Tag: Kendall

What a relief!

rehearsal

better

managed to get some laughs during an improv.

improv exercise to do a gory fairy tale death

I’m not the only one who has trouble.  One woman acted out a nursery rhyme when the assignment was to act out a fairy tale.  Buzzzzzzz.  Wrong.

Kendall wanted people to talk about process after, I did but then I felt like I’d said too much and that it was a mistake to have said that I used to feel more relaxed when I thought this was Kendalls thing and she just chose things and put them on stage.

Zombie bodies coming out of the wolf’s belly when the woodsman rescues the already eaten Little Red Riding Hood and Gramdmother was my improvisation success today.

This morning The Husband and I attempted to have nice restaurant breakfast but we were both so stressed out about our work neither of us could eat much.  He spent the whole time on his crackberry because of some problem at work and I was so nervous about rehearsal because I was so unsucessful in my improvs on Wednesday (which I now realize was partly because of all the build up and stress over the first day of school and we need to have a nice dinner and talk and decompress after the first day of school and we didn’t get to do that because I had to take My Kid to my rehearsal at 6:30 and then The Husband took much longer getting to the studio to pick her up because he got hung up at work).

My Kid ran out of the studio full of women clowns so fast when she saw her daddy.

The Husband said My Kid didn’t fall asleep until 11:00.  Yikes!

My puppeteer friend met me in the East Village after rehearsal and we had drinks at The Cloisters and then ate perogis and borscht at Veselka.  Poor puppeteer friend she had to listen to me complain about my creative block and encourage me to believe that I am really funny.

So stressed.

Costuming issues

Tomorrow is the first day of school.

Tomorrow I have rehearsal.

First I made sure I knew what My Kid intends to wear on the First Day of School and that it is something that is clean and exists in the apartment. 

Then, I ransacked my closet looking for something for me to wear as a clown in the studio tomorrow. The clothes we wear in Clowns Ex Machina are not dropped in our laps during tech week by some costumer we haven’s seen since having our measurements taken right after being cast (as is the case in traditional theatre).  We develop our own costumes in the course of the rehearsal process and at the moment I have none.

It is a source of stress.

We are re-working Clown Axioms which had its first incarnation at the undergroundzero festival last summer.  I came in at the end of the process at the end of the studio time and the beginning of tech.  I was assigned to wear all black and move across the stage during transitions.

As a result, while the other women are trying to remember what they did in their pieces, I am starting that process from scratch.

I have no idea what to wear.  We’re riffing off of fairy tales and gothic romances and so on the first day of rehearsal I put together a skirt and corset affair.  But, several of the other women are already wearing that sort of thing so it’s a no go.  For the second rehearsal I wore a cotton Indian tunic, pants and sari outfit, given to me by friends from India.  I wore it to a workshop this winter and enjoyed the color and ease of movement.  But, when I brought it in for this particular show, Kendall said it didn’t work because it’s from a different time and place than the others.

So, I am back to square one.

I have returned to the pictures we were given as inspiration.   In among the wenches in corsets and full skirts, there are also fluttery gowns and flowing hair.  So I have found something else to try.  It’s fluttery but it’s dark, grey and black instead of virginal white.  We’ll see.

Rosemary Kennedy

 While I was listening to all the news coverage of the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, I began idly googling the Kennedy family and was drawn to the women, especially Rosemary Kennedy.

She was different, troubled, but most likely not retarded as has been printed repeatedly.  Some reports speculated that she probably had an average intelligence, but compared to the future president and his competitive siblings she just seemed retarded.  She may have had learning disabilities. Some speculated that she suffered from mental illness exacerbated by her inability to meet the exceedingly high standards of her birth family and the Catholic Church of the period.  Rosemary Kennedy was prone to emotional outbursts and seemed to like the attention of men.  Maybe she expressed anger at the double standard when the men in her family were encouraged to sow their wild oats, while the women had to avoid “the thing the priest says not to do”.  In another culture, in another time, in a different family, she might have been happy and successful.  (Or not, as in the 1961 film “Splendor in the Grass”.)

I think of the Clowns Ex Machina work we do with Kendall, in our all women troupe, riffing off cultural images and expectations.  Some of my most successful improvisations in the studio have at their core attempts to maintain some physical manifestation of a feminine ideal.  The failure brings simultaneous laughter and tears because when a clown does it the absurdity is obvious.  When it happens in real life.  

Well…

Rosemary Kennedy was given a lobotomy.

There is a photograph of a pretty bright-eyed young woman, Rosemary sharing a laugh with her little sister Jean, a freckle-faced girl with braces on her teeth who looked into the eyes of her older sister with obvious admiration.  It was taken about a year before the lobotomy left 23-year-old Rosemary Kennedy completely incapacitated.  Jean would have been about 13 when that happened.  Jean is described in the press as the shyest and most guarded of the children of Joseph P. Kennedy.  In 1974, Jean Kennedy Smith founded Very Special Arts, a non-profit organization that promotes the artistic talents of mentally and physically challenged children and is an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The Missoula Public Library and The Book Exchange

I was literally plugging in my laptop so I can check my e-mail from a public wi-fi site (because my parents only have dial-up) when my cell phone rang.  It was Kendall asking if I’ve sent out the e-mail blast asking for donations for the troupe. Yikes I haven’t.  GUILT.  I’m a bad friend.  I am a bad company member.  I dropped the ball. Twice that I’m aware of–maybe three times if end up not making it to the Bigfork Summer Playhouse Reunion this weekend.  I’m here in Montana without a car and just today getting passwords and such so I can walk over to my brothers house in order to use my laptop outside of a coffee shop with wifi.  

Last night I really missed being able to check e-mail and facebook as part of my bedtime routine.  At the hotel in Seattle I’d go to the lobby for wifi or use The Husband’s bluetooth connection because I don’t have a crackberry of my own.

In Brooklyn before we left we made it to the good-bye party for the friends moving to Uganda but I didn’t get back to the friend running for office in Brooklyn who needed me to fax him our info because his campaign lost our donor card.  The Husband was too busy at work trying to get ready to leave town for a week.  I was cleaning and packing and trying to say good-bye to the friends who will have moved away by the time we get back to Brooklyn.  Things were dropped. Things were missed.

Now I’m at the public library where I have come with My Kid, Girl Cousin and The Grandparents.  The girls are signing up for the summer reading program (grand prizes provided by Dairy Queen) and searching the shelves for matching books to read to their dolls.

And now we’re at The Book Exchange where my father has a lot of credit and his grandaughters are sure to acquire some new books in the next few minutes.  While I try once again to go on facebook and see who I know from long ago who is in Missoula, Montana at this point in time.  Yesterday I got a call on my cell phone from an old friend and we were so excited to speak to each other that it took a while to figure out that I who live in Brooklyn am in Missoula and she who lives in Montana is in New York.

Now that I’m sitting here looking across the street at the fairgrounds where the rides and animal pens are being set up for the Western Montana Fair and My Kid is otherwise occupied I can’t remember what I wanted to say.  It’s just so weird being back in my home town, a not-young (this is a college town) mom, just visiting from my Brooklyn, New York.

And the girls are ready to go.

Post production meeting e-mail

Kendall followed up with an e-mail including a long description of the show we are working on as well as this catchy short version:

With their new show Clown Axioms, Kendall Cornell and Clowns Ex Machina take a cold, hard clown-look at gory fairy tales and gothic romance – and the thrilling terrors within. Through a series of short vignettes, songs and dances this troupe of all-women clowns creates a grave yet preposterous world filled with mystery, delightful gore and high humor.  

This sounds fun!

Reading over the actual work, the literature and the clown–I am excited about the project.  Focusing on data bases, spreadsheets and mailing lists last night sucked the life out of me.

 I really do struggle with result of the idea that I have to first succeed at office management tasks before I can allow myself be creative which really puts a damper over this little light of mine.

Checking my e-mail

I’m glad I’ve got a production meeting next week for Kendall’s fall show and a new gig in November to put in my calendar.

I was beginning to think I was nothing but a housewife and that I have nothing to think about but cooking and cleaning and chaperoning My Kid.

It was Greg DeSanto’s video master class that did it.  Look at all these clowns and what am I doing…

Something.

FIRST OF MAY; Clown Women and Clown Girl Scouts

I could have/should have/didn’t post this when it happened on because in my mind there was a lot more to write…

Friday May 1, 2009

After spending the afternoon in the studio with Kendall and the clown women I ran my daughters Girl Scout troop through a series of theatre games and some red nose time in order to qualify the Brownies for a Try-It badge and the Junior Girl Scouts for their Theatre Patch.

The Brownie Girl Scouts got their patches!

A bit of a clown Friday

Adam’s all gaga over his baby he wasn’t there. Well I wasn’t there either. But, we checked the box office at “Humor Abuse” to see if there were tickets. (Tonight’s show was sold out but we have tickets for tomorrow night.) We got to see lots of clowns I know in front of the theatre. Jay Stewart was there in town for the weekend, and Lisa Lewis with her husband (Their kid chose not to accompany her clown parents to someone else’s clown show when there was an opportunity to play with a Wii.) Michael Bongar was there with his wife. There were others I knew. It’s the last weekend of Larry Pisoni’s kid’s solo show about growing up with a clown for a dad.

It was a clown day for me. After I got My Kid successfully to her daily spring break swimming lesson at the Y (notice how I haven’t had any Pilates classes or lap swims this week…), transfered her care and feeding to The Husband who was taking a long childcare related lunch, I got to spend a couple of hours playing in the studio with Kendall and the other clown women. It was good to do. It’s been a while.

Then uptown on the train with My Kid and The Husband, returning him to his office and accompanying my kid to FAO Schwartz for the last afternoon of the last Friday of her Spring Vacation. She spent an hour hanging around the adoptable baby dolls, so I was softened up and let her paint a penguin in the new ceramic painting section of the toy store. I did one too to keep myself from getting bored. I hope I will have the courage to throw it away as I am trying to clear clutter. It was like buying a sandwich to sit in a cafe because your feet hurt even though you aren’t hungry.

After we didn’t get into the play we went and had a lovely end of the week family dinner at Trattorio Spaggetto in the West Village. It’s not the best Italian food in the city, but it’s the best location between a church and a public fountain.

I had hope of going out and talking with clowns tonight (Jef Johnson is also performing this evening) but after wine and heavy food with My Kid and The Husband, I find myself home in the apartment typing up a quick blog entry while My Kid watches some “SpongeBob SquarePants” before the entire weekend becomes about My Kid and the AYSO Spring Soccer Season which begins for our family tomorrow!!!!!!

Exploring the Bozo Mystique…on…Feminine Terms

The show opened last night. The house was small (due in part to the fact that the “undergroundzero” festival of experimental theatre, was moved to the Manhattan Children’s Theatre from Collective:Unconscious space after a sewage leak forced the theater to close.) Kendall said she was told there would be signs and a live person in front of Collective:Unconscious sending audience around the block and across the street to the new location. But, there wasn’t. There were some advance sales who did not show.

Anyway the show went well. Not genius, but for the first time in front of an audience it was great. Some things, like Ginny’s Cinderella piece which needed an audience volunteer really clicked. It’s always scary to put a clown show in front of a real audience for the first time because contact with the audience is so important. More so than in scripted theatre, the performance changes with every audience. (This thought makes me nervous about the one shot I get to be on stage at the New York Clown Theatre Festival in September.)

At a bar after the show Kendall revealed that she had been contacted by someone from a high profile comedy show, after the New York Times article came out on Tuesday. Such things are taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes it’s just an assistant trolling for material, even when they don’t know what you do. A friend of mine started the Chad Everett fan club at her college to see if the student government would give them money. The student government funded the club and it and it was written up in the papers. She was contacted and invited to be on the David Letterman show. She assumed they knew it was a stunt since they’d found her through the newspaper. She was flown to New York and got as far as the green room before anyone actually read the articles close enough to realize she was in on the joke and her appearance was cancelled.

Kendall was very interested in what her friends had to say after the show, which images stuck with them and what they found funny or fascinating. It’s hard to tell in a rehearsal process. Something is cool, and then you rehearse it and watch it over and over, everyone in the studio has seen it so nobody’s laughing anymore and you don’t remember why it’s in the show. Then you put it in front of an audience and they are surprised and they laugh and you remember, oh yeah that was a good idea.

It’s weird that we have such a big article (half a page!!!) about our company in advance of a short work-in-progress at small festival. But, as Kendall said, you can’t control when somebody from the New York Times wants to write a story and you take the attention when you can get it.

It was pretty obvious to me that a man wrote the headline over the story by April Dembosky. What woman would write; “Exploring the Bozo Mystique, and Defining Funny on Their Own Feminine Terms’.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/nyregion/29clowns.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Adam Gertsacov posted the article on his site, clownlink.com
Speaking of Adam, and Kendall and women in clowning…

Adam and I were in the same workshop at Studio Kaple in Nectiny Czechoslovakia (some years ago, it was actually about 4 months before Czechoslovakia turned into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. We had a heated discussion one evening, other people were included, but Adam

smug anxiety

Despite having a good time on the 4th of July I spent a good percentage of the next day filled with anxiety and stress.  I should have felt good that I had just had a paying gig, but then I watched re-runs of “I Love Lucy” with my kid and instead of enjoying them I thought about how when I first became a clown the knowledge that she did the “I Love Lucy” shows in her 40’s made me think I still had lots of time in which to make my mark as a clown.  I’m not feeling that way so much anymore.  (There is also the shrinking amount of time in which to clean and pack and get ready for our trip to Montana which must also include being ready to hit the ground running at Kendall’s rehearsals the day we get back to New York, –clearing and readying our bedroom for the delivery of a new bed, by far the biggest job on my list– and being packed and ready to go to Toronto the morning after the last performance of “Clown Axioms”.) I drank too much coffee until I suddenly had to eat or implode.  I quickly prepared a breakfast of vegetarian imitation bacon and fried eggs for the three of us while I listened to an NPR interview with Barbara Kingsolver talking about her book about her year spent eating in season food they had grown themselves.  People with the cultural capitol to write books that are published about such things generally begin their stories by describing the beautiful property that they own, this book is no exception.  And so a bitterness tinged the fresh berries, greens and apple juice I had purchased for more than twenty dollars at the green market in the park that morning.

In the afternoon we went to see WallE at Cobble Hill Cinemas (second time for My Kid and I, first time for My Husband).  We played in the park and ate an old-school Italian dinner at the Red Rose on Smith Street.   Wine and pasta in the company of my small family comforted and relaxed me even without the smug joy of preparing the dishes myself using homegrown produce.