Nouveau Clown Institute 2012 Barcelona Workshops

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These look great, especially that last one!
1. The Clown Tribe of a New Paradigm FULL!!

     March 7th to 17th
     Johnny Melville and Jango Edwards
     (400€ — 40 hours of training)
2. Clown Master Class
    April 9th to 14th
    Steve Smith
    (300€ — 24 hours of training)
3. The Clown Theory
    May 14th to 18th
   Jango Edwards

    (250€ — 20 hours of training)
4. Physical Comedy
   June 12th to 17th
   John Towsen

   (300€ — 30 hours of training)

 Info and reservations

 Información y reservas
 Cristina
 nouveauclown@gmail.com
 T-0034 661111127

The Clown Tribe of a New Paradigm
with Johnny Melville & Jango Edwards
March 7th to 17th

is a unique opportunity to train for 10 days with two of the leading teachers of the N.C.I., Johnny Melville & Jango Edwards - who are veterans of stage and screen with thousands of hours of performing experience and success, and who still perform around the globe as comedy surges through their blood and love through their hearts.

La Tribu clown de un Nuevo Paradigma es una oportunidad única de formación con dos de los profesores principales del N.C.I. Johnny Melville y Jango Edwards - veteranos del escenario y las pantallas con miles de horas de actuación, experiencia y éxito, y todavía actuando alrededor del mundo ya que la comedia se desborda en su sangre y sus corazones.

Johnny Melville B.Sc is a trained teacher, actor, clown, writer, director, and a trained Pleiadian Lightworker. In 2001 he won best actor award at the Brooklyn Film Festival. He has performed and taught in over 30 countries and is continually active in the theatre and movie world. Johnny will appear with  Jango in the feature film the Parade of Fools, to she shot in New York in summer of 2012. Diplomado en Ciencias Sociales, profesor, actor, clown, director y formado en el Pleiadian Lightworker. En el 2001 ganó el premio al mejor actor en el Brooklyn Film Festival. Ha actuado y enseñado en almenos 30 paises y está continuamente en activo en el mundo del teatro y el cine. Johnny aparecerá junto a Jango en el film Parade of Fools, que se filmará en New York el verano del 2012. www.johnnymelville.com  Jango Edwards. Founder of the original "Festival of Fools", director of "The Nouveau Clown Institute" and the "Fools Militia", creator of "Cabaret Cabrón", international clown artist, writer, composer, director and producer.  During the past 40 years he has performed and taught in over 30 countries and is constantly active in the evolution of the global clown profession. Fundador original del "Festival of Fools", director del "Nouveau Clown Institute" y la "Fools Militia", creador del Cabaret Cabrón, artista del clown internacional, director y productor. Durante los últimos 40 años ha actuado y enseñado en más de 30 países y está constantemente activo en la evolución global de la profesión de clown. www.jangoedwards.net   www.jangoedwards.es Planeamos abrir un nuevo grupo de "Clown Tribe of a New Paradigme" en verano. Pronto mas información We plan to open a new group of "Clown Tribe of a New Paradigme" next summer. More info soon!

Clown Master Class with Steve Smith
April 9th to 14th

Steve Smith has built a highly-successful career in the entertainment industry, fully utilizing his talents as a writer, performer, producer, teacher, manager and director. He started out as a performer, having studied at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, earned a BFA in acting from the Goodman School of Drama and studied physical comedy with some of the world’s top performers. He performed in the Greatest Show on Earth for several years before “running away from the circus to join a home.”

Steve has taught extensively and served as the Director of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College for ten years, from 1985 – 1994. He has also traveled the world conducting workshops and master classes in physical comedy.  During his tenure as Director of the college, Steve conceived and directed the highly successful 123rd edition of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (“The Greatest Show on Earth”).

In 1996, Steve was able to combine his skills as a producer, performer and manager when he served as the Talent Development Coordinator for Chuck Jones Film Productions and he went on to produce and direct numerous shows including several of his own plays and a critically-acclaimed one-man show, Slapstick & Sawdust.

Co-writer & Guest Director of the 2005, 2006, 2008 & 2009 editions of The Big Apple Circus.

Steve Smith ha construido una carrera llena de éxitos en la industria del espectáculo, utilizando plenamente sus talentos como un escritor, performer, productor, profesor, manager y director. Inició su carrera actuando. Estudió en el Ringling Bros. y Barnum y el Bailey Clown College, ganó un BFA en interpretación de la Escuela Goodman de Drama y estudió comedia física con algunos de los mejores performers del mundo. Actuó en el Mayor Espectáculo sobre la Tierra durante varios años antes de “fugarse del circo para unirse a un hogar"

Steve ha dado clases durante largo tiempo y ha sido el Director de Ringling Bros. y Barnum y el Bailey Clown College durante diez años, 1985 - 1994. También ha viajado por el mundo que impartiendo talleres y clases magistrales de comedia física. Durante el tiempo que fue director del Clown College, Steve concibió y dirigió la 123 edición sumamente acertada de Ringling Bros. y Barnum y el Circo Bailey ("el Mayor Espectáculo sobre la Tierra ").

En 1996, Steve fue capaz de combinar sus habilidades como un productor, performer y director como el Coordinador de Desarrollo de Talento para Producciones el Chuck Jones Film Productions y continuó produciendo y dirigiendo numeroso muestra incluyendo varias de sus propios obras y un one-man show aclamado por la crítica, Slapstick & Sawdust.

Co-escritor y director invitado en las ediciones del 2005, 2006, 2008 y 2009 del Big Apple Circus

http://www.stevesmithshow.com/pdf/NYT_Clowning-5-87.pdf

http://www.stevesmithshow.com/index.html

Clown Theory with Jango Edwards
May 14th to 18th

The art of the clown actor is not just a profession, but a lifestyle that demands an understanding of emotion, sensitivity, passion, pathos and the heart. The essence of clown, in the pure sense, is a combination of innocence and maturity. The Clown Theory Encounter is a way of uniting these qualities so each participant can discover and develop their personal clown, and apply it to their life after the course is completed. A combination of 20 years of professional experience, simple awareness and common logic, enables the instructor to reveal the clown character within each of us.

Through the use of assorted games, physical activities, socio-logical demonstrations, improvisations and performance, each student will find his or her comic simplicity, innocence and logic, which are the fundamental ingredients of the clown formula. A play-environment is created, in which trust within the group ensemble can develop. This motivates the students to remember the innocence they have forgotten. It will also reveal present social and human conditions. It may sound complicated but in fact it’s simple; it is the simplicity that is difficult for us to grasp.

Clown is a social character in all realms of life. The performance situation, be it theater or circus, is probably the most common form through which we know clowns; but it’s the least important. The primary requirements to reveal your personal clown is a knowledge of the comic formula and the creation of a clown heart. You have always had, and always will have, a clown heart, but to revive it demands the simple desire to regain and sustain your youth throughout all aspects of life.

The Clown Theory Class first reveals the innocence each of us has surrendered; and then proves it is never too late to recapture it again. It’s a challenge, it’s revealing but most of all it’s fun. —Jango Edwards

Teoría del Clown con Jango Edwards. El arte del clown actor no es sólo una profesión, es un estilo de vida que requiere la comprensión de la emoción, de la sensibilidad, de la pasión, del patetismo y del corazón.

La esencia del clown, en el sentido más puro, es una combinación de inocencia y madurez. El Encuentro con la Teoría del Clown es una forma de unir esas cualidades de manera que cada participante pueda descubrir y desarrollar su propio clown y aplicarlo en su vida. La combinación de 20 años de experiencia profesional, de simple conocimiento, lógica y sentido común permite al instructor revelar el personaje del clown dentro de cada uno de nosotros.

A través del uso de juegos variados, actividades físicas, demostraciones socio-lógicas, improvisaciones y representaciones, cada estudiante encuentra su propia simplicidad cómica, su inocencia y su lógica; ingredientes fundamentales en la fórmula del clown. Se crea un contexto de juegos en el que desarrollar la confianza y la unión del grupo. Esto motiva que los estudiantes recuerden la inocencia que han olvidado. Y también revela el presente social y la condición humana. Puede sonar complicado pero de hecho es simple; es esta simplicidad lo que nos es tan difícil de agarrar.

El clown es un personaje que socialmente se puede manifiestar en todas las esferas de la vida. Las representaciones en el teatro o en el circo son, probablemente, las formas más comunes a través de las cuales conocemos a los clowns; pero no son las más importantes. Los requisitos primordiales para revelar tu clown personal son el conocimiento de las fórmulas cómicas y la creación de un corazón de clown. Siempre hemos tenido y siempre tendremos un corazón de clown pero revivirlo requiere el simple deseo de recobrar y conservar la juventud en todos y cada uno de los aspectos de la vida.

La Teoría del Clown primero revela la inocencia de la que cada uno de nosotros ha claudicado para luego probar que nunca es demasiado tarde para recuperarla. Es un desafío, es un descubrimiento, pero sobre todo, es divertido!
—Jango Edwards

Physical Comedy with John Towsen
June 12th to 17th 

A hands-on crash course in physical comedy vocabulary for clowns, mimes, actors, and everyone in between. Technique leads to application in short pieces, with an emphasis on character interaction, gag structure, and storytelling. Skills are centered around working with your partner (counterweights, levers, mounts, lifts, partner tumbling) and with the physical world around you (tables, chairs, doors, props, etc.). Some performance experience and a reasonably sound body highly recommended, but all levels of experience welcome.

Comedia Física. Un curso intensivo sobre el terreno sobre el lenguaje de la comedia física para clowns, mimos, actores, y todo lo que pueda haber en medio. Uso de la técnica en piezas cortas, poniendo énfasis en la interacción de personajes, la estructura del gag, y la narración. Las técnicas se centran en el trabajo con el compañero (contrapesos, palancas, montajes, levantamientos, la caída de compañero) y con el mundo físico a nuestro alrededor (mesas, sillas, puertas, apoyos, etc.). Se recomienda tener alguna experiencia en actuación y trabajo corporal previo, pero el curso está abierto a todos los niveles.

John Towsen has taught semester-length physical comedy courses at Princeton University, Ohio University, and the Juilliard School (the latter two for six years each), plus numerous shorter workshops, including at the Nouveau Clown Institute in Barcelona. He has many famous former students but doubts he had anything to do with their success. His once-upon-a-time performance career included 7 years of television acting as a child growing up in New York and a decade of clowning as an adult, from the elementary schools of Long Island to the sands of Saudi Arabia, most of it with partner Fred Yockers. In his other lives he teaches multimedia and digital video in the Creative Arts & Technology program at Bloomfield College, and spends his summers working for the Open Society Institute doing media training for activists in hot spots across the globe. He is the author of Clowns (1976) and was artistic director for the first two New York international clown theatre festivals (1983, 1985). He currently teaches and directs physical comedy in New York City, where he is co-founder with Audrey Crabtree of the NYC Physical Comedy Lab. His latest research on the subject is to be found on his blog: physicalcomedy.blogspot.com

John Towsen ha impartido cursos académicos de comedia física en la Universidad Princeton, la Universidad de Ohio y la Escuela Juilliard (en estas dos últimas durante seis años cada una), más numerosos talleres cortos, el más reciente en el Nouveau Clown Institute de Barcelona. Muchos de sus antiguos estudiantes son famosos, pero duda mucho que su éxito tenga algo que ver con él. En los inicios de su carrera se incluyen 7 años de televisión interpretando a un niño que crece en Nueva York y una década de clown ya como adulto, desde escuelas primarias de Long Island hasta las arenas de Arabia Saudí, la mayor parte de ello con su compañero Fred Yockers. En sus otras vidas ha enseñado multimedia y video digital en el programa Artes Creativas Tecnología del Colegio Bloomfield, y ha pasado sus veranos trabajando para el Open Society Institute preparando a activistas para lugares conflictivos del planeta. Es el autor de Clowns (1976) y fue el director artístico de los dos primeros festivales Internacionales de Clown en Nueva York (1983, 1985).Actualmente enseña y dirige Comedia Física en la ciudad de Nueva York, donde es cofundador con Audrey Crabtree del  NYC Phisical Comedy Lab. Sus últimas investigaciones sobre el tema pueden encontrarse en su blog: physicalcomedy.blogspot.com

Cabaret Cabron at the NCI & the Photography of Manel Sala "Ulls" — Live from Barcelona #6

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There's a cabaret performance each of the four Saturday nights as part of the month-long curriculum at the Nouveau Clown Institute. I was involved in the first one and even shot some Flip camera video of it. Unfortunately, I later lost the camera with the second-half footage on it. Fortunately, the still photography shot by Manel Sala "Ulls" is extraordinary enough to ease my pain. Click here or on the image to go to his Picasa album of the first cabaret at the The Coco Loconuts Club.



Manel is clearly Europe's answer to Jim Moore. His Picasa home page has 101 albums, and the vast majority are devoted to circus, clown and cabaret performers, as these screen shots of just some of his albums show:



And for the latest stuff, check out his excellent blog, Circ .. Manel Sala "Ulls"

But back to that first week's cabaret. A lot of it was put together day-of, but the results were pretty strong, especially for performers working together for the first time. Here are two pieces from the first half, shot from not a perfect angle with my late great Flip camera.

If you watched the first slide show, you might be wondering what all those gleaming bare asses belonging to luxuriously-oiled men were doing in a clown cabaret. Well, they were the Las Vegas Acrobats, as choreographed by Grada Peskens, though no doubt inspired by that Jango Edwards fellow. The challenge here for the performers was to do the act with the utmost conviction, what Jango likes to speak of as one of the twenty axioms of clowning: attitude. Simply put, you the performer have to believe 100% in what you are doing if you want the audience to. Or as Eddie Cantor once said of Laurel & Hardy: "It's their seriousness that strikes me. They play everything as if it might be Macbeth or Hamlet."



If for some reason you want a better view of all that flesh, you'll have to check out Manel's album.

This next piece grew out of my physical comedy class, and I was very pleased with the creativity the students brought to it. We had been working on chase scenes, a trademark of physical comedy but also a cliché. (Or as Chaplin once complained, must every movie end with a chase?) And for us indoor clowns, without cars and trains and broad avenues and hundreds of cops, what's possible? The challenge became to draw upon the elements of the chase, but to expand the possibilities by going beyond naturalism, playing with rhythms and embracing the absurd. Six or seven different pieces were created in class and none of them, I'm proud to say, resembled a conventional chase. This piece is based on the famous running of the bulls popular in Pamplona and other Spanish towns.

First a few high-rez stills to make up for the low-rez video.







And here's the video....



Curtain call. Moi (left) with Jango (in a suit!) and Grada.

Pie Throwing — Live from Barcelona! #5

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"God always has a custard pie up his sleeve."

—the character Georgy (played by Lynn Redgrave) in the movie Georgy Girl

Okay, so I'm not really in Barcelona any more and I'm no expert on the art or history of pie throwing, but these photos really are from Tuesday afternoon at the Nouveau Clown Institute and I knew you'd all enjoy seeing a photo of me with pie on my face, shot by Rich Potter with much joy in his heart.

The occasion was a workshop by Pat Cashin and Greg DeSanto in — yep, you guessed it — the making and launching of pies. Despite a career that has not been without its unique experiences, I had never been on either end of an airborne pie, so I found myself actually eager to volunteer my mug for target practice. It was totally stupid and very funny. Sometimes we (yeah, me) get too analytical about clowning and forget the power of pure silliness. Well, this was silly.


A very short action video of Daniela ConTe on the receiving end:




Update (3-17-10): Some more pie photos from the Facebook album, N.C.I. -Second Class- March 2010, courtesy of Mandy Dalton, and featuring Pat Cashin making a batch of pies and then delivering one up in top balletic form.







Like I said, I'm no pie historian, but it was fun unearthing a few famous scenes for you....

The first pie in the movies was apparently received, not by Fatty Arbuckle or Mabel Normand, as is often said, but by Ben Turpin in Mr. Flip (1909). The annoyingly flirtatious Mr. Flip gets his pie comeuppance in the final scene of this 3:45 short. (You can see or download the whole movie here.)




But to give Arbuckle his due, here he is wrecking the general store in The Butcher Boy (1917) with Buster Keaton (in his first film) and Al St. John. They start with flour but work their way up to pies. Pies in the kisser must be funny because you can actually see Keaton smile for a brief moment. (You can see or download the whole movie for free here.)




Here's Keaton on This is Your Life in 1957 talking about getting hit by Arbuckle's sack of flour.




In his autobiography, Keaton commented: "When we turned to the making of features we found a whole set of new problems facing us. One of the first decisions I made was to cut out custard-pie throwing. It seemed to me that the public — by that time it was 1923 — had had enough of that. The pies looked messy on the screen anyway. So no pie was ever thrown in a Buster Keaton feature." (My Wonderful World of Slapstick, pp.173–4) However, when Keaton made somewhat of a comeback on television in the 50s and 60s, it was pies they wanted to hear about. Here he is demonstrating the technique in 1962:



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Update (4-13-10): This just in from 1916! Less than two years after leaving Keystone, Charlie Chaplin was already making fun of Mack Sennett's studio in Behind the Screen, in which pie throwing is sarcastically referred to as "a new idea." But while Chaplin may be spoofing Sennett, he still puts together a pretty good pie fight. Most of the throws in this are done in two shots, but just past the 3-minute mark you can see Chaplin get off two accurate long-distance tosses, accomplished without any editing.



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Laurel & Hardy take it up a notch in The Battle of the Century (1927)




The Great Race (1965) features a take-no-prisoners, multi-colored pie battle. It was directed by Blake Edwards, of Pink Panther fame, is dedicated to Laurel & Hardy, and stars Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Natalie Wood, but is still a pretty disappointing movie. I do like the joke of Curtis strolling through the mayhem unscathed, though the payoff could be stronger. I didn't like the fact that 99% of the pie tosses are done in two shots so you never get to see a pie fly any real distance. This film is available on Netflix Instant Play.




And in more recent times, click here or on the image to see Greg DeSanto shaking it like a modern-day Arbuckle in the soap entrée with Barry Lubin. (Big Apple Circus, The Medicine Show, 1996) .




Finally, for the serious pie scholar:
• Thanks to alert reader Hank Smith (see comment to this post) for pointing out that the original ending to the classic satirical film, Dr. Strangelove, was a pie fight (photo, right) in the War Room! Director Stanley Kubrick cut it because "I decided it was farce and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film."
• The flying flour in The Butcher Boy reminds me of one story, which may or may not be apocryphal, about the origins of the clown's whiteface makeup. The practice is usually attributed to French Pierrots of the 1600s, who were said to have powdered their faces white, inspired by the laughs they got from a comic combat with bags of flour.
• The Keystone Cops, popularizers of pie throwing in the early days of silent film comedy.
• Soupy Sales, who brought pie throwing to television in a big way starting in the 1950s.
• Pieing, the controversial practice of embarrassing political opponents with a pie in the face.
• And did you know that Sunday (3-14) was Pi Day?

Tables are Funny — Live from Barcelona! #2

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Pure acrobatics operates in a precise world where time and 3D space intersect in ways even Einstein could not have imagined without vaudeville. As my old Russian circus teacher Gregory Fedin put it, "if you are able to see space, the acrobat has to go through it... go with the curves, like the tracks of a railway."

Physical comedy often hitches a ride along these same curvy tracks, but it also inhabits the messier world of people and objects, of personality and ambition and conflict. When I teach physical comedy, I like to play with this material world as much as possible, with oddball characters at odds with one another, and with all kinds of man-made stuff — chairs and tables, stairs and doors, walls and windows, and with every object that dares challenge our pride with the label "unbreakable." So here in Barcelona we’ve been developing a vocabulary of theatrical acrobatics by using our partner's weight and mass to create counterbalances and human levers. Add to that an exploration of the material world starting with our old friends, chairs and tables. As I mentioned in my previous post, within two hours we had reconfigured four chairs and one table (and by reconfigured I mean smashed to smithereens). No, not a record for my classes; not even close.

Which brings us to this post — Tables are Funny — and a new blog feature that looks at how physical comedy makes use of specific elements within its real-world environment. Stay tuned for Chairs are Funny, Doors are Funny , etc.. I’ll be combining clips of imaginative work from the past with some how-to instruction that should give an idea of how I approach this when I teach hands-on physical comedy.

I first became enamored of table tricks while on the Hubert Castle Circus in the late 70s, where a French troupe, the Gaspards, performed a sure-fire act with many of the tricks you'll see in the videos below. I don't know whatever happened to the Gaspards, I've never uncovered any footage of them, but many other acts have performed very similar routines, which have surfaced in various video archives.


Tables for Dummies
Some obvious things we know about tables:
• they are flat, so we should be able to walk, roll, or lie down on them just as we do on the ground
• they are elevated, so we have the possibility of vertical movement to and from them, including from the table to a higher target
• they can be a surface for working or a gathering place for eating, often bringing people together in a festive and sharing atmosphere
• if it's a dining table, a variety of objects — plates, cups, utensils, food — are placed on and eventually cleared away
• because we associate cleanliness with fine dining, human bodies on top of tables or hands other than our own contacting our food are simply unacceptable in polite company; let us not forget that it was standing on a kitchen countertop that precipitated movie Max's journey into the land of the Wild Things.
• many other structures share some of these characteristics with tables and are therefore eligible for similar treatment at the hands of the unrepentant physical comedian

As with most physical comedy elements, we can look at tables both from a purely physical point of view — what tricks can we perform on them? — and from a comedic angle — how do we make that funny? In fact, we pretty much have to do both, don’t we, or it won’t be physical comedy? Physical + comedy = physical comedy (more or less).

Tricks
We’ll see numerous variations on these in the videos that follow, but here’s a breakdown of the physical possibilities:
• diving, leaping or falling onto and off the table
• sliding onto, along, and off the table
• balancing in precarious positions on or from the table
• using the table as an obstacle, chasing around it, diving over or under it, etc.
• hiding under the table
• manipulating the objects on the table
• moving, manipulating or even destroying the table itself


Basic Table Technique:

The better the acrobat, the fancier the tricks possible on a table, but you have to begin with the basics. This is what I started them on here in Barcelona:

1. Forward Roll onto Table: Because you are working against gravity here rather than with it, you will need to initiate the roll with more force to push your hips up and over this higher center of gravity, but you will need less arm strength in the second half of the roll to cushion your landing. Be careful to get the hips up and straighten the legs (point those toes!) so you don 't scrape your shin bones on the edge of the table. Unless the table is too long, you should be able to come smoothly off the other end and onto your feet. From there you might go into another roll or into a front fall, as in the video below from my NCI class.



2. Backward Roll from Table: A back shoulder roll is actually easier than a symmetrical roll and also frees up your hands for other activities, such as balancing bowls of soup. First figure out where your butt will sit on the table so that your head is actually off the edge of the table and you are pivoting directly on the shoulders. Sit in the same spot every time and you should be fine. As you go over, think of your shoulders as the pivot point for your rotation and actually see the floor long before your feet make contact. If you are doing a symmetrical, two-hand back roll, push off hard and straighten those legs to avoid the edge of the table.

Here are two in a row, the first by Tony Curtis or his double, from the 1965 movie The Great Race.




3. Peanut Roll onto and off the Table:
[Peanut roll = partners holding each other's ankles.]
First of all you need to be able to perform a smooth peanut roll on the ground, and especially be able to keep the speed up. It's mostly timing and momentum, but some arm strength does help.
Doing it on and off the table looks a lot harder than it is. The person diving from the table needs to plant their partner's feet on the ground and to maintain tension in the arms to minimize the impact. The person sitting on the table can help a lot by resisting on their partner's legs. This is not difficult and, in fact, it's easy to execute the dive from the table in slow motion — admittedly not very spectacular, but a good starting point.

When rolling back onto the table, the partner doing the pulling should be fine so long as they use their butt on the table as a fulcrum and lift more with their legs than they yank with their arms. In the video below two NCI students who just learned the trick muscle their way through it. With more practice, using movement similar to a back extension roll (= back roll to a handstand) will allow the bottom person to make it easier for the lifter, and momentum will replace muscle. Here it is performed by Stefano Battai (Italy) and Giovanni Sanjiva Margio (Australia)




4. Slide Across the Table
This is everyone's favorite stunt! In the movies you might see it across the length of a saloon bar, though in this clip from a barroom brawl in The Great Race, it spans a stage catwalk and down some stairs.



You'll want a smooth laminated table top and will probably want to sprinkle some baby powder on it as well. The idea is to slide clear across the table and off the other side, your body in a slightly arched position, toes pointed. It can be done with no hands, but try starting by placing both hands on the table to boost you up there and push you forward. The hands can grab again to pull you off the end, but with a running start and minimum friction you won't even need to.

Sliding between the legs of one or more people who just happen to be standing on the table is pretty common, as is deliberately knocking objects off the table as you go. I still remember Charles Murray, in a class of mine in Athens, Ohio in the early 80s, sliding desperately across the table to get to a ringing telephone in time. (You see, back then we had these big loud telephones that sat on tables and didn't take messages and didn't tell you who the missed call was from... oh forget it, you wouldn't understand.)

A more common crowd-pleaser is the two-person table slide with the partners approaching from opposite directions. This can be dangerous if you get your signals crossed but is not particularly difficult so long as each person sticks to their side of the table. A demilitarized zone of a few inches is recommended.



An even funnier ending for the table slide is to maintain the swan dive position and belly flop to the ground rather than go into a roll:




5. Hair Pull onto Table
Everyone loves the hair pull, even those of us who are starting to get receding hairlines. In the politically incorrect Age of the Flinstones, caveman grabbed cavewoman by the hair and yanked her left and right, up and down. This was called courting. Nowadays we are only allowed to pretend. As in most stage combat — or as Joe Martinez aptly labeled it, Combat Mime — the "victim" initiates all the action, which keeps things safe and believable.

The basic move goes as follows. To make up for an ice age of discrimination, we'll let cavewoman do the honors.
• Cavewoman reaches her hand into the lushest region of caveman's hair, bringing her hand into a fist as she does so. The idea is to give the impression that she has gathered a clump of hair into that fist, but in fact she should have none.
• Fighting back, caveman grabs cavewoman's wrist in a futile attempt to disengage. What he is actually doing is pressing her wrist into his head because if we ever see a gap between her fist and his skull, the illusion is shattered.
• All movement, from a simple shake to dragging the whole body across the floor, must be initiated by the victim, aka the caveman. The cavewoman follows through, miming being the aggressor. This is both for safety purposes and to maintain the illusion.

Same technique for pulling someone up to the table.
• Cavewoman stands on the table, caveman on the floor.
• Cavewoman reaches down and grabs caveman's hair, as explained above. Caveman grabs her wrist. You may find a two-hand grip easier.
• Caveman plies and jumps to the table while cavewoman mimes being the cause of it all. While caveman may get some support from his woman's arm, the bottom line is still that fist and head cannot come apart.

In class we first tried this jumping to a chair just to get the movement down and our confidence up.

Here are the Three Ghezzi doing it (their full-act video can be seen later on in this post).




6. Ye Olde Tablecoth Pull
We've all tried pulling a table cloth out from underneath the dishes, but did you know it can be done with 4 plates supporting 4 legs of a chair and a person sitting in that chair? The principles remain the same, and are all designed to minimize friction:
• use a smooth table with a sharp edge
• use a tablecloth with no edge seams
• let the tablecloth hang down on your side but not off the back
• put fruit in bowls, etc.; crockery is more likely to stay in place if it's heavier
• taller objects are more precarious, so place them closer to the near edge of the table so they have less contact time with the tablecloth
• pull quickly downwards with both hands as you step back

And, yes, this is me with hair (Toronto, 1989).



And, yes, those front two plates were supposed to stay put. It looks to me like my yank was slightly up rather than slightly down. Don't you make the same mistake! An even worse mistake would be to ask a horse to do a human's job, as in this early Max Linder film:





A Table Safety Note:
Most tables these days fold up. You probably don't want this to happen while you are on them. When I use this type, I like to brace the opposing legs with a 2" x 2" wedged between them so they cannot fold inward. Of course in a workshop setting you can always use a spare human:





Table Acrobatic Acts

No doubt tables have been funny ever since they grew that third leg, and certainly hit their stride with the fourth. I have no idea which caveman did the first table comedy acrobatic act, but such shenanigans were common by the time vaudeville came along, and the black & white photograph at the top of this post is indeed of Buster Keaton's father, Joe. Their vaudeville act was the Three Keatons (that's Buster on the left) and Joe was the Man with the Table. "He would dive on it headfirst, turn handsprings along its top, and then from apogee plunge head down almost to the floor before, with a catlike turn, he would land on his feet."

It's unlikely we'll ever discover footage of the Three Keatons, but Buster never tired of doing his trademark table fall, a bizarrely brilliant piece of business which he may or may not have gotten from dear old dad. To get up onto the table, he places one foot up there so that leg is now parallel to the ground. Hmm...that worked well enough, so why not just do the same thing with the other leg? Here he is, still demonstrating it well into his senior years.




Through the miracles of DVDs and YouTube, we do have some complete table acrobatic acts that hearken back to vaudeville. The oldest piece I have is from the early days of television, performed by two comedy acrobats on the Colgate Comedy Hour. (I don't have their names, but I'm working on it!).




Fast forward to 1966, where Allan Sherman ("Hello muddah, hello fuddah...") is introducing The Three Ghezzis at the London Hippodrome. They combine standard table tricks with clown carpenter shtick to create some high-level mayhem. Pay attention at the 1:40 mark as one of the Ghezzis reprises Buster Keaton's table fall.




Next up are the Stanek, performing in the Tarzan Zerbini Circus (USA) in 1989. (I had not heard of them and the announcer seems to be calling them by another name.)



More recent are Quartour Stomp, who go more in and out of the comedy in order to show off their formidable acrobatic prowess.



Our final full-length piece comes from the excellent web site Circopedia This act by the Fumagalli in the 2007 edition of the Big Apple Circus is more clown than comedy acrobatics, perhaps a bit thin in both areas, but interesting enough.




Shorter Table Bits (the bits are shorter, not the tables)

The Launching Pad
Usually we descend from a table. Usually. Here's Buster Keaton cornered by Joe Roberts in his short film, The Goat (1921). Buster has succeeded in getting invited home by the girl he's been chasing, only to discover that her father is the cop who's been chasing him all day.




The Folding Table
On a sillier note, here's Harpo Marx, thwarting an attempt to fold the legs of a card table.




The Mobile Table
Usually a table is stable, but there's no reason it can't be moved and manipulated, as in this brilliant sequence from the Beijing Opera sketch, The Crossroads, or, The Fight in the Dark.




Breakaway Tables
And finally, it is of course possible to destroy a table. Breakaway furniture has been a mainstay of physical comedy since the invention of the 3-legged stool, and I think when I asked Jango months before my workshop to get me some tables and chairs, that must have been what he thought I meant, because they all kept breaking.

In the 19th century, the Hanlon-Lees were famous for breaking anything and everything: trains and stage coaches, and of course ceilings and tables...


In The Great Race saloon brawl, they break everything within sight: chairs, tables, windows, mirrors, doors, stairs, railings, and two balconies. Here's the most explosive table smash:




On a lamer note, here's the Brit comic Spike Milligan crashing onto a card table in his multi-cultural "waiter, there's a fly in my soup" routine, in this variation making fun of the Irish:




Table That Story

Now after looking at those videos you might think that all table tricks are good for is a highly technical comedy acrobatic act. As much fun as such acts are, they require highly skilled acrobats, which very few of my students are and which I never was. Furthermore, the 10-tricks-a-minute approach is fine for presentational acts but not for routines with a narrative structure where falls, flips, and nosedives have to be motivated.

So let's look at the use of table tricks within a storyline....

First up is Joe's Restaurant, a 10-minute piece created by and starring Christopher Agostino, Laine Barton, Aaron Watkins, Joe Killian and Mari Briggs, and performed at the 2nd NY International Festival of Clown-Theatre (1985). The piece actually grew out of work in a physical comedy class I taught and was reshaped and directed by Steve Kaplan. I remember Steve liked to say "what's the joke here?" in an attempt to sort through all the shtick and hone in on the primary comedy angle in a scene. This piece was more a series of tricks than a story until it was agreed that the joke was that there were not enough chairs for all the customers.



Joe's Restaurant has dozens of tricks, but this is not the only way to go. Instead of trying to string together a series of table tricks into a substantial sequence, it's equally valid to use a single technique at just the right moment in just the right away. The move doesn't have to be hard, it just has to work within the context of the piece. Here's a good example from this past weekend's Cabaret Cabron at the Nouveau Clown Institute. In this funeral home sketch, Giuseppe Vetti and Salvatore Caggiari, who in real life work together as as Il Duo Dorant, reprise the Dead or Alive motif, using just a few partner and table moves from my class. This was put together in one afternoon after three physical comedy classes. Giuseppe is the undertaker, Salvatore the body.

Because this was shot with a basic Flip camera and from a bad angle, first a couple of high-rez stills by Manel Salla "Ulls" to set the mood:




You can find a dozen more stills here, but onto the video:

Nouveau Clown Institute — Live from Barcelona! #1

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Greetings from Barcelona, I mean Barthelona, by many reports the coolest city in Europe. And arguably cooler now that it is the home of the Nouveau Clown Institute, an international clown school started just this past year by Jango Edwards, who is amazingly energetic for someone who may or may not be as old as me. I'm running away from administration and he's starting a school. Go figure.

I'm doing a physical comedy workshop this week for students taking a month-long clown intensive, and I hope to do several blog posts on our work here. There are forty participants from eleven different countries, most of them already working at a professional level, and it is an exciting mix of very creative talent. While many performance academies espouse a particular method (Stanislavsky, Lecoq, Decroux, etc.), these students are being exposed to a wide variety of styles and approaches to clownesque performance. Every few days a new teacher with a new angle. It may get overwhelming at times, but from an educational point of view I like the idea of them getting to play with so much. Plenty of time to sort it out and use what works for them — starting in April.

Here are a few pics of the space at the Roca Umbert Fàbrica de les Arts, a former factory complex being transformed into a formidable arts center.











Today was a good day. As far as I know, we only broke four chairs (here's two of them) and one table. Don't tell Jango until after I get paid.


Jango's Office:


The café, just steps away from the main classroom space.



And here's Jango (not to be confused with his long-lost cousin, Django Reinhardt) doing the classic but deadly headfirst dive into the cup of water, proving he's no slouch when it comes to physical comedy.



Stay tuned for more posts from the NCI...