you and me and you and me and you and me

my my, it's been a while.

Time is a funny thing. i'm feeling more and more like it's just cyclical and anything you once did and continue to do will revisit you sometime later. As I'm working currently on performance pieces and just thinking about where I am as an artist right in this moment I keep getting snagged by these brambles that I thought I was done with, things like bee dances and victorian dining etiquette. But it's really cool to see how they accumulate and solidify this idea that nothing's really lost, just that what you're building might not be what you thought it was when you started.

I've been thinking about ownership of one's art a lot lately. This idea that You are not your Art, but of course that's only sort of true because there's a degree of ourselves in everything we make, or else we wouldn't care about making it. And then with clown work there's a ton of You there, it's You laid bare in fact. so how do you put enough space between the work and you to see it as Work and be able to continue working on it?

That's all I got for now.

tactical maneuvers

Good evening, champions.

I take for granted the theatre I've seen, the nature of the theatre I love, the compliments I receive on how different and innovative our stuff is because it’s just where I live. It’s when I step out of it, travel abroad, that my own life is put into clearer view and see what everyone else is doing. It’s when I do Stanislavski and I break down to no applause that I’m reminded of who I am because I have ventured so far away from it.

Let me explain.

I'm currently enrolled in a semester long program here in Philadelphia, Headlong Performance Institute, that deals with devising work, dynamic forms of movement onstage, and healthy and productive collaboration. I'm happily out of school (although apparently not so happy that I wouldn't subject myself to it again) but felt like this would be a unique and important opportunity I should take advantage of while I live here.

I've been having many existential issues with the program in general, largely because I'm comparing it to the semester I spent in Italy where we studied similar things- commedia dell'arte, clown, responsive movement- but with much more intensity. The biggest comparison I can't seem to shake is that when I was in Italy it felt right. I knew that's where I was supposed to be at that moment pushing myself to those ridiculous lengths. Here and now, I am decidedly less sure.

Then, I was 19. I'd had a rough semester at school before leaving, I was angry at my school and my situation and was just ready for something new and exhilerating. I didn't know what I wanted to do as an artist becuase I was all future and potential and I didn't need answers. Now, I'm 23. I've been out of school for a year and working as an actor, learning about the business, teaching and directing at a summer camp that embraced me for what I was and generally trying to figure out what I want to do with myself as an artist. By no means do I pretend to have everything figured out, but I do know what questions I want to ask.

This is a little roundabout but I'm getting to the point, promise.

I've written before about artistic honesty and finding authenticity as a performer and how it seems that everyone's looking at the 'can you express raw emotion onstage' test to see if you're a "good" and "authentic" actor and how I find this to be crap.

Well.

Today in class we did some Stanislavsky. Tactics, specifically. I've read about the stuff but never done it first hand. So because of all my doubts about this program and feeling disengaged so often I've been really trying to pour myself into the work giving it every opportunity to teach me things and convince me that I'm doing the right thing. So I'm up in front of the group doing an open scene with a partner where one of us wants something and can only say things like "Help me" and the other one refuses to give them what they want and says "I can't help you" and the one has to use different tactics in order for the other person to say yes, they can help you. My phrase was "I'm moving to Spain" and my partner's was "I want to go with you" but the subtext of what I was saying was "release me" so I was the one pleading and he was the one denying me so I had to use different tactics.

Ducklings, I don't know what happened, but I lost it. I couldn't change tactics even though I thought I was and I was yelling and screaming and losing my mind. The teacher stayed on me about my impulses to move away from my partner and avoid the issue and I gave it my all to stay in it. But man, I wanted to quit.

When I sat down and they moved on to the next pair I felt horrible. I couldn't tell if those feelings were coming from the exercise having tapped into something (I had to admit that I was out of the habit of asking permission so maybe asking to be released was not something I could connect with anymore) or from feeling like I'd thrown myself into something that just felt really wrong, like putting on someone else's skin.

I had to make peace with the fact that yes, it's important to pinpoint your habits and shake them off so that if you're using the same tactics all the time you should....not. And yes, it's important to be able to access raw emotions when the time is right....but being able to do those things do not mean you are being authentic. More specifically it does not mean that I am being authentic.

Our current commedia teacher (which is a whole seperate issue I'm having with this program. the class, not the teacher) talks about how the moves he does look great on him because they suit his body but wouldn't necessarily suit us because we have different bodies. Any way you slice it, Stanislavsky does not suit my body. This is not some major obstacle I have to overcome or I will never achieve success because that is not the kind of performance I care about or that i was built to do. I remember the feeling I got in college when I found out I could study comedy and physicality as a whole thing. My world opened up. Not so with the Stan man.

I have to remember to have faith in what I do, in who I am. I've worked really hard to identify where I find joy and I will not have those places taken from me just for trying on something new. These probably seem like rudimentary lessons and anyone I'd run out and share them with would probably just nod and say yup like they'd figured it out long ago. But I think it's never a bad thing to have your reality called into question once in a while and rediscover some old truths about yourself to see if they're still in fact true.

Anyway that's where we are. Learning one's own beauty is a treacherous thing; being able to see things for what they are without patting onself on the back for what we'd like to believe they are.

And for your troubles, here's a little bit of adorable.

*shuffleshuffle...

Do you and your friends have a signal for when things get awkward? Like there's the awkward arm, which is your arm held out to the side, bent at the elbow with your forearm hanging down and you move it side to side like the early stages of the robot. Or the awkward turtle. Take one of your hands and hold it out in front of you with the palm down. Take your other hand and put it on top of your first hand, also with palm down. then move your thumbs in little circles. This is the awkward turtle. I don't really like that one though because it's actually the sign for sea turtle in ASL. My favorite is the awkward snowman where you make fists, put one under your chin and the other one right under that. What an awkward snowman it makes! His head is huge! (thanks dulcey)

anyhoo I was thinking about the nature of awkward.

This came about by yet another viewing of symphony of science and thinking of how good I feel when I think about how huge the universe is. Like the galaxy song. Or...universe song. whatevs.

When I think about my stupid little insignificant life…it just makes me feel better. Takes the pressure off, you know? I’ve probably said that before, but it’s really lovely how I can still be reminded of that and it’s like I’m hearing it for the first time.

This leads me to thinking about how other people might take that information, it might send them the other way and make them feel hopeless and worthless, like they don’t matter and how important it is for them to make themselves MATTER. And how that life just frustrates me, that life of the drama of daily life and social hullabulloo, it’s just exhausting.

So I find myself thinking about these guys who just live in that exploring-the-universe world but they can't deal with people. Whoda thunk I had anything in common with science people.

So maybe it’s not so much ‘awkward’ that I’m thinking about as it is…one’s place in the cosmos. Well no, maybe that leads to awkward, how easily some people, those that see the small scale comings and goings and can wiggle themselves into a place in this everyday life and how much trouble some people, the folks that live in the bigness, have fitting in. With all their awkward angles and what not.

Makes me think about the nature of the stuff I like to create, these little nothing pieces. I guess they celebrate and focus on the little nothing moments that make up our lives. I'm working on one now that's a love story between a girl and a tomato. I think it's almost there.

I've also been thinking about this because I'm suiting up to embark on another summer of glorious theater and good times with chilluns and I'm faced with looking for scripts that we could work on. And man, there's a lot of crap out there. There's a lot of good stuff that would be challenging and what not, but I'm searching for that tiny little barely existing category of absurdist youth theatre because that's what I like and I'd love to expose the kids to some of it too.

Sorry if these sort-of revelations are getting repetitive, it feels like I keep having the same thoughts in slightly new ways. So again, here's something for your troubles. How bout the Symphony of Science video I was watching earlier.

Also some quotes I think illustrate what I'm talking about.

"And so, while others miserably pledge themselves to the insatiable pursuit of ambition and brief power, I will stretched out in the shade singing." -Fray Luis de Leon

(that was the quote on my senior page in high school. Cool how I still connect with it.)

"Within every atom there is infinite love. Take a moment to be loved." -...I think this was from a meditation I was listening to. Or something.

Also also, here are some sites that celebrate little nothing moments in cool ways.

http://missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com/

http://1000awesomethings.com/

http://www.postsecret.com/

Also also also I still don't understand formatting, so I apologize for the wonkiness.

vogue part 3: parkour

So I think parkour is awesome. Plus it's a great way to talk about frame in a setting that isn't on a screen with that built-in frame. (remember how these were about frame? yeah it's a thing.)

Here are two videos of a parkour group called Physical Graffiti.

What I think is so great about parkour is that it takes the rigid environment of a cityscape, with its buildings and railings and hard edges and corners and geometry and what not, and overlays fluid lines and movement, it gives it an energy and life that ordinarily one doesn't associate with such a landscape. It turns the whole city into a playground. I feel like Buster Keaton would be on a parkour team if such things existed then. Have I mentioned I'm a little crazy for Buster Keaton?

The thing about playgrounds, too, is that they're designed to have such movement occur on them, it's encouraged with its crazy shapes and and colors. Even just the look of an empty playground is active and inviting, not lifeless and heavy. You see things on playgrounds where it's not even clear about how you're supposed to use them because there isn't one way, you're supposed to play and climb on them how you want.

I wish I had the ability to see the world, the everyday business boring practical world, like that. It's probably why I like site specific performance, since that's essentially what that is. If I had the strength and total lack of concern for my physical well being I'd give parkour a shot.

I'm also totally impressed at the precision it requires. Especially when they make huge jumps and land on a very small spot. It's so clean, not flailing around or struggling to maintain balance, they just...stop. And they practice, making sure to get the proper height or distance so they don't fall and die, and then they can embellish where they feel like it. And they train so they can get to the point of just playing and knowing instinctively how much power to give it.

And you know I say that it's a thing we can talk about regarding frame without a screen but parkour videos are a big part of the deal. On Mtv's Ultimate Parkour Challenge the first half of the competition has been to make a video of their team on the course and they're judged on not just the actual parkour that appears in the video but the way it's shot, the angles, the editing and everything else. And that makes sense really, videos are an easy way to gain exposure and visibility with such a great network like Youtube at your disposal. Again, maybe I'm late to the game on that but it wasn't something I realized.

And I do really like the videos Physical Graffiti makes, they always pick great music and have great editing and a just a great eye for how to put everything together.

Speaking of Mtv's Ultimate Parkour Challenge, I gotta tell ya, it's great that the sport can get such widespread recognition by taking the sport and putting it into a more conventional sports tv show format, but I think makes for pretty deadly television. That Andy Bell is one uncharismatic personality. To me it takes the worst things of sports shows- the commentary, the parts where people who don't know how to talk try and ask the competitors how they felt- and paired it with a sport that doesn't follow the same set up as organized sports. There are no calls to feel one way or another about, no technicalities to call someone on and you can't really cheat.

This is all just talking around the point though. I wish I could speak more articulately about what makes parkour great but really I don't know enough about it to go into more detail. I think parkour's really cool and I'm glad it's getting the exposure it deserves. And ultimately I think it can speak for itself.

The head of a dead cat

I was listening to this lecture by Alan Watts, who's a lecturer, interpreter of Zen Buddhism, philosophy and theology and what not in case you didn't know, about the idea of the Self as Play. It's a really interesting lecture that meanders a bit but I'll see if I can summarize some of the points he was making, at least the points that piqued my interest. He said that the Self and all that is is maia and that maia is an illusion, so therefore the Self is an illusion. And as an illusion, it serves no direct purpose, it doesn't work or try, but instead it plays. In fact the Japanese would say that someone doesn't die, they play at dying.

He continues on saying that because the Self is an illusion it's pointless to try and figure out what one's Self is. It's only when we stop trying to figure out what our Self is that our Self does us any good; when we stop and let it play. In my imagining of this idea, if we were to try and determine the Self, one could only discover oneself in letting it do and be, rather than trying to force it to be something we've decided it IS or should be.

Naturally this leads me to think of clowning. for a change. I'm thinking again of the argument between clown as free form playing and improvised self-expression vs. plans, practice and routines. I've already said here that I'm an advocate for the latter, I just find it more personally satisfying and I think modern clowns discount its benefits. You need to get from A to B...but how you get there is where you can play. I might say though, as one who believes in the clown as more than just a thing you do but a thing you are, that to discover oneself AS clown through play is totally valid.

Still with me? ok, moving on.

He also says that measurements are an illusion since, essentially, they are. They aren't a concrete thing ("you don't see inches lying around") but in fact they're "elaborate systems of cosmic bookkeeping."

So I was thinking about this idea of measurement as illusion in two particular senses. One, in terms of performance. I took a class a little while back called Scripts and Scores (I feel like I may have mentioned it here before but I can't remember). If I can insult my teacher and summarize that too, the class was about creating performance of a dance/theatre variety and the ways in which we record it. As in, how do you represent the performance to someone else in a physical form for them to use as a guide? do you draw stick people dancing around? Do you set it up with panels like a comic strip breaking down each step? Do you write it out like a screenplay with who says what, what each scene looks like, etc.? Do you make a box with strips of paper and pull them out randomly? Is the box itself the recording? Often it seemed like the recordings were just as important as the actual performance. At the time it just felt frustrating to find creative ways to represent what we were doing since I would find a system that worked and just wanted to work on the performance, not spend time making its record interesting to look at, too.

Today, after the fact, I can appreciate the value of doing this, and it led me to think about the fact that the ways in which you record something, commit it to paper or whatever, deal with what the performance essentially IS. what IS movement? what IS sound? Do I need to draw movement lines around a stick person or put in sound effects a la Batman? If I wanted to represent long pauses would I need to draw the figures with lots of space in between? And then would I need a key in the corner to make myself understood?

Now this is great for a class in which we're encouraged to represent abstract ideas, like movement and sound, in new and creative ways but what if we applied this to other things in the world? What if quarterly reports came in expressive paintings or fortune cookie fortunes taped to oranges? No interpretive dance, though. I'm tired of that joke.

unrelated story, my friend once wanted to advertise for our school's literary magazine by writing the name on little rubber bouncy balls and throwing them down a hallway. If it wasn't such a blatant safety hazard it would be the way I advertise for everything I'm a part of.

Anyway.

So the other way in which I'm thinking about the illusion of measurement is what if we applied this to ourselves? What do we each measure our lives in? and yes, we could get all RENT about it and measure in love and whatever, or we could put on our big girl panties and actually think about it seriously. I'd say I probably measure mine in cups of tea, moments of stillness, days my hair looks good, laughing, and muffins. Although muffins would be a greater measurement, one I wouldn't expect to occur as often. Like a year.

So as always, onwards and upwards. It's really exciting to read and listen to ideas that can apply to performance and art and creation as much as it applies to life. You should all check out Alan Watts too, he has a lot to say about everything. And he says it well.

And if you stuck around til now, here's something for your troubles.

no matter how much you push the envelope it will still remain stationary

For all the well thoughtout, thoroughly researched, expertly crafted pieces of brilliant and moving artwork out there, sometimes there's nothing better than a well-executed tribute to the rockettes performed for people who already love you. good times.

think cold thoughts.

water that is filtered drunk with ice cubes made with not filtered water is gross.

a pile of thoughts.

-As one who delights in physical theatre, I've read a bunch of theorists and practitioners who have their own systems of how best to rehearse and execute such performance. Things like Laban Movement Analysis, Alexander technique, Williamson technique, Margolis method, that sort of thing. When you read one right after the other, you find that they're all very similar, just establishing different vocabularies for mind-body connections. My plan is to make a big table of all of them so I can break them down more easily and understand them. There will also be a column labeled "crap?" with a yes or a no for each one to save time.

The thing that strikes me is that all the spirituality I've been pursuing lately- things like meditation, chakra work, taoism, quakerism- have all had similar philosophies of finding a mind-body connection. It puts the spiritual energy and focus that one pursues in studying faith into one's own body rather than out into the universe or in past civilizations and stories. Gives me all sorts of fun ideas for where to take my performance. And my spirituality for that matter.

Also I went to an audition/workshop for a movement-mask-puppetry theatre company a few weeks ago and the guy leading it led us in a few exercises using the Del Sarte system. I thought it was one of those methods you learn about as a past example because you work in that field, I've never seen anyone actually use it. Most exciting.

-I think the best things lately have been reveling in the bigness and the smallness of everything.

-Have you ever watched a candle put itself out? Just sat and waited for the wick to run out and the flame to disappear? You feel a little dirty, like you just witnessed something really private that you weren't supposed to. or....that's how I feel anyway.

-Good teas are expensive. But usually totally worth it.

far and wee

so I've been thinking a lot about authenticity in acting and performance lately. I've focused on clowning since there aren't many conversations about 'method clowning,' but there is a lot of disccusion about what good clowning is and where it comes from. I'm paraphrasing so don't quote me on any of this, but the current thinking about clowning tends toward the play philosophy, that true clowning is off-the-cuff improv resting on character and audience interaction and you can't plan any of that out or it loses the life and energy needed. The now old school concept of clowning was that it came in learned skills and involved routines and practice and lots of thought beforehand. You can blame Lecoq for that really, there's definitely a pre-Lecoqian and post-Lecoqian divide.

Personally I'm somewhere in the middle. I think it needs to come initially from within, finding your own styles and rhythms and character, and then you can develop routines and skills and repeatable things out of that inital spark.

I don't wish to argue with either side, being in the middle as I am, but for those that claim that it's all spontaneous improv, don't cite the greats to prove your point. The Marx Brothers toured their routines all over the country gauging the audiences reaction to every single line and finally using the best version in their films. I mean a lot of their classic routines are stage pieces anyway, like the Tootsie Frootsie Ice Cream routine from A Day at the Races? Tell me that doesn't look like two people on a proscenium stage. But anyway.

So to parallel this train of thought, I've also been reading a fair amount of poetry lately. Some I like, some I don't, some gets me kind of frustrated. And in being frustrated, I realized that my feelings about it were not limited to poetry. In fact they're very like my criteria for judging dance.

I look to art, be it performance, writing, whatever, for something outside of the normal way of doing things. I like it to express something that can't be expressed in everyday life, like a dancer doing superhuman things, or a clown doing something simple that I never thought to do that makes me laugh, or a poet who uses some combination of words to express something that was stuck on the tip of my tongue. I want to see something that takes me out of my reality as I know it, not necessarily into a fantastical world, just something that points out things about life that people don't say.

For example, we did a clown show last December that was a clown version of A Christmas Carol. One gag was that Tiny Tim was in fact lame, not crippled, just into really lame things. We spouted a list of them-like pretending to be a dinosaur and listening to Coolio-that pretty much took up the whole scene. Then afterwards, as Scrooge moved onto the next vision, he says "so that Tim is pretty lame, huh?" and the Ghost of Christmas Present says "yeah I think we drove that joke home pretty hard." Granted this isn't hilarious, but it lays it all out on the table, commenting on itself and winking to the audience that we're in on the joke.

So I suppose that's the kind of authenticity I'm striving for. One can be over the top and ridiculous but self-aware at the same time and it assumes that the audience has some intelligence. I was taught as a clown that if a child were to ask how old you are, you don't insult their intelligence by saying "I'm 4 year olds!" when you are clearly not, you take the oppurtunity to say something ridiculous, like "well I'm 20 in dog years, 47 in cat years, 190 in mosquito years and 3.65 in clown years so..."

So onward and upward the search continues. And now, a poem I do like.

may my heart always be open to little

birds who are the secrets of living

whatever they sing is better than to know

and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry

and fearless and thirsty and supple

and even if it's sunday may i be wrong

for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully

and love yourself so more than truly

there's never been quite such a fool who could fail

pulling all the sky over him with one smile

-ee cummings

roasted, toasted and burnt to a crisp

I am feeling decidedly grumpy at the moment. Things are just not going my way.

So to prevent lapsing into ennui and/or angst, here are some good things to help all of us be less grumpy.

Can it be summer please?

On dance and creation

I don't know why I hold dance as an artform to such high standards. I myself am not a good dancer and cannot do most, if not all, of the dancing I watch. I know little to nothing about dance vocab, by which I mean the names of different moves. Yet for some reason when I watch dancing there are certain things I want to see and certain things I want the performance to do.

1. I want to see things I've never seen a human do before.

2. I want to see things I doubt a human could actually do so that I go CHRIST ALMIGHTY HOW'D THEY DO THAT?

3. or I want to see things that I've seen before done in a whole new way

4. I want to see good storytelling that makes it clear that the artist thought about the piece as a whole, from beginning to end.

5. I want all the elements of the performance- choreography, costume, set, lighting, and music -to go together well.

1 and 2 aren't mandatory if #3 occurs, but 4 and 5 are always mandatory.

And I apply these criteria to any level of performance I'm watching, from professionals to the campers I work with each summer. I feel sort of bad about criticizing the campers in my head, but I can't turn it off.

I just watched this video

I came away a little annoyed. I went in expecting to see things I'd never seen before (#1 and 2) but instead I saw a lot of street moves that I've seen a lot. Maybe I've just been watching too much ABDC, but my thoughts while I was watching it were "oh, he's spinning on his head. Oh ok, now they're doing robotic isolation deals..." so I had to realize that street dances are just like any other form of dance in that there are certain moves that people can attempt and some do better than others and people can be judged by how well they do them, like ballet or jazz or anything else. Maybe that's a thing people knew and I'm late to the game, but it wasn't something I'd thought about until now. So I was less annoyed once that occurred to me, but then I had to rethink my judgment of it. I had to judge it by criteria 3,4 and 5. And I'll tell ya, I liked that they were dancing to violin music and that the overall look worked really well together, it's that recontextualization I can't get enough of. Not that like performance at the Oscars with that crew that breakdanced (brokedanced?) to all the original score nominees, I didn't think it worked well or added anything to the music or dancing. But I digress.

Something like this

blows me out of the water. Fits all my criteria for an amazing performance.

So I guess then my personal tastes tend towards modern and lyrical dance where there aren't designated moves or styles or steps that people can master, it's all pretty subjective and works as a big topic heading that can encompass many kinds of abstract movement. I realize also this lends itself to more theatrical movement that can involve character and narrative, like the kind I like to do, so that the face is engaged. When I'm performing I need my face to be doing something constructive, otherwise I just get that face you make when you're dancing in a club and you think you're awesome.

I'd say this interest in modern dance has to do with the way I like to create performance pieces. As I've said, I like to play with lines and shapes- more form than content -so that naturally lends itself to thinking of the overall look of the piece, numbers 4 and 5. I might conceive of a piece as "I want to use this piece of music and do a thing where my foot's stuck to the floor" and then fill in the rest as I work with it.

I realized that a lot of young dancers starting out will pick a style of dance and maybe some music and so are entirely attached to the music, just filling in beat by beat with an arm movement here or a kick there and so the end result is a monotone collection of motions that don't require a lot of effort. It's not a bad thing, it's necessary growth. It just doesn't always make for the most interesting performance.

The summer camp where I work has dance concert after dance concert filled with these kinds of dances. But this past summer there was a neat little twist. The theme of the concert was the 7 deadly sins (watching lust was awkward). So for the envy section, one of the music teachers composed a chance piece to be the music. A chance piece is a piece where you come by the bits of the performance by, surprise!, chance, like rolling dice or picking it out of a hat. This particular piece of music consisted of different lines of text read in different ways, different strains of music played in different ways, and then both of those mixed on a sound board in different ways, all determined by dice. Meanwhile the dancers were choreographing a dance without any music, just around the concept of envy, and then the song and the dance were combined at the very last minute before performing. So as a result, there was this really amazing dance about the dancers wanting to be in the spotlight and this very weird noise happening at the same time that gave one the distinct feeling of envy and tension that was unrivaled by all the other pieces in the concert. Sorry dance teachers.

There's a sculptor, Arthur Ganson, who shares my creating philosophy in making his kinetic sculptures. I love and adore his things, especially for their simplicity. He makes pieces whose sole purpose is to lift and drop a piece of cloth very slowly for the pure joy of revelling in the texture of the cloth and the light hitting it. I feel like it gives me permission to do little nothing pieces that are just fun to do and hopefully watch.

Here's one of his pieces. The beginning is him setting it up, the actual piece starts at about 1:20.

He also composed and played the music.

I want to be him.

So anyway, my tastes evolve, my understanding of the dance world evolves, and my own performances evolve as I'm inspired to keep doing weird things in ridiculous ways. Which is the best advice I could give anyone, if ever they asked for it.

time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana

Ok so I don't seem to be able to escape bananas in my life. I don't know if it's some weird Freudian clown thing or something, but we make the most of it. I was looking for a book about the history of the banana in American pop culture for a little while, but I think it's out of print. Unforch.

Anyway, I just came across this video. The guy I took it from said it was a revolution in physical and visual comedy. I have to hope he was being sarcastic because I think this is one of the creepiest videos I've seen in a long time.

...I don't really have anything to say about it. I just think it's real creepy.

So to redeem the banana's good name, here's A. Robins the Banana Man! Don'tcha miss vaudeville when there was a space for this kind of thing? I sure do.

His act at one point involved more bananas.

And here's the Aggrolites on Yo Gabba Gabba! doing a fabulous song about bananas. And just fyi, Yo Gabba Gabba gets a bad rap but um...Anthony Bourdain is making an appearance on an episode in March. So don't hate.

The Aggrolites - Banana (Yo Gabba Gabba!)

WTF | MySpace Video

It's a knick-knack, patty black, give the frog a loan.

I love love love shaggy dog stories. Those would be the jokes with very long set-ups that result in a terrible pun or otherwise anti-climactic ending. So I don't have anything profound to say right now, I just wanted to share this one. Cuz I likes it. It's definitely long but totes worth it.

Once upon a time, a young man went to the circus. He was very excited, as he lived in western Manitoba, the kind of town where you shave and the trolley stops, and had never seen a circus before. Anyway, as the circus days drew near, the young man grew ever more excited. He arrived before dawn to get the best seat in the house, and was seated hours before the first trapeze act. Finally, the trapeze artists gave an awe-inspiring performance, the elephants danced, and the lion tamer tamed.

At last, the clowns came out in full regalia and green hair. They rode around by the gross in a purple Volkswagen. The volksie pulled up to the center of the ring, and an overweight clown with orange hair, acne, and a purple nose advanced to the podium: "Will the person in section A, row Y, seat 42 please stand up?"

The young man looked at his ticket, and to his surprise, he was sitting in that very seat. The young man stood up. Clown sez, "Wellllll, there's the horse's ass, now where's the rest of the horse?"

The man, dumbfounded, stood for a moment, then made his way quickly through the crowd and out of the tent. Returning home, the man wept for days, and mourned the loss of dignity and honor. Eventually reason overcame his grief and the man grew determined. "I'm not going to get mad, I'm going to get even, and avenge the honor of myself, my family, and this town," exclaimed the man.

He picked up the curriculum guide for the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) correspondence courses and started to read. Eventually his eyes came to rest on an advertisement for a class in "Quick Wit Retorts." "Learn how to use those snappy comebacks to your advantage, now!" So the man sent in his $19.95 and soon received the course materials. In a few weeks, the man mastered the materials, and sent the final back to UNLV. Much to his surprise, a registered letter arrived from the president of UNLV. It read: Dear Sir: We are utterly flabbergasted at your performance in Quick Wit Retorts 101. We would be most gratified if you could come to UNLV to complete your degree with our fine academic institution. Here's a check to cover your expenses.

To make a long story short, the man made straight A's in the QWR program. He was awarded numerous distinctions and honors, and when he graduated, the graduation speaker Ed Meese awarded the man the Presidential Medal of Outstanding Quick Wit Retorts, signed by Bill himself!

Some days afterward, Harvard University sent a Lear Jet to pick the man up for an interview. The graduate admissions officer didn't mince words. "If you complete our masters/doctoral tenured track program in QWR, you will never have to worry about money again," said he.

Needless to say, the man promptly moved to Cambridge. In 5 years, the man had finished his doctorate. By this time, the man was known throughout the world as the leading expert in Quick Wit Retorts. Word had even reached western Manitoba, which made his mother very proud. Everyone from the Pentagon pundits to Beltway bandits consulted the man on technical questions of QWR.

One day, while sitting at his desk reading his hometown newspaper, the man noticed that the circus was coming to his hometown again. An evil smile crossed the man's face. "Siegfried," cried the man to his assistant, "We must be away to Manitoba. Ready the jet!" As the plane crossed the downlands of Michigan, the man savored the moment of victory that was to be his.

The man arrived at the circus tent very early, making sure to get the seat in section A, row Y, seat 42. Finally, the trapeze artists gave an awe-inspiring performance, the elephants danced, and the lion tamer tamed.

At last, the clowns came out in full regalia and green hair. They rode around by the gross in a purple Volkswagen. The volksie pulled up to the center of the ring, and an overweight clown with orange hair, acne, and a purple nose advanced to the podium: "Will the person in section A, row Y, seat 42 please stand up?" The man glanced at his ticket. This time he was ready. Clown sez, "Wellllll, there's the horse's ass, now where's the rest of the horse?"

The man rose to his feet, full of confidence. He thrust out his chest and said in the loudest voice you can imagine: "FUCK YOU, CLOWN!!!!"

Shall we go? Yes let's.

So Waiting for Godot is a tricky piece. Much analyzed and thought over and done to death, really. But there's no denying that it redefined modern drama as we conceive of it. Plus I got to see it on Broadway with Bill Irwin, Nathan Lane, John Goodman and John Glover. So nyeh.

The thing I like and continue to find intriguing is how to use Godot as template with clown duos and performance in general. Vladimir and Estragon were written as clownish types so it's not hard to make the connection, but I'm more interested in bringing Didi and Gogo-ness to clowns rather than bringing clowniness to Didi and Gogo; making that existentialist absurdism more accessible I guess. Last spring I directed a children's show called Noodle Doodle Box that was described as Waiting for Godot meets Spongebob. I was extremely proud of that.

There are a million examples of comic duos, the whiteface and auguste, that have excellent dynamics but I'm more interested in how we can take this simple and very well-known structure and mix it up to show people something new and thought-provoking. Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about.

This is a Jan Svankmajer piece called "Breakfast" Svankmajer is a Czech surrealist filmmaker who is all around awesome. I might just post a bunch of things he did without any commentary from me to show you how awesome he is. I showed my NDBox cast this to illustrate repitition, routine and to show the comical and weird relationships possible between two people when the body is redefined. Plus it's awesome.

Here's another one, Mummenschantz on the Muppet show. I'm hugely in love with them for the way they integrate mask, movement and puppetry (sidebar, I taught a class this summer called just that) in a simple way that still conveys a lot of nuance and character. Here's a story not just with two masked characters, but their faces are their characters and as their relationships between themselves and their faces change, so do their relationships with each other.

I don't know that you would call either of these pieces 'clown pieces,' but I would say that they're comic performances. You could argue that the Svankmajer piece isn't comic, but then I'd argue that you have no sense of humor.

I really like that both of these pieces play with personal space. One guy is all up in another guy's face, pulling and pushing it to change what he looks like and change his status, one guy is reaching in another guy's mouth, sticking his fingers in his ears, eyes, chest cavity, what have you. I've been really interested in playing with bodies in space as relationship; not just what gestures or expressions a person does to define their character but the physical space they take up. It's like what I was saying before about Buster Keaton vs. Charlie Chaplin, Keaton's lines and shapes defined his world and character, not just his faces and gestures. Guess I'll keep trying stuff out.

Vogue part 2: Sesame Street

I am so proud and impressed that a show like Sesame Street has lasted as long as it has. With the changing trends and needs in child-rearing this one show has managed to stay relevant and necessary. Granted there have been major changes in its 40 year career, but it's still around biddies. Oh yes. I haven't sat down and watched an episode recently, but I have seen some of the important sketches that make these current seasons as important as the old ones.

Like Cookie Monster, for instance. All I was hearing was that he was becoming Veggie Monster, giving up cookies and wearing birkenstocks. or something. I, like the many folks who grew up with this show, were crushed to hear this news. But then I actually watched the sketches where they address Cookie's new diet, and it's done with the same humor and frankness as any other issue they address. There's one sketch where Cookie encounters a bowl of fruit and gets all excited to eat it. Matt Lauer appears from nowhere grilling Cookie on the fact that he's about to eat FRUIT?!? Cookie handles it like a pro and says, "You members of media blow story WAAY out of proportion. Me still like cookies. Me Cookie Monster." And there you have it.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about, I want to continue our discussion of frame. One of the things that makes Sesame Street so great is the way they parody other tv shows, movies, theater, what have you, and part of that means parodying their camera work, so there are way too many different ways in which they use frame to generalize and say that there's one way that SS uses frame.

Instead I would like to focus on one sketch in particular, one called Fat Cat Sat Hat.

First of all, I love how this is done like a beat poem with the individual words coming slowly then a big explosion of sound and rhyme. And you immediately establish character and relationship with unique voices and text that has nothing to do with any of them (by which I mean text that directly addresses who they are or what they want). But the smooth shapes of the Anything Muppets (the green, blue and purple fellas) next to the wild and unkempt energy and look of Bip Bippadotta (the Mahna Mahna Muppet whose name was later changed) suggest a conflict between order and disorder just by looking at them. And all this for teaching word families.

So frame. It's my feeling that a lot of shows with puppets keep a very two-dimensional look to everything given that the puppets are restricted by their real life puppeteer. They can move left and right, down but not too far up without some serious rearranging and the occasional near and far (just ask Grover). But here we have them all over the place creating this liminal empty space that's not a room or a street corner, it's just a place. I'm continuing with the vision of this sketch as a beat performance on a standard proscenium stage. So the Anythings try to keep things going left and right, as if they are walking on and off stage, and then from the back here comes Bip Bippadotta. But when they all leave to start a new round of words, they go in all directions, defying the bounds of a conventional stage. They even use status techniques of having the Anythings tower above Bip when they want him gone adding levels that further define relationships and take up more of the frame that we haven't seen used yet.

Perhaps my favorite part though, other than when Bip yells "Hey y'all!" would be when the three Anythings are right in front of the camera looking at Bip and we only see the tops of their heads. They're standing in our position creating a visible audience for Bip and totally redefining their roles as performers, if we keep up with my vision of them on a stage. They're no longer looking left and right, they are in our space where we have not seen them before. And to finish things off, they throw Bip right offstage out into the audience with us, straight into the camera.

I think the great thing about this sketch is how much they managed to pack in there and the sheer simplicity of it all. It's like a visual and artistic vitamin, getting everything you need in one dose. I don't know that I'm trying to make a grand point, other than that Sesame Street has a good eye for putting sketchs together and we could all learn a little something from them.

And now, in the vein of Sesame Street parodying things, here's the opening to Follow That Bird, one of my faves.

Vogue part 1: Buster Keaton

Ok ducklings, let's talk about frame for a tick.

In any performance arena, you have to be aware of the space, space designated for the performance, space designated for the audience, how easy it is to move back and forth between the two, etc. So if you're on a good ol proscenium stage, there's the stage up above the audience, maybe an apron of stage jutting out a little beyond the arch, the audience facing the stage on one side, probably some room on the floor used by the audience as an aisle, and maybe some stairs to and from the stage. The audience has expectations about what the performers will do, how close the performers will come to them, and how they can do their part to react politely by applauding and laughing at the appropriate times.

If you're in a circus ring, you're dealing with an audience in the round, the audience is sitting right next to the partition dividing the performance space and the seats, and the audience has a very difference expectation of what the performers might do and how much they the audience might be involved.

This is of course just dealing with live performance and doesn't take into account outdoor shows, site specific shows, street performance, or anything of that. These are just the areas I plan to focus on here.

But let's consider film, too. In a film you can change the setting in each shot and deal with any sort of depth and scale you'd like. But no matter how many different shots you have and how many different depths and set ups and all that, the filmmaker is always confined to the frame of the screen.

SO, having said all that, for a clown in any space it's her job to redefine the space she occupies. If she appears in a space, you don't want to see her treating it how it's meant to be treated, you want to see her do things that no ordinary person will do with it. If the piano is on the other side of the room from the bench, you move the piano to the bench (Grock, 1880-1959). So in any frame, the clown should defy the audience's expectations, occupy space not meant to be occupied by the performer, treat audience members in a way they don't expect, so forth.

But how they choose to redefine the space is what makes each performer memorable and unique. Let's look at one of my faves, Buster Keaton.

Probably the biggest difference between Keaton and Chaplin, because it's sort of hard to talk about one without the other, is that while Chaplin was a strange man in a normal world, Keaton was a normal guy in a crazy bizarre world. Both were directors and so were responsible for the looks of many of their films and the construction of their film worlds. Buster tended to place himself next to giant machines or mammoth landscapes to emphasize his lil size and he largely drew his comedy from the geometry of each shot. Anything that's not in the shot doesn't exist in that moment. Often there's a lot of perfectly symmetrical shots, representing order, and then along comes Keaton who can't help but disrupt such mathematical perfection. Observe:

The Garage, 1920

The Haunted House, 1921

Neighbors, 1920

That particular movie deals with a forbidden romance so this shot bisected with the fence happens a lot. This shot has a nice unbalance happening as Keaton tries to get things to be as they should.

And a super classic fave...

Before

and After! Steamboat Bill Jr, 1928

Fun fact! They only ever did one take of this shot because it was so freakin dangerous. They got it done that one time and despite Keaton's nerves of steel (he proudly boasted that he broke every bone in his body at some point in his life) he didn't feel the need to do it again.

Nothing is accidental in any Keaton shot. And in such a geometrically constructed world, Keaton's acrobatics are all the more emphasized and celebrated.

I mean seriously, check this out:

Thanks Dr. Moon Rat for that lovely tribute.

Let's not forget people, the kid did all his own stunts.

If you're interested in a further discussion of this, check out The Body in Hollywood Slapstick by Alex Clayton. He does a whole chapter on this subject. (I realize I've mentioned this book before in a less flattering context, but don't read that chapter. Just read the one about Keaton.)

I couldn't find the food I liked

One of my favorite Kafka stories is A Hunger Artist. I say "favorite" but really I mean one that I can sort of wrap my head around and speculate about what that particular allegory might mean, plus it's also a fun conversation with artists about the nature of performance and what not. In the story, the narrator talks about how the standard duration of a fast for a hunger artist is 40 days.

DID YOU KNOW that David Blaine, weird magician illusionist fellow, lived in a glass box suspended over the thames with no food and only water for 44 days? Cuz he DID. He says of that particular stunt that it was one of the hardest things he's ever done but one of the most beautiful.

I mention this for a few reasons.

1) While he probably wasn't doing it to live out a Kafka story (next he'll wake up a bug!) I think it's pretty cool to see something Kafka wrote about actually happen to a certain degree.

2) I just watched D-Blaine's TED talk where he mainly discusses preparing for his 17 minute breath holding extravaganza and he's totally a cool guy. He's super low key and talks about his life, like purging your body of CO2 and freezing yourself in a block of ice, like its no big thing. I kind of just want to be his bud.

3) A Hunger Artist really holds a special place in my heart. This past summer I had the kids in my acting class act out the story anywhere on camp except the theater and their performances were incredibly brilliant for totally different reasons. Like the one group that had the performer and the audiance cram into a tiny hallway and while we were inches away from the performer, the director would be behind everyone shoving us forward. Love it.

Anyhoo, cool tricks.

I need more hellos

One of my most favorite things about creating art is the process of going from the source of inspiration to the finished product. Lately I've been harnessing a lot of inspiration in a lot of places and even if I don't get to follow through with performing/executing the thing I want to create, even getting an idea from somewhere and fleshing it out into a piece on paper with little stick people is enough of a push for me to keep going.

I'm a big fan of parody and satire and since such an enormous part of that is the original source, the inspiration is...I mean, it's pretty obvious. There are few things I like better than a good parody, a really solid recontextualization of a thing that makes us re-examine everything. Thank you nerd-dom.

Here's one of my faves.

What's Opera, Doc? - Click here for more amazing videos

The classic and somewhat archaic music coupled with a hip trickster like Bugs Bunny, plus some exaggerated art deco-y settings and creative lighting/focusing just warms the soul. And the fact that they don't try and make it so cartoon-y that it takes away from the opera-ness of it; Bugs and Elmer are very sincerely doing this opera the way they would do it. When Bush Jr. first declared war, all I could hear was him going "kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit..."

On a different note, I spend most of time with people making their living on acting jobs, which is an incredible opportunity for me to get a lot of insight into the business while avoiding bodily harm or getting screwed out of money or any other unpleasantries. But at the same time, it's the first time I'm dealing with theater and acting as a business more than an artform and that's the fastest way to suck the life and passion out of a guy. So imagine my delight when today, despite being totally exhausted and gross-feeling, I got to encounter some kids to whom I taught exciting things like performance art and physical theater and awareness of human behavior and they, in return, were excited to hear that they could do more of it next summer with me. I mean it's always a nice ego boost to hear that someone likes you and wants to work with you, but it was totally something I needed to hear. As I continue to say, theater is nothing if not a conversation, so now I can go beyond drawing little stick figures for myself and actually do some art with people that want to and maybe inspire them to do their own arty loveliness. And now I've got all kinds of exciting plans for the summer, including some secret immersion theater...

and while we're talking about cartoons and goodness, here are some other ones I like a lot.

happy janus day! ....month!

So Janus is the Roman god of transitions, new beginnings and what not. He was most often worshipped at celebrations like births, weddings, harvests, anything that marked a major change. He's depicted with 2 heads looking in opposite directions, originally with one face bearded and the other clean shaven to represent the sun and the moon, and those faces appeared on early Roman coins. Unfortunately not a lot is written about his cult of followers, except that it was said that when Romulus and his men kidnapped the women of the Sabines, Janus saved the day by making a hot spring appear stopping the men in their tracks. So in times of war the doors of his temple were left open so that he could intervene again. The doors stayed closed during times of peace. However his most lasting impression is the month that carries his name, January, as its the transition into the new year. Fun facts.

The thing I really dig about Janus though is when he's called the god of doorways. It makes me think of that liminal space, not quite in and not quite out, and as one who often gets made fun of for lurking in doorways I was just pretty excited that doorways would get their own God.

But more importantly, that liminal space is just where the clown type of fella fits in. Always perched precariously between acceptibility and ridiculousness. So I have to wonder why there aren't more nerdy clown types paying homage or working Janus in some how. And by "have to wonder" I mean it's not the least bit surprising. But should still be a thing that happens.

This sort of thing, as was the last thing I wrote about, isn't so much a profound observation of the world or performance or clowning or anything, or even some exciting new statement of never-before-thought-of ideas, but it makes me very happy to put these interests of mine into a sort of context, since these ideas of liminal space and performance and what not repeat themselves over and over throughout our lives, and find connections in very unlikely places. Warms the tummy.