Traveling across eight countries in a matter of a month or so allowed me to see a whole lot of bloggable performance, but left me very little time to edit video or to write. The result was only one post, though a substantial one: my recent report on the Antibes Street Theatre festival. I thought I'd catch up now that I'm in one place here in Dikili, Turkey, where all I'm doing is saving you, your grandchildren, and planet Earth from extinction and all that other messy stuff. In other words, teaching a lot and learning even more at the Climate Advocacy Institute, where I'm heading a Bloomfield College Creative Arts & Technology team working in collaboration with OSI (the Open Society Institute), Tactical Tech Collective, 350.org, and IndyAct training activists to prepare for COP 15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference this December in Copenhagen.
All fine and good, but disaster has struck, at least in terms of this blog. For starters, internet service here has been spotty at best, at times non-existent. To make matters worse, YouTube is blocked in Turkey and the proxy servers (vtunnel; hidemyass; etc.) aren't doing the trick this year. Yes, it's hard to do this kind of blog without YouTube! All of which I might be able to work around, but right after finishing the Antibes post my lovely Mac laptop died, dead as a doornail. In NYC I live five blocks from an Apple Store; here I'm five countries away. This means I am suffering the ultimate indignity of having to type on a Windows computer, and with a Turkish keyboard no less. But the really sad news is that my Mac had a ton of performance video and half-written blog posts on it, which may indeed be lost forever, but I won't know for sure until I reach London or New York. Yeah, yeah, I know I should have backed it up, but I wanted to travel light for a change and not lug a firewire drive around for ten weeks.
So the blog will be back at full delta force, maybe not The Day After Tomorrow, but certainly by the last week of July; meanwhile, if you have any London physical comedy recommendations for me for the week of July 20th, drop me a line!
Update: Back in NYC, and yes it was total hard drive failure, lost some good stuff but did have some things backed up. Hope to have computer back by end of the week and start posting soon thereafter. — jt (7-30)
As many of you know better than I, street theatre and circus are flourishing in Europe, thanks in no small part to government funding of the arts. The happy result is that it seems like every town has its street theatre festival, where you can spend the day or even a long weekend catching a wide variety of international performers and consuming a whole lot of calories. I think museums are okay in moderation, but hanging out at a performance festival, especially one outdoors, gives me a much better feel for a place and its people. The fact that it's free doesn't hurt either.
Antibes (France) had a three-day festival the last weekend in May — Déantibulations: Festival Arts de Rue — and I got to spend a good part of Saturday there. Antibes is just 20 minutes west of Nice and is known as the former haunt of Pablo Picasso and current site of a significant Picasso museum, the outside of which I distinctly remember seeing as I dashed from one performance site to the next.
Here are some video highlights of last year's festival:
And here's some footage I shot just to give you the feel of this year's event... Disclaimer #1: Video Footage
All video is shot on a cheapo ($135) Flip camera and thrown together on the fly. Hey, it's only a blog!
Disclaimer #2: My Festival Attention Span As much as I enjoy these festivals (coming soon: report on the Berlin Street Theatre Festival), I like to do other things too, so chances are I'm only going to see a fairly small part of the festival. I'm not attempting a comprehensive report, and for all I know I may be missing some phenomenal performances. As the French say, such is life.
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The first show I saw was Hocus et Pocus, a comedy duo in diapers whose premise is that they are Siamese twins, joined together by a large plastic umbilical cord, each one unable to function without the other. Here's a YouTube clip of their work:
As you can see, they've got some truly nifty juggling/manipulation chops, and I found a lot to like in their work. They also do a lot of other stuff — knife throwing, music, a levitation gag, etc. — which you don't see in the above video; here's a quick look at their one-man band duet from Antibes:
At the festival, however, I felt the show needed to be a lot tighter (yes, shorter), especially running as it did close to an hour in the hot sun. The umbilical cord premise was interesting enough — the desire for freedom, the necessity of cooperating — but once you set up a push-pull relationship like that, I think it really has to become your story and you have to build everything around it. The characters have a situation to deal with and I wanted to see the tricks grow more out of their attempts to problem solve. Disclaimer #3: Storytelling Hey, I warned you in my blog intro (over there in the sidebar >> ) that I like physical comedy that deals with context and storytelling, but the flip side is that I'm over-sensitive to comic premises that get dropped half way through a show. It doesn't mean I can't enjoy the show, just that I'd like to see them go further with their ideas. Okay, so maybe I am too literal-minded....
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Next up was a trio performing a piece called Le Tennis, basically a partner juggling act but two of the performers were opponents in a tennis match, passing and sometimes hurling the clubs at each other over the net, with a percussionist-referee providing comic commentary. They had changed the venue because of windy conditions near the waterfront, so I got there late and only saw the last half of this, but what I did see was performed with flair and considerable skill, and was quite popular with the crowd. The festival site doesn't provide any info on these guys, and I haven't found a web site link, but here's some footage I shot from the back of the crowd showing them mixing a little kung-fu with tennis and juggling.
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While waiting for the featured evening act, I caught a few musical acts —a hip-hop group, a large ensemble playing Brazilian music, and a French reggae band — all a lot of fun, and also caught an interesting theatre piece by Sara Martinet called The Bath. This was dance, not physical comedy, but it had a nice sense of whimsy, inventive use of props, dynamic rhythm changes, and a performer with a strong presence and wide range of movement. The collaboration between dancer and percussionist (Jean-Philippe Carde) was excellent, and the score worked quite well with the movement. I feared it would be too dry and artsy for my plebeian tastes, but I thought it was excellent, as did the crowd.
Here's her Vimeo clip:
And here's some Flip camera footage of the piece at the festival:
Milo e Oliviain Klinke
Although this was a street theatre festival, several of the acts involved elaborate set-ups that one would not usually associate with the low-maintenance mises-en-scène adapted by most street performers. Such was the case with Milo e Olivia, from Italy (Accademia del Circo di Cesenatico), by way of Blue Lake, California (Dell'Arte School) and Montreal (Ecole Nationale de Cirque), who drew a large crowd to their prime-time Saturday night spot.
Klinke, a "poetically comic new circus show," is the story of two oddballs — a porter and a vagabond who apparently travels the world inside of wooden crates — who meet, fall in love, flirt and fight, but in the end unite. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. The plot doesn't always make perfect sense, and the skills are somewhat arbitrarily incorporated into the story. But so what? The performers were so engaging, the circus work so varied and at such a high level, and the non-stop inventiveness so refreshing that the end result was delightful. Here's a video from their web site, which will give you some idea of their work:
Unfortunately, I think this rally fails to capture the energy and the spirit of the live performance. Partly it's the classical music background, not in keeping with the show's eclectic music choices. (I especially liked their use of Bjorg's It's Oh So Quiet.) Partly it's just that video and live performance are not the same thing (so get off your ass and go see some live performance!). Here's part of their diabolo routine shot live in Antibes, though cut off when I ran out of batteries. (Note to Self #1: always bring extra batteries. Note to Self #2: read notes to self.)
Among his many skills, Milo is a master of the unsupported ladder. A couple of live clips from Antibes:
All in all, a good time...
You have to hand it to those French. As long as you don't actually read the pretentious program notes, much less expect the acts to live up to all that poetic hyperbole crap, they do produce some good shows and, as always, attract international talent that may not get as much support on their home turf.
The first movie comedy I saw starred Danny Kaye. I might have been 6 or 7 and I laughed so hard that I still remember thinking, gee, I didn't know anything could make you laugh that hard. My first Jacques Tati movie was Playtime. I was 19 and in Europe for the first time and, despite a show biz childhood, I had seen little if any silent film comedy. I was amazed. I remember thinking, zut alors, I didn't know you could do that! It was as if I had discovered a new art form.
Although Playtime lost a lot of money, Tati's legacy is in very good shape. His stature has grown, his movies are finding a new international audience on DVD, and this summer he is the subject of a retrospective in France housed at the Cinemathèque Française (through August 2nd), but with events outside of Paris as well. Here's a very short promo for the Tati exposition:
Authorized Digression: Did you see Tati's trademark pipe in that short animation? Well, believe it or not, they had to remove it from the print posters in the Paris métro:
Yep, I find that amazingly stupid (and I'm fairly anti-tobacco). What's next, Chaplin's cane? But what do you think? I think it's about time this blog had a Raging Controversy! Don't be shy — cast your vote in the poll (Raging Controversy #1) in the sidebar to the right.
There are a ton of Tati clips on YouTube, but you might want to avoid them. Better to see the whole movie to really get the whole picture. Tati weaves a complete tapestry with each movie, and what makes him unique is the overall world he creates, far more than just the isolated gag. [See the André Bazin article link below.] Furthermore, his cinematographic style and his sense of detail are best appreciated on the widest screen available; he even shot Playtime in 70 mm. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday and Playtime are good starting points, though others will certainly argue for Mon Oncle, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1958.
What is singular about Tati is his ability to find physical comedy in everyday life. He is the master of observational visual humor; one critic labeled him "an entomologist of the material world." Despite some big gags such as the fireworks scene in Hulot's Holiday, most of his stuff is subtle and quirky. Often the main event happens off-camera, and our imagination is left to fill in the blank. "I want the film to start when you leave the theatre," Tait explained.
Although he has a great eye for social interaction, we know very little about Tati's characters, his alter ego Hulot included, and there is nothing that you could call a plot. People come together, they interact. Hulot, usually too old-fashioned for this modern world, struggles mightily with his environment, with the world of things, but nevertheless exudes a contagious joie de vivre, most appreciated by the very young and the very old. Before long the characters go their merry ways with tales to tell and fond memories of that odd man. End of story.
Tati is not the only director to attempt to revitalize the silent film form after The Jazz Singer (1927) precipitated its fall from public favor. To my mind, however, he may be the only one who truly succeeds, and he does so by finding his own style rather than by imitating the classics. I believe it was the Czech clown Bolek Polivka who said something to the effect that if you're going to be silent, there needs to be a reason. Rather than choose silence, Tati relegates actual dialogue to background chatter. Environmental sounds and human speech are part of a broader soundscape that works seamlessly with the visual humor. Buster Keaton, who commented that "Tati started where we left off," is said to have been so impressed that he asked Tati about working on new soundtracks for Keaton's silent films.
Just as it's hard to capture the essence of Tati in a YouTube clip, one might also wonder what a museum exhibit can add to the actual films. At least I wondered that. Here's what the expo has to offer in Paris:
• A museum exhibit at the Cinemathèque with props, costumes, and dozens of screens with clips from the movies and from his life.
Good job here. Tons of costumes and props, some original, some reconstructed. Models of sets. Dozens of monitors showing not just clips but also some nice thematic compilations of Tati's work juxtaposed with that of other directors.
A life-sized reconstruction of the set for Mon Oncle.
I didn't get to see this, but you can see a video of it going up here.
A screening of a fully restored "director's cut" version of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.
This was wonderful. The movie is 87 minutes long, but it felt like 50. If this comes to a movie theatre near you, don't miss it! Like I said, a large screen does make a difference.
A commemorative book, Jacques Tati : Deux temps, trois mouvements.
I bought it, I like it, but not necessarily a must-have. Tons of images and documents and about 75 pages of short pieces on Tati, mostly by other artists. You can buy it here from the French Amazon.com
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Finally, I know I said that YouTube wasn't necessarily a good way to get to know Tati, but here are a few unusual clips you might miss. The first is said to be Tati's first screen appearance (he speaks!) dating from 1935:
The next is Tati dancing, again from an early short, The School for Postmen(1947). You can see the whole movie here. (In two parts.)
And you can even sing "the Jacques Tati":
Update: Alert reader Jonathan Lyons has alerted me to another Tati song, Jacques Tati by the El Caminos. It's available on iTunes, but I also found it here.
Other Perspectives:
David Kehr on Playtime:
Jacques Tati's Playtime is perhaps the only epic achievement of the modernist cinema, a film that not only accomplishes the standard modernist goals of breaking away from closed classical narration and discovering a new, open form of story-telling, but also uses that form to produce an image of an entire society. After building a solid international audience through the 1950s with his comedies Jour de fête, Mr. Hulot's Holiday, and Mon Oncle, Tati spent ten years on the planning and execution of what was to be his masterpiece, selling the rights to all his old films to raise the money he needed to construct the immense glass and steel set—nicknamed "Tativille"—that was his vision of modern Paris. The film—two hours and 35 minutes long, in 70mm and stereophonic sound—opened in France in 1967, and was an instant failure. It was quickly reduced, under Tati's supervision, to a 108-minute version, and further reduced, to 93 minutes and 35 monaural, when it was released in the United States in 1972. Even in its truncated form, it remains a film of tremendous scope, density, and inventiveness.
Playtime is what its title suggests—an idyll for the audience, in which Tati asks us to relax and enjoy ourselves in the open space his film creates, a space cleared of the plot-line tyranny of "what happens next?," of enforced audience identification with star performers, and of the rhetorical tricks of mise-en-scène and montage meant to keep the audience in the grip of pre-ordained emotions. Tati leaves us free to invent our own movie from the multitude of material he offers.
One of the ways in which Tati creates the free space of Playtime is by completely disregarding conventional notions of comic timing and cutting. There is no emphasis in the montage to tell us when to laugh, no separation in the mise-en-scène of the gag from the world around it. Instead of using his camera to break down a comic situation—to analyze it into individual shots and isolated movement—he uses deep-focus images to preserve the physical wholeness of the event and long takes to preserve its temporal integrity. Other gags and bits of business are placed in the foreground and background; small patterns, of gestures echoed and shapes reduplicated, ripple across the surface of the image. We can't look at Playtime as we look at an ordinary film, which is to say, passively, through the eyes of the director. We have to roam the image—search it, work it, play with it.
With its universe of Mies van der Rohe boxes, Playtime is often described as a satire on the horrors of modern architecture. But the glass and steel of Playtime is also a metaphor for all rigid structures, from the sterile environments that divide city dwellers to the inflexible patterns of thought that divide and compartmentalize experience, separating comedy from drama, work from play. The architecture of Playtime is also an image for the rhetorical structures of classical filmmaking: the hard, straight lines are the lines of plot, and the plate glass windows are the shots that divide the world into digested, inert fragments. At one point in Playtime, M. Hulot stands on a balcony looking down on a network of office cubicles, seeing and hearing a beehive of human activity. As an escalator slowly carries him to the ground floor, the camera maintains his point of view, and the change in perspective gradually eclipses the human figures and turns the sound to silence. It is one of the most profound images of death ever seen in a film, yet it is a death caused by nothing more than a change in camera placement. Tati's implication is that life can be restored to the empty urban desert simply by putting the camera in the right position, by finding the philosophical overview that integrates all of life's contradictory emotions, events, and movements into a seamless whole. His film is proof that such a point of view is possible.
So, dear friends, Barack, Michelle and I are in Paris but, man, things are so busy that we don't even get to spend any quality time together. Had to ix-nay the prez on helping out on the trip to Normandy (or as they say in France, Normandie), but at least I got to show him around the Pompidou. Yes, the life of a chief executive is a hectic one, whether you're running a country or a physical comedy blog. Speaking of which, back to work...
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Quote of the Week "What you have to do is create a character. Then the character just does his best, and there's your comedy. No begging." -- Buster Keaton
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• Waiting for Godot New York vs. London Ultimate Smackdown with them fightin' supertramps Bill Irwin, Nathan Lane, Patrick Stewart & Ian McKellen, plus Peter Brook goes mano à mano with Beckett in Paris • Live video report from Déantibulations, the street theatre festival of Antibes, France
• Complete coverage of this summer's Jacques Tati Exposition in Paris What's New this Week
• New posts:The Julians Acrobats, Dick Van Dyke on slapstick, and a Feydeau Performance Report
• New sidebars:Blog Post History, My Other Blogs, the Visitor Counter, and Followers.
Keep Showing Me Your Shows!
Still in Europe (Paris at the moment) and will be here and in Turkey thru July 25th and welcome any suggestions of shows to see, especially physical comedy and physical theatre, but other arts events as well. Here’s my remaining schedule:
June 9 – June 12: Amsterdam
June 13- June 17: Berlin & Poznan
June 18–22: SW Turkey
June 22-26: Istanbul
June 27-July 18: Dikili (Turkey) = work
July 19 – July 25: London
July 26: back in New York
Tech Notes • I have Comments turned on but for some reason it's giving an error message.
• The blog title field seems empty (no title in your browser tab) because Blogspot has been refusing to let me load my banner instead of the title text. Right now I have a workaround that keeps a minimal title (just a period) and allows me to load the banner.
I hope to get both of these fixed soon, but I've learned the hard way that technology can make you less creative and less productive, not more, especially if you let it bog you down spending days on end trying to solve some glitch. I'm seduced by technology but at times miss the old days when if you wanted to write, you wrote, if you wanted to do a show you just rehearsed and did it. (Or didn't rehearse.)
I could, for example, have spent another six months figuring out blog coding to get this site to look the way I really want it to look, but I've wisely made a content-first vow and will deal with design/tech issues as I go. For example, I don't like this narrow 2-column Blogger template, but every time I tried something different I ran into glitches that I'd waste a day or two trying to solve, and meanwhile no blog. So eventually this may have a wider three-column layout and a snazzier design, but one thing at a time, eau-quais?
Georges Feydeau's 1897 farce masterpiece, La Dame de chez Maxim's (The Lady from Maxim's), at the Odéon National Theatre here in Paris was sold out this week, but that didn't stop your intrepid reporter from splurging a whole 3 euros on a rush ticket for a partial view seat in the 2nd balcony. I'm not qualified to write a full-fledged review here, not having read the play in over 30 years and often finding the three and a half hours of French dialogue, as heard from my seat on the fire escape, going too fast for my ears. (Je le lis mieux que je l'écris; je l'écris mieux que je le parle; je le parle mieux que je l'entends.) However, even I could tell the production kicked ass, with especially strong performances from Nicolas Bouchaud as the husband and Norah Krief as a dancer from the Moulin Rouge.
But why should a physical comedy blog devote space to Feydeau?
• Because he was a master of comedy situation and plot
• Because he used all sorts of gags (see below)
• Because he thought visually and, as I've written elsewhere, wrote reams of stage directions, plotting the physical action of his precision farce machinery down to the most minute detail.
So here are two aspects of the production that I thought worth sharing with you clowns.
A typical Feydeau farce is set in an elegant belle époque Paris residence, with bedrooms and salons and the doors that connect them an essential part of the tightly choreographed action. For this production, the director, Jean-François Sivadier, chose to merely suggest the set. Only the essential furniture is there, and what doors and walls are necessary hang by cable from the rafters and come and go as they please. At certain moments, doors even rotate 90 degrees from their base (as if the hinges were on the bottom). For the party scene, the characters mostly sat on chairs downstage facing the audience.
Look's interesting, eh? And it was kind of refreshing, but I ended up being disappointed by it. One of the big jokes of the play is that Monsieur Petypon wakes up to find a woman who is not his wife in his bed — a Moulin Rouge dancer. As was the style, it's actually all very innocent, but before he can sort things out, his chamber is overrun by friends and family, prompting him to tell a few lies that of course backfire, weaving a web of deceit that cannot be happily unraveled until the last scene, shortly before midnight. Petypon's home is his castle, but his castle is being invaded, so walls and doors matter. Not only could they have done more with this, but what they did do seemed inconsistent; for example, breaking the fourth wall by having characters enter from the audience weakened the power of the other walls, so that this abstract representation of Monsieur Petypon's world never became the force it might have been.
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Feydeau loved gags and sure knew how to milk them. In this play, the main gag centers around a chair with magical powers: anyone who sits in it is frozen in place, as is anyone who touches them. Luckily there's a button that unfreezes them, but only Petypon and his best friend know about it. (I had no idea they had such advanced technology back in 1897!) If you think of the gag in physical terms, it's at least a second cousin to your standard Dead and Alive routine.
What's interesting is that, unlike in a variety act, Feydeau has three and a half hours to develop the gag. It first appears fairly early in the play and gets some quick laughs. It doesn't reappear again until the last act, just when we had forgotten about it. Of course you need a reason to repeat it or it would probably prove stale. This Feydeau accomplishes by integrating it into the plot's final farce madness, and by increasing the number of characters frozen (see photo, below). Nicely done!
Finally, if you're in France reading this, you can catch all of this yourself because it will be broadcast live on the Arte network on Wednesday, June 10th à 20h45. Hey, someone tape this for me!
Had lunch today in Paris with Caroline Simonds, who is doing wonderful things with clown care in the city's hospitals (and as far away as Brazil) through her work with Le Rire Médecin. Caroline turned me on to this Dick Van Dyke clip about slapstick comedy, which I somehow never saw before. Not sure of the original context, but I think you'll like.....
Update (12-17-09): Thanks to Laura Fernandez for alerting me to the fact that the original YouTube clip is no longer there. I tracked down the episode (finale of season 1) and here's the clip, but with the scene before it as well, so now we do in fact have the original context. Come to think of it, the context of physical comedy is what this blog is all about, so this blip turns out to be a good thing! One step back, two steps forward...
You can watch the entire episode (with new commercials) on Hulu by clicking here or without commercials on Netflix Instant Play (if you're a member).
I already threw a lot of stuff at you in post 008 about the comic uses of human pyramids (On the Shoulders of Giants: From the 2-High to the 1200-High). Since then I discovered these two short but very cool clips of the Julians Acrobats from 1902-3. It's not comedy, but the series of rapid-fire two-high, risley (foot juggling of people), and tumbling moves is fantastic. The clips are similar and very likely shot at the same time, but with some different tricks in each one. You gotta love the group choreography.
You can read more about the Julians on the interesting web site where I got these clips: Palace of Variety, put together by Charlie Holland, a British juggler and circus educator, and the author of Strange Feats & Clever Turns, "an anthology of illustrated articles on remarkable specialty acts in variety, vaudeville and sideshows at the turn of the 20th century." I don't know this book, but hope to pick up a copy when I'm in London.
The site is not extensive, but does contain some choice goodies, including a series of illustrations of the Hanlon-Lees in Le Voyage en Suisse from a children's book, as well as this poster of a three-high column collapse by the Trevally Acrobats, which I am retroactively adding (in a larger-size version) to post 008.
[post 019]
