the New York Clown Theatre Festival – Page 2

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

Kill Me Loudly

I saw Deanna’s show tonight. Spent the first few minutes obsessing about not having brought my Clown Axioms postcards to distribute. The woman seated next to me was looking over the Eric Davis/Bouffon Glass Menajoree postcard in her hand before the lights went out. (I thought to myself; “Hmm. I wonder how much those two sided postcards cost. Lorraine and I should have some made for the Clown Theatre Festival!”)

I was looking forward to seeing Kill Me Loudly because I was in the workshop last year where Deanna found her character “Butt Kapinsky”. It’s exciting to see something from a workshop develop into and evening of theatre and Deanna’s show was a success. She gave it to Eric Davis to direct and so her costume developed buffoon bulges. It wasn’t a surprise when Eric announced after the show, as he was inviting everyone in the audience to adjourn to the adjoining bar, that this show would be in the New York Clown Theatre Festival in September. Bouffon Glass Menajoree has been playing around town since it was in the festival two years ago.

Jeff Seal got to show off some of them clown skills he acquired out there in California and that was good to see.

Also that space, Milagro Theater at Clemente Soto Velez, on the Lower East Side is a good space. I wouldn’t mind doing a show there.

On the subway coming home my head was full of pithy and critical thoughts about clown theatre in general and Deanna’s show in particular, but when I got home My Kid was still awake and there was much ado about a bath, itchy ears, eating cherries and brushing teeth so now it’s all gone.

Also, I am still a little jet lagged.

The Husband just reminded me that it’s 1:30 in the morning and I have rehearsal at 10:00 am. So I’m going to close my eyes and go to sleep now in our new brass bed that was delivered at 8:45 this morning (thank God I didn’t leave clearing out the room for morning) Rehearsal today was at PMT from 10 till 2. Then I schlepped back to Brooklyn. I had to pay attention to My Kid. There e-mails to check and send before I could go to the show tonight. We’ve been scheduled for the New York Clown Theatre Festival Cabaret on September 11. I’m just waiting for Lorraine to confirm. (I wonder if she has 9/11 issues. She did fly out of Boston on that morning… I wonder if I have 9/11 issues… I saw the second tower come down from the Monument in Fort Green Park where I was standing with My Kid in a pack on my back.)

Stay At Home Mom –NOT!

When I was preparing to begin a blog of my own, in my random cyber-wanderings I came across a blog that made me laugh. It wasn’t the wit of the writer, it was the subject matter. A man, a professional athlete had just become a proud stay-at-home-dad. His blog bragged about how smoothly his day went. He got up early and got in a good workout before his wife went to her job. Then he managed the care and feeding of the baby all day, accomplishing other tasks and getting in more exercise while the baby slept. He didn’t know why people complain about how hard it is to stay home with a child. There are no further posts.

I don’t want to be one of those people who start a blog and don’t continue. But, I also don’t want to chat and vent and whine. I want to write about what I do or try to do making my way as a theatrical clown in New York City at the same time as I am a “stay-at-home-mom” although apparently unable to stay home for more than a few hours at a time. Granted My Kid is in school now (except she’s not now–summer vacation has begun both “Finally!!!!!” and “Already???”) so it’s not like she’s a baby or a toddler. But, it did seem that going on the science field trip, attending the Second Grade Field Day, the Brownie Girl Scout Badge Ceremony and taking cupcakes to her class in honor of her “summer birthday” not to mention, the cleaning, that I don’t do enough of, but spend a lot of time stressing about and the cooking, that I don’t do enough of but spend a lot of time stressing about, and the laundry, that I don’t do enough of but spend a lot of time stressing about, and the hanging out on the playground so that she can run and play (before the summer becomes too hot), during which time I think to myself: “Surely there must be some high school or college student who could do this instead of me”. Except that it was lucky for me to be there talking to the other moms on the playground when it was decided to organize a week of Mommy Camp for those of us who haven’t registered our kids daycamp starting-right-away-like-the-moms-with-real-jobs and so there is the problem of what will our kids do now that school is out and all their friends are in day camp. I wouldn’t have been a part of this project if I hadn’t been standing around chatting with the mothers at the edge of the playground when the idea came up and Enthusiastic Mom ran with it and several multi-kid mom’s latched on because they hadn’t planned anything anyway because of upcoming travel or visitors or baseball or finances.

It’s a good thing I was there, because otherwise My Kid would spend all next week watching Hannah Montana and The Suite Life of Zach and Cody (I hate that show) and iCarly, television shows wherein My Kid learns that middle school is going to be great fun and grown-ups are sight gags. Meanwhile I would drink too much coffee and vibrate between the kitchen sink and my laptop trying to decide whether I should clean or cook or shop or do laundry or work on a clown piece or write or take My Kid to the park or the library or the beach or a museum and end up going to Target because it’s entertaining for her and has some errand accomplishing value for myself.

Instead, for this coming week my friend, Enthusiastic Mom, has already e-mailed me a spreadsheet schedule of when and where My Kid and I are supposed to be each day in order meet up with the other kids and mommies to do something stimulating and exciting with My Kid’s friends and assorted younger siblings.

Meanwhile, there is some life in my life on the clown front. The full-length show I proposed was not chosen for the New York Clown Theatre Festival this September, but they would like us to do a piece in one of their evenings of short works. I forwarded that e-mail to my puppeteer partner but she didn’t respond. Before I sent her another e-mail asking why she hadn’t responded and would she be able to be in town to perform with me, and what’s the matter didn’t she like the show we proposed or want to work with me anymore. I googled the summer theatre where she is running the prop shop and noted in their calendar that they had 4 different shows open this week, so I let it slide for now. I was on stage at the New York Downtown Clown Revue in a demonstration of Jef Johnson’s Clown Lab. Kendall’s next project, “Clown Axiom”, went into rehearsal on Friday and I was there at Triskelion Studio on Williamsburg (after schlepping my kid to a begged-for babysit/playdate in Brooklyn Heights and the end of the day I took the girls swimming at the Y and then for pizza and then donughts with My Husband and then the next morning my kid’s friend’s mommy called and said her daughter was still asleep at nearly 11 am. She reported that her child had gone from little girl to teenager in less than 24 hours.) I attended some Clown Labs at Theatre Lab and The Producers Club and I got a 4th of July corporate gig through a Ringling contact. So I’m not doing nothing.

But,

It feels like it sometimes.