London Calling: The City, the Theatre, the Workshop, the Podcast

[post 464]

"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
—Samuel Johnson, 1777

I've always loved London, having first visited there in 1968 and countless times since, and as recently as three months ago. I still fondly recall getting off the plane at Heathrow early one June morning in 1970, going straight to the National Theatre (then at the Old Vic), and getting £5 rush tickets to see Laurence Olivier play Shylock that evening in Merchant of Venice. (I have since learned that Shylock was his last Shakespearean role.) I've been going back to London ever since. I love the (affordable) theatre, the high level of acting and the British wit, I love the history, and of course I love the pubs, and in this century, the cultural diversity, which thankfully equates to better food. My favorite dog lives in London, as does my chess coach.

The Comedy School
Visiting is one thing, but I am especially excited that my next visit will be to teach there for the very first time, this May at London's esteemed The Comedy School. The school, created by Keith Palmer MBE in 1998 and still under his directorship, specializes in stand-up comedy but has also run many courses in clowning and mime and all kinds of improvisation. Which is great because I am hoping that the participants will come from a variety of comedy approaches and we can all learn from one another. Instructors from our neck of the comedy woods have included Luke Sorba (improv), Mick Barnfather (clown), and Richard Knight (mime).

Since this is my first time teaching in London, it will only be a two-day (all-day) workshop, but if we get a crowd then next time we would aim for my usual 4-day intensive. The dates are Sunday, May 24th and Monday May 25th, that Monday being a bank holiday. You can read all the details here.

Classes will be next door in the home of BADA (the British-
American Drama Academy). Yes, fancier than my usual digs!

Comedians Paradise Podcast
A while after this workshop was arranged, I received an email from Marvin McCarthy asking me to appear on his London-based podcast, Comedians Paradise, to discuss physical comedy, which I was happy to accept. Marvin is a stand-up comedian but he is admirably eclectic in both his training, which includes several Philippe Gaulier workshops, and in his choice of guests, many of whom come from the broader clown world, including Mark Gindick, Jeff Raz, Chad Damiani, Iva Peter, Tim Eagle, Lee Delong, Jon Davison, Johnny Melville, Tiffany Riley & Dick Monday, Sue Morrison, Barnaby King, Mariko Iwasa, Rene Bazinet, and Aitor Basauri. And there are even more of them, so check it out!

I was introduced as "The Beast of Physical Comedy." Not quite sure what that means but I have to admit it sounds cool! We talked non-stop for almost two hours but thankfully Marvin edited it down to half that. I also have to admit I have not watched all of it because, frankly, I don't like listening to me talking about myself, but then that's my hang-up. But I do think it was a good discussion, Marvin is a knowledgeable and skilled interviewer, and I've already received excellent feedback on it. Therefore, check it out!

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• I have just learned that there was a 1973 television version of Olivier in Merchant that is streaming for as little as $2.

A Tale of Three Studios (but especially Falling Coyote)

 [post 463]

I'm betting this has happened to you: You find an affordable place to rehearse, perhaps in a neighborhood that you can also afford to live in. Other artists who work large gravitate there. Pretty soon it becomes a pretty interesting neighborhood. More restaurants open up, maybe a couple of art galleries, and before you know it, it's trendy. Everyone wants to live there… and many of them have a lot more money than you do. This of course is not lost on the real estate industry. Rents rise, not just a little, but by tenfold, and before you know it, you and your fellow artists can't afford to live or rent space there so you move to the next neighborhood you can afford, a bit farther off the beaten track, a bit farther from public transportation, a bit seedier, maybe a bit less safe at night. And the process repeats... from Soho to Tribeca to Williamsburg to Bushwick to Ridgewood to small towns along the Hudson River.... change the names for your city, and there you are.

Until recently, I lived in Manhattan, not far from where I was born. Although I had been a childhood television actor, for that I did not need rehearsal space. That was provided by CBS or NBC. But when I got heavily into all things clown and circus in my twenties, instead of working for other people, my friends and I were creating and producing our own shows, and it takes space to do that. There is a limit to what you can do in your small NYC apartment! In the mid-70s, Fred Yockers and I had started our clown business, If Every Fool, Inc., soon to grow into an ambitious arts organization. In or around 1979, a few of us decided to get serious, with the idea of pooling our resources and getting our own place. A lot of light industry had moved out of the city, making large industrial spaces suddenly affordable.

143 Chambers Street (Manhattan)
I started the search with puppeteer Eric Bass. I remember us looking at large lofts in Williamsburg (Brooklyn, not Virginia), just on the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge. If you are not familiar with New York City geography, that is about as close as you can get to Manhattan without actually being in it, but in those days Brooklyn might as well have been Timbuktu. The lofts were big and the price was right, but we never seriously considered it. Now it is the Gold Coast.

Then one day Eric was walking along Chambers Street in downtown Manhattan. Though not far from Wall Street and all that, the area was still undeveloped, still not on the yuppie radar. Soho ("south of Houston") was already going upscale but the Chambers Street area —about to be popularized by realtors as Tribeca (“triangle below Canal”)— not so much. Taped to the front door of a 19th-century building at 143 Chambers Street was a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying the space was for rent. A phone call was made and Eric and I met with the owner, an older gentleman who had closed up his decades-long business there, Universal Eggs, Butter & Cheese, and was looking to rent out the space. It was spacious indeed: 80% of the ground floor, all of the basement, and all of the sub-basement. The price? $300 a month. Okay, with inflation that's $1,350 a month today, but still..

We were there for seven years and probably never realized how lucky we were. The studio was the spawning ground for many new shows and home to countless workshops, classes, labs, and of course parties! And thanks to the essential work of dozens of volunteers, we launched two influential international clown-theatre festivals on a shoestring budget. Given the space and the affordability, a wonderful clown community grew out of the dust and mold of old egg crates and conveyor belts. Even with our improvements, including eradicating the rat population and bribing the Con Ed inspector to turn on the electricity, it was never a candidate for Architectural Digest, to put it mildly. But as that song from A Chorus Line goes, "it wasn't paradise... it wasn't paradise... but it was home."

Top: covers of programs for 1983 and 1985 festivals.  
Lower left: This publicity photo by Jim Moore of Fred Yockers and myself for our clown-theatre show, A Beautiful Friendship, was shot just a few blocks away! What is now snazzy Hudson River Park was then just landfill.  
Lower right: That’s a slightly younger me on the slack wire, rigged between two steel I-beams we had attached to the floor and the ceiling, which was at least 16' high.

Over the years, the original gang of four —Eric, Fred, Peter Hoff, and myself —morphed so that at the end, I was the only one left. My loft partners had become Joe Killian & Liz Reese (who lived there); Mike Seliger; and Catherine Turocy and her New York Baroque Dance Company —still active today! But a lease is a lease and it ended in 1987. And by then Tribeca was highly desirable, and our studio would soon be a restaurant. But by that time I was a father and had, not coincidentally, taken a job teaching full-time at Bloomfield College in New Jersey, as well as two days a week in the theatre program at Juilliard.

At Bloomfield I actually had my own theatre, but no theatre department, and also a large room where we had circus classes. Yes, I created/directed many shows, but with students who ranged from talented, enthusiastic and hardworking to (more likely) those lacking experience and enthusiasm. It's not enough to have the space. You also need the possibility of getting together there with the people you want to get together with!

And I had zero time outside of Bloomfield, Juilliard, and fatherhood. I naively thought I could still do it all, clown-theatre included, but inevitably I was pulled away from active participation in the clown scene. The birth of another son and my wife Susan's illness took me farther away.... for something like 15 years.

Soundance Studio (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
Yes, the same Willliamsburg. Fast forward a couple of decades and I have been lured back to the clown world bit by bit (so to speak) by some old friends who should have known better. In 2011 or so, I was invited by Audrey Crabtree to do a weekend workshop for the new version of the NY Clown-Theatre Festival in now hip but not totally gentrified Williamsburg, and that workshop led to many of the participants wanting to continue working together. Audrey knew of a space to rent by the hour right there in Williamsburg, SounDance Studio on N. 7th Street. The price was right, the space was large, and it was conveniently located two blocks from the L train.

 

This morphed into the NYC Physical Comedy Lab (fizcom lab), which started as a closed group of eight people. After a promising start, that petered out and led to me working with lab stalwarts Audrey Crabtree and Billy Schultz on No Reservations, again at SounDance. About a year after that, I had an idea for another lab for a larger crowd. In February 2015, if not earlier, Lab version 2.0 was launched, a twice-a-month, 3-hour open lab where anyone with $10 to throw in the hat was welcome. Yes, again at Soundance.

We took turns leading warmups, improvs, and exercises, and teaching a variety of skills that ranged from rope spinning to knife throwing to partner acrobatics to yo-yo to, well, just about anything. Anyone could bring new material to get group feedback, and many did. 

Full article on the lab by Ben Robinson in VANISH magazine.

Yes, that's Bindlestiff's Keith Nelson, totally unaware of what I've hurled  his way.

Our trick doors, built by Adam Strauss (theatricalcontrivances.com)

Every lab was different, but always a great cross-section of eccentrics.

It was a large space, especially by New York standards, and I was even allowed to store all my physical comedy gear there at no extra cost, which included three trick doors, half a dozen mats, all kinds of juggling equipment, weird props, and weirder costumes. A sizable corner of the room. At that price, I could afford to run the lab and rent the space for myself for three mornings a week, four hours each morning, always biking from my lower Manhattan apartment over the bridge and back, though on Fridays that included an essential detour to buy several pound of smoked salmon at Acme Smoked Fish Friday in Greenpoint, a habit I gratefully picked up from Stanley Allan Sherman.

The lab averaged around ten people per session, but had as many as 17 —though one week only Hilary Chaplain and I showed up. But all in all the lab was a great success, a gathering ground for the clown community, and a place out-of-town performers could come to and immediately make friends. I'll cover some stuff we did there in other posts, but meanwhile check out all the video on the Facebook page, NYC Physical Comedy Lab. The lab continued for more than five years, until covid hit and what we did became risky in a way we could never have imagined.

But how was all this possible? Because SounDance director Vanessa Paige was a true friend of performers, and rented the space for $15 an hour. I believe it was film director Otto Preminger who said, "As usual with artists, the only problem is money."

Falling Coyote Studios (Greenwood Lake, NY)

Clearly I loved having a studio for all the reasons above, but I especially loved having it available 24/7. So when Riley and I, both native Manhattanites, finally started that search for a country escape, building my own studio there was a fantasy that took wings. The more I thought about it, the more it became an essential part of the purchase, meaning the new property would have to have enough space for the studio, and that I'd be able to roll out of bed and be there in a New York minute. In the summer of 2018, Riley and I visited my old clown partner Fred Yockers at his family's home on the San Juan Islands off the NW Washington coast. Over the decades he had added several tools to his belt, one of them being construction. He was more than enthusiastic. He was about to retire from teaching video and volunteered to come east for lengthy stays to help build it. Which was essential, because I had enough money for the construction, but not enough money to pay a team of contractors. Oh yeah, not enough knowledge either, though that's rarely stopped me.

By then we had narrowed our search to Greenwood Lake, which we were familiar with from having visited our late-great clown friend, Jan Greenfield and his wife Gunnel and kids Hannah and Daniel. And it was indeed there that we found our log cabin in the woods, luckily closing on it a couple of weeks before covid hit. That June, Fred made his first of many lengthy work trips from somewhere in the Pacific to somewhere near Greenwood Lake. It took him longer to get to Seattle for the flight than it did to get from Seattle to here.

Jan's clown costume and clown spirit
look down on us from up on high

Fred and I naively thought we could build the studio in under a year. Oh boy. But build it we did, though the work spanned closer to three years, seemed endless, and required a brigade of fellow clown/would-be carpenters, too numerous to list here. But at the top of the list is Fred Collins (New Jersey Fred), who joined Fred Yockers (west-coast Fred) and myself as our third partner in constructive folly. Other clowns made frequent contributions, particularly Michael Zerphy (all the way from Vermont) and Adam Auslander. And it was especially gratifying that Gunnel, Daniel, and Hannah Greenfield also pitched in, helping perpetuate a project that Jan had in many ways inspired. 

I am very thankful that west-coast Fred made the movie below about building the studio and what's been going on there ever since, because it does a better job than I could possibly do writing about it. Enjoy!

I do like it when visitors see this movie because I think it's important for them to realize that the studio wasn't the result of some rich guy writing a check, but rather was the product of some ridiculously hard work over several years by many clowns —whose average age was well above 70!

The movie shows some of the creative work being done at the studio, but here's a quick summary:
• Rehearsals for a variety of shows
• Performances, which have included Deborah Kaufmann's Veni Vidi Vici and Michael Zerphy's Bedutzed.
• Parties, especially our big June 2025 clown reunion, dubbed Clownmageddon by Judy Gailen.
• Work-in-progress 3-day labs, which of course we had to call Labmageddon. These have been wonderful and will get a blog post down the road.

• And last but not least, as a personal workout space for my brain and body!

Clownmageddon (June 2025)

I prefer to think of a performing arts studio as more of a community center than a business, so I don't rent out Falling Coyote. It is available to friends and kindred spirits and you can't give me money. All we ask is some sort of "soft barter," which has ranged from helping out with the work (there's always work to do around here), to cooking meals, to (in one case) sharing some of your weed crop, which of course I would only use for medicinal purposes.

Y'all come visit...

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• If you ever frequented 143 Chambers Street back in the day, you might be interested in this short history of the building (dating back to the 1830s!) by Tom Miller in Tribeca Citizen.
• You can read Ben's whole Movers & Shakers article on the NYC Physical Comedy Lab here.
• It was Michael Zerphy who came up with the name Falling Coyote, which is especially apt because our address is 11 Cliff Road. There are other connections to the Road Runner / Wile E. Coyote cartoons, but that too is another post.

April Fools! 1957: The Spaghetti Harvest

 [post 462]

It would have been way too predictable for me to try to fool you on April Fool's Day, but this BBC video from 1957 was actually just such a joke, likely the first April Fool's prank by a major broadcaster. I remember seeing it on the tv show, Tonight Starring Jack Parr, and since I still remember it, obviously it made an impression, either because I thought it very funny or perhaps because I actually fell for it at the time. I was eight, after all. I was reminded of it again when my old clown partner Fred Yockers sent me a clip of it. This is the original BBC version:

I love the deadpan documentary style. As Eddie Cantor said about Laurel & Hardy, "It's their seriousness that strikes me. They play everything as if it might be Macbeth or Hamlet." Also, I suspect what Jack Parr showed was condensed for an American audience, as are some of the versions you will find on YouTube. Which is a shame, because what really sells this for me is all the detail, both in the narrative and in the visuals. After all, art is in the details, and comedy is an art.

Rejected Workshop Proposals

 [post 461]

Caroline Simonds sent me the video below, describing it not only as "the best moment in Switzerland" but also "the highlight of the conference." Caroline is an old friend (but younger than me) who moved to France in 1991 and brought hospital clowning with her, establishing Le Rire Médecin, which through her leadership became a large and highly respected organization for French hospital clowning. Her 2024 book, Le Rire Médecin: Journal du Docteur Girafe, was the inspiration for the wonderful French film, Sur un Fil  (On the Edge).

The conference (in Lausanne) was HCIM 2026 — Healthcare Clowning International Meeting. Several of  my clown friends from the New York area were there and had a great experience. 

I wasn't at the conference, but I thought this presentation on Rejected Workshop Proposals was indeed very funny. Enjoy!

Rule by Slapstick: Another Fine Mess by Donald Trump

[post 460]

An article about Trump's attack on Iran from the Financial Page in the highbrow New Yorker —Trump’s Inexcusable Unpreparedness for the Iranian Oil Crisis— was the last place I expected to find a discussion of Laurel & Hardy. But I think the writer, John Cassidy, nailed this one:

Nothing is certain, except the fact that the President is floundering, making conflicting statements from one day to the next about how long the war will last. As it continues, rule at the whim of a strongman seems to be giving way to rule by slapstick. Growing up in England, I spent countless hours watching the comedies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, which the BBC showed all the time. In each show, the two nitwits would set out on some caper, which would inevitably go horribly wrong, leaving them broke, or tied up, or in jail, or hanging over a cliff, or some other situation of great peril. At which point, Ollie would turn to Stan and say, “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”

Trump is turning into Oliver Hardy.

Yep. 

And I am admittedly proud to point out that I have for a very long time been making the case that physical comedy (and by extension clowning) is inherently political in that it showcases human error and undercuts the delusional arrogance and inflated self-esteem that the high and mighty rely on to justify and perpetuate their position of power. In my 1987 article for Yale Theater, Zen and the Heart of Physical Comedy: The Revenge of Murphy's Law, I made a similar argument to Cassidy's:

A closer look at last year's hit parade of catastrophes offers compelling evidence that clown behavior has infiltrated its way into the highest echelons of society. The meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is surely an example of Laurel & Hardy at their most mischievous. In an attempt to complete an experiment on the power capability of the reactor's steam-driven turbines, the plant's resident clowns cleverly executed a series of maneuvers that in effect dismantled the reactor's safety features one by one.

This Russian two-reeler is full of laughs as our fiercely determined technicians, Laurelovitch and Hardyofsky, find perfectly good reasons to turn off the emergency cooling system, remove all but a few control rods while leaving the reactor operating, and disengage all safety systems designed to implement automatic shutdown. When Mrs. Hardyofsky — in this version played by a Soviet nuclear expert — returns home, she is shocked beyond belief to learn that the menfolk have deliberately disabled so many safety and warning systems, then run the reactor in a very unstable condition. But they did, and our little tragi-comedy ends with the prospect of millions of people, even the unborn (politely referred to as third- and fourth party victims), paying the price in sequels yet unfilmed.

Another fine mess was created by NASA engineers and administrators who allowed the Challenger space shuttle to be launched although several warnings of potential danger had been sounded. NASA's need to perpetuate a public image of having effectively vanquished the hazards of space flight — to have rendered it so routine that they could now rocket a schoolteacher into orbit — guaranteed that their infallibility would be shattered.

This American silent movie classic opens with engineer Laurel frantically gesticulating as he tries to get the attention of his boss, a very busy and self-important Mr. Hardy. The subtitles tell us that Laurel wants to warn Hardy about the weakness of the o-ring seals. But we can see that a vain Mr. Hardy is too busy impressing his big-shot friends to listen. The final image is unforgettable, as the camera dissolves on a whimpering engineer Laurel, stammering through his tears. The subtitle reads, "But Ollie, that's what I was trying to tell you all along."

Finally, I never tire of quoting Henry Miller from his The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. He said it first (1959) and he said it better:

How little the public understood! To be a clown was to be fate's pawn. The life in the arena was a dumb show consisting of falls, slaps, kicks —an endless shuffling and booting about. And it was by means of this disgraceful rigolade that one found favor with the public. The beloved clown! It was his special privilege to reenact the errors, the follies, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself, that was something even the dullest oaf could grasp. Not to understand, when all is clear as daylight; not to catch on, though the trick be repeated a thousand times for you; to grope about like a blind man, when all signs point the right direction; to insist on opening the wrong door, though it is marked Danger!; to walk head on into the mirror, instead of going around it; to look through the wrong end of a rifle, a loaded rifle! —people never tired of these absurdities because for millennia humans have traversed all the wrong roads, because for millennia all their seeking and questioning have landed them in a cul-de-sac. The master of ineptitude has all time as his domain. He surrenders only in the face of eternity.. 

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• Hardy usually said "another nice mess," but they did make a film Another Fine Mess (1930), and this has been more frequently copied as a catch phrase ever since. Take your pick... 

• When I say "...physical comedy (and by extension clowning)..." what I am thinking is that most clowning is physical, the clown character's vulnerability is revealed through the body. So clowns are nearly always physical comedians but physical comedy moments can happen to anyone, and can be depicted in dance, opera, serious drama and film, and can be described in literature and personal narratives. So (almost) all clowns are physical comedians but physical comedy can and often does exist without clowns.

• I first asked Claude, the AI program from Anthropic —the company that actually stood up to Trump— if it would alter the Laurel & Hardy image below to make it look like a worried Trump and Hegseth.  It declined: "Placing real people's faces — including public figures like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth — into existing images or scenes is something I have to decline, as it creates potentially misleading or manipulative depictions of real individuals." Fair enough.

 Then before giving it any specifics, I asked ChatGPT if it would perform such an edit. It gave a qualified yes, but said that "I can’t create deceptive edits meant to impersonate real people in harmful ways." I said it wasn't deceptive and that it was obviously satirical and I sent the photo. And it did it! But I was worried people would not immediately recognize Hegseth from the first image ChatGPT generated so I had it re-do it with Vance instead, as you can see above. And since these AI programs are always offering to do more, it of course wrote: "If you decide to use it for a blog post or talk—especially given your interest in physical comedy history—you could also play with a few small variations: removing the “BIG BUSINESS” title so the image reads more like a still from the film, aging the typography to match the original intertitle style, or even adding a silent-film style caption beneath it. The Laurel & Hardy visual grammar is surprisingly flexible. If you ever want to push the gag further—say, turning it into a fake 1920s lobby card or a newspaper-style still from a “lost Laurel & Hardy short”—that can be done too." It's endless....

• I don't know if The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder is a novella or a long short story, but it is my favorite piece of clown fiction. Sigfrido Aguilar and I even co-directed a student dramatization of it at Ohio University back in the mid-80s. But I mention loving the book because I see it only gets 3.6 stars on Goodreads (2,263 ratings), but if you read this blog, I'm betting you will have a much keener appreciation of it.

I Guess I Can't Get Enough of Sid Caesar

[post 459]
I recently came across two more Sid Caesar pieces that I liked so much that I had to share them here. And that's even though I've already written about Caesar several times over the years:

Sid Caesar Was My Father
And Imogene Coca my mother. But only for a day or two, and not as publicly as I might have liked. The year was probably 1958.....

Sid Caesar's "Gallipacci" or the Fine Art of Gibberish
Sid Caesar (1922–2014).... was one of the truly great American comedians. He was also the King of Gibberish, fluent in faking many a foreign language....

Gibberish (Say What?
Perhaps the best gibberish comedian was "my father" Sid Caesar. His one-sided duel with Drew Carey on Whose Line Is It, Anyway? has been yanked from YouTube, but...

But, nothing! I was inspired to track down a copy of this, and added it as a bonus here, as well as restoring it to that older post.

Sid Caesar (1922–2014)
The king is dead. You can read the whole NY Times obituary here and...

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So... let's go straight to that Caesar appearance at the age of 79 on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, a funny-enough improv game show that ran for eight seasons a decade ago. Our hero talked circles around Drew Carey, no slouch himself, but what I really enjoyed was Caesar's use of gesture and facial expressions, as he acted out every nationality. And as I wrote in that earlier post, in real life Caesar spoke only two languages, English and Yiddish!

Beethoven's 5th
I love this 1954 pantomime marital battle between Caesar and Nanette Fabray, choreographed to the opening music of Beethoven's Fifth, which I just learned is known as the fate motif. That seems quite fitting here! Fabray (1920–2018)  grew up as a singing and dancing child vaudevillian who performed as Baby Nanette, and later studied opera at Juilliard.

A Streetcar Named ????
Elia Kazan's movie of Tennessee Willliams' play A Streetcar Named Desire was a big hit when it opened in September, 1951, with Marlon Brando sensational as the tough, blunt-spoken Stanley Kowalski fighting for his wife's allegiance against the intrusion of his demure, Southern belle sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois, played by Vivien Leigh.

In this parody from April, 1952, it's Caesar doing battle royale with Imogene Coca, with Betty Furness caught in between.

If you like Sid Caesar as much as I do, you'll be happy to know that this probably is not my last such post, because I just ordered what is purported to be the most complete collection of Caesar material. I doubt it's definitive, but I'm sure I'll find us some goodies. Note to researchers: not everything is on the internet. Sometimes you still have to buy DVDs

Philippe Gaulier in Performance "We broke 200 plates every night"

 [post 458]

I never met or studied with Philippe Gaulier (1943–2026), who passed away on February 1st at the age of 82, but many of my friends did. While some found his confrontational, via negativa teaching style not to their liking, most found his pedagogy valuable and indeed many returned to his school in Étampes for multiple sessions. Either way, it is hard to exaggerate the enormous influence he had on contemporary performance, including but not limited to the clown world. Especially noteworthy is the long list of successful performers who credit him for major breakthroughs in their artistic development, including Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat); Théâtre de Complicité; Roberto Benigni (Like is Beautiful); Aitor Basauri (Spymonkey); Dr. Brown (Phil Burgers); and Geoffrey Rush (Shakespeare in Love). 

Like his mentor, Jacques Lecoq, Gaulier was famous as a teacher, not as a performer, but that wasn't always the case. In the 70s, he toured a highly successful clown show with fellow Lecoq teacher, the Swiss-Romande clown, actor, and musician Pierre Byland, who also became and remains a prominent clown teacher. In fact, I first heard about Gaulier from my original circus mentors, Hovey Burgess and Judy Finelli, when they returned from the 1974 International Mime Festival in Viterbo, Wisconsin. (I had wanted to go, but did not have the money, alas!) Hovey and Judy loved an act, Les Assiettes (The Plates), performed by Gaulier and Byland, in which they broke 200 plates a night. The act even got a brief mention in my book Clowns (1976) in a section on Mimes and Eccentrics:

Franz Josef-Bogner, Pierre Byland, and Philippe Gaulier —all former students of Lecoq— have already achieved some recognition as clown-mimes: Byland and Gaulier work together, performing a plate-smashing act in the tradition of Bagessen.

Earlier in the same chapter, I had written this about Bagessen:

Carl Bagessen, 1868?–1931, developed an entire act around his inability to hold onto dinner plates, while an entire roll of flypaper experienced no difficulty at all sticking to all parts of his body.

Carl Bagessen

The little we know of the Gaulier-Byland act mostly comes from the 1972 video clip below. But first this....

TECHNICAL NOTE: People younger than me (there are a few) sometimes ask to see video of work done by my generation in the 70s and 80s, as if video technology always existed and would have been in use by us. In fact, consumer-level video cameras were not even available until the early 80s and cost $1,000 and up, which would be about $5,000 in today's money. The quality was poor and the physical tape deteriorated fairly quickly. Most of the videos you see of performers from pre-1985 are from movies or, more likely, television shows.

AND now back to our main story, already in progress: While performing Les Assiettes at the Théâtre de Carouge just outside of Geneva, Gaulier and Byland did a short excerpt from the piece as part of an interview with Radio Télévision Suisse to promote their run.

But is this the whole story? Clearly not. Les Assiettes grew into a 90-minute piece, so what we are seeing above is a mere snapshot. In an interview with Christian Hendriksen, Gaulier explained the origins of the piece:

"Pierre was my acrobatic teacher. I had a good reputation at Lecoq’s school as a clown, and he asked me if I wanted to do a show with him for Berlin. Me, I was the guy who makes the decisions and my friend Byland, he was the idiot who follows me. And we went to a catastrophe every time. But it's always like this, a couple of clowns, one thinks he's intelligent and the other, he discovers the hot water, so it gives a good complicity for having fun. We wanted to make people laugh. Breaking plates or kicking ass. And, so at the end we decided to break plates.. [How did you pick?]  I dunno, rock paper, scissors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."

"But the audience told you if you were a good couple. Yes, we were a very good couple, and it's difficult to find. It was a miracle. It's not easy. In the beginning, because we were teachers at Lecoq’s school, we tried the show in front of our students, so it was good. If they laugh or if they don't laugh, we can see if it's funny or not, and the, the students are not very nice with the teacher!"

Both Stanley Allan Sherman and Avner Eisenberg were students at the school that year, and they shared their memories of that first draft with me.

Stanley: "The first test show was at Lecoq’s and was hysterical. The video does not begin to capture how hysterically funny the show was. The timing, the tease, playing off one another, was beyond belief. And it really was 200 plates... it was hard to find quantities of plates that were cheap! Every plate trick/manipulation that you know was in the show. The tease went on for 5 or 10 minutes, slow, then boom boom boom. Then a shitload. Others wanted to do things with meaning but they said, 'No, we’re just breaking plates, the joy of breaking plates... What’s the stupidest thing we could possibly do that was totally worthless? This is what we came up with, how stupid of a show can we create?' Entire show, no other bits for an hour. That’s the type of gall these guys had."

Avner: "Philippe was a teacher at Lecoq when I was there. He and Pierre Byland, another teacher at the school, had a show called, Les Assiettes, in which they broke over 200 plates at every performance. In my second year at Lecoq’s I was one of the few at the school who juggled. Gaulier and Byland asked me to work with them to create two juggling numbers in the show, one sitting side by side, and the other to pass 6 plates. We mocked up plates out of plywood and rehearsed intensively for a couple of weeks. They finally arrived at passing 5 plates competently, always to the surprise of the audience. Pierre caught all the plates, grinned out at the audience, and smashed them on the ground. In the course of this I went from student to teacher to friend; friendships I still treasure. Neither of them knew how at the time of the clip. I wish there was a video of the whole show as it evolved. It was marvelous."

Berlin was a triumph.  Gaulier continues: "So the opening day and after newspapers, we could stay two or three months in Berlin. It was surprising that there were so many people who wanted to invite the show. So we needed a director to come to look at us. Roger Blin was a French actor and director. He directed many things, including the first performances of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Happy Days and Endgame."

The show was said to have run for a year at Le Petit Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris.

"The success of it led to a further 10 years off and on performing it all around the world. We played three or four months in Berlin, Steinham Theater, and after we were invited to Czechoslovakia.  I think in our life about 10 years, but three months here after we teach in local school after three months."

"And you, you stay one hour and a half looking at these two idiots. It's possible. Yeah. It's a long time. It is a rhythm problem. Everybody laughs... you can be more subtle and you have to, like a symphony, you have to play with a different rhythm. You cannot stay on the same rhythm one hour and half, so you change your rhythm, but you have to, to start strong and to finish strong."

Asked in the interview if the broken plates are a symbol for anything, the response was "No. For us, it’s a joke. If people want afterward to imagine things —many people discover symbols, even messages in it— that’s fine. But for us, at the beginning, it’s a gag. Of course a plate can correspond to many things…"

I am sure there is more to be found in the physical archives of the Paris newspapers, in the Odéon archives, and by interviewing Pierre Byland, but I will leave that to some young Ph.D. student searching for a dissertation topic! But I kinda doubt more video exists.

___________________________

• Others have written extensively about Gaulier's teaching, but I did want to include this Stanley Allan Sherman memory: "Lecoq brought Gaulier into teach and he was one of the best teachers I ever had. The nicest, most concerned. He asked for a little photo of every student and at night looked at them, every one. He helped me break new ground."
• The third person in the video is André Chameau, who wrote the music for the show.
• Byland is still active at his Burlesk Center in Cavigliano, Switzerland.
• In The Moving Body, Lecoq gives Byland credit for introducing the red nose to his school's curriculum: “It was Pierre Byland, a student at the school before he returned to teach here, who introduced the famous red nose, the smallest mask in the world, which would help people to expose their naiveté and their fragility.”
• Thank you to Drew Richardson for first alerting me to the video footage.
• The always interesting Trav S. D., in his Travalanche blog (see sidebar list of other blogs), has written a tribute to Gaulier here, with links to a lot of his related posts.