Leo: Off-the-Wall Physical Comedy

[post 235]

If you combined the physical contortions of Janik & Arnaut (post 231) with the loony inventiveness of Brooklyn's own Rube Goldberg (post 230), the result might be Leo, the unique one-man show playing at the Harold Clurman Theatre in New York through Feb. 5th.

I am writing about it now in the hope that some of you locals will get to see it before it closes, but the reality is that I am too pressed for time at the moment to write a review that would do it justice. Indeed, there have been dozens of shows that have come and gone and not gotten a mention on this blogopedia for that very same reason. This is my attempt to  overcome that all-or-nothing mentality — and get some sleep tonight. So I'll be brief rather than lengthily pseudo-profound...

An award-winning solo show performed by Tobias Wegner and directed by Daniel Briere, Leo literally stretches the boundaries of physical comedy. Stage left is a room where Wegner performs silently, though with a soundtrack; stage right is a (near) simultaneous, life-sized video of his performance — except it's rotated 90 degrees. When Wegner walks on the floor, the video shows him walking up the wall, etc. This could easily become a dumb gimmick, but he is amazingly adept at making his movements look natural when rotated a quarter turn, and his physical vocabulary is impressive. The results are often magical. As the piece progresses, his world grows, first with hand-drawn objects (he sketches a chair and then sits in it) and then projected animation.

from the New Yorker

The show is little more than an hour, and the question obviously arises as to whether or not the bizzaro world he conjures adds up to much of anything — such as the price of admission. It's a fair question, and one I hardly have time to debate here. It certainly worked enough for me, and if you're reading a physical comedy blogopedia, I'm guessing you'll find it well worth your time just for the sheer creativity. So like I said, go see it!

Good news: half-price tickets have been available on TDF and thru Theatermania.

Here's some video for you:



• Click here for the Leo home page.
• A video interview with Tobias on Jim Moore's VaudeVisuals blog.
• A rave review from Total Theatre.
• A mostly positive review from the NY Times
• A negative review from BroadwayWorld.com

Improv Everywhere: Pranks, Punking & Put-Ons

[post 157]

In the early days of modernism, conceptual artists such as Marcel Duchamp and George Grosz delighted in blurring the line between art and reality. In 1917, Duchamp submitted an upside-down urinal as a work of art, though one obviously lacking in the aesthetic appeal traditionally associated with Art with a capital A. This "found object" was unaltered except for its label. He named it "Fountain." The piece was rejected by the show's curator and was soon lost, yet went on to make art history.

In the 60s came happenings, interactive public events that were part scripted, part improvisatory. Since then, post-modern art movements have continued to explore non-traditional approaches, concocting every variety of performance art that not only acknowledged but constantly referenced its own artificiality.

On television, Candid Camera (first broadcast in 1948!) stayed on the air for more than half a century in various formats and ignited a tradition of filmed practical jokes that are, if anything, even more popular today.

Guerrilla street theatre often went beyond agitprop skits to stage provocative theatrical events. Abbie Hoffman showering the NY Stock Exchange with dollar bills just so the press could witness brokers diving for a few measly bucks was a classic political publicity stunt. Hoffman's "Yippies" (Youth International Party) "became known for mocking the political establishment and the social status quo through pranks and street theater, leading some to refer to them as Groucho Marxists.” Custard pies in the faces of politicians are as popular as ever, and this year has seen a lot of anti-gay politicians getting "glittered" (e.g., Michelle Bachman just two weeks ago).

Now that we live in the post-post-modern era — or is it the post-post-post? I do get confused — pranking has almost become its own art form, with flash mobs a common enough sight in major cities across the globe. The New York City group Improv Everywhere [motto: "we cause scenes"] is perhaps the best known practitioner.

With all of life and all public space as their canvas, it's natural that IE's humor goes beyond mere jokes. Free from the constraints of stage and screen, assisted by an army of volunteers often numbering in the hundreds, they create large-scale events where weird and silly mass behavior — for example, the spontaneous eruption of a splashy Broadway-style musical number in a small fast-food restaurant — is offered up to an unsuspecting public as perfectly normal. Hidden cameras shoot spectator reactions, with YouTube viewers being the real target audience.

The most famous of these is their No Pants Subway Ride, in which groups of commuters enter New York City subways (in the winter!) wearing nothing but underpants on their legs; this has become an annual event that has spread to 48 cities in 22 countries.

The work is aways very visual, usually quite comic, and at times even physical, but is it physical comedy? And is it improv?

The typical IE event is in fact highly structured. Many involve professional actors ("agents"), a script, and rehearsals. In others, volunteers follow precise instructions and engage in synchronized actions. For example, in a series of MP3 Experiments, a group of participants wearing headphones start listening to the same series of audio instructions at the exact same time, the result being a well-coordinated ballet of eccentric actions meant to stun and delight the onlookers. Improvisation, however, is fairly limited, as is any consequential interaction with the audience.

I'm sure many of you have seen their work before, but here are some good examples.  First the latest no-pants video:




And the latest MP3 experiment:




Many of their pieces do indeed overlap with the world of physical comedy.  In The Mute Button, they transform everyday life into a silent movie:




And in this one, they turn off movement, creating a freeze-frame Grand Central Station:

____________________________

"The golden rule for a prank is that it should be as fun for the person getting pranked as it is for the prankster."  — Charlie Todd, IE founder

____________________________

A spoof on the cliché of the would-be suicide leaper getting talked down from a high ledge:




Here's a fake hypnotist act, with shades of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the young lovers being puckishly tricked into falling in love with the wrong person.

____________________________

“Someone once told me, ‘What you’re doing is giving other people anecdotes.’ You don’t regularly see things in New York that make you go, ‘Wow, that’s awesome.’ You don’t see humans interacting in a way that takes you off guard and makes you smile. You see a guy taking a shit on the sidewalk.”  — Charlie Todd

____________________________

Finally, their most clownesque piece, the Worst Ice Skater Ever. Watch it first, then I'll give you my two cents!



Or as Huckleberry Finn said: "And by and by a drunk man tried to get into the ring -- said he wanted to ride; said he could ride as well as anybody that ever was. They argued and tried to keep him out, but he wouldn't listen, and the whole show come to a standstill. Then the people begun to holler at him and make fun of him, and that made him mad, and he begun to rip and tear; so that stirred up the people, and a lot of men begun to pile down off of the benches and swarm towards the ring, saying, "Knock him down! Throw him out!" and one or two women begun to scream. So, then, the ringmaster he made a little speech, and said he hoped there wouldn't be no disturbance, and if the man would promise he wouldn't make no more trouble he would let him ride if he thought he could stay on the horse. So everybody laughed and said all right, and the man got on. The minute he was on, the horse begun to rip and tear and jump and cavort around, with two circus men hanging on to his bridle trying to hold him, and the drunk man hanging on to his neck, and his heels flying in the air every jump, and the whole crowd of people standing up shouting and laughing till tears rolled down. And at last, sure enough, all the circus men could do, the horse broke loose, and away he went like the very nation, round and round the ring, with that sot laying down on him and hanging to his neck, with first one leg hanging most to the ground on one side, and then t'other one on t'other side, and the people just crazy. It warn't funny to me, though; I was all of a tremble to see his danger. But pretty soon he struggled up astraddle and grabbed the bridle, a-reeling this way and that; and the next minute he sprung up and dropped the bridle and stood! and the horse a-going like a house afire too. He just stood up there, a-sailing around as easy and comfortable as if he warn't ever drunk in his life -- and then he begun to pull off his clothes and sling them. He shed them so thick they kind of clogged up the air, and altogether he shed seventeen suits. And, then, there he was, slim and handsome, and dressed the gaudiest and prettiest you ever saw, and he lit into that horse with his whip and made him fairly hum -- and finally skipped off, and made his bow and danced off to the dressing-room, and everybody just a-howling with pleasure and astonishment."

In other words, whether on horseback, a tight wire, or ice skates, this is one of the oldest acts in the book. The problem here is that it's very underdeveloped: he stumbles around a bit, eventually gets his footing, and is then revealed to be an elegant skater. Ta-da! But they missed so many movement possibilities and great opportunities to interact with rink staff and audience. It's the bare bones of the gag without the meat.

I guess I am of two minds about IE's work.  I enjoy it, I find a lot of it funny, and I'm glad they're doing it.  On the other hand, it's more cutesy than provocative, and far less improvisational and interactive than I would like to see, but that's more of a quibble than a criticism; you can't please everyone all the time. And as you know, I do like to write about new directions in physical comedy, what I call "physical comedy in the 21st century," and right now I'm thinking that this performance paradigm may have far more potential than we realize. Gotta think about that one....

_______________________________

Some links:

• Web site for Improv Everywhere. For each project, you'll find not only the video, but also an article about how they did it, photos, and sometimes supplementary video footage.

• Urban Prankster, another blog by Charlie Todd covering "pranks, hacks, participatory art, and other creative endeavors that take place in public places in cities across the world." It has all the IE videos, but stuff by other groups as well.
• An earlier blog post of mine about a flash mob of commuters in the Antwerp (Belgium) train station suddenly dancing their hearts out to "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music. 

• A 2002 IE article with photos (no video) of two IE "stuntmen" who dazzle the crowd with such harrowing feats as running with scissors and sitting too close to a TV.
• A New York Magazine profile
• A Rolling Stone article
• A Wall Street Journal article
• A New York Times article

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

Physical Comedy in the 21st Century: Legs & All

[post 087]

Right before my trip to Barcelona, I got a chance to catch Legs & All, a charming and inventive physical comedy piece, first in a short preview at the next-to-last installment of the New York Downtown Clown Monthly Revue, and then in its full-length incarnation at the Frigid New York Festival. It was inventive enough to get me thinking again about the new and innovative paths physical comedy might follow in this post-post-modern-pre-apocalypse world of ours.

I'll come back to Legs & All in a bit, but first some thinking out loud...

When I first launched the blog feature Physical Comedy in the 21st Century, I had only the vaguest idea what I was talking about. I knew I wanted to highlight work that wasn't just funny, but that took physical comedy in new directions — conceptual, political, whatever...

What I was getting at is that all art forms change over time, often inspired by visionary artists who break the mold and demonstrate a new way of seeing. In the visual arts, just think of all the isms: impressionism, cubism, expressionism, dadaism, surrealism, futurism, abstract expressionism, pop art-ism, post-modernism, etc.

Physical comedy is, however, a very traditional — one might even say conservative — art form. Not only are many character types and gags traceable to antiquity, but these same characters and gags show up spontaneously in isolated indigenous cultures throughout the world and throughout history, proving (at least to me) that this stuff is ingrained in our collective DNA.

But while the deep truth underlying physical comedy — the realization that "we're all bozos on this bus" (Firesign Theatre) — remains a vérité eternelle, the new shapes physical comedy has taken over the past few decades are refreshingly varied. Think of Mummenschanz and Pilobolus and Momix. Think of much of the innovative work that gets labeled New Vaudeville or Clown-Theatre or Nouveau Cirque. Or try this: compare Grock's full-length clown entrée with Bill Irwin's decidedly post-modern Regard of Flight; many parallels and yet worlds apart. The bottom line may always be laughter, but what you're laughing at and how and when you get those laughs are another matter.

Hypothesis: Physical comedy very much needs to reflect its era, to move with the times.

...but before you start thinking I'm about to trash the tried and true, some background as to where I'm coming from....

Back in my graduate school days at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, I worked as an assistant editor at TDR (The Drama Review), then under the guidance of Michael Kirby, chair of the Drama Department, author of Happenings, and strong advocate for avant-garde theatre. I was turned on by all the new stuff going on in the New York theatre scene, but turned off by any arguments that assumed that the new was superior just because it was new. I am, truth be told, a fan of old-fashioned storytelling. I can happily devour a 19th-century novel or a contemporary page-turner by Richard Russo or Richard Price, by Anne Tyler or Zadie Smith, but I never did make it through a Robbe-Grillet nouveau roman. I was, however, struck by Michael's frequent use of the word significant to describe certain theatrical productions. Significant as in influential, which is not necessarily the same thing as good, better, or best. Significant as in, gee, I didn't know you could do it that way. Avant-garde literally means advance guard, or vanguard, those who go ahead and forge new paths.


Some axioms:

• When it comes to comedy, it's hard to be influential if you're not funny, so the work has to be accessible enough to grab and hold audiences, but it doesn't have to be THE BEST THING EVER.

• Simply being different or new is not the same as being significant. Anyone can be different — think of all the work you see today in music and theatre and film that is done just for the shock value — but that doesn't make it significant.

• New directions and different styles are not necessarily in competition with one another. It's okay to like them all. No art form and no performance piece has a copyright on the shining truth.


Evidence:
Physical comedy seems to be heading in a lot of new directions these days. Here are some I've noticed:


1. Combined with technology.
If you haven't seen my first post in this series on the work of Circoripopolo yet, check it out; you're in for a treat. Too often video editing is used as a shortcut to con us into believing an actor has performed some amazing feat, but the possibilities of creating comedy by combining technology with legitimate physical comedy chops are enormous. A popular example these days would be all the shadow pieces done by Momix and Pilobolus. The technology is in the lighting, but the movement is authentic.












2. In Real-life Settings.
The audience's role in comedy is usually well-defined. Safe in our seats, we're given the privilege of feeling superior to the characters onstage. We know stuff they don't know, we're one step ahead of them. Ideally we'll recognize our own humanity in their predicament, but it's not a requirement. More and more, however, you see performers creating public events that deny spectators their lofty perch and play with the audience's ability to tell what is or isn't real. Improv Everywhere (motto: "We Cause Scenes") is famous for such happenings as its annual and global No Pants Subway Ride, its Frozen Grand Central, and its Spontaneous Musicals. Their mission is to "cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places." For another example, check out my post on Dance in the Central Station of Antwerp. And of course much political theatre does the same thing: check out the underwater Maldives cabinet meeting in my post on the Copenhagen climate summit.


3. As a Visual Theatre Component
Traditional comedy, be it physical or stand-up, usually follows tried-and-true formulas to build toward surefire "punchlines," and the seasoned comedian will have a good sense of where the routine's small laughs and big laughs are to be found. Lenny Bruce once famously said that “the role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds; I'm not a comedian, I'm Lenny Bruce.” Bruce had a comic perspective on society, and it was this perspective that made him who he was; the individual jokes, not so much.

Likewise, there are many visual theatre pieces that draw heavily upon the vocabulary of physical comedy without aspiring to non-stop belly laughs. Again, watch a comedic piece by Pilobolus or Momix and the smiles and laughs will be less structured, less predictable, even to the trained eye. We will probably laugh less — after all, this is dance, not clowning — but still be immersed in the whimsy and overall humor of the alternate reality they've created. Likewise, many of the nouveau cirque productions I've seen have contained exquisite moments of physical comedy, though overall you would not describe these productions as comedies.


I have to think about this some more — hey, this is a blog, not a book — but meanwhile back to the show....



Legs & All

Legs & All is a 50-minute piece created and performed by Summer Shapiro and Peter Musante, who once upon a time were roommates as undergrads at UCLA. Shapiro is a San Francisco Clown Conservatory graduate and Climate Theater resident artist, and Musante a member of the current New York cast of Blue Man Group, amongst other impressive credits.

Their publicity describes the show as "a magical look at the mundane," which reminds me of a piece of sage Moni Yakim advice: "Don't do something ordinary with the extraordinary; do something extraordinary with the ordinary." It's a clown show, but not in the traditional sense. As Shapiro comments in the interview below, "I like clowning that’s more realistic, even though what I do I’m not quite sure if you’d call it realistic or not. Things that are not 'Hey I’m a clown!' More like 'I’m an exaggerated human being.'”

And one more quote from her web site: "Summer looks to create orchestrated mishaps, controlled chaos and a playful electricity of risky humanity on stage."

It's not a total cop-out to describe this show as indescribable. Yes, it's a take on the standard boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl story, only the man is in an attic, the girl in a box, and their relationship centers around a pink rubber ball. They circle each other with various flirtation games, and eventually get transported to a world that defies gravity; no, this photo is not an aerial shot. Their world is surreal, which is to say it has its own beautiful logic.

Well, it's late, I've had too much wine, so why not let someone else describe it better than I can. Okay, better than I could even without the wine. Here's Bonny Prince Billy on the Cultural Capitol blog:


Romantic love, the kind all the movies are about, often produces the same vertiginous feeling, as if the room you are in is about to be suddenly and without warning tipped on its side, and you and the charming person you are with might be literally thrown together into all kinds of awkward, unexpected physical intimacies. Poets have used anthologies full of metaphors to explain this effect: love is magic, transforming a skinny, awkward duckling into a graceful swan; love is a hallucinogenic drug that can give you angelic (or demonic) visions; ultimately, love is the feeling of flying, and the attendant fear, complete with sweaty palms, a queasy stomach, and the desire to squeeze your eyes tightly shut, so you can’t see what a predicament you’re in.

Summer Shapiro and Peter Musante have taken the words out of these metaphors to re-articulate them with a purely physical vocabulary in Legs and All. Their wonderful hour-long play (in my opinion, the best of the festival) is a kinetic poem about the space we share with our desires, the space taken up by the desires of others, and the uncomfortably delicious vertigo one feels when your personal space crashes into someone else’s.

Love’s sweet confusion commences when a recorded voice, deep and seductive, mumbles and purrs something in pseudo-French gibberish. The lights come up on a woman, standing in a box, rotating in a circle and staring into space, like a specimen on display in a replicant boutique. The lights go down and come up again on a man in the same situation. The gibberish French pretends it’s the narrator of a New Wave movie and implies that these are the two who are going to fall all over each other while they fall in love.

Their story is particularly touching because both characters are so awkward. The romantic axis on which many love stories turn – the strong man and the ethereal woman – is wonderfully inverted. The man is shy, a collector of trifles, a little squeamish, and definitely hemmed in by timidity. The woman, on the other hand, is palpably physical, almost to the point that her head (the place of thinking and feeling) is alienated from her overpowering corporeality. Her opening scene describes the strangeness of the body, like a scene from Sartre’s Nausea, or a teenager’s horror on finding hair growing where no sane person would grow hair. In the scene her hand appears out of a giant blue box to do a sexy dance routine. Ms. Hand is joined by the another hand who appears to have three legs, and then morphs into a quadruped. Finally the woman’s head pops up to take a look at the goings on, and in a fit of anger Head bites the naughty Hand and gives it a death shake – until she realizes it’s connected.

After the pair negotiate their personal space, they start to move around in each other’s shared space, and that’s when things go topsy-turvy. The picture at the top of the post was not taken by a photographer hanging from the rafters. Rather, the man and the woman fall to the left in order to have a romantic picnic. The visual metaphor is so charming you can’t help but get hot and cold running blushes and chills. The woman continues to be uncomfortably physical, and the man continues to be freaked out, like someone with OCD negotiating the subway and realizing they just ran out of hand sanitizer. This situation morphs through several situations until the two get comfortable with each other and climb into a big blue box of shared, intimate space.

Words don’t do it justice, and I must resist the urge to read Ms. Shapiro and Mr. Musant’s every gesture! There are so many tasty ones, so many hilarious moments, if I took the time to relate them all we’d be here until next week. Suffice it to say that Ms. Shapiro and Mr. Musante both have strong physical theater chops.... Ms. Shapiro has the most expressive face that she uses to maximum comedic effect, and Mr. Musante is a picture of grace, even when he’s falling on his face.

Nice writing!

Here's an interview of Peter & Summer by Christopher Lueck, mastermind of the New York Downtown Clown Monthly Revue, produced by Jim Moore, mastermind of the very cool Vaude Visuals blog.



As usual, I don't think you can truly appreciate the show from the promo videos, but here they are anyway. This first one is short, all of 36 seconds:




And here's an eight-and-a-half minute demo reel:




And some links for you:
Summer Shapiro web site
The full Cultural Capitol review
More Jim Moore photos
Scallyway & Vagabond review
NewYorkTheatre.com review

On the Streets at the Copenhagen Climate Summit

[post 048]

Greetings from COP 15, the U.N. climate "Conference Of Parties" in Copenhagen, Denmark. In case you don't get out much, COP 15 is considered a big deal not only because it was designed to forge an environmental treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, but because global warming trends have proven to be even worse than what the "alarmist" scientists were predicting just a few years ago. Thus not only do all the nations of the world have delegates at the conference, like it or not they have us "unofficial delegates" in town in the form of environmental activists staging their own Klimaforum, and taking to the streets with a variety of theatrics and actions intended to pressure the politicians and hopefully grab some international media attention.

Truth be told, it's a madhouse here, with so much going on at any given time that, like the parable of the six blind men and the elephant, it's impossible to ever get much of an overview. Saturday's big 6-kilometer march from Parliament Square to the Bella Conference Center attracted somewhere between 60,000 people (police estimate) and 100,000 (organizers' estimate). The march — I almost wrote "parade" — was quite theatrical, with the clear intention of engaging onlookers and attracting major media. Of course most of the headlines focused on the arrest of a very small number of violent protesters, even in newspapers you would think more attuned to the actual issues and to the not insignificant fact that this was the largest and most international climate change protest ever.

Of course the problem with political theatre is that you are mostly preaching to the choir, but I guess if that choir is empowered and goes on to preach to others, picking up a few tricks along the way, then all is not in vain.


So how do you visualize the politics of climate change? Here's what I saw:

• Depictions of the rich and powerful as puppets, robots or clowns.

• Images of imminent extinction, with the earth's most vulnerable inhabitants dying a grim death. Our 350.org contingent included a boat ("we're all in the same boat"), plus a dinosaur on poles created by a couple of Bread & Puppet Theatre vets.

• Masks, puppets, floats giving voice to the powerless, including endangered species — polar bears, penguins, and assorted wildlife.

• Personifying the positive: the wholesome qualities of the environmental movement (organic, natural, green, warm, fuzzy, etc.). Clowns, bright costumes, and green noses were part of this joyous branding of the movement. The motto for Mr. Green's Circus (see below) is "We are gonna save the planet — and we will have fun doing it."

• Imagery centered on the desirable number 350 (target for safe number of carbon particles per million in the atmosphere).

Here are some images and video of the spectacle. I don't have time for everything while I'm here, but will add some more to this post later, so check back!

Here's my friend Adnan Saabi, from IndyAct in Lebanon, in action inside the Bella Center, in clown nose and glasses unsympathetically portraying a member of the oil lobby. The 850 refers to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere this character is apparently willing to tolerate, and the "recruiting e-mail hackers" refers to the recent brouhaha in England. So in this case the clown persona is basically saying the guy's a bozo.



The Greenpeace puppet of a rich cigar-chomping industrialist manipulating the world's political leaders (including Obama) on marionette strings; all of the "puppets" were in fact human performers.



Mr. Penguin and Mr. Dinosaur.



Clowns on a mission.


Frosty the Snowman says: "I fell down and I can't get up!"



Three puppets (about 35' tall) swaying in the wind, from Seven Meters, whose poster you see toward the top of this post. Seven meters is the height water will rise if all the ice in Greenland melts.


Partial view of our "We're all in the same boat" contingent.


Mr. Green's Circus.


And here's one of their videos.




And here they are at the mall. Not sure what they're doing there, but at least you get to see the whole group in action.





Okay, I admit it, this last one isn't from Copenhagen, but I figured I could sneak it in while we're on the subject of climate change. Besides, it is visual and I did learn about it in Copenhagen. If you like 3D street art, I think you'll love this ice-age video of the summer 2008 work of German street painting artist Edgar Müller .




Physical Comedy in the 21st-Century
One way for physical comedy to break new ground is to move it outside of your standard performance structures and into a remix with everyday life. The work of Improv Everywhere (motto: "we make scenes') offers some good examples of this, as does the history of street theatre. But with street theatre, we're usually talking about a band of outsiders trying to shake up the complacent and the powerful. Think Abbie Hoffman throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the NY Stock Exchange.


You may be pleasantly surprised, therefore, to see similar shock tactics being employed by an actual government, though one that itself is very much on the outside of world power. I am talking about the Maldives, whose president, Mohamed Nasheed, I will in fact be hearing speak later today. The Maldives are an island nation in the Indian Ocean and because of global warming they are literally sinking. Here are the text and the image from an excellent Daily Beast slide show, Our Sinking Earth:

What does it take for a small country like the Maldives to get noticed on the world stage? The nation’s cabinet recently held a meeting underwater, in scuba gear, to call attention to the state — the lowest-lying country on earth. Using hand signals and white boards 20 feet underwater, the cabinet produced a document calling for all countries to cut their carbon dioxide emissions before the Copenhagen meeting.



More to come....

My Life as a Parkour Traceur

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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.