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.

Bill Irwin Plays King Lear's Fool

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Never content to rest on his clown laurels, nor to just stick with well-paying movie gigs, Bill Irwin has consistently returned to the stage to star in ingenious pieces of his own creation or to take on challenging works by Beckett, Brecht, Moliere, Fo, Feydeau, and Shakespeare.

He is now at the Public Theatre, all of a block from my apartment here in New York, playing the Fool to Sam Waterston's King Lear, and your intrepid reporter is there. Oh wait, no I'm not. It's $85, the production got bad reviews, and it closes tomorrow. Three strikes and I'm out.

While the production was mostly panned, Bill's reviews were much better, especially in the New York Times:

You can read the whole Times review here.
You can read 20 — count 'em, 20 — more reviews at the Stagegrade web site.

The only video trailer for the show is here, but it's only about Waterston and it's all talking heads with no actual performance footage. More fun is this old Lear parody by Bill, one of the Clown Bagatelles that served as an afterpiece to his 1987 Regard of Flight. This is very much in the style of 19th-century talking clowns such as Dan Rice, who delighted in comic summations of Shakespearean plays.

Bargain Bundle: Tumblers, Shakespeare, Abbott & Costello, Subway Cars & Scholarly Tomes

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Here's a riddle for you: what do the sticky floors of New York City subway cars and dusty, musty books on Elizabethan drama have in common? For the answer, just read on....

First clue: flash back to last spring. I'm on a crowded E train from JFK airport when a quartet of performers bound onto the train, loudly  announcing their act with no little modesty. More hip-hop popping I'm guessing, ho-hum, which is why I don't bother to whip out my Flip camera. Suddenly these guys burst across the length of the car in a flurry of handsprings and somersaults and some nifty partner moves, all dangerously close to their (truly) captive audience — "if I touch you, I'll give you a dollar." I especially like the peanut rolls (double forward roll holding each other's ankles) because they have to make precise, last-second detours to avoid impaling themselves on the car's vertical poles.

I really didn't think you could do any of that on a standing-room-only subway train bolting along at 40 mph. I was wrong. Unfortunately, at under two minutes, by the time I got my camera out, they were gone. A YouTube search turned up nothing, but inspired by the next act in this post, I searched again yesterday, this time successfully. I still don't know who they are, but this is definitely them.

Because camera angles are a challenge in a subway car, here are two views of the same act:







And then yesterday I noticed a NY Times article on two performers, Paul Marino and Fred Jones, who call themselves Popeye & Cloudy and who are no strangers to subway floors. They have been earning a reputation and a fair amount of loot by doing another form of action drama underground, casting the passengers as groundlings as they perform quick renditions of scenes from Shakespeare, favorites being Romeo's suicide and Macbeth's decapitation. Not only that, but they also throw in some Abbott & Costello as well; yes, Who's on First?

Read the whole article here.

"Not all subway lines are well suited to Shakespeare," writes a reporter for the Wall St. Journal in an earlier article. "The long cars of the N and R trains allow for a bigger audience per scene. And the J,M,Z trains, which cross the Williamsburg Bridge, give riders time to relax for a lengthy performance. Riders who frequent the 4,5 and 6 trains in Manhattan are out of luck: those lines are too crowded for a proper death scene or sword fight, the actors say."

Here's the Popeye & Cloudy website.
Here's that article from the Wall Street Journal and a short WSJ video.




If you want to see more, here's a 12-minute Vimeo video montage that includes some of the Who's on First.


Popeye & Cloudy from Paul Marino on Vimeo.


So speaking of Shakespeare, and hopefully bringing this post full circle, here's some more chapter two material, this time two complete public domain books on the fool characters in Shakespeare's plays.


Studies in the Development of the Fool in the Elizabethan Drama by Olive Mary Busby
Our first dusty, musty book answers that eternal question, "whence came this insistent demand of the English public for the buffooneries of the fool?" Okay, so I exaggerated; it was never published as a book, it's just a 1923 master's thesis. Hard to believe, but it cost money to publish books back in what is now known as the Pre-PDF Era. I'm guessing Olive Mary Busby went to her grave not knowing that this blogopedia would make her famous.

Fools Elizabeth an Drama



The Fools of Shakespeare by Frederick Warde
This 1913 work starts with a chapter on "the fool in life and literature," followed by individual chapters devoted to each of Shakespeare's principal fool characters, including: Yorick, Touchstone, Trinculo, Feste, Launcelot Gobbo, the grave-digger in Hamlet, and the fool in King Lear.
Fools of Shakespeare


That's all I got!

Complete Book: Fous et Bouffons (1885)

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Fous et Bouffons: un Etude Physiologique, Psychologique et Historique (Fools & Buffoons: A Physiological, Psychological, and Historical Study)
by Dr. Paul Moreau

You have to hand it to the French. They have an appetite for historical research and writing, as well as a keen interest in circus and clowning. Put the two together and the happy result is a lot of good books on the variety arts. When I somehow ended up as a French major in my undergrad years at NYU, I had no real idea how or if I would ever use my meager language skills. Four years later I found myself writing a book about clowns, the research for which would have been impossible had I not been able to read French.

So as we near the end of my posting public domain books about fools and jesters, I throw in a book in French on the subject. I figure there are enough of you gringos who read French, and the blog is getting a lot of visitors from francophile countries, so it may be of use to someone out there. And as I may have mentioned, it is free.

Moreau was a member of the Paris Medical Psychology Association and his approach aspires to be scientific. He was in fact the author of over a dozen books that bridge the gap between medical and psychological issues, tackling such subjects as suicide, childhood madness, and jealous insanity. One contemporary review of the book I found questioned Moreau's science and opined that "the historical section of the book contains many anecdotes which may amuse those who have nothing better to do than to read them." Zing!

I doubt H.G. Wells knew of Moreau when he wrote Island of Dr. Moreau, but Wells' mad scientist is none other than Dr. Paul Moreau, played by Charles Laughton in the 1933 film, Island of Lost Souls. But I digress.

Fous et Bouffons by Dr. Paul Moreau

Complete Book: Erasmus' In Praise of Folly

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It turns out Erasmus is not just the name of a high school in New York City. Apparently before he was a high school — about 500 years before — he was also a famous philosopher.

Hey, I'm just kiddin' ya. I went to graduate school, I know everything there is to know about Erasmus that's on his Wikipedia page. Like his full name was Desiderius Erasmus, though his friends called him Razzmatazz, that he was born in Rotterdam some time between 1466 and 1469, died in 1536, and in between established quite a reputation for himself as a Dutch Renaissance humanist. See?

But why was he praising folly?

As the forward to this edition says, "under the pleasing mask of Folly our author has uttered truths which are indeed sublime, and in the witty language of the Jester he has exposed the fallacies of ...." Well, the fallacies he exposes are a bit esoteric to us today, having to do with religious controversies raging over the Protestant Reformation. (Good thing we don't have religious controversies any more.) Erasmus was a Catholic but at one point an ally of Martin Luther and quite critical of the Catholic establishment. Erasmus speaks to us through a voice of his creation, the Greek Goddess of Folly, a personification of folly and a vehicle for launching satirical attacks on his favorite targets.

In Praise of Folly

Okay, so I made up that part about Razzmatazz.

Complete Book: Robert Armin's "Foole upon Foole" and "A Nest of Ninnies"

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The standard entry on fools and jesters usually makes mention of Shakespeare's jester characters, especially the fool in King Lear. It was Robert Armin (c. 1563 – 1615) who first acted the role as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, as well as such similar roles as Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, Lavatch in All's Well That Ends Well, and perhaps Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, as well as comic parts in other Elizabethan dramas. In fact, Armin's joining the company around 1600 is credited by some with Shakespeare's increased interest in witty jesters.

Armin was not just a leading actor of his day, but also a scholar with a keen interest in the ancient lineage of fools. He was one of the first to chronicle their history at length in his Foole upon Foole (1605) and his A Nest of Ninnies (1608), where he made a clear distinction between the natural fool and the "licensed fool," a performer sanctioned to play the role of the fool for money. It would be a logical assumption that, working as closely together as he and Shakespeare did for so many years, Armin shared his historical knowledge with the ever-curious bard.

Even though the text is short (56 pp.), it is rough sledding, given the wacky way they wrote and spelled back in those days. But it is historically significant and, once again, it is free...


Armin Foole Upon Foole

Complete Book: The History of Court Fools

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The History of Court Fools by John Doran

This is a 389-page monster of a book written by Dr. John Doran (1807-1878) and published in 1858. Doran was a prolific writer of popular social histories. No illustrations, not even the one to the right.

I used this book when researching chapter one of Clowns, but it should come with a warning: it's heavily anecdotal, with nothing in the way of footnotes or bibliography. Like a lot of books about fools and jesters, it tends to romanticize its subject and rarely questions the accuracy of a story so long as it's a good one.

It was republished just last year by Cornell University Library in book form — you know, with double-sided printing, a cover, a binding and all that. Your choice: buy it for $27 on Amazon or download and print it right here.

John Doran's History of Court Fools

Chapter 1 — Supplementary Material

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Hmm... Fools, Natural and Artificial... what a topic!

This was my opening chapter, though actually written towards the end. In it I tried to bring together manifestations of the clown spirit in a wide range of contexts, though with an emphasis on cultures variously labeled as primitive, indigenous, non-literate or non-technological. The argument is that if the Clown Spirit emerges spontaneously amongst these isolated peoples, separated as they are by time and geography, then this spirit must speak to something deep in human nature. Its appearance in more than a few creation myths perhaps offers the strongest proof.

It's great stuff, though the problem is that to do it justice you need to be a seasoned anthropologist, which I'm not, despite several visits to the American Museum of Natural History before the age of twelve. It's one thing to put together a reasonable narrative about the evolution of the tramp clown figure, and quite another to chart a vaguely defined clown impulse through all of recorded time, especially since it forces you to have to define exactly what it is you mean by "clown" in the first place. So I feel like I'm on shaky ground here, academically speaking, but nevertheless on the right track. Help and suggestions are certainly in order!

Since I started the book by writing about the dances of the Hopi people, and go on to also discuss the Navajo, the Zuni, the Yaqui, the Crow, the Cheyenne, and even Sri Lankan demon plays, I have of course been curious and hopeful that, living in the YouTube generation where everything is supposedly online, some choice ethnographic film might surface showing clown figures in performance, more or less in their native authenticity, uncorrupted by the white man pointing a camera at them. I'm just beginning a serious search, but in the meantime, here's some stuff...

Creation Myths
Clown figures do figure prominently in many creation myths, though it's usually more the clown as trickster than it is the clown as bumbler. The standard text on this when I was writing my book seemed to be Paul Radin's The Trickster (1956), but since then at least three other books of note have come along, all of which I'm trying to find time for.

First up is Barbara Sproul's 1979 collection, Primal Myths, an anthology of well over one hundred creation myths from throughout the world. Yes, Genesis is included. Only some of the texts touch on trickster figures, but the scope is impressive, and Sproul's intelligent and very readable 30-page introduction to the subject is a great way for the layman to understand how these stories function within a society.



Apparently along similar lines is Kimberley Christen's and Sam Gill's Clowns and Tricksters, though I haven't gotten my hands on it yet. Subtitled "An Encyclopedia of Tradition and Culture," it would seem to be a valuable resource in this area. According to the review in Library Journal, the authors have "created a reference to tricksters and clowns, figures found in cultures and myths worldwide but whose characteristics differ according to the culture in which they originate. The work lists 185 cultures by geographical area, followed by a main section consisting of 194 alphabetically arranged entries related to tricksters and clowns; the entries, which are heavily cross-referenced, cite the name of the character with its culture or country of origin followed by stories or other information. The entries conclude with bibliographic citations, and there is a comprehensive bibliography as well. The scope of this work is vast, covering clowns and tricksters from the ancient world to the present and including some references to cultures that no longer exist as well as material from current popular culture. As the introduction states: 'This volume is meant as a general introduction to both the characters and the people who see the world through their eyes.' It succeeds admirably."

For an even broader perspective on the trickster spirit, there's Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World (1998), which I am currently reading. Hyde is also the author of The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, and has been praised to the skies by David Foster Wallace as "one of our true superstars of non-fiction." Hyde's real subject is "trickster consciousness,'' which he traces across a broad spectrum, from dozens of folklore myths through the work of such modern artists as Marcel Duchamp, Allen Ginsberg, and Maxine Hong Kingston.


The Feast of Fools
The title of the chapter, "Fools, Natural & Artificial," hearkens back to the middle ages and points to the distinction (or confusion) between those performers who acted the role of the fool for fun and profit, and those who were kept on by the rich and powerful, who found their very real physical and mental deformities amusing.


While this practice seems to have somewhat died out, I would take this opportunity to draw your attention to a NYC-based theatre company I'm fond of that has done a lot of exploration based on the Feast of Fools and the Fool's Mass. They are Dzieci Theatre, whose roots are in the teachings of Jerzy Grotowski, but whose explorations have included not only the fool's mass, but burlesque and circus as well. I want to cover more of their work at a later date, but meanwhile here's a pdf of a full-length article about their work from Ecumenica:

dzieciecumenica

If you're in the New York area, be sure to check out one of the December 2009 performances of their Fool's Mass, which are listed here.





Jesters
The medieval jester who, like Lear's fool, could speak truth to power has no doubt been romanticized. I suspect it was not all that common, and that many a "jester" had to shut up or at least tone down their criticism to keep their head attached to their neck. Even in our day and age, freedom of speech is not all it's made out to be, given the control of the media usually exercised by the rich and powerful inisde or outside the government. That being said, here are two modern examples of comics taking on the powers that be...

Will Rogers
The political humor of Will Rogers (1879–1935) seems pretty tame today, yet in his heyday as a star of film and the vaudeville stage, he was unique in his folksy ability to say some pretty nasty things about politicians without having everyone hate him; kind of a lovable Bill Maher. Here's a clip of Lance Brown as Will Rogers:




Stephen Colbert
For me, the most significant moment in modern comedy was Stephen Colbert tearing apart George W. Bush to his face at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. The character he plays on The Colbert Show is very much a jester, as he pretends to espouse a set of views while ripping them to shreds through exaggeration and the recital of inconvenient facts. When I saw the show being taped live, Colbert chatted with the audience beforehand and wanted to make sure they really understood that he was playing a character. (Hey, you never know who's going to wander in off of West 54th Street.) At the correspondents' dinner he destroys Bush by praising him, kind of like Mark Antony praising Caesar, only a lot funnier. It's in three parts...

Chapter 1— Fools, Natural & Artificial

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Chapter 1 from my book, Clowns: A Panoramic History
It's been my intention to get my entire Clowns book up on the blog, but since this is only the second chapter in six months, it looks like I'm going to have to accelerate the pace. [Click here for chapter five.]

There are two problems. One is that scanning a book (yes, it was written in the pre-digital Dark Ages), then correcting all the scanning errors (OCR is still not perfect), scanning the photos, redoing the layout, etc. is a tedious and time-consuming job. Not much fun either. The other obstacle is my silly desire to take a few small steps towards improving the book, both by correcting any errors and by adding supplementary material.



Okay, enough excuses. Here's a pdf of chapter one, to be followed by a post of supplementary material. And to be followed by chapter two in a lot less than six months!

Clowns—Chapter 1