Dub FX 13/12/2011 in Melbourne. [street theatre]

Dub FX (real name Benjamin Stanford) is a worldwide street performer and studio recording artist from St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia. After playing and singing in a band called Twitch, he set out solo when he moved to Europe. His trademark is creating rich live music using only his own performance aided by Live looping and effect pedals combined with his voice.He creates intricate hip hop, reggae and drum and bass rhythms

Dog Puppeteer in Recoleta

This video was filmed in Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Impro everywhere , 'Say something nice'

People just need structures to trigger permissions to play and celebrate.

Close Act, Street Theatre

Wall-People, Copenhagen

Here's the bare bones.
I was in Copenhagen teaching at a circus school, 'modern clown' a suitably vague and romantic term.
There were initially I think 3 or 4 students but it was very casual,[socialism's casual] no-one but the govt had invested any money, although I did get paid, and there were really only two very curious pupils.

I created a character exercise in which these two, male and female were 'wallpeople' in that their characters existence depended on having a wall at their back.
They explored the room, if a door was open they would have to reach out and close it to be able to move across.
We experimented for a bit, the innate problem was that they could never get past one another, well they did improvise one under, one over and that was a victory in itself.
I told then that the next day we would experiment further on the Strøget, the longest pedestrian st in Europe, [another reason I was there]

The next day they arrive in town in characters they had worked on overnight, one had blackface with big white circles round the eyes and the other was the inverse, whiteface with large dark circles. It stays light late and after the shops had closed, [no more open doorways] we selected a long stretch of shops that faced out onto a square.

They started at opposite ends moving towards each other, as yet unaware of each other and exploring this new strange planet, [clown can be very much like that]
They had decided to make trilling noises as their language and each with fingers and back and arms explored while staring out at passers by.
Copenhagen is used to strange creative goings on, people further back who could see the inevitable, that they would meet, stopped and watched and slowly a crowd formed as they travelled closer to each other.

At some point they saw each other, still separated by 50 feet or so. They went through the scared but curious alternation as they now moved much more tentatively towards each other.

Before meeting, shoulder to shoulder, their eyes darting, scared but inquisitive.
They tried to push past each other but that didn't work.
They tried backing up and sliding into each other at speed, but that didn't work either.
They tried the one up one down method but gave up half way, one on the bottom sitting with legs splayed, one on the top, sorta sitting on the others head.

At this point they could have disengaged and been past each other but they resumed their respective positions, all the while staying wallpeople. This was a far as we had gone in class so I knew they must have something.

I waited, as did now a reasonably large crowd of curious Danes.

They came together again and both scrunched up their faces in a fair approximation of strenuous exertion and then it happened.

Their leading shoulders levered against each other and they popped free of the wall and stood back to back.

The audience laughed and clapped, they themselves were startled and amazed at this new freedom and locked back to back performed a dance, a dance they must have practiced the night before, locked back to back they circled and wove and trilled with joy.

They had good timing and did not overplay this but went back to the wall and transfered themselves against it in the opposite manner than they had left it so that now they had managed to pass each other.

The only prop they both had was they each had a tin can, about as big as your head, that they had carried individually with them along the wall and left there while they initially interacted.

They each now picked up what now was not their can but the others and in a bumbling way returned each others cans.

It was only at this point they recognised they were being watched and so digested the attention of the crowd fearfully and then playfully. One of them had an idea and trilled and gestured with eyes and arms and the other understood.

They pushed mightily against each other and popped free of the wall again, this time tin cans in hand, they strode straight out deliberately, side-step by side-step until halfway between the wall and the facing crowd, they slowly lowered themselves, back to back, placed the cans on the ground, straightened and then scampered back sideways to the wall where they then crouched together, facing out, staring intensely at the cans, wide-eyed.

The first audience member made the break, walking forward and dropping some coin into a can.

The clowns jaws dropped, they turned to each other and in unison, squealed and shook both their fists in joy Then they became immediately serious and stared at the cans again.

This went on for a while, their jaws dropping, the exchanged gleeful eye contact, the squeal and the vibrating fists of joy with the back to serious cut-off until they had milked the moment and the audience sufficiently. They then broke from the wall and bowed, receiving applause, collected their cans, I came up and hugged them and we walked away.

It really was remarkably beautiful what they did. On quite a few levels.

What street theatre is essentially to me and why it's profound.

Look at this. Take the time and look at this or these, one will do, two is better. This whole post, if street theatre interests you, is worth the time to do properly.

NYC - Mindrelic Timelapse from Mindrelic on Vimeo.



Mindrelic - Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.


Now this is New York. A tough city to perform in but it's possible. I wouldn't like to have to survive it long. It's immune system is one of the toughest. Street theatre is a hack and as such it needs rough surfaces to adhere to in terms of public spaces where eddies of public can be formed but New York is sandblasted smooth by the sheer pace of the place.

Looking at these films allows you to see the immensity of the inter-connective systems that dwarf the individual taking part in them.

While we all take trains and busses and do the things we do this huge, almost inconceivably complex system exists as a common cumulative invention that exists to facilitate itself and you could be forgiven in thinking that in a way it's using us as fuel as much as we'd like to think we are using it. When I say 'it' I mean that collective hive we have evolved to sustain us.

Because look here, I say "do the things we do", what is that? Choices are made within certain perimeters by each of us at some formative stage as we decide what it is we are going to be. Education, connections, aspirations, overheads and a multitude of factors are calculated at one point or other in our lives as we decide what role we are going to take in this machine that surrounds us.

And this is just one city. London, Tokyo, Sydney, Paris, the list is long.

Street theatre is it's own tiny system built on some primitive primate level that if done with skill can subvert the larger system and exist temporarily and successfully within these large and complex social machines and unlike any other occupation I can think of it is profoundly a celebration of almost and in some cases literally absurd individualism in the face of the otherwise overwhelming weight to conform to what these complex systems demand of us all in order to achieve our needs.

What other occupation sets as it's ambition to singlehandedly conquer the world?

To travel to NY, to Tokyo, to Paris, to any major city and collect a crowd and do that thing where you tap into what is universally comic and receive in gratitude the means to continue your global conquest.

It is a high risk game but the rewards are nothing smaller than your continued existence on your own terms in a world otherwise riddled with conformity, compromise and subservience.

I cannot think of a more self contained concept and I consider myself very privileged to have stumbled onto it at just that stage in my life where the questions had to be asked and the decisions had to be made. My very early twenties when I decided that yes I was going to, out of all the roles available, be a clown and , yes, I was going to specialise in Street theatre.

28 years pass..... I've changed, the world has changed and yet my makeup and costume sit beside my bed and I still fly off to look down on people as an 11 foot disgruntled pantomime because that is essentially the most powerful tool I've created to deal with the world.

I look at this film of New York as a humming hive of intimidating scale and recall outside the museum of modern art, just as Tokyo, Barcelona, Paris, and probably around a hundred others and marvel that a single person with imagination can interrupt these massive systems and exploit laughter.

I am a member of a select tribe and we are older than most modern civilizations and while one perspective could see our impending extinction we are nothing if not adaptive.

Perhaps the internet is the newest and largest boulevard to play on?

Those people rushing down footpaths looking at shop windows as they move from A to B

That's all you're doing reading this.

Unlike street theatre there's no beginning middle and end on the internet. But that's a topic for later.

gamarjobat. Modern Pantomime

A solid international street theatre background, very high level slick isolation mime skills and a playfulness that gives them clown chops.
Their timing is well honed.

Anthony Livingspace- Street Performer

Anthony Livingspace turned his back on society 25 years ago and has been in its face ever since.His neck aches. Nobody seems to care.

Out of this frustrating void Tony pulls laughter.

He's adopted the junctions of two bars and a church on banked cobbles in the old part of Granada on the hill in the south of Spain.

His show is built on pain so Tony has to build up sorrow misfortune and woe in useable quantities to even consider going through the agony of comedy.

Tony's genius is that he provides industrial quantities of sorrow misfortune and woe and many other, equally sterling qualities by the use of a simple tool that is his lifestyle.

He's an anarchist, a comic anarchist whose laughter is drawn from those who recognise in his show and thus in his mind, and briefly theirs, that all this seriousness and convention and dignity and rigidity, is laughable.

He has a free apartment, his own pitch and nuns who lock up the church (with them inside for the night) in the middle of his show to play with.

He puts a cloth over his head and in Spanish pleads to be let back into the nunnery,

"It was only one movie",

"The people were only pretending",

"It wasn't real love."

He skips up to the church with soccer ball underarm and shouts repeatedly for Mary at the door, he waits loudly, asks if Jesus can come out to play soccer, then starts kicking his ball against the steps.

He's walked in the church clothed and out the church naked within seconds to thunderous applause.

He's been experimenting for years.  One of the last great street theatre purists. He can and does do shows inside, on stages, in theatres, but just for variety. He is the only performer I know of his quality who's married the street form rather than using it as a springboard.

Originally Australian and a dishwasher, Anthony confronted his own boredom in public places as a young man, and in this self induced state he has carved a small career consisting of his trousers. amp,mike, suit and a multitude of small ever changing props.

In small part, Pepe, and Lee Ross have been influences although in my mind Tony goes further. He takes Pepe's physical impro further and Lee Ross's improvisational commentary further still having codified it in a small sampling unit connected to an amp.

For those unaware Pepe was the king of Covant garden improvisational mischief for a while, legendary in the risks he took, physically and socially and comically before tragically succumbing to his alcoholism, while Lee Ross was a graduate of some NY theatre arts unit who spent time internationally on the street before taking three roles at once for cirque du soleil touring Asia before retiring to be a conceptionalist of sorts in LA.

However no-one else to my knowledge has spent time consistently getting obese men to take off their shirts in public and vamp.

Or eats a flower so wistfully.

Or created so many inspired original comic 'bits' in the increasingly template d and regulated world of street theatre.

His show is contrived madness dedicated to simply and briefly making people happy.

Figuratively, if you were to imagine the outskirts of society and from there walk a day and a half, then have on hand a very powerful set of binoculars, you may, in the distance make out what looks to be a putrid swamp.

Tony lives just on the other side of that but returns to do shows for the folk.

He has a rare full instinctive sense of comedy coupled with that second sense of where the crowd can be taken and innate timing, all counter balanced by a romantic disdain for success or safety.

Many years ago we shared a hotel room, a cheap room in a converted victorian house downtown Christchurch NZ.

Anthony confessed that he was actually painfully lonely but held a belief that somewhere out there was a woman who was perfect for him and that gave him strength.

It was pitch black and I let the moment hang before stiletto-etting his soft underbelly with my scorn.

“Do you have any idea of the amount of compromise that goes into a relationship?” I asked.

“This fairy tale you use to ward off weeping yourself to sleep, this article of faith of yours, you realize your unrealistic hope dooms you to a realistic hopelessness?”

There was a weighted silence and then the wounded retort.

“You know Martin, when I'm your age I'm going to be a lot more successful than you.”

I laughed. Yet twenty years passes and while Tony is still living month to month, in Australia now but still working Europe which is the better fit for him and having just returned from Japan from a post apocalypse Tokyo street theatre festival I concede that as a street performer he does now hold an advantage. He remains fearless and at heart still a practicing optimist .

Already an accomplished technical mime he bounced up to me once after years apart and excited confided.

“Hey Martin I've been studying a lot of this clown stuff, doing classes in Europe.”

“Really” I returned guardedly.

“Yep, did all these exercises, getting in touch with my inner child, that sort of thing.”

“What came of that?” I asked.

“Well what happened was I found my inner child...and raped him.. and got sentenced to 15 years in my inner prison.” he delivered with a deadpan expression but an evil grin in his eyes.

Anthony's beyond successful. He's an uncompromising public comedian and while it could hurt his feelings to be told this, he is indeed a clown of exceptional quality.

The next link might be external. It's stored on facebook but open to the public. I loathe facebook but this is an entire show staged on the street in Edinburgh and captures the energy and the glee Mr Livingspace creates.

http://www.facebookvideoindir.com/vm1167993-anthony-livingspace-edinburgh-fringe-2010-hd-.html

One man acting oddly, infects others with the happy.

End of Nth American summer tour report 2010. #2. Pittsburgh.

From Nth Carolina to Pittsburgh by train, arrive after midnight, John Pike, ex Invisible Circus and a veteran of shared Halifax and NZ festivals, himself an Englishman, is managing an Irish Bar in the South side.
He’s had a taxi waiting 30 mins without the meter on when I arrive. I note he hasn’t lost his touch.
He runs a smooth bar, he’s been increasing all the metrics. Some people are just good to hang with. John’s one.

I just stayed over the weekend, I was told it might be workable South Side.

I had meant to work the friday evening but as I approached the square I was smothered in a dense spectrum sense by a mega gaggle of hideous women all mincing along to the premier of “Sex in the city 2.

Some ‘Ladies night out’ had been arranged and hundreds were invited to a happy hour complete with manicures, massages, tarot card readings and a Botox demonstration before the movie.

I was suddenly surrounded by a weighty funk of estrogen driven malfunctionists. My desire to reproduce, a hardwired constant since puberty, immediately flatlined.

Somehow contained inside evening dresses bought with the aid of circus mirrors or chronic delusion, teetering on heels handicapped to a spina bifida equivalent. Careening unsteadily in a scrum of similarly programmed tipsy tribeswoman towards a theatre after two drinks and a Botox lecture. Competing alpha females shrieked and bellowed their woosy attempts at wit.

The phalanx meandered unsteadily with me immersed in it’s many overexposed bosoms.
I’d worked at the Maryland Renaissance Faire for 7 years, I wear stilts, I’d seen my share of undulating uplifted breast lagoons from above. I have nothing against breasts, they kept me alive a number of months and I’m grateful.

No it was more the overall complexion, these woman were grown under the fluorescent light of  typing pools, fed convenient empty foods and easily digested TV culture and given just enough disposable income to have some colorful and tightfitting joke played on them by the fashion industry while they fuel their brittle dreams of one day being treated like they themselves treated their barbies. Love being simply  a means to accessorise.
[Not that I pretend to know what love is]
It’s not Dante’s fault, how was he to know hell had other levels?


Well that kind of thing just depresses me so I didn’t work the friday. I just rode in the midst of the fractured femininity until I could shake them loose and loop back home.

But Saturday! [see how quick I bounce back?] I was back at the South Side square for some uninterrupted fun. I worked one corner, then danced with the band in the square and then did a much larger show  that I didn’t hat because I’m a too cool for school fool.
All good.
It was interesting to revisit street theatre in of all places an old steel town in the states.
I payed my way.
Next onto Canada.