Leonard Pitt: Physical Theatre Lecture-Demo

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On my last post I welcomed Leonard Pitt to the blog as he introduced us to a great documentary on Mel Blanc. The 20-minute video below is How I Learned to Write by Learning How to Move my Body, which he performed at a monthly conference called (coincidentally) Leonardo, an evening of art and science presentations. In it Leonard touches on different aspects of physical theatre, with topics ranging from the work of Etienne Decroux, to poetry, to Balinese masks. A special delight is an excerpt from his widely-acclaimed show, Doppo, Clown of Yesteryear. Truly a must-see!




Yes, I've already told him he should do this for a TED Talk!

• Previous Leonard Pitt post
• Leonard Pitt web site

Guest Post: Leonard Pitt on Mel Blanc

[post 294]

I am honored to have Leonard Pitt contribute his voice to this blog. Leonard Pitt is a world-renown performer and teacher, not to mention being the author of several books on historical Paris. Please allow me to quote from his bio at length: "Leonard Pitt was born in Detroit in 1941. He attended The Art Center School in Los Angeles and at age twenty got a lucrative job in an advertising agency as a graphic designer. Staring into a creative dead end he quit his job and traveled to Europe. He landed in Paris in 1963 and took a few mime classes with Etienne Decroux. After a few days he was hooked. He spent four years with Decroux and seven years in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1970 and settled in Berkeley, California where he opened a school of physical theatre, attracting students from around the world. Leonard's one-man shows have received critical acclaim. He has performed and taught at theatres and festivals throughout the United States, in Europe, Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia. In 1973 he attended a concert of Balinese dance and music. Turning to his friend before the curtain went up, he whispered, "If this is boring, let's leave in the middle." Stunned by what he saw, he closed his school and traveled to Bali to study mask theatre. While there he performed with the Balinese in their village and temple festivals. He returned to Bali in 1978 to study mask carving. In 1986 he co-founded Life On The Water, a contemporary theatre in San Francisco presenting new work. In 1991, Leonard created Eco-Rap, an environmental education program combining ecology and rap music as a way to educate inner city youth about urgent social issues. Leonard has written three books on Paris. From 2009–2011, he and James Donlon operated The Flying Actor Studio in San Francisco, offering a one-year program in the art of physical theatre. Leonard lives in Berkeley, California.

Visit his web site here.

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Mel Blanc is the national treasure we never knew we had.

This stunning documentary about the voice of Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Woody the Woodpecker and hundreds of others is a must for any physical performer. A film this good is our equivalent of going to church.

If you've never heard of him, lucky you! You're in for a gooood time. What he does with his voice we have to know how to do with our body and our voice.

Go to 28 minutes and watch him and others talk about his process of creating and acting the voices and characters he played for years. He was the consummate actor.

The story of his near-death auto accident in 1961 and how Bugs Bunny brought him out of his coma is a tear jerker. If it doesn't bring a tear to your eye you should not be on stage. He knew what fun was and knew how to communicate it. He never got trapped in overthinking things, in trying to be cool, trying to impress, to shock. He played the character, he played the situation and did it with consummate artistry.

Clearly Mel never had to discover his inner child. He never lost it.

And on top of everything, from all reports, he was a very nice man.

Every physical performer must genuflect daily to the gods of youtube for the treasures it continues to provide.



Update (2-6-13):  Just discovered this Radio Lab podcast on Mel Blanc.

"Clowns": Chapter Two — Supplementary Material

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Chapter two (previous post) covered a lot of ground — about twenty centuries and at least four continents — so there's a ton of potential supplementary material. I'll just throw a few at you here, and then follow up in my next posts with some free books.

The first comes from the 18th-century tradition of French fairground theatre, which thrived outside the censorship laws imposed on the royally-sanctioned "serious" theatres in Paris. The most popular form of fairground comedy was a short farcical sketch known as a parade.  Popular, that is, until they were closed down by the police in 1777.

Below is a quite humorous example by Thomas-Simon Gueullette (1683–1766), a lawyer and scholar who wrote over sixty pieces for the commedia actors of the Théâtre-Italien. Rather than inventing much that was new, I suspect that Gueullette, like Goldoni and Gozzi, took much of the comic business made popular by the improvisatory commedia actors and repackaged it in a more tightly structured, written form. The good news is that he did a nice job of it.

One Armed, Blind Deaf Mute


Here's what that dumb comic servant Gille may have looked like:

And click here for a recent Ph.D. dissertation on the work of Gueullette.

If you've seen my favorite movie ever, Children of Paradise (1945), you already have some sense of the fairground theatre atmosphere, but transported half a century later from Gueullette's time to the heyday of the Boulevard du Crime in Paris. If you haven't seen Children of Paradise, you are hereby ordered to do so. Soon! It's on DVD and it's available on Netflix, though if you can actually see it in a movie theatre, it's worth the money to take it all in on a big screen. Much of the action takes place at the Théâtre des Funambules (theatre of the wirewalkers) and centers around the legendary mime, Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796–1846), immortalized in the performance of Jean-Louis Barrault.

Here's a scene that did a lot to popularize pantomime. This is Barrault as a not-yet-famous Deburau, dismissed as the family idiot, forced to work the platform in front of the Funambules to help draw in paying customers.

There are no subtitles, but you won't need them. When the master criminal Lacenaire picks the pocket of a bourgeois gentleman, his accomplice Garance gets the blame. The police ask if there are any witnesses, and the silent mime suddenly speaks, saying he saw it all. Once he acts it out, Garance goes free, and her show of gratitude triggers a romance that is one of the movie's central plot lines.

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"Act! Act! You have the wrong place. We are not allowed to act here. We walk on our hands! And you know why? They bully us. If we put on plays, they'd have to close their great, noble theaters! Their public is bored to death by museum pieces, dusty tragedies and declaiming mummies who never move! But the Funambules is full of life, movement! Extravaganzas! Appearances, disappearances, like in real life! And then, BOOM, the kick in the pants!"   
— the director of the Funambules

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A mime piece performed by Barrault as Deburau at the Funambules:



Stay tuned: I will be posting a complete book (in French) of Deburau's mime pieces in a week or two.

Now here's a real curiosity: Etienne Decroux, the father of French mime, teacher of Marceau and Barrault, and later the creator of the more abstract corporeal mime style carried on by his students Tom Leabhart, Daniel Stein, and Steve Wasson, amongst others. Yes, that Etienne Decroux. Here he is, eye lashes fluttering, jabbering away, hamming it up like crazy as Deburau's very verbose father!

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"A kick in the ass, if well delivered, is a sure laugh. It's true. There's an entire order, a science, a style of kicks in the ass."
— Anselme Debureau (played by Etienne Decroux)

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Did I mention this is a great movie? Not only that, but once you've seen it, you'll want to know more about this whole theatrical era. Well, you've come to the right place, and I'm referring to our final supplemental item, "The Golden Age of the Boulevard" by Marvin Carlson.

When I was in graduate school at NYU and working as an assistant editor for TDR (The Drama Review), I commissioned this article from the distinguished theatre scholar Dr. Marvin Carlson for an issue on popular entertainments I was putting together. It gives me great satisfaction, almost forty years later, to have been back in touch with Professor Carlson, who kindly consented to have his article reprinted on this blog so it could reach a new and wider audience. It's an excellent article, and I once again thank Mr. Carlson for this and his many other contributions to theatre scholarship, which you can check out here.

Golden Age

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And, last but not least, an important correction. The following photo, from a Columbia Records lp of gamelan music, appeared in the color plate section of my book with the caption "Clown character from the wajang wong, the Balinese dance-drama."

Well, it turns out that was wayway wrong. After the book was published, I received a note from Leonard Pitt — mime, maskmaker, student of the above-mentioned Etienne Decroux, and expert on Balinese theatre — advising me that this photo was mislabeled. My bad for not having double-checked this. But I did save the note, and when I visited Leonard last year at his Flying Actor Studio in San Francisco, I was able to show it to him (35 years later!) and promise to finally make amends. I wanted to scan the note for this post, but it is lost somewhere here in my office. If instead I showed you a picture of my office, you'd see why it might take me a while to retrieve the note! Anyway, correction made, photo removed, and thank you again Leonard!

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Coming next, the following complete books, all related to Chapter Two material:
• The Mimes of Herodas
• The Commedia dell'Arte by Winifred Smith
• Masques et Bouffons by Maurice Sand
• Mimes et Pierrots by Paul Hugounet
• Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni
• Goldoni: A Biography by H.C. Chatfield-Taylor
• The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi
• The Life of Moliere by Henry M. Trollope
• Le Théâtre des Funambules by Louis Péricaud
• Pantomimes de Gaspard et Charles Deburau

Gettin' Schooled in San Francisco

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The Clown Conservatory & The Flying Actor Studio


This January I finally got back to San Francisco for a week, my first visit to the west coast in something like seven years; always flying out of the country instead of across it.

Much to see there — friends, family, a beautiful city, a breathtaking coastline — but no visit to the Bay Area would be complete without checking out the local performance scene. San Francisco has one-tenth the population of New York City, but when it comes to the whole physical comedy / circus /new vaudeville / clown scene, it may have us beat. For starters, they've got not one but two — count 'em, two — schools devoted to our favorite art form: the Clown Conservatory (one of several programs offered by the Circus Center) and the Flying Actor Studio, a physical theatre training program under the tutelage of James Donlon and Leonard Pitt. Take that, New York!

A lot of this activity can be traced back to the strong influence of the commedia-style political satire of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, founded by R.G. Davis (see next post) way back in 1959, and the Pickle Family Circus, launched in 1975 by jugglers Peggy Snider, Larry Pisoni, and Cecil MacKinnon, who as the Pickle Family Jugglers had been working with the SF Mime Troupe at the time. Pisoni had vaudevillian grandparents as well as circus training in New York from Hovey Burgess

I once got Paul Binder, director of the Big Apple Circus, very mad at me for writing in our obscure 1980s clown-theatre newsletter that the Pickle Family Circus was America's only indigenous circus because all of its acts were home-grown. He had a point, some of Big Apple's were too, but not to the extent that Pickle's were.

The Pickle's accomplishments were not insignificant:
• They were living proof of the artistic advantages of the small, intimate one-ring circus format.
• They raised the status of clowning and launched the careers of Larry Pisoni (aka Lorenzo Pickle), Geoff Hoyle (aka Mr. Sniff), and Bill Irwin (aka Willie the Clown). [For more on this, check out Joel Schechter's book, The Pickle Clowns: New American Circus Comedy]
• They created a new funding model, touring up and down the west coast under the sponsorship of local not-for-profit organizations.
• They gave juggling more prominence in their show; in those days it was not uncommon to go to a circus and not see a single juggling act.
• They established a circus school in San Francisco.

[ Click here to read my post on Humor Abuse, Lorenzo Pisoni's show about growing up as a child performer on the Pickle Family Circus.]

As a performing unit, the Pickle Family Circus eventually dissolved. It was later replaced by the New Pickle Family Circus, but it has not had the resources to maintain an ongoing ensemble or touring schedule. The school, however, very much survives in the form of the San Francisco Circus Center. Here's their promo video:





The Clown Conservatory

The Clown Conservatory program is directed by Jeff Raz, who was off performing with Cirque du Soleil's Corteo during my visit, but I did have a chance to visit with Paoli Lacy, Dominique Jando, and my first juggling teacher, Judy Finelli. I cannot actually offer any behind-the-scenes revelation about the training there because instead of me watching them, they put me to work talking with students and faculty about this and that. (Okay, it's true, I did just happen to bring along some videos, but that was only because I was afraid that the students — for whom my Clowns book is actually required reading — might ask me questions about it that I wouldn't be able to answer. Not having read the damn thing since I wrote it 35 years ago, I figured I better have something to distract them with.) However, the facilities, teachers, and students were all impressive, and I do look forward to getting back there.

The clown program takes a full academic year, meeting all day three days a week. Judy felt that this wasn't really enough time, though I suppose lacking substantial funding you have to give the students time to eke out a living, no? And besides, know any other full-year clown program in the United States?

Admittedly the more training the better, but I also think that clowning is such an all-encompassing art form that no program, no matter its depth, is going to automatically churn out creative and polished performers. Nor should it. Better to think of clown school the way we used to think of an undergraduate education: it exposes you to all the pieces but you have to put them together yourself, over time, with input from an amazing variety of unforeseeable resources.

But if you're thinking of going to San Francisco, with or without some flowers in your hair, do check out the Clown Conservatory. Here's the basic info from their web site:

The Clown Conservatory accepts students from a variety of performing arts backgrounds who show a strong potential to become professional clowns, whether in the circus ring, on stage, or in other settings (such as clowning in hospitals). Students submit to a selection process and upon acceptance enter the First Year Program (September to June). Weekly classes (three days-a-week) include:
• Core clowning (classic routines, character development, history, performance, creating material, clowns in community)
• Acrobatics
• Circus skills (juggling, stilt-walking, balancing and more)
• Dance
• Mime
• Body awareness
An Advanced Program (September to May) is offered to Clown Conservatory graduates and qualified non-graduates in one of three specialized tracks:
• Clown Ensemble Performing Track – Creating and performing an original production directed by top professionals (acceptance by audition only)
• Social Circus Track – Instruction and hands-on work in hospital clowning, teaching, clown therapy, and other aspects of Social Circus
• Independent Study Track – Additional one-to-one artistic and business coaching for working performers


Evaluation and Performance
Our program directors and faculty evaluate students on a regular basis. Students are offered an opportunity to perform in front of an audience at the end of each session (December and June), and possibly at other times (every five weeks for Clown students) in order to gain performing experience. When they have completed their course of study and are considered ready for professional work, students are given resources and assistance to help them get started in the circus business.

Some photos of the Circus Center:

Above with Paoli Lacy. Below with Judy Finelli and Dr. Nora Bell

No, we're not back in the Haight in '68; that last photo is of clown students doing contact improv.

Finally, if you're anywhere near SF, get on the Circus Center's mailing list because they sponsor a lot of performances in the bay area, including a clown cabaret at The Climate Theater on the first Monday of the month. Here's what went on earlier this week:

LOVE is in the air this month- and it's funny! Join emcee Jeff Raz, straight off of his tour with Cirque du Soleil's "Corteo", advanced students from Tony Award-winning ACT, scenes from the "Monkey King, a Circus Adventure", graduates from Dell’Arte International, our resident pranksters, Pi, the Physical Comedy Troupe and some very special guests (who may or may not be from a BIG circus, opening soon in San Jose, whose name we cannot mention). Marco Martinez-Galarce’s video art and some students from the Class of 2010 will be making their Clown Cabaret debut; Clown Cabaret Favorites The Stringsters and Jonah, Fae and Calvin of Wuqiao Festival fame will be back, bringing some of their own love.

See what you're missing?

Update (only 2 days later): "Coastal Carolina University, in association with the Clown Conservatory of San Francisco Circus Center, has just been approved to offer an accredited BFA degree in Physical Theater, the first in the nation!... We are currently recruiting students to begin in the fall of 2010, graduating in the spring of 2014. Students will spend the first 3 years at Coastal Carolina University in a rigorous BFA program, which includes movement, acting, technical theatre, and general education requirements, with a faculty member from the Clown Conservatory in residence for one semester during the sophomore and junior years, and will spend the entire 4th year as first-year students at the Clown Conservatory. As students of Coastal Carolina University, students will be eligible for federal financial aid and student loan packages, and will receive a NAST accredited BFA degree upon graduation."



The Flying Actor Studio


Right in the heart of downtown San Francisco you will find a handsome and spacious studio that houses what is probably the town's newest professional performance training center, the Flying Actors Studio, opened this past fall by James Donlon and Leonard Pitt. The focus of the training is physical theatre, defined broadly enough to include "movement, mime, mask, clown, circus arts, improvisation, voice, and new performance.

" They are offering a 28-week professional conservatory program, already up and running, with classes 30 hours per week, as well as shorter courses open to the general public.

Once again your intrepid reporter came away with no eyewitness account of training in progress because they used my arrival as an excuse to stop working and sit down and have a discussion with me. Luckily, animator Jonathon Lyons has already provided this blog with a guest post about an introductory class he took at the studio this past fall. I can report that the students I chatted with for a couple of hours were already quite knowledgeable and bright and seemed to be exploring some very interesting performance areas. I look forward to seeing their work!

Other than the Dell'Arte School of Physical Theatre, almost 300 miles north in Blue Lake, California, I don't know of another conservatory program in the United States devoted exclusively to physical theatre training. As James Donlon was pointing out to me, there are several university graduate theatre programs with excellent physical theatre training. He should know, having taught at the North Carolina School of the Arts, the Yale School of Drama, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. The difference, however, is that those graduate programs are all geared toward integrating physical training into more text-based theatre, whereas the Flying Actor Studio also encourages the creation of original work whose roots are as much in the body as in the word.

It's great to see these two highly accomplished artists, both now in their 60s, forsake the easy life and launch such an ambitious enterprise, and one I'm sure they won't exactly get rich from. The breadth of their experience is staggering. Just a few highlights: Leonard Pitt was a student of Etienne Decroux in Paris, studied mask theater and carving in Bali and performed with the Balinese in their villages and temple festivals, and was movement consultant for the film Jurassic Park. James Donlon has toured internationally to wide acclaim, has taught at several prestigious institutions, was a teacher of Bill Irwin at Ringling Brothers Clown College, and has been a coach for several Oscar-winning actors. Click here for the complete scoop. You can see why I couldn't resist telling the students how lucky they were to be able to work with them and plug into all the tradition they represent.
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A few photos:





With James Donlon (l.) and Leonard Pitt (r.) .



Physical Comedy in Real Life
So... I'm staying in our home-exchange house in West Portal, about to head downtown to visit the Flying Actor Studio. I like to bike around cities I visit, and I've mapped out the route in great detail. I'm excited about this, hills be damned! I've been told there's a bike in the basement I can borrow, but it turns out the tires are flat and there's no pump. No problem, I wheel the bike to a gas station six blocks away and pump up the tires. The air holds, the tires seem good. I hop on the bike and start pedaling. The pedals spin around very rapidly, as if I'm in a super-low gear... only I notice I'm not going anywhere. I hop off the bike and look down: no chain.

Guest Post: Jonathan Lyons on San Francisco's Flying Actor Studio

[post 041]

by Jonathan Lyons

[Jonathan Lyons is an animator at Imagemovers Digital, and you can see his latest work in Disney's A Christmas Carol, starring Jim Carrey, in theatres everywhere right now. You can read his other guest posts here and here.]



When I was an adolescent living in New England, I was told that Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus ran a clown college in Florida. To me, that sounded like an excellent institution of higher education. Just about my speed.

Alas, one thing leads to another and the decades go by. I never made it to Clown College. I think perhaps it’s a good thing, as I am somewhat injury prone. I probably wouldn’t have lasted many years in the profession. Still, my love of physical comedy, and my curiosity about the art remains undiminished. I practice it in a virtual form, animation. Recently however, I had a chance to sample the real-world training of a physical actor.


I live in Marin County, California, and this past summer a new school opened up in San Fransisco, just across the Golden Gate Bridge. The Flying Actor Studio, operated by James Donlon and Leonard Pitt. They offer “physical theater training with world-class master teachers offering: movement, mime, mask, clown, circus arts, improvisation, voice, new performance.” They have an impressive list of guest instructors, including Geoff Hoyle, John Gilkey, Bill Irwin, Judy Finelli, and Suzanne Santos.

To kick off the opening of the school, they held a special performance with Donlon, Pitt, and Cirque du Soleil alumni, John Gilkey. The show was called “The Zany and the Surreal.” It featured rotating solo performances from the three actors. Donlon delivered some of his deeply felt mime, Pitt introduced some mask techniques and told an entertaining Jewish tale. John Gilkey’s pieces included his signature coat rack juggling routine, which I enjoyed watching in the Cirque du Soleil show Quidam.

The Flying Actor Studio is a full-service training facility offering everything from one-day workshops to a full-time, 28-week conservatory program. They also arrange special guest shows and workshops. This October they welcomed the International Czech Theater Festival, and held a clown workshop with Steve Capko. Among the workshops and classes they had the ideal opportunity for a working family man such as myself. “Meet the Flying Actor Studio Drop In Class”. Held on a Sunday, 10 am to 4pm, it is described like this:

“A survey of the Flying Actor Studio methods including improvisation, imagination, time, movement, mask, and mime. This class is offered on a sliding scale to make our classes accessible.”

I was happy to pay the high end of the $25 to $40 suggested price. It was more than reasonable for the experience. I and a handful of other participants warmed up with stretches in the bright loft space. Some of them were actors, at least one other was just curious like myself. James Donlon ran the morning half of the program. Among Mr. Donlon’s many teaching credits, was the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Clown College. Finally, I would have my day! We did a variety of basic exercises in movement. He introduced the idea of “neutrality,” which I found intriguing. Neutrality in this case being a way of moving (or being still) that would offer no clues about the person. You wouldn’t be able to determine age, sex, state of mind, state of health, anything. Half of us would wear black hoods, to hide the face, while walking around the room in whatever fashion felt neutral to us, while the others would discuss what they saw. We did the same thing with sitting in a neutral position. While I would have thought that the class would be all about creating character, this exercise in removing character was just as informative. After that we practiced a variety of mime exercises, and by this time, I was beginning to sweat. It was a workout, and I would be sore the next day.

After a lunch break, Leonard Pitt took over the class. During Mr. Pitt’s 40 years of experience he has studied with Etienne Decroux, written several books, and been a movement consultant on major motion pictures. We started with an exercise between pairs of people locking eyes and moving back and forth as though on a rail. Building on that we expanded it to random group movement, quickly switching to pairs. The exercise involved focused attention, and physically grabbing attention from others by just turning towards them. I can see where it would be a useful exercise for the stage movement. Following that, Mr. Pitt introduced us to the basics of using masks. It was interesting to learn that mask work is not so much about movement, but about posture and posing, and also eye direction. This is useful stuff for an animator.

Thanks to James and Leonard for setting up such an accessible, educational and enjoyable program. Good luck to them and their venture.

Click here for more information about the Flying Actor Studio.