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 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. We took turns leading warmups, improvs, and exercises, and anyone could bring new material to get group feedback. Yes, again at Soundance.

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 here 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 I'd be able to roll out of bed and be there in a New York minute. In the summer of 2018, we 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 to pay a team of contractors.

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, who had settled there with his wife Gunnel and new kids Hannah and Daniel. We 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. Fred Collins became our third partner in constructive folly, and other clowns made frequent contributions, especially Michael Zerphy and Adam Auslander. I am very thankful that Fred Yockers 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 see studios as more of a commuity center than as 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.
• 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.