Pratfalls at Super Bowl 2012

[post 239]

Sunday's Super Bowl had a couple of moments of unintentional physical comedy, which of course is the best kind, at least if it's happening to someone else. First we had Madonna's near-pratfall, as she stumbles during her half-time show extravaganza:



To her credit, she did recover smoothly and — performing alongside acrobats from the Cirque du Soleil — did execute three partner acrobatic tricks; relatively easy moves, but then she is 53.

Far more amusing was running back Ahmad Bradshaw trying not to score the winning touchdown for the Giants. I was watching this with a large gathering of clown types on the Waterfront Museum barge who found his ass-first drop into the end zone hysterical. This one was funny on two counts. It looked funny, as if he were doing it that way on purpose, which if you didn't understand the intricacies of the game (and some clowns don't!) that's exactly what you would think. After all, no one was near him, so why suddenly come to a screeching halt, turn around, and sit on your prat in the end zone?

The answer — and I think it's much funnier if you understand what he was trying to do —was that the Giants wanted to run out the clock. Since they were pretty assured of scoring at least a field goal, enough of a winning margin, it was more important to use up time before doing so rather than give the Patriots almost a full minute to come back. So Bradshaw barrels full-throttle up the middle, only to discover the defense has no interest in tackling him. He's not dumb, he knows what's going on, but he's a big guy with a lot of momentum, and try though he does, he can't quite stop short. Pratfall!

The good news is that though Tom Brady did get his chance, the Patriots failed to score and the Giants won. Had the Patriots pulled it out, we Giants fans might be finding this more tragic than comic, eh?

You can read more about it here.

Not Exactly Physical Comedy: Wall Trampolining

[post 238]

Apparatus such as unicycles and trampolines are built for stunts. They're cool and all, and excellent comedy has certainly been done with both, but I've always been more drawn to physical comedy that uses objects commonly found in the real world — chairs, tables, doors, stairs, etc. Maybe that's why I also like parkour and flair bartending, living proof of the appeal of circus techniques applied to everyday life.

So all things being equal, I prefer a comedy bicycle act to a comedy unicycle act, and I've most enjoyed trampolining that has incorporated other scenic elements into the act. One such element is a wall (and platform),  transforming trampolining into — you guessed it — wall trampolining. Cirque du Soleil has been doing some version of this for a couple of decades, but now it is is attracting participation by dedicated amateurs and is being touted as the latest, greatest extreme sport, as evidenced by this video piece in last week's NY Times:




Here's the Julien Roberge routine mentioned above.



More theatrical was the wall trampoline act I saw almost two years ago in Cirque de Soleil's Ovo. The sheer number of acrobats and the use of a customized climbing wall, with all its nooks and crannies to hold and step onto, creates a multitude of variations. Here's a one-minute excerpt:

Not exactly physical comedy, but you can see the potential, and I do seem to recall there being a few "king-of-the-mountain" comic moments as rival leapers struggled to supplant one another atop the wall. Likewise, actors (or their stunt doubles) and physical comedians have for centuries been using springboards (usually concealed) to catapult them to heights and distances they could not otherwise reach — what you might call "augmented reality."

Click here for the 2008 showreel for trampolinist, stuntman, and freerunner Damien Walters. This one's all wall trampolining.

Blog Readers Sound Off on Cirque du Soleil

[post 153]

My recent two posts on the Cirque du Soleil, which you can read here and here, elicited some debate on Facebook as well as comments to this blog. Since most of you probably missed this, I thought they might be worth excerpting here.  Nothing like a little controversy!

Is Cirque du Soleil bad for clowning?  Can you do clowning in a large space? Has the Cirque lost its soul? Everyone has an opinion, so feel free to add yours via the comment link at the bottom of this post!

From Facebook:

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    Mandy Dalton Wow, yet another piece of crap from NYT regarding circus. Gee I'm so surprised. It's been a long time since "We Reinvent The Circus." The most compelling part of the show was the clowning. Varekai had some great clowning with Mookie. It's a shame to see cirque turn its back on clown. In the first show it made them.
    

    June 9 at 8:43pm 
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    John Towsen Hmmm... but that sounds like you agree with the Times!?
    

    June 9 at 9:23pm 
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    Mandy Dalton I tried to follow the link with to the article to see the rest.
    

    June 9 at 9:24pm 
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    Mandy Dalton The link seems to be broken--gonna look it up. I just don't like the comments that you captured about "painted on smiles" the usual cliche stuff.
    

    June 9 at 9:26pm 
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    John Towsen Fixed the link. Thanks.
    

    June 9 at 9:27pm
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    Mandy Dalton Now that I have seen the rest of the article I do agree that clowns built Cirque. I had my usual knee jerk reaction to cliche characterizations of clown. "Painted on smile" "Crying on the inside". But the article is interesting and it is a shame that Cirque is turning its back on clown.
    

    June 9 at 9:47pm 
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    Mandy Dalton I am trying to figure out what editor in her right mind would allow the word "twee" in NYT. "Rather, it is because developing a clown act requires more experimentation and spontaneity that the Machine allows time for. And Cirque was built on arty, sometimes twee clowning that can’t fill up a large space like Radio City." How did that end up in a newspaper? Much less a Newspaper like the NYT?
    

    June 9 at 9:49pm 
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    Pat Cashin Didn't Slivers Oakley, Marceline Orbes, Poodles Hanneford, Joe Jackson, Toto, Otto Griebling, Emmett Kelly and A. Robins ALL play the New York Hippodrome? Wasn't the Hippodrome stage LARGER than that of Radio City?
    

    June 9 at 10:03pm 
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    John Towsen Yep. and didn't Shiner himself play a sizable Broadway theatre with Bill Irwin in "Full Moon"?
    

    June 9 at 10:41pm 
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    Mandy Dalton I hate it that the answer in Cirque is that "clown is bad for the space" instead of "Banana Shpeel just didn't work, let's figure out another way to incorporate clown in the show."
    

    June 9 at 10:46pm 

    
    
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    Jango Edwards 
    

    JOHN LETS PUT THE CARDS ON THE TABLE AND BE HONEST FOR ONCE, WHEN IT COMES TO CLOWNS THERE ARE NO REAL CLOWNS IN THIS SUCKUS. OHH THE ALL HIGH AND MIGHTY SOILEIL. THESE GUYS WERE MY STUDENTS YEARS AGO AND IN THE BEGINNING LIKE IN GENISIS AT CREATION IT WAS A GARDEN OF EDEN FOR THE CLOWN ARTIST BUT NOW ITS A MAN MADE HELL BUT TO QUOTE THE ORIGONATORS THEMSELF-WE WANT TO BE THE MC DONALDS OF CIRCUS....WELL CONGRATULATIONS YOU ARE. LOST IN SPACE. PAT ITS NOT ABOUT THE SIZE BIG OR SMALL STAGE ITS ABOUT THE HEART. I'VE PLAYED FOR 150,000 AND FOR ONE AND THAT WAS AS A CLOWN. YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT FELLAS YOU BEEN THERE DONE THAT RIGHT GREG. THATS WHAT THE NOUVEAU CLOWN INSTITUTE WAS CREATED FOR BUT JUST THINK WHAT WE COULD HAVE DONE FOR THE PRICE OF THAT FLIGHT TICKET. NOW THAT WAS AN EXPENSIVE BONER. PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT.

    
    

    June 9 at 11:05pm 
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    John Towsen So it is possible to be a clown for 150,000!?!?
    

    June 9 at 11:17pm 
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    Jango Edwards YES BUT NOT ON THE MOON. AND YOU HAVE TO SHOW A LITTLE MORE THEN USUAL,.
    

    June 9 at 11:18pm 
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    John Towsen Most clowning works better close-up, but of course it all depends on your meaning of clowning. It takes all kinds, blah blah blah. A clown in a cabaret or theatre isn't necessarily better than one in the circus, or vice-versa. All depends.
    

    June 9 at 11:20pm 
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    Jango Edwards JOHN FOR ME THE STAGE IS THE LEAST IMPORTANT PLACE MAYBE THATS WHY I'M HAPPY BUT BROKE. BLAH BLAH BLAH ENOUGH TALK JUST DO IT....NIKE
    

    June 9 at 11:24pm
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    Pat Cashin 
    

    The nature of a clown always changes based on the size of the venue and audience. Things that are perfect for hospital clowning are useless in an arena and vice versa. It doesn't make one style better, just more appropriate to the scale of the venue.
    
    The fact that there were once clowns that COULD successfully work a venue LARGER than Radio City Music Hall means that it CAN be done.
    
    It is just done differently.
    
    Banana Shpeel failed for many reasons. Not least of which was that it WASN'T an actual vaudeville show. A variety show format might have gone over huge in New York if it weren't drowned in Cirque's patented formula of fairy dust and unicorn farts.
    
    Maybe they need to drop their preciousness and pretensions this time, stop trying to reinvent the wheel and instead think about what that wheel really is... and what size tire it needs to work correctly for them; )

    
    

    June 10 at 7:33am · 
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    Jango Edwards Captain Cashin, this discourse demands such an open forum between all of us to share our experience and knowledge with those who will follow and go further. One thought I try to live by is a clown by true definition adapts to his public and not expects his public to adapt to him. Miss ya brother. Keep keepin on.
    

    June 10 at 8:02am 
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    Sue Morrison I agree with that, Jango ..
    

    June 10 at 10:48pm 

And a couple of interesting blog comments:

 David Lichtenstein said...
Rene Bazinet is the most talented clown I ever spent close time with, a truly brilliant performer. (And although he has a German side to him, he's basically Canadian from Winnipeg.) David Shiner is not exactly a slouch in the clown department. All power to them trying to keep some theatrical clown in Cirque de Soleil. Shiner's comment is odd, since he, Bazinet, Geoff Hoyle (who I saw in Cirque years ago) and the famous clowns of the past did make the big arena intimate. 
I am envious of the New York worldview being able to underplay the influence of Cirque de Soleil. Out here in the provincial capitals (Portland, Oregon) Cirque de Soleil brings a show for 6 weeks every two years and outgrosses all Portland theaters by a mile. In the popular American conscious all live theater is small, but within that slice Cirque de Soleil is huge and dominant.

I recently saw the Cirque Beatles Show Love, after not seeing them for 18 years. 20 years ago when I saw Cirque shows in Quebec I used to tell non-circus people that Cirque was bringing the one-ring circus intimacy, the theatricality of circus back to America. Well no more. In Love, there was almost always 4-12 things going on at a time. I had a great time, there was so many interesting characters and costumes to check out but the artistic choices were terrible. Any focus on character, or Beatles themes (There's a lot in those songs after all.) was infantile and always abandoned within two measures of 8 in favor of the next splash of images. It seemed to me an end of live theater, it will be difficult for theater to reach even shorter attention spans with even fast crashing of big imagery. There are physical limits live.


The problem for the USA is that we never had the full small circus, physical theater boom that birthed Cirque de Soleil. Although the 1970's 1980's American juggler-street theater wave helped spark the European Street Theater wave, the much larger European Tsunami of Circus and physical theater never made it back here.


Rene Bazinet and Shiner come from an important generation. Rene studied intensively for years with Decroux and did 3 years at Lecoq with Lecoq and Guallier and other studies. They spread it out with brilliance to the world. Is there no room for theatrical clowning descendants in America? So many forces in America squeeze off small theater. Our Wanderlust Circus http://www.wanderlustcircus.com/ puts on original productions with live bands for $10,000 total production budgets and then there's Cirque de Soleil, where is the midsize physical theater?


The European Street Theater Festival Circuit is driving the European, Australian, and South American new circus/physical theater scenes. Out of the European Street Theater Festivals come the most theatrical new circus work like El Grito. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3orrsDJe2AU


On the West Coast of the USA I think the leadership of the post-hippie generation (Oregon Country Fair, Moisture Festival) is perhaps past it’s peak. I think the new generation of leaders is developing at the second generation Burning Man type festivals that are proliferating. But perhaps their style will be too loud, fast, and rock and roll for the Rene Bazinet/David Shiner brilliant clowns that we love.


Thanks,
David Lichtenstein
Leapin’ Louie Comedy Shows
david@comedytricks.com
http://www.comedytricks.com

June 11, 2011 2:07 PM

 Noah Mickens said...
Hey Leapin'. Noah Mickens here, co-director/producer/ringmaster of The Wanderlust Circus (and Bogville, Queen of Knives, Societas Insomnia, et al.)
I only wish I had the resources available to these fortunate gentlemen who are producing the new Cirque du Soleil shows - what fun we could have. For that matter, I wish that I more frequently had access to the $10,000 mentioned in your comment here.

For better or for worse, the microbudget DIY conditions under which the independent theater troupe labors in the United States has necessitated a more inventive approach. How to do something great using only the limited resources available? "Availabism", as the peerless Kembra Pfahler used to call it in New York.


I've heard that, in most European countries, one is eligible for significant government grants without having to prove that one's artistic efforts are worthy of 501C3 status. The problem with the old 501C3 is that a given troupe simply does not qualify unless they can prove that their work has an educational or charitable component. So you get plenty of money for the Ballet, the Symphony, the Opera; and small troupes must split their time and energy between their actual shows and whatever classes and workshops they have to tack on in order to qualify for the big bucks. I look at current European krewes like Grand Royal and think how much I could do with their budgets too.


But for now, and likely for good, the US just doesn't run that way. To be an artist here, one must find ways of squeezing magic from the everyday. Maybe it's always been like that? And maybe it lends to the hardscrabble spirit of experimentation that brought jazz and vaudeville (and Burning Man) to the world in the first place?


Anyway, back to work. Thanks for drawing my attention to this article.


All you naysayers in the Big Apple listen up - Cirque du Soleil is an amazing organization, capable of inspiring levels of wonder and majesty that Broadway doesn't even comprehend right now. When you stop inflicting garbage like Mama Mia on the world, then you can judge the Cirque.

______________________

Well, I plead not guilty to inflicting Mama Mia on the world — I barely know what it is — but thank you all for your comments.  More welcome below.....

"At Cirque du Soleil no one is more depressed than the clowns."

[post 151]

Or so says the New York Times.  A mere five days after a lengthy profile of Cirque du Soleil co-founder and owner Guy Laliberté, which I wrote about in this post, the Times is back with a three-page preview of Cirque's upcoming debut at Radio City Music Hall, the stage show Zarkana.  And though their previews tend to be fluff pieces, the Times is again raising questions about the Cirque's artistic direction, comparing Zarkana to Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and wondering out loud about the caliber of the theatre and clowning components.

Here are a few quotes:

In an effort to rebound from the rare failure of the intimate “Banana Shpeel” in New York last year, the one thing everyone agrees on is that this will be a very big show. There will be daredevil feats, bold images and high-flying acrobatic spectacle. As Mr. Girard put it: “No theater. No vaudeville. We want to be more Cirque than Cirque.”

Mr. Bazinet’s job is to help guide 15 performers of diverse backgrounds into a comic unit called the Movers. Less than a week earlier he had spoken to his friend David Shiner, the director of “Banana Shpeel,” who told him what he already knew: that clowning at a theater the size of Radio City is impossible. “The clowns are going to die,” Mr. Shiner says. “You need an intimate space for clowning, otherwise you have nothing.”

At Cirque du Soleil no one is more depressed than the clowns. That’s not just because the painted smiles hide a deep-seated sadness, although there is some truth to that stereotype. (“You can’t imagine the number of clowns I’ve seen cry in my life,” Mr. Laliberté says.) Rather, it is because developing a clown act requires more experimentation and spontaneity than the Machine allows time for. And Cirque was built on arty, sometimes twee clowning that can’t fill up a large space like Radio City.

[Okay, I admit it, I thought "twee" was a typo, but it turns out it means "excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental." —jt]

The story is, if anything, more impenetrable. When asked about it, Mr. Girard answers abruptly, Cirque “is not a good place to tell a story, period.”

You can read the whole article here.

And here's a video preview that'll give you some idea of the look of the show; there are more on YouTube.

NY Times: Defiant Showman Demands His ‘Wow’

[post 148]

Guy Laliberté, co-founder and owner of Cirque du Soleil, has done well enough for himself to afford to pay $35 million to be a space tourist. Yes, you read that right; yes, out of his own pocket. Not bad for someone who started as an accordion-playing street performer!

With his latest show, Zarkana, preparing to open in New York at Radio City Music Hall, he and the Cirque are the subject of an interesting enough NY Times profile.

Because the Cirque's Banana Shpeel, an attempt at a vaudeville stage show, bombed so badly in Chicago and New York, there's been considerably more criticism of their artistry, and a lot of pressure on them to bounce back with their next show.  The article does tackle this head-on:

As Cirque has transformed from an arty alternative to traditional big-top circus into what it is today, some suggest it has become emotionally cold and risk-averse. “If Cirque is going to succeed in New York, they need to understand story — and they don’t,” said Richard Crawford, an actor currently in “War Horse” who was fired from “Banana Shpeel” last year. “They have no idea about Aristotelean plotting or character. It’s not in their heart. They come from street performers, and now they are street performance with laser beams and millions of dollars.”

The problem is that audiences have come to expect a certain scale from Cirque, and when they don’t get it, as in the case of “Shpeel,” they may be disappointed. It’s a nagging worry for Mr. Laliberté too. “Are we condemned to only doing big acrobatic shows?” he says, leaning forward with a grave look. “Creatively we have the capacity to do much more. The answer is we can explore new stuff, but we need to give the public a bone to chew on.”

You can read the whole article here.