Tag: Slovakia

After a workshop with Chris Lynam

Last night, Jef organized a workshop with Chris Lynam, a clown who is in New York for the Broadway run of Slava’s Snowshow. It’s always good to meet new clowns. After the workshop, there were three conversations at once around the table at the diner. Jef and Chris were talking about working with Slava and working on their own work. I was talking to the only other woman from the workshop about writing and the other guys were talking about guys being goofy.

Walking to the train at the end of the evening, Chris mentioned another clown, Thomas Kubenick a Czech clown who has his own show that he tours around the world. It’s good. I’ve seen it. I met Thomas for the first time at Movement Theatre International in Philadelphia in 1990. He was at that time assisting Boleck Polivka who taught a workshop. I met him again when he showed up at the workshop I was taking with Ctibor Turba at his studio in Nectiny, Czechoslovakia (right before it turned into Czech Land–that’s what the locals called the Czech Republic–and Slovakia) I’ve been around a while, but it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve gotten a handle on what may be my particular style…

I’m pretty much the opposite of Amy G. Chris took a call from her about a gig at a club. Organizing and coordinating are so not my thing that the passing mention of a woman I know putting together an evening of acts apparently caused me to have a nightmare. I had a dream, last night, about running a theatre space–like Annex where Allison Narver, Andrea Allen and Gillian Jorgenson have all been artistic director or the Brick where Audrey Crabtree is the face of the organizers of the New York Clown Theatre Festival. In this dream which was more like a nightmare, brought on perhaps by conversation about successful theatrical clowns and the women behind them, (I was reminded of the organized women behind the careers of monologists, Spalding Grey and Mike Daisey and cartoonist Gary Larson, not to mention the countless women who work as personal assistants, executive secretaries and stage moms (The Husband, My Kid, My Sister and I all saw Gypsy this week.) These passing bits of conversation caused me to have a nightmare about being in charge of an art space like Celebration Barn, currently run by the Amanda Huotari. In my dream there 4 toilets on the second floor that were all overflowing and unusable. The Marley dance floor in the rehearsal hall had been scrubbed with Comet by someone’s helpful visiting unsupervised mother and was now ruined… It was a nightmare.

Now, disorganized person that I am, I’ve got to hurry and help My Kid, (who is alternately yanking on my body an falling on the floor to prove the point of gross parental neglect) get dressed in a manner appropriate for both ice skating with her aunt at Rockefeller Center and hooking up at the Museum of Natural History with old Seattle Annex friends and their offspring, who are visting from Chicago.

Gotta go.

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