Around the World in 212 Days with Ken Feit

Ken Feit performance poster courtesy of Jef Lambdin

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My October series honoring the 72nd birthday of the late, great "itinerant fool" Ken Feit included a post on his incredible travel journals, reproduced in the form of three PDFs. At the time I mentioned that I was still missing the holy grail letter, the one about his most ambitious trip, a seven-month, around-the-world journey that took him and San Francisco street juggler Ray Jason from the U.S. to England, Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Russia, Japan (via the trans-Siberian Express), Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia (including Bali), China, Australia, New Zealand, and French Polynesia. Phew!

And now thanks to Barbara Leigh of the Milwaukee Public Theatre, we have that 22-page document and, with a bit of serendipity, a "new" poster (above; click to enlarge) of Ken unearthed by my old buddy, North Carolina mime performer and movement historian Jef Lambdin. Yahoo!

What was amazing about Ken's adventures was his total openness and his genius for quickly getting to know some of the most fascinating people — many of them performing artists — wherever he went. I travel a lot, and do my best to go beyond the artificiality of the pre-fabricated tourist experience, but I definitely feel like a gringo in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt compared to Ken.

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In Java, performances last for nine hours, in Bali for four hours, and the audience generally falls asleep or steps out at times. The trick is to know when to wake up, generally around 2:00 AM when the clowns come on the scene; the performance ends at sunrise.

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These are travel journals, not just performing arts research, but within its pages you will find adventures encompassing the Edinburgh Fringe; Russian circus; Japanese bunya, noh, and bunraku; Filipino tribal storytellers; Balinese dance and masks; Chinese opera and circus. And stories galore. One of my favorites was told to Ken by an octogenarian lumber merchant who was on Ken's official tour of China (only way to go in those days). He had lived in Shanghai from 1936 to 1941 before immigrating to the United States:

Once he was dining with a Chinese doctor when there was a knock at the door. There stood a man with a bandaged head and a bandaged object in his hand. Unwinding his head gauze revealed that his ear was missing; he was holding it in his hand. The doctor upon examining the ear sent him away telling him that the ear was too old and withered to sew back on. The man bowed politely and left. An hour later there was another knock. There stood the same man holding a fresh ear in his hand.

Ken's comment: "Thereafter I wore a hat in China."

Ken passed on another story to me from this same elderly Chinese gentleman, one that doesn't appear in this letter, but which I still remember: Here he was, returning to his native country after nearly four decades away. When they reached Shanghai, he decided to go see if the building housing his old office was still there. He did, and it was, so he went upstairs. Lo and behold, there was the same office door, and it still had his name on it.

You can't make this stuff up. Read and enjoy!




Click here for all the Ken Feit posts.

Beijing Opera: The Fight in the Dark

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Post #200. Wow! I thought I was getting out of this business, but I guess the money's just too good. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

So.... here we are again.

Let's celebrate #200 with one of my favorite pieces, The Fight in the Dark from the Beijing Opera (where Jackie Chan trained). If you think about it, being "in the dark" is a good metaphor for comedy, especially the physical kind. In this classic piece, two mortal enemies — only it turns out they aren't — find themselves in a room together with the lights out. Naturally they try to kill each other.

This is one part comedy to five parts friggin' incredible physical dexterity, but there are some real nice comedic moments where they slow down the mayhem long enough to savor the predicament. Enjoy!





Some links:
• Click here for previous post of Monkey King act from Beijing Opera.
• Jackie Chan was a student of Beijing Opera from the age of seven to seventeen, which you can read about in detail in his autobiography, I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action.

Beijing Opera: The Monkey King

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In the most recent entry to this blog, guest poster Jeff Raz left us off in Japan, so while we're all there let's just hop one country to our left and pay a visit to China and the Beijing Opera. (Or as we called it back in the good old days, Red China and the Peking Opera.)

If you're not familiar with the monkey king, be prepared to be blown away. The monkey king is a trickster character from Chinese folklore, what Joanne Woodward, host for this presentation, describes as a combination of Robin Hood, Zorro, Superman, and Charlie Chaplin.

The origins of the monkey king are obscure but the figure gained widespread recognition in the character of Sun Wukong in the epic Chinese novel, Journey to the West (1590s). The figure reappears in countless fables in China and other Asian countries, and even in a 2001 television mini-series and in this BBC commercial for their 2008 Beijing Olympics coverage, entitled Journey to the East, presumably because here, instead of voyaging to India, the monkey king is traveling back to Beijing to get to the Olympics.

While the Beijing Opera version of the monkey king is not what any Westerner would think of as opera, it is a highly stylized form, lacking scenery and with combat scenes that are closer to dance than to stunt work. The level of acrobatic skill, however, is incredibly high and the action full of physical comedy.

This entire piece, including the Joanne Woodward introduction, comes to about 32 minutes, and when you capture that much video on the Mac it segments it into 2-gig files. Rather than patch it back together, I've kept it segmented for easier downloading. The first video is just the introduction (4 minutes); the actual piece starts in the second clip, and the action accelerates as the piece goes on. Enjoy!