Physical Comedy in the 21st Century — James Thiérrée in "Raoul"

[post 103]

As the lights went down at the end of the final performance of James Thiérrée's Raoul at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this afternoon, the entire audience immediately jumped to its feet to give him a rousing standing ovation.  And yet the New York Times review argued that "the charms of Raoul the show quickly wear thin."

What gives?

I'll tell you what we've got here.  On the one hand there's the performer's skill and magnetism, the world he creates, its impact on the audience. On the other hand there's the MEANING of the piece, so dear to critics, the overarching themes that connect everything and hopefully add up to a whole greater than its parts. Call it plot, structure, choreography,  playwrighting, whatever....



So let's start with the performer,  James Thiérrée, in what is essentially a one-man show.  Great-grandson of playwright Eugene O'Neill, grandson of Charlie Chaplin, son of Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée and Victoria Chaplin (Cirque Imaginaire), kid brother of Aurélia Thiérrée (see my post #67) — well obviously he has a lot to live up to. Lucky for him, luckier for us, he manages quite nicely, thank you very much. Thus the standing ovation, which Jim Moore, Jan Greenfield, and I had no hesitation in joining.

 

Thiérrée's movement is a stunning, fluid, and seamless blend of mime, circus, physical comedy, and dance. His routines are inspired and at times so complexly layered that you can only compare him to physical comedians such as George Carl or Bill Irwin at their best, or to a comic like Reggie Watts at his wildest.  There were many moments during the show when I felt as if I had been privileged to see Charlie Chaplin live.  Yes, there is a family resemblance (he's not adopted!), and Thiérrée's physical virtuosity reminds one of why W.C. Fields paid Chaplin the supreme compliment of saying "He's a goddamn ballet dancer. I'd like to strangle him with my bare hands."  If you're really interested in physical comedy, and not just reading this blog to impress me, do not miss a chance to see Thiérrée live.

But what is the show about and why was the Times so dismissive?  Well, you can read the review here, but the argument in a nutshell is that the world Thiérrée creates ultimately doesn't add up to much of anything and doesn't go anywhere. This is not necessarily an unfair argument, though certainly harsh.  There's no clear linear narrative, and the character is not anchored in naturalistic detail.  We gather that this is a tale of a man whose home is gradually destroyed, but we know not why. We see his fight to survive and make sense of his existence, but again it is not always clear what's going on. In those  moments when Thiérrée isn't wowing us, the piece tends to sag because we lack the conventional hooks of story and character.

What we get instead is more of a surrealistic dream world.  Raoul is in essence an abstract piece, open to multiple interpretations, pretty much like 90% of the dance pieces I see these days... though somehow they don't meet with the same scorn from the press.  Ditto opera, though I must admit I don't see much of that. The reality is that some shows are more performer-based and others more literary-based, and an ideal melding of the two usually proves pretty elusive. I think Bill Irwin pulled it off for most of Regard of Flight, but at least 95% of the time we have to accept an imperfect universe.  

Note to publicist:  Don't evoke Beckett in your press release. Too much to live up to; a strategy pretty much guaranteed to backfire with your more high-toned critics.

But here's another thing I like: our star's formidable talents, which the Times haughtily disparages as "Mr. Thiérrée’s shtick," are not merely technical. His interaction with the physical world has one foot in the inventions of Buster Keaton and the other firmly in a futuristic mindscape — thus my placing this show in my coveted category, Physical Comedy in the 21st Century — a designation reserved for performances that point the art form in new directions.  It is Thiérrée’s genius to transform all of the physical world, everything on stage, curtains and all. As surely as Dali painting a landscape, Thiérrée’s body and imagination interact with a dynamic theatrical set that itself becomes another character in the show.  What the hell am I talking about?? Hey, you gotta see the show, but take it from me that nothing on that stage is nailed down; nothing remains what it was. Dali, Bréton, Magritte, Miro and the gang would be proud.

Hey, I'd love to show you some representative video to back up my enthusiasms, but not doing too well there.  I continue to be unimpressed (shocked, actually) as to how so many strong shows have such poor promo videos. And why is it that funny shows have to have these artsy, lyrical trailers that don't even hint at comedy?  For example:



But like I said, try to see the show.  Meanwhile, here are a few good links for you, courtesy of Jim Moore.

• London Telegraph
• Sadler's Wells (London)
• The Age (Australia)
• The New Yorker

Live from Paris: La Clique

[post 098]

Life is a cabaret, old chum, so willkommen-bienvenu-welcome to La Clique, an intimate cabaret of burlesque comedy and circus, delivered in a mix of French and English, and performed mostly on a tiny circular stage set in the midst of an audience that is never more than about ten meters away. The show has roots in Australia but was first seen as a fringe offering at the 2004 Edinburgh festival. It has since enjoyed extended runs in the capitals of the world, with many of the same acts intact. I finally caught up with it at the Théâtre Bobino in Paris, and found a lot to like.

Here's their YouTube promo clip, the usual few seconds from each act, but it gives you some sense of the show.



In Paris, my notes scribbled in the dark list these acts, more or less in this order:
1. Mario, Queen of the Circus — 3-ball juggling as Freddie Mercury
2. The English Gents — comedy partner acrobatics
3. Amy G — comedy roller blading
4. Captain Frodo -- tennis racket contortion
5. Le Gateau Chocolat — opera / audience participation
6. Susannah Martinez — strip-tease magic
7. Yulia Pikhtina — hula-hoops
8. Bret Pfister — aerial hoop
9. Amy G — highly unusual Salute to America
10. Captain Frodo — balancing and contortion
11. David O'Mer — bathtub acrobatics

My favorite act, a very nice piece of physical comedy indeed, was the 10-minute contortion routine by the Norwegian "Captain Frodo." Most contortion acts bore me to tears, but this one was hilarious, with our good captain delivering non-stop bi-lingual patter as he attempted to pass his body through two tennis rackets, all the while falling off a chair and contending with an uncooperative microphone right out of George Carl. The choreography and timing were superb, which makes me hesitant to even show you the following video of his act from a performance in a far less intimate setting. It doesn't even show the whole act and it's missing a lot of the physical and verbal business that was so effective in the Clique environment. But, hey, we're all professionals here; I'm sure you know not all performances and settings are the same. So here's the video, but pretty please do try to catch him live.




Likewise nicely combining character and physical skill were the English Gents, who begin their partner acrobatic act dressed as dignified bankers, but for an encore strip to their Union Jack underpants.


The skill was there and the deadpan delivery worked nicely. Here's a short clip of their cabaret work, followed by a clip of them doing street performance, already stripped to their shorts:







Another crowd pleaser was the lip-synching juggler and unicyclist Clark McFarlane, "Mario, Queen of the Circus," so billed because of his emulation of rock star Freddie Mercury.





Your enjoyment of La Clique will, however, depend upon your sensibilities. The acts are mostly at a high level, several with a refreshing degree of originality — David O'Mer's water acrobatics in the bathtub is a joy — but the show bizzy glitz, glam, and sexual posturing were all a bit too forced and Vegas-y for my tastes. Le Gateau Chocolat, a flamboyant opera-singing queen who describes himself as an African homosexual zebra, gets a lot of easy laughs sitting on the laps of the front row of spectators. Amy G plays "God Bless America" on the kazoo, apparently from her vagina. Susannah Martinez vanishes a red silk scarf using ye olde thumb tip trick, each time"finding it" in an article of her own clothing, which she then of course must remove before repeating the trick... and repeating it and repeating it.... until she is finally out of hiding places. Yes, oh my gawd, naked! And you'll never guess what part of her anatomy she finds it in as her big finale! (Speaking of which, did you know that the French word for vagina is masculine? — le vagin. Go figure.) Clever enough for most of the audience to love it, but I found it predictable and nowhere near as skilled as the other acts.

I'm hardly a prude, and I even have a decadent fondness for cheap theatrics, but let's just say that the borderline between schlock and a parody of schlock can be a fine one.

La Clique continues its Paris run through June 26th. Go during the week and buy standing room and you may end up sitting in the first row of the balcony; we sure did.

Performance Report: Aurélia's Oratorio at the Berkeley Rep

[post 067]

In the beginning (1889) there was Charlie Chaplin. And then it came to pass that 54 years later Chaplin took as his fourth wife 18-year-old Oona O'Neill, against the wishes of her father, playwright Eugene O'Neill. Despite the age difference they lived happily ever after and gave birth to eight children, the fourth being Victoria (born 1951). Like mother, like daughter: Victoria Chaplin eloped at a tender age with French actor Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée, and together they created their own lyrical blend of circus and visual theatre under such titles as Le Cirque Bonjour, Le Cirque Imaginaire, and Le Cirque Invisible. Victoria and Jean-Baptiste have two children, Aurélia Thiérrée (born 1971) and James Thiérrée (born 1974), both of whom performed in their parents' productions and have gone on to star in their own. On January 8, 2010, I took the BART to Berkeley to see Aurélia Thiérrée star in Aurélia's Oratorio, a theatre piece directed by her mother, Victoria Chaplin, thus completing the cycle started in 1889. (Huh?)

This is only the third piece staged by the Chaplin-Thiérrée clan that I've seen, but they have all amazed me with their visual inventiveness and sheer creativity. Most reviewers describe their work as, well, indescribable, but I'll make a stab at it.

Their shows use both the name and the vocabulary of the circus, but are in many ways rooted in the theatre, making clever use of its proscenium, its sight lines, its stage lighting tricks, its magic illusions. Their world is that of everyday objects — especially furniture and clothing — which are transformed in their hands into actual performing partners. The finely tuned physical comedy imagination at play here often yields stunning results, aided in no small part by the lithe and well trained bodies of Thiérrée and her co-star, dancer Jaime Martinez. There are few applause cues. Instead you feel like you are floating through a Dali-esque dreamscape or the world of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland .

While references to surrealism are obvious and probably apt, in a radio interview Thiérrée traced the show's origins back to the middle ages: "It was a picture book called The World Upside Down, and there were drawings that were very popular in those days, they were sold on the street. These were sometimes political and sometimes purely comical drawings, where they would invert the situation so instead of a man being on a horse it would be a man carrying the horse. Instead of a man going to war it would be a woman going to war. So this was the starting point."

Here are two of 29 images from that book, and you can download the whole book for free here. [NOTE: The English text hardly seems from the middle ages, though I suppose the plates could be. The printing date is given as 1820, though perhaps it's a reprint edition with modernized verse.]







The 70-minute, no-intermission, dialogue-free show is comprised of dozens of set pieces accompanied by pre-recorded music. Thiérrée opens the evening by emerging from a chest of drawers (see video below), ignoring a phone caller who seems desperate to reach her. The curtain drapes come alive, as though windswept into assuming different shapes and transporting her into a sort of parallel universe, complete with a bunraku-style puppet theater. She and Martinez play with self and identity as they don and share a wide variety of garments with the dexterity of quick-change artists, but with a better eye for transformation and comic moments. The inanimate world is constantly coming alive before our eyes and merging with the live action, so it comes as no surprise when our heroine becomes part of the puppet show.








What can I say? You have to see it for yourself. And though I would definitely pay to go again, I do have some not-so-minor quibbles. The physical comedy brilliance is unfortunately not matched by any deeper sense of theatre. The characters, such as they are, have pretty much a neutral presence throughout, and the relationship between them is vague at best. I am not expecting narrative structure or naturalistic characters in a piece like this, but I still think the results would be far richer if we felt that the characters were more invested in the situation, no matter how absurdist that situation may be.

The show runs the risk of feeling like a series of bits with not enough holding them together, so that when they're not being brilliant boredom can set in. It is as if they are on the verge of saying something, but can't quite go there. I was reminded of the brilliant Garden of Earthly Delights (photo, right) choreographed by Martha Clarke (a Pilobolus founding member), another visual piece with roots in medieval iconography, but one held together with a stronger vision. Of course Ms. Clarke had Bosch to draw upon! (Hieronymus, not Home Appliances.)

All in all, this is still amazing work that should be seen, and seen live. There's not much in the way of good video available, but even if there were, it would be no substitute.

Here's the official 2-minute trailer for their show, which I include in the interests of being thorough, but which I'm afraid does a pretty poor job of representing the show's strengths:



And here's the opening chest-of-drawers sequence.



A promo for Au Revoir Parapluie, a show by Aurélia's brother James;




Click here for an interesting enough radio interview with Aurélia Thiérrée
Click here for a 1986 New York Times review of Le Cirque Imaginaire.
Click here for a New Yorker profile of Aurélia's brother James.

My Life as a Parkour Traceur

[post 042]


I guess it's a generational thing, but when I mention parkour to anyone over 40, I usually get a blank stare, which if nothing else makes me feel young and in the know. If you too are going "huh?" just think of those videos you've probably seen of ridiculously agile teenage daredevils — Spidermen without the web — jumping on, over and off walls, railings and other structures that get in their way. They are called traceurs presumably because they trace a path through space while leaving only a faint imprint.

The Wikipedia definition is pretty good: "a physical discipline of French origin in which participants run along a route, attempting to negotiate obstacles in the most efficient way possible, as if moving in an emergency situation, using skills such as jumping and climbing, or the more specific parkour moves. The object is to get from one place to another using only the human body and the objects in the environment around you. The obstacles can be anything in one's environment, but parkour is often seen practiced in urban areas because of the many suitable public structures that are accessible to most people, such as buildings and rails."

If you still don't know what I'm talking about, here's one of those videos:



This summer in London I actually had the opportunity to participate in a parkour workshop and performance at the National Theatre, meet some of the original practitioners, and grow some thoughts about connections between parkour and physical comedy. I would have written this sooner, but there's so much to cover!

Parkour is essentially a street art form like graffiti or skateboarding, but with its own unique philosophy and history. The word parkour comes from the original French term, parcours, meaning course, as in obstacle course. Parkour seems to have become the accepted international spelling because it's phonetic and therefore less likely to confuse. Depending on who you're listening to, free running and l'art du déplacement are either synonyms for or variations on parkour. (Wikipedia translates l'art du déplacement as the art of moving, though it also contains the more exact sense of displacement or shifting.)



Origins
If there is an inventor of parkour, it would have to be David Belle , the guy in the video above. Belle developed parkour with friends in Lisse (just south of Paris) in the 1990s, and has since become an international celebrity as an actor and stuntman in films and commercials. He was also the subject of a New Yorker profile piece, which you can read here.

The story of parkour, however, goes back way before Belle and, in fact, shares roots with modern movement theatre. Belle's father Raymond — a French soldier, fitness enthusiast, and firefighter — was a legend in his own right. Raymond Belle's training in the French military had brought him into contact with the teachings of Georges Hébert, which he passed onto his son, and which played a key role in formulating the basic tenets of parkour.

And who was Georges Hébert? He was a French military officer who traveled all over the world before World War I and later became a teacher of physical education. Hébert came to the conclusion that the weight training regimen used by the military was building muscle without promoting dexterity and speed. In its place he developed la méthode naturelle, which he based on the movement skills of indigenous peoples he had observed in his travels, especially in Africa. "Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skillful, enduring, resistant and yet they had no other tutor in Gymnastics but their lives in Nature."

Hébert's natural method, also known as hébertisme, promoted "the qualities of organic resistance, muscularity and speed, towards being able to walk, run, jump, move quadrupedally, to climb, to keep balance, to throw, lift, defend yourself and to swim." One of Hébert's top tools for achieving this was the obstacle course — le parcours du combattant — which was to become integral to French military training. So if you ever hated being forced to run an obstacle course back in high school or in army basic training, you have Hébert to blame. On the other hand, if you ever did an Outward Bound program and loved it or you're into adventure racing, how about a tip of the hat to uncle Georges?

Although his teachings were already widely accepted by the '40s, the publication of his multi-volume work, L'éducation physique et morale par la méthode naturelle (1941–43) no doubt cemented his reputation. Here are some scans from the book, courtesy of Hovey Burgess.









Hébert's work was also a strong influence on French theatre, and specifically on movement training for actors. Jacques Copeau, whose work in the 1920s at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris was strong on improvisation and physical training, adopted Hébert's natural approach to movement as an antidote to the artificial stylings of the staid establishment theatres. He created the Vieux-Colombier theatre school, whose instructors included the Fratellini clowns and one M. Moine, an Hébert-trained teacher.

There is a clear line from Copeau's school straight through to modern times through such figures as Jean Dasté, Jean Dorcy, Étienne Decroux, and Jacques Lecoq. Decroux taught such physical performers as Jean-Louis Barrault, Marcel Marceau, and Leonard Pitt, and created modern corporeal mime, inspiring such mime artists as Thomas Leabhart and Daniel Stein.

Lecoq writes about his debt to Hébert in his book Le Théâtre du Geste and in The Moving Body, describing him as one of the significant influences on the transition from artificial mime styles to a more scientific study of the body in motion. Mark Evans, in Movement Training for the Actor, points out that "Lecoq's Paris school was to find its final home in a disused gymnasium, a symbolic return he himself noted with approval... Lecoq's meticulous approach to the analysis of movement owes much to the French tradition of scientific, anthropological, and philosophical movement analysis..."


Silent Film
The film world offers more direct connections between parkour and physical comedy, the most obvious being the reverence parkour practitioners have for such silent film stars as Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton. When Fairbanks first went to work in Hollywood in 1915, his boss was the legendary director, D.W. Griffith, whose Birth of a Nation had just changed the course of film history, and who immediately locked horns with the acrobatic young actor. "D.W. didn't like my athletic tendencies," Fairbanks recalled. "Or my spontaneous habit of jumping a fence or scaling a church at unexpected moments which were not in the script. Griffith told me to go to Keystone comedies." This parkour-like spontaneity was part of his creative process, prompting Alistair Cooke to comment that his collaborators needed "a willingness to let Fairbanks' own restlessness set the pace of the shooting and his gymnastics be the true improvisations on a simple scenario." The Mark of Zorro (1920) is just one of many examples of Fairbanks in parkour mode.



The following archival clip, which has appeared on some parkour sites, is from the movie Gizmo! (1977) and has also been identified on YouTube as from 1930, but is actually German stuntman Arnim Dahl (1922–1998), and is probably from the 50s.


Monkeys!
Another movement source for parkour is even more ancient: the animal kingdom. Or as they say on the Mumbai parkour web site:
Q: What do you get when you combine a monkey, a cat, and a frog together?
A: A Traceur!
In that New Yorker profile, David Belle talks about a trip to India and an encounter with a tribe of monkeys: “I was at a waterfall one day, and there were huge trees all around, and in the trees were monkeys. There were fences and barriers around them, so they couldn’t get out, but I went around the barriers and played with the monkeys. After that, I watched them all the time, learning how they climbed. All the techniques in parkour are from watching the monkeys.” Belle then showed the New Yorker reporter segments from the BBC documentary, Monkey Warriors. Here's a clip that shows exactly what he means:



Monkeys and physical comedy also have a shared heritage that can be traced back to popular animal impersonations by such 18th and 19th-century physical comedians as Grimaldi, Mazurier, Gouffé, Perrot, and Klischnigg , which you can read all about in chapter five of my book Clowns. You can get a good sense of what these performances might have been like from Buster Keaton's 1921 turn as a monkey in his short The Playhouse, which you can watch in the supplemental material for chapter five.



Philosophy
While the origins of parkour go way back, its rapid dissemination throughout the world came in the form of videos that were uploaded to the internet and quickly went viral. In fact, it has been said that parkour is the first art form whose growth into a movement has been totally dependent upon the internet. In the process, however, parkour has become a case of different strokes for different folks. For some, it is trick-based, the idea being to pull off the most spectacular stunt, and YouTube videos certainly lend themselves to showcasing these feats of derring-do. The founders and many subsequent practitioners have, however, framed it in far broader terms. Here are some of the concepts that have been put forward:

• Civilization has made people lazy, but parkour trains one to get along in nature and with one's physical environment. This hearkens back not only to Hébert, but also to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his writings on nature and the education of the whole person.

• Hébert's maxim "be strong in order to be useful" is often cited in parkour writing. Both David Belle's father and Hébert were "superheroes" who had won considerable acclaim for dramatic rescues made possible by their physical prowess.

• Parkour is a discipline, as much as any martial art. One must overcome mental obstacles to overcome physical obstacles. For example, the philosophy section of the American Parkour site reads: "Many people take the principles they learn through parkour and apply them to their lives. By challenging themselves in parkour both mentally and physically, it becomes easier to deal with problems and obstacles in everyday life. When a difficult situation comes up in daily life, a parkour practitioner can see this as any other obstacle which they've learned to overcome quickly, efficiently, and without disruption to their intended path."

• Parkour is play, and play is essential to creativity.

• The essence of parkour is the attainment of efficiency, moving efficiently through a space rather than around it. "If you run through a pedestrian zone without losing speed and without touching any person, you do good Parkour although you probably don't use any techniques like saut de bras or saut de chat." (Benedikt Bast)

• It is a fresh way of looking at one's physical world, viewing architecture as function rather than form. Parkour teaches pkvision, the ability to look at the environment and see the potential for movement within it.

• Parkour is self-expression, not performance. Once you start drawing attention to it, creating crowd-pleasing movements, is it still parkour?

• Instead of society discouraging parkour because of liability and insurance issues, parkour should be recognized as a valuable form of self-expression for youth, an alternative to over-indulgence in alcohol, drugs, or video games, and as an activity that does not require equipment or the formation of teams. Older practitioners of parkour send a message to youth that it is still okay to play.


The Urban Playground
So there we were in London in July, taking advantage of all the good productions offered at affordable prices (£10 and up) at the National Theatre, when we discovered that their outdoors series, Watch this Space, was sponsoring the performance troupe Urban Playground (an offshoot of the Prodigal Theatre in Brighton), in five days of parkour workshops, forums, and performances.

UPG (Urban Playground) performers come from backgrounds in contemporary dance and in Eastern European theatre labs, and specifically Grotowski's system of physical actions. They are older (thirty-somethings) and approach parkour less from a daring stunt angle and more from that of actor training, movement, and theatrical exploration. Their literature favors the term l'art du déplacement, and this definition of the term from Parkourpedia fits them nicely: "The spirit is still the same as Parkour, there is still the aim of being strong, to be useful and the need to overcome fears, but the movement is less concerned with speed and efficiency and more to do with the aesthetic of the movement."


UPG subverts traditional parkour use of found space by traveling with their own mobile playground, and this summer they even opened a permanent facility as well, the "UK’s first permanent, free, outdoor Parkour Training Area" in Crawley (West Sussex). They brought the mobile version to the National with them, and used it for their workshops and performances.

The Old Man & the Seesaw
Sorry about the pun, which at any rate may be wasted on those of you unschooled in the writings of Ernest Hemingway or Karen Gersch. I’m sure parkour has been done on a seesaw, but not by me. In fact, you could certainly argue that parkour has never been done by me, despite my decades of climbing trees, rocks, and man-made objects, not to mention hugging parking meters. But here's the story:

UPG's residency at the National included a series of short (free) workshops, including one just for kids, one just for women, and one just for brave souls over the age of 50. I somehow managed to qualify for the last one and, egged on by my sweetheart Riley, joined her in this afternoon adventure, wondering how my bad hip would feel after diving off rooftops and all that. Could I become the George Plimpton of parkour... and live to tell about it?

As it turned out, the workshop was not really challenging physically, but the process was quite interesting and worthwhile. Though it was taught from a dance and movement theatre perspective and certainly not from a physical comedy angle, it did give me a feel for the potential discoveries possible when one art form "samples" another.

Because of light rain, the workshop began in an upstairs lobby space. There were just eight of us: four students and all four UPG performers as teachers: Alister "Buster" O'Loughlin, Miranda Henderson, JP Omari, and Janine Fletcher. Not a bad faculty–student ratio, eh? Led by Buster, the workshop was first framed by a discussion of the history of parkour and of UPG's involvement. The warm-up began with follow-the-leader movement throughout the lobby space, with the kinds of walks and stretches that I'm sure many of you have experienced in workshops you've taken. The difference here was in the more deliberate use of the physical environment, from simply making contact with various surfaces (walls, steps, railings, furniture, etc.) as we passed near them, to pushing off and rolling off of walls as you ran, to engaging with obstacles rather than simply detouring around them.

Next was floor work, where we did some basic shoulder rolls, with the usual emphasis on smoothness, spreading out the contact with the floor, and controlling one's center of gravity well enough to roll in slow motion. Maintaining the line of attack of the roll was emphasized, and to work on our orientation in space we did them in pairs side by side, holding our partner with our free hand, trying to stay in unison as much as possible.

By then the rain had let up so we got to move outdoors to the "jungle gym." The first exercise was simply to move "through" one of the structure's horizontal bars on our own, either going over or under it, while our workshop leaders observed our choices. While it was not a question so much of right or wrong technique, there were some good suggestions for increasing efficiency and awareness of the space. One was to touch the apparatus as we went through even when we didn't need it for support, the idea being that this would aid our proprioceptive awareness of where our body parts were. The second was a specific technique for gripping the bar as we passed under it that involved crossing one wrist over the other so as to provide a smooth transition as our orientation rotated 180º.

We repeated these simple movements many times, focusing on efficiency and spatial awareness, and then built on them with a series of variations. We passed through one bar and then immediately through another at a 90º angle. We played with grips and positioning for maneuvering over the bar. We developed more complex paths through the structure and had one person begin when the person in front of them was only part way through, adjusting the timing to avoid collisions. By the end of this segment all eight of us were exploring the cubes and railings, as many as four at a time, moving in and out at will, developing awareness of the structure and of one another's movements.


Our Micro-Choreography
After a break for lunch, we were ready to start putting together what UPG terms a micro-choreography, a very short piece to be performed then and there for whatever public we could muster in the middle of a rainy afternoon. For yes, it had indeed started raining again, and we had a dilemma on our hands. All of the open-air structures were getting soaked, but what audience there was to be found would have to be outdoors. There was, however, an overhang just outside the National's coffee shop with a row of tables under it. Ever resourceful, UPG chose to commandeer the last table and its four plastic chairs and throw together some minimalist parkour.

The entire piece, three minutes plus, was put together in under an hour, with Miranda as choreographer. The process was clearly from the world of dance, with the vocabulary borrowing from parkour basics. We began in our chairs, and we each came up with our own three to five movements involving the chair, which we then stitched into our own movement phrases. Here and throughout, Miranda's role was not to give us any specific movement, but rather to help us make choices from what we'd come up with and to structure it in a dynamic way. She focused on building on moments that worked best; when she saw a dynamic relationship developing she sought to bring focus to it.

Next we tackled the table, some of us literally. Again we came up with a variety of movements, picked our favorites, and sequenced them, but since there were four of us and only one table, we also had to work out the timing of our movement in coordination with the whole group.

The final stage of our magnum opus involved descending two short nearby stairs, finding different ways to get down them. Clearly this was an example not of moving efficiently through the stairs space, but of transforming them into a plaything. Again, we had to coordinate this with one another and eventually work toward an ending of sorts.

The modernist performance philosophy behind all this is that dramatic relationships and moments arise from the dynamics of these structured improvisations without any specific intention being imposed. Performers interact, patterns emerge. Rather than the piece telling a story, the audience is free to take whatever narrative from it they like. For me as a participant this went against my clown and actor instincts. I had to fight the urge to seek out eye contact and grow it into a psychological relationship with another character. It was hard not to think in terms of status and control, hard not to want to transform a physical movement into a physical comedy bit. (Yeah, yeah, that's also the story of my life, but we'll save that for another post...)

While the end result (below) was clearly a "process piece," I liked the process and can see its potential for developing all kinds of material. And yes, the rain did let up and we did get an audience of 30 to 40 people, all of whom gave us a standing ovation because it was still too wet to sit down. All I could think of was the storied tradition of the National Theatre: Gielgud, Richardson, Olivier and now Towsen.






In Performance with the French duo Gravity Style: Quartet
For the weekend performances of Quartet, UPG was joined by
two leaders of France's Gravity Style, Charles Perrière, and Malik Diouf, original members with David Belle in the group Yamakasi, back in Lisse in the 90s. They've been collaborating with UPG for several years and on the weekend put together several semi-improvised performances.

UPG's interest in mixing genres is echoed in Gravity Style's concept of gravity art: "Around the art of dispalcement (parkour), the sportive and artistic discipline popularized by the Luc Besson Film, Yamakasi, it brings together a wide range of physical performance such as acrobatics and urban dance and integrates them into different artistic contexts."

The performance of Quartet they did later that night was scaled back somewhat because everything was still quite wet, but it went over very well with the audience. The video below, shot with a handy-dandy Flip camera, is from far enough back to take in the whole space, so you lose some detail. To remedy that, here are some photos of the performance taken by Riley that help balance things out.






And here's the video (about 11 minutes):





Parkour and Physical Comedy
If UPG's choreography eschews character and plot, and other manifestations of parkour are self-expression, what does it all have to do with physical comedy? Physical comedy as a specific genre is usually based on meticulously planned out characters, stories, and blocking. Still, I do see some useful connections:

• Movement vocabulary
The most obvious link is between the acrobatics seen in a lot of parkour and that robust branch of physical comedy that emulates the daredevil antics of Lloyd and Keaton and likes large spaces and big movement.

• Intention, or, why did the chicken cross the road?
The parkour traceur's intention is a given, the desire to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. The physical comedian is more likely to be running from someone. Speed is an issue, the intention is survival.

• Obstacles and Inventiveness
The obstacles are what make parkour and physical comedy interesting. Both the traceur and the physical comedian are creative in their solutions to overcoming these obstacles. While these solutions are efficient and "simple," they would not be the obvious choice for most people, which just reinforces the eccentric nature of the physical comedian's character. Likewise, it is usually the clown's m.o. to overcome obstacles in an inventive way, even when not working in a physical mode.

A textbook example of parkour-style physical comedy is the climactic scene in Keaton's College (1927), where Buster — an abject failure as a college athlete — must make a mad dash to his girlfriend's dormitory room, where she is being held captive by an overly-insistent male rival. The intention is clear, the obstacles many. In the course of his rescue mission, he successfully makes use of many of the sports techniques that had eluded him on the playing field.



It should be noted that the pole vault was the only time in his silent-film career that Keaton used a stunt double.

Not only can physical comedy make use of parkour-style leaping and bounding, it can also make fun of it. Here's a sharp parody of Douglas Fairbanks by Will Rogers. You may think of Rogers as primarily a verbal comedian and political satirist, but he had a long career in silent movies as well, making fifty of them! In this excerpt from Big Moments from Little Pictures (1924), Rogers channels his inner clown as he offers us a rather fey Robin Hood showing his very merry men the fine art of jumping.




And then there's this parkour parody from the current season of the tv sitcom The Office:



Good ending, but I gotta admit it, overall I thought Rogers was a lot funnier.


Physical Comedy in the 21st Century??
Since we're doing some genre-bending here, I'll close with a cool video by Vidéo El Dorado that combines Mayan ruins, parkour, visual effects (time remapping ), and of course more monkeys. Not sure if it fits my "physical comedy in the 21st century" category because it's not exactly comedy, but it is cool. Did I mention that it has monkeys?




Well, that's a lot of stuff to throw at you. I hope it makes sense to all you old folks! I know I'm a novice here and just scratching the surface, so here's some more info for the insatiable:

Links
• Jump Four — a 2003 BBC documentary about parkour that features French free runners leaving their trace on London's landscape. This is available on YouTube, segmented into five parts.
• Parkour-Videos.com — "all the best videos of parkour"
• Parkourpedia — a reference source compiled by the Australian Parkour Association
• American Parkour — site for AMK
• Training Videos — also from the AMK site
• New York Parkour — site for NYPK, parkour group for NYC / New Jersey area
• Sandbag — parkour events staged all over the world to promote the fight against climate change
• Point B — a 2009 documentary about parkour
• Parkour in Casino Royale — James Bond chases Sebastian Foucan. I'd like this a lot better if there weren't so many cuts undermining the believability of the leaps. I want to see the take-off, flight, and landing all in the same shot, thank you very much!
• Update (3-15-2010): Parkour Motion Reel — from Vimeo, a short but cool hand-animated flip book about parkour.

Performance Report: Cirkus Cirkör & the Delayed Gag

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This is a physical comedy blog, not a circus blog, which means my main focus is on how physical comedy works rather than on reviewing circuses. However, before I get to my little piece on the delayed gag, a few words on Sweden's Cirkus Cirkör, where I saw this really nice delayed gag and so much more Saturday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

I loved this show. No, it wasn't perfect, and yes it's quite sentimental — two "civilians" get drafted into the world of the circus and discover it's all about heart — but for me it was that rare instance of circus and theatre actually working together. I'm glad not to have read the negative NY Times review until the next day. To tell you the truth, it was odd seeing the Times being critical of a circus at all, since in the past most if not all of their circus reviews have been fluff pieces. ("Golly gee, the circus is in town and ain't that just terrific.")

Cirkör had the bad luck to be picked on by a critic, Jason Zinoman, out to prove them just a pale imitation of Cirque du Soleil. Zinoman's argument is that Cirkör's technical expertise is no match for that of their more famous counterparts: "Cirque serves up this kind of thing as an appetizer, not the main course." Zinoman's own expertise would carry more weight if — here's an idea! — he knew what he was talking about. Take his last paragraph, the only nice thing he had to say about the show: "The one true heart-pounding moment is when a woman climbs a rope in a few bounds and then, from the height of the stage, drops, plummeting almost to her death at an incomprehensible speed. No matter how many times you’ve seen that performed, your jaw still drops."

The only problem is that it wasn't a rope, but a rigid pole, a traditional Chinese pole act. And no, it wasn't some 10-second stunt that went by so fast that such a mistake would be understandable, but a complete act, some 5 to 7 minutes long! Hovey Burgess, who was in the audience that night and in fact for four out of the five performances, commented that it was "the only time I have ever seen this genre performed solo by a woman." He also points out that Zinoman refers to juggling clubs as juggling pins.

And while it's true that the typical Soleil show may have more in the way of technically advanced acts (though not by much), I often find the theatre half of a Soleil show to be very "theatrical" without necessarily being good theatre; glitzy but jejune. With Cirkör, the character interactions and storyline actually made sense. Imagine that!

Here are just a few of the things I liked about Cirkör:
• The troupe is small — eight circus performers and five musicians — and their roles in the production are very clear.
• Most or all of them have been working together for a decade, and it shows in the seamless flow of everything they do. Mirja Tuulikki Jauhiainen and Sanna Kopra perform a really nice stationary trapeze act with transitions that are as smooth as silk, not surprising since they've been working together since 1998.
• Although there are in fact individual acts from time to time, much of what happens is just part of this general flow and is not constrained by traditional variety structure.
• Their use of stage magic and of rear-screen video projection actually worked well with the overall mise-en-scène.
• The band, Irya’s Playground, which the Times only mentions in passing, was not only excellent, but tightly integrated into the performance. You know how the typical juggling act is performed to set music with a few dramatic drum rolls thrown in right before the big tricks? Here there was some terrific interaction between juggler Jay Gilligan (incredible, though from Ohio, not Sweden) and percussionist Erik Nilsson, whose drumming, human sound effects, and scat singing played off of every juggling move to great effect.
• They performed an act walking on bottles that I had never seen live and had only read about being done by the French grotesque Jean-Baptiste Auriol (1806–1881): "He could run along the tops of a row of bottles without knocking them over and then balance in a free headstand atop the last bottle while playing the trumpet." In Cirkör, the performer walks across the tops of a row of bottles on a table. The walk is slow and measured, as the shifts in weight have to be precise to avoid upsetting the bottles, which makes each step more precarious and dramatic than those taken on a tightwire. I'm a bit skeptical of the description of Auriol — c'mon, did he really run across them and do a headstand on one, and were they really free-standing bottles?? — even if that description does come from my book Clowns (p.164). Another nice thing about the Cirkör version was that the table was already there, had been used for other purposes, and the bottles were placed down in order by the "diners" as the equilibrist approached.
















All that being said, it's perfectly fine for someone not to have liked this show. I'm not at all opposed to the idea of serious circus criticism, but I think the "paper of record" might want to apply the same standards to all circuses, and find a writer with real expertise in the area. As my friend Dave Carlyon pointed out, if you're going to write about opera, it's not enough just to know about the performing arts, you actually have to know about music. Likewise... well, you get the point.

Hmm... maybe the Times should hire Hovey as their circus reviewer.

Final salvo: I've been to shows where I was not impressed yet the audience gave them standing ovations, so it's all a matter of opinion, but I still can't resist mentioning that the sold-out crowd at BAM Saturday night gave Cirkör a prolonged, rousing, (mostly) standing ovation.

End of Rant. Here's Cirkör's promo video, which gives you a taste of it all, though without capturing any of the beautiful moments that make it such a strong performance.






Hey, that was more than a few words... no more delays getting to that delayed gag!

For starters, here's what I wrote about the delayed gag in my Yale Theater essay on physical comedy:

Surprise being essential to comedy, the smart performer may play with the cadence of the 1-2-3 gag by initiating the third part either sooner or later than the gag's rhythm would lead us to expect. Most common is the delayed gag. Especially useful in a play or a longer performance piece, it allows a lapse of time between parts two and three. In the interim, the main action of the piece continues. Just when the audience has begun to forget about the gag, the payoff comes, often with doubled effect.

The legendary Swiss clown, Grock, was famous for a heartwarming delayed gag involving his violin bow. After finishing a short flourish on the violin, he tacks on a slight embellishment, flipping the bow up into the air and attempting to catch it back in his hand — unsuccessfully. Embarrassed, he hides himself behind a screen and practices his bow juggling. We see the bow soar repeatedly above the top of the screen. It is clear he has mastered the technique. But back in front of the audience, he again fails. He holds a second rehearsal behind the screen, but when he returns he is beset by new mishaps and soon forgets about the bow.

It is several minutes and one violin later (the first one having been pulverized beneath a Grock pratfall) and he is finally finishing off his tune on the violin. Now comes the payoff. Without thinking about it, he casually tosses the bow up into the air and catches it. Realizing what has happened, he is eager to duplicate his success. He starts to toss the bow up again, but before he can release it he assesses the probable risk, thinks better of it, and decides to leave well enough alone.

By accomplishing without thinking what had been impossible when he tried so hard, Grock creates a splendid clown moment. The delay has heightened the comedic impact, at the same time enriching Grock's characterization.

Got it? So here's the one I loved in Cirkör. It's a bit involved, but I hope worth following. At the very beginning of the show, an audience member is drafted to come onstage and ride a stationary bicycle, which is rigged to generate electricity to power the main spotlight. (Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! He's actually an audience plant, though not an obvious one.) If he doesn't pedal, the stage goes dark. He resumes pedaling, the spot comes on (and they sneak on some other lights as well, but you get the joke.) There's a bunch of business with this, but after a while you forget about it and tune in to the rest of the show. At a certain point you might notice that he's stopped pedaling but the lights are still on, though presumably he's generated enough power to last awhile. Meanwhile, you're captivated by the whitefaced performer who's attempting to balance in a handstand high atop a tall stack of chairs. I'm guessing we were now 20-30 minutes into the show. Just as he goes into his riskiest trick, far above the stage, the lights go out! There is a panicked shout and the cyclist has to pedal furiously to restore the lights as our acrobat barely manages to regain his bearings.

It deservedly got a big laugh, all the stronger because we knew we had been tricked into forgetting about it.