on and so she swigs her own, larger mouthful and spits on Dill. The bit escalates. But, because of their sense of ease and simplicity in its escalation, the whole thing had a chance to resonate nicely in my head: “Holy sh*t! My parents do that! Holy sh*t, I do that! Holy sh*t, I did that yesterday! Holy sh*t, I’m like my parents!” (Not the most profound revelation, I’ll agree, but maybe I’ll have to wade through my own self-discovery clichés before I get to the real stuff. In any case, it was a moment I’ll remember for a long time.)

This show had a nice arc, compositionally speaking, going from the very first sleepy entrance of the musician to the fight between Dill & Digger that causes them to split apart, and their joyous reconciliation afterwards. It very effectively used the simple story of a picnic as a way to explore these characters in cooperation, conflict, misunderstanding, celebration, jealousy, and joy. And as we come to know these characters more and more through the course of the show, we come to recognize ourselves more and more in those characters. Bravo.

"Bubkus"--10/7

2007-10-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

It is difficult to describe a clown show to someone who's never seen one before. In some ways it's like trying to describe other performance-based theatrical forms to the uninitiated. How do you describe with language, in meaningful terms, the experience of watching a Noh play, or a Commedia Dell 'Arte scenario, or a Kathakali dance drama? Clown may be even more difficult in that it carries with it some negative cultural baggage when speaking to an American auditor: you say “clown” and immediately the images conjured up are the prevalent “clown signs”: the party clown playing with props in the cleared-out corner, cartoon clowns (although Krusty is better than most), birthday clowns, hamburger clowns, murderer clowns, and people who dress like murderer clowns as a gimmick to sell records or other schlock of any innumerable varieties.
“What happens?” people sometimes ask about this show you're trying to describe ecstatically. And as you try to recount the events that take place, you sometimes realize halfway through, that what you've described sounds juvenile, uninteresting, and not even you want to see the show you've just described. It's hard talk about what happens, in other words, because so much of it is in the treatment, not the events. The sublime is difficult to enfence with words.
A more savvy interlocutor may ask, “what does it mean?” I used to bristle at this question and retort somewhat sarcastically, “what do the Water Lilies mean? What does King Lear mean? What does Endgame mean?” I have since come around to the notion that what one is really often asking in that question is, “was it meaningful to you? And if so, what was it that was meaningful?” This is a legitimate question and takes the burden off of me to try to encapsulate into two or three logical sentences the emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual responses to a show that should hopefully stay with me long after the show and mean different things to me as I make my way through life.
“Meaningfulness,” however, is not the same thing as “meaning.” "Meaningfulness" is not reached through peppered identifiable references or topicality, although those things could be meaningfully played with/upon. Rather, the question of “meaningfulness” has to do with relations: between moments, between actors, between actors and audience. “Meaningfulness” is the space that opens up between two or more elements and resonates, inviting other ideas and experiences in the viewer's (and the clown's) head to join in the party, even if that participation is small or silent. “Meaningfulness” is the space between visible parts where something invisible that cannot be fully named becomes clear.
“Bubkus,” performed by Jesse Buck answers the first above question quite adequately. A clown wakes from his slumber to find an audience in his sparsely decorated room. He uses a series of quotidian props—a sheet, a pillowcase, a toothbrush, a bottle of water, a milk crate—to imaginatively play out a series of scenarios, sometimes thematically, sometimes aesthetically linked. The games start simply: waking up, brushing teeth, playing “waiter” with audience using the bottle of water and the pillowcase. These games get more elaborate as the show moves on, with the last half of the show devoted to an elaborate story involving a hero guarding a sleeping companion made from a pillowcase against a nefarious-looking villain and his minions, in which the clown plays all of the parts using a sort of montage technique vaguely reminiscent of some of scenes from Dario Fo's Mistero Buffo.
This description does not do justice to Mr. Buck's performance, which contains many surprises and well-executed gags. He also has written some witty comic structures, in which physical challenges are encountered, overcome, forgotten about, and then encountered again in a different context and with raised stakes. He has some nice moments of physical and writing prowess, transforming himself into many different characters and objects, and hitting the button well on many of his gags. He does some very funny bits and occasionally made me say to myself, “that was a nice surprise!”
This is what happens. A series of feats, essentially. While the question of “what happens,” is answered, and answered entertainingly in many parts, the question of “meaningfulness” is more problematic. I am not posing the question, as some might, “who gives a sh*t about a guy playing make-believe in his room?” The theme could be quite meaningful. The question here, rather, is one of arc and execution. The operative personality trait of Mr. Buck's clown is a person who continually says, “look! See what I can do!” And he shows us some wonderful storytelling techniques and comic structures. But that is all. The performance reminded me not so much of a dramatic work (that is—a work where the story of a character is told through action) as an acrobatic event. And not a theatrical acrobatic event, but more of a sporting one, like a gymnastics display for an Olympics trial, or a martial arts demonstration.
Ultimately the events in the show do not resonate. They mean what they are and do not become “meaningful” in a larger, resonant sense. This is for a number of reasons. First is the question of breath and stillness. While executing movement and gags with precision, Buck rarely shares himself in the action. He does have “sharing moments”, but these unfortunately seem canned, scripted, occupying too much the same tension of his gags. I found myself asking, “where is his innocence? His bide [void]?” The innocence existed largely as an idea, not as a state, and by cheating me of this shift in states, I was not allowed the time or space to make his exploits meaningful. Rather we moved from one gag to the next, with little space between. This limits even his nuanced events, such as the transformation of his pillowcase into a delicate sleeping companion from becoming more than just a prop in the plot.
Related to this is a question of arc, in terms of writing. Mr. Buck's clown undergoes no change from start to finish. A clown is not an animator of a certain adventure story. Rather s/he is a ridiculous, naïve, sensitive creator of a certain adventure story. Implicit in this last statement is the fact that a clown show often is two stories. One is the story the clown is telling/enacting, and the other is the story of the clown trying to fulfill that task. (Noises Off, of the Mechanicals' production of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream might be examples from dramatic literature.) If we do not see internal challenge and change in the clown then we are left (in Mr. Buck's case) with a clown who wakes up in comfort, performs a strenuous workout, and then goes back to sleep in comfort. In “Bubkus,” from an emotional arc sense, we start at point “A” and end at point “A,” with gesticulating in between, but no journey.
Mr Buck works very hard for his audience, and in a good way. Physically, he is interesting and accomplished. Maybe he works too hard sometimes? With so much audible breath in a text-free show, the breath almost becomes a sort of text that comments on the difficulty of his feats. At times I was reminded of ancient Noh practitioner Zeami's advice to never play physically more than 7, even at moments when you must internally play 10. But it must be said that his show was funny and surprising, and while he could be more open as a performer, he does have a good relationship with the audience. I might like to see another show by Mr. Buck where he does less, but feels and lives more.