Self Promo

One Man Bands

The internet is the new street. Loses that live immediacy but retains something. Enough?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Meanwhile with the finger clicking and foot stomping

and ending with a classic.

The Childs Scream is worth the wait.

Sometimes it's about making something out of nothing.
This is one of my first seasons stiltcam adventures.
I was looking to edit this down to just the scream and lead in but thought that the periods where nothing happens highlights the scream.

 

This was shot on the same night. The last scene in this one fades out seconds before the scream and is interesting overlapping footage.

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.

Online gambit plus stiltcam intro.

I like to write and ritual quantifies chaos.

All this would be easy if not for my unfortunate bias's towards sloth, ennui, mental paralysis, a complete stalled sense of purpose and waves of universal futility that make the shifting of the plates and volcanic outbursts look like twitches and black holes look comparatively cosmetic. [I'm also told that bombastic hyperbole is symptomatic of my condition.]

So I search for structure. I travel the world with my stilt character and experiment with humor.

After 20 years I find a home. I continue to perform internationally at what amounts to a small financial loss for muted enthusiasms sake. Quite sad in its way.

So that 'clown' is waning. Still kicking but 'Lurk' is 20 years old.

In the 80's and 90's everyone was muscular with disposable income and happy. My public character was disgruntled. In these times of convusive insecure transitions I think perhaps I should produce more whimsical distraction and sneer less at others personally.

With Stiltcam I can provide for both realworld and online audiences. Offline is it's own multiple perspectives and online being via camera my perspective.

My attempt now is to self produce, recognizing the internet as the worlds widest pedestrian boulevard. At its beginning that's what I've always seen it's potential as.

Clown stuck/writing clung.

Over the years I wrote in a school book like pads. It added up, poetry, short stories descriptions of events. Moments of my fluxing consciousness captured.

Sophomoric or deft, I had no idea, no relativity.

What do you make of this for example?

I am sometimes privy to dark, swirling, turgid thoughts emanating from the dodgy craniums of passers by.

While one womans staunch caustic cerebral radiation was strong enough to warm my hands

I did have to wash them afterwards.

There's a picture that goes with this. The woman concerned.

The internet arrived and I had a laptop instead of notebooks. My brain-pan exterior storage potential increased.

A larger vessel, far more productive.

I published online. Had a site from midish nineties.

As years went by I wrote more and more. I collected my thoughts far more often on a laptop than I did on paper.

Online community entered into at Performers.net and early [first 3 and a bit years] Newsvine saw me publishing within communities as well as simply for my own enjoyment. I found the online environment suited me.

I'm moving towards trusting in providing content online as a substitute for street theater income.

The good news is the targets involved are as reasonable as my street performance income.

I'd like to accept that this online boulevard is in it's own way the street theater capital of the world with all it's added elastic conventions.

Whereas previously I'd employ stilts and makeup and physical skills and balance installing myself on street corners of the world to silently comment on the human condition producing mirth and existing off the kindness of strangers I would or will or am now committing myself in venturing out and producing and projecting my quite distinct flavor of clown and/or whimsy and/or tangential investigation for the worlds digestion in the hope I can retain that purity street theater allows.

[long sentences are my weakness]

You entertain them, they pay you in gratitude and as willing participants in a transaction they accept.

While I have far more tools online than I would have on a street corner I accept I have less to hide behind in a sense.

Stilts, full white face and a sardonic mime character on stilts camouflaged me comfortably.

The online effort will be new and potentially apprehensive [checks pulse] venture akin to a new pitch, a new, foreign yet slightly familiar venue. After all, people are people.

I'll admit to being a romantic fool if you'll admit that pragmatism's the least sexy of the gmatism's.

And at the end of the day when all said and done and the suns sunk and what you afford fills your belly.

Well I'm either worth something to people or I'm not.

That was street theatres daily mandate.

I suspect it will be harder in this isolation to illicit that feeling of being part of an audience.

I am looking at finding a way online that you can glance from one to another.

I wrote this on a bus. I'm on my way back from Robert Nelsons. That man contains much juju.

Juju doesn't work online. Or does it?

Hollywood

Hollywood’s where people who haven't made it yet congregate.


A passage people have to successfully pass through, much like a lower colon,  prior to the end game in the high stakes mass entertainment gamble.

Those that make it get premasticated and fed as pap to the overly deodorized.

Those that don’t hang around leading high volume lives of increasing desperation.

It has every shade of extreme fashion intermingling frictionless by virtue of a common yet lonely greed and dissatisfaction.

Success being perceived as an ever morphing respite via the purchase of goods and services from the yearning  to fill the voids and vacuums that are in great part Americas cultural core. 

Lots of over-dressed  try-hards with just enough philosophy to confuse the unwary into presuming depth.

Depravity is the biggest section in the yellow pages here.

I’m having a wonderful time.

Entombed in the constantly teetering dynamic of a goth S+M after-hours club in Hollywood I sit behind the curtain.

No-one got tortured today, someone got tortured yesterday.

It was behind closed doors in the dungeon but I could still listen in.

I was tidying up around the place.

It was a long session, past 3 hours with peaks and troughs.

Alternate snuffling, passionate howling, a rigorous choreography of extreme discomfort.

On the third peak of applied pain he went to the next step in his self analysis

“Mummy..Mummy, oh no Mummy.” he mumbled

Pain/mummy/love whats new under the sun.

I continued sweeping the dancefloor.

I went in later to inspect the tools of the trade, they went beyond spanky spanky.

It was more your trussed suspension, industrial nipple-clamped, scrotum twisting, deep and rugged anal probe while being injected with substances that increased intensity at chosen crescendos kind of operation.

I read in the paper today of a little girl, 7 years old, who rang 911 because her friends had hurt her feelings.

I sit behind the curtain.

I should be sleeping, its 9am and the place usually closes between 6 and 8am

But this morning it sounds like theres extra efforts being made.

Theres an orgy happening.

Couches unfolded  flesh-slapping, moaning, encouraging words, various interwoven rhythms.

I could watch but I don’t,

 I could walk through and spectate but I don’t,

 I could part the curtain and peek but I don’t.

I just sit behind the curtain and listen.

Thankful really, that my life allows me such depravity surfing circumstances.

I’m an inhabitant, I let myself out a side door unseen, onto Sunset Boulevard.

Its hideously bright, stark unfiltered LA morning light. I walk 2 blocks to the 7/11.

I see the dapper, shopping cart pushing street person. He wears a clean pressed shirt every day and a tie. He panhandles reflexively and is unfathomably chipper.

He says “God bless you sir.”  He contains more gravity than I because for a moment I do feel blessed. For a brief moment I am not calculated  flotsam. 

On the way back from the 7/11 I meet the soul bleached gaze of a crack-whore whose expression contains no enticement or sexual authority but rather a candid searching  scan.

Her eyes slide off me. I’m too fresh.

I’m relieved and disappointed.

 I let myself back into the nondescript building across the road from Hollywood High.

Regulars, Perth.

I had a 4 year relationship with this man. He had brain damage from a car accident in his youth and a walk that suggested a former broken hip.

He always wore the same hat.

A barrow Florist would give him damaged flowers and he would walk around the inner city giving them away.

(Who wouldn't sacrifice a bit of brain damage for the opportunity to walk round town leering quite openly at women, thrusting wilting flowers in their faces.)

His benefit to me was that he would always do the same thing,

He would limp slowly up to my corner, head down, seemingly oblivious to the audience and the rising tension until,

at the corner he would stop and without looking up raise his left hand high in the air

and flip me the finger.

He'd then limp off. He had great timing.

I could create a ball and spin it on my finger and then transfer it to his

knowing exactly when his hand would shoot up and the finger appear.

I remember I impaled a stuffed toy on his finger by its butt once.

He didn't like that.

I showered him with petals , he quite liked that

I bent suddenly as he passed and pretended he'd poked me in the eye with his offending digit, he didn't notice that one, even funnier.

Most of the time I just highlighted his one moment, he got his laugh and chuckled off.

He was a regular.

Another regular was a nurse 50s, she'd approach pretending to read and then squeal and jump sideways,

always got a huge laugh, she'd also sometimes borrow motorized carts from the hospital

and motor 3 blocks into the mall past me and swerve out onto two wheels,

she was a hoot.

I had another old woman that I could tempt to dance easily.

She'd light up in front of 200 plus people, dancing with the tall clown.

Another elderly woman who did a great job of acting angry and attacking me with her stick about once a fortnight,

I'd cower behind my flyswat terrified, she thoroughly intimidated me and the audience loved it.

She spluttered convincingly. We were both seasoned professionals.

Singapore pt 2 conclusion.

Part one is here
http://winsomesrevenge.blogspot.com/2010/10/singapore-pt-1-work-in-progress.html


So I return to the ‘Holiday Chalets’ to rest up, I’m pretty scary to look at.

I take the next day off, my vision condition is mending.

Day three and I thought I’d be all gung ho and depart from my circus based, street based stilt show and delve into the world of the human statue. After all, how hard can it be? Contractual obligations would be met.

I did it for an hour, I will never do it again. Some little kid undid my fly. I wanted to kill him. But...I was a statue.

It was on day three also a curious misfortune beset us, The currencies of Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia took a spectacular dive. Sending Dom to his contract for us where he noticed for the first time our payment was in Singapore dollars and not the Australian he’s presumed. Only about a 70% decrease in the value of our wages, never mind.

The next day I was gratefully on stilts again, my groin high above prying fingers.

Our job, and it was obvious no-one had ever thought it through, was to entertain crowds who arrived by the busload predominantly to watch the musical fountain. An only minimally majestic piece of colorfully lit plumbing that wooshed about to classical music inside a custom built ampitheater.

The kind of thing, going off as it did on the hour, that could construe, to people living nearby with holes in their heads, cruel and unusual punishment.

What became immediately evident was that our presence on Sentosa was merely a sop to having our promo on the posters. Appearance being part of the collective hallucination that is Singapore in which appearances are created like a bow of a ship to forge through the deep waters of the society leaving reality to be formed , less importantly behind the bow, which is always shiny and overpromicing. [In my limited experience].

The glitch in the system was the finely tuned ballet involving Tourguides holding different colored flags leading efficient Asian tourists past all and any distractive temptation towards the grail that was the musical fountain.
These tour guides would simply not brook any dilly dallying.
We, who were trained and efficient at creating stages and audiences in public , were reduced to watching as meta human caterpillars wove purposefully past.
The tourguides were scary, they were like screaming sergeants let loose on elderly folk.

The next problem that eclipsed the guides, the utter lack of any engaging point was to come in the second week. We were employed to work between four and seven, pm, six evenings a week.
By week two the ‘rainy season’ kicks in. One very distinctive feature of the rainy season is the monotonous precision of the daily deluge. It starts every day five minutes either side of four pm and finishes within the same varience around seven pm.
By week two it was set to rain for those 2 hours for the rest of the contract. Just a little miffing.

On the short walk home, every day after dutifully getting ready by four and cancelling by five past, I’d pass the cages containing the monkeys who split coconuts in their spare time. I had an excuse to feel self pitiful, I had a big hole in my head and was trapped in some Kafka like hell. I can remember feeling jealous that the monkeys had a more meaningful existence than I.

Our accom was surrounded by similar converted Japanese WW2 barracks and in these were housed a regularily replaced collection of Young Singaporian Born Again Youth.
They played guitar as badly as only a certain type of christian has the gall to do and sung folk hymns til four in the morning.

At seven in the morning, given it was fall and leaves tend to fall, a squadron of leafblowing imported laborers would meander through the neighbourhood. By nine, the first of the Christians would be up and at the guitar again.

The weeks dragged on, the hole in my head got better. I abandoned the job after our first scheduled payment was delayed. I flew back to Perth a couple of days before the six weeks ended guessing they wouldn’t even notice. They didn’t.

singapore pt 1 work in progress

The first thing that struck me about Singapore was a Bannister knob at speed.
It hit me above my right eye.
No?
While Singapore might not have greeted me with open arms the intensive care unit was open and in lue of any formal greeting. They simply fixed the gaping wound in my head and put me to bed next to some old fellow who, it was explained to gaggles of med students who passed through, was going through a multi-organ meltdown and was on palliative care, pre expiry.
He was an indian guy, he’d toss and moan. Background soundtrack, dieing Indian.

I’d got off the plane and 3 of us, Andrew Elliot, Dom Ferry and myself met up and were taken to Sentosa. Sentosa is an island, apart from a bridge that connects it to Singapore itself. It has a musical fountain, caged monkeys who split coconuts, a very large sculpture at it’s highest point of a “Mer-lion” [mermaids back-end, attach lions head, mystical emblem] a marketing ploy .

It also had a golf course and a tiki-bar that faced the refineries across the water and an aquarium.
I’d done some research, it used to be the graveyard for Singapore, it’s name used to be, ‘place where you bury dead people.” or something close to that in Chinese but that was thought not to be zingy enough for an amusement park and so it was changed and a mer-lion invented.I saw on a poster in passing that Sentosa was having a treasure hunt event which I found deliciously morbid. Don't dig too deep kiddies.

We were being employed to work it, performing for a retainer as well as being the first performers we knew of who actually had permission to busk which made the small retainer worth the risk.
These were some of the astute business choices I was making before I got my knock on the head.

We get driven from the airport and were being housed for 6 weeks in ‘Holiday Chalets’
These are actually Japanese WW2 Officers quarters with about 40 additional coats of paint.
Another factor that was to become critical was that the stairs were all different heights.
Get there 11pm, chat til 1am, I get up about 3 to go to the downstairs bathroom which was outside the air conditioned humming bedroom we were all sleeping in, stumble on the stairs, put my arm out, get my underarm hooked on the rail and careening the length of the stairs before bashing my head on the large irregular piece of hardwood knob at the bottom and then falling into the landing twitching and having and extending puddle of blood form beside my head.
HELLO SINGAPORE!
So no memories but Dom had heard a noise and investigated. He’d not failed to notice I was a bleeding, twitching shadow of my former self and had rushed the 200 meters or so to the island police bungalow and summonsed an officer who walked the distance back to look at me, still bleeding, still twitching before concluding, “Yes, I think an Ambulance would be apt.”

I wake up the next day, there’s some indian next to me fretting about in a coma. I have 26 stitches in my forehead, both eyes are swollen, I look like a disgruntled Panda. When I move my head it takes split seconds for my vision to calibrate the movement. I presume this means my balance is shot and wonder about my stilt career. I wonder also where the meter is that is recording the medical expenses and who will eventually pay it.

A doctor did his rounds, surrounded by a gaggle of students. I found out the guy next to me wasn’t expected to live out the day and that I had been brought in bleeding from the ears but they couldn’t find the fracture after repeated xrays so had just stitched the hole in my head together.
Good to know.

My employers, who I would grow to hate with a brooding molten fury but at this stage were the only link I had with reality, arrived. Calming me by covering all expenses and suggesting it may have been a drink related accident. I let that slide.
I was to be let out that day, The day I was supposed to begin working.

I was in scramble mode, I’d put makeup on over facial injuries before, the swelling was going to be problematic but with whiteface and a tankhelmet and glasses I might just be able to pull off that highly fashionable, ‘deformed panto’ look.
Stilts were out, I had no idea that this faulty inner ear thing of mine, where my vision was a moment behind my eye movement, would not be permanent and I had a 6 week contract to fulfil.

It was only later I realised this first day in the intensive care unit was the happiest day in the weeks to come.

Quick interview with me.

To you, what makes a great clown performance - if you were in the audience. what are 3 or 4 things that must be present for you to rate a clown performance "great"?

These are all personal answers, I'm just speaking for myself obviously.

I look beyond the physical skillset and watch for 'risk and redemption' because that to me illustrates the commitment the performer has to exploring the dynamic of clown or any performance.

Risk and redemption is the conscious puncturing of the audiences faith in you, it raises the dramatic tension not so much in the performance but the room or venue itself. Then the performer takes that and with mastery relieves that tension and redeems hjim/herself and in so doing further cements the trust the audience have. Each time you do this you push the perimeter of what the audience will accept further out. It becomes harder to do consecutively because of this and it is my personal litmus applied to clown.

Dirty Fred is a master at this, Leo Bassi is a master at this, Tony livingspace, Bobarino Gravitini, Peter Post, also employ this gambit woven into their shows.

I'd be looking at character also, empathy. Do I have any. Is the clown solid or brittle, is it skills based, in which case it's just cabaret using the clown form and I'm not so interested because while I admire physical skills and use some myself clown to me is about empathy more than admiration.

Having been streetbased for a large portion of my proffession I look too at the interaction between performer and audience. If it is a stage piece without interaction I look for the clowns pacing to see if it's rote or flexible, I look for variations.

That's three things.

Mostly I'm looking at the quality of the relationship the clown has.

When you walk off stage after a show and it was the most incredible show you've ever done, what 4 things did YOU accomplish?

I made people cry with laughter, [passive aggression at it's finest]

I felt a lot of love.

I explored a structure of my own making to create laughter and celebration out of passing foot-traffic, I accomplish pride.

I conveyed my worth to strangers who reinforce it by donating towards my work. I accomplish the means to carry on.

Does it make a more impactful show if you can take the audience through a range of emotions ?

Which is tastier, a peanut or a 12 course meal?

What led you to clowning? when did you first know you wanted to be a clown?

Philosophically I was drawn to both mime and clown in my teens as I tried to work out as you do at that age, what contained within my culture was real and what was simply fluff reinforced by societies collective hallucination of itself.

I didn't trust language itself, too slippery, I can wrangle words purty good but I was more interested in the quality of silent communication. I thought it had the potential to be both pan-cultural and perhaps if I were lucky, profound.

I saw that clowns are allowed to take liberties, they are allowed that role as long as they can handle and master the situations they create. I found that very seductive as I'm playful and wanted to be so on my own terms.

Do you wake up as a clown?

Do I exist without an audience? yes.

How has clowning changed you , personally?

As a male I'm much better at makeup than most. :)

I have a lexicon that includes, status awareness, body language, tone, pacing and subtext. I perceive tension because it's my job to create it in small part and as such I am sensitive to it, it's a factor in comic timing. These things all bleed across.

Describe how you interact with the audience.

I pretend I can barely tolerate them, they see through it but it's funny.

I submit passing pedestrians to indignities and my audience watches and laughs. Or I do a stage piece which is usually more skills focused with some emotional attachment. Or I do some conceptual piece of whimsy and the audience interact with their own curiousity more than anything.

Is it necessary to create anarchy? can you do a show that is safe and nice?

That's a very polar question. One thing to bear in mind is that to a real degree you are a technician, another thing to bear in mind is that the collective reality of a show is firmly rooted in the minds of your audience. You can make them hear words articulated by a squeaky doll simply by mouthing those words as you make the sound. Sounds incredible, but I watched Hoopal do this night after night and it was eyeopening. I too heard the words in my head that did not exist.

Anyway, anarchy, maybe, more likely moments between studied impulses that seem like anarchy to an audience.

Anarchy's a tricky concept, socially it's always been vague and in absolute terms the Heisenberg uncertainty principle suggests that Anarchy is a subatomic constant.

I have nothing against safe nice shows,

What is the funniest thing that ever happened on stage?

I've had a few things that could go here but the best ones are all me suffering, dancing into an overhead fan in Edinburgh, vomiting on a japanese audience.

The funniest things in the show to me are those moments where someone shucks off their anxiety and plays in some way with me and the audience roars it's approval.

I could list moment after moment. I won't though because I can't afford the time right now.

How do you filter your impulses when you're performing or interacting with the audience?

You kind of evolve behavioural templates, the borders of which have been defined by past experience.

I filter my impulses determined by my perception of where the audience are in their relationship with me, am I still flirting with their approval? or am I at the next stage once I've seduced them, of perhaps taking them somewhere new.

Who are some of your idols? and why?

Bassi, Grock, Butterflyman, Dirty Fred, there's lots of others I draw from but I tend not to idolise, [as it can be really painful when you divorce.]

What reaction do you get when you tell someone you're a clown?

I tend to say I'm an adhesive chemist, it's just easier.

What do you do, on stage, that makes you a great clown?

I own the fact that I inhabit this role naturally.

What rules do you have about interacting with the audience, touching the audience?

I don't have an overt sexual aspect, I can be excessively romantic but I never express any libido of my own. I will mimic a dog and hump a lampost like someone's leg but that's the dogs libido not mine.

Have you encountered clown fear? how do you deal with it?

I try and amplify it for the amusement of others, these people cannot be cured, they can still be useful in the production of comedy however.

Is connecting with the audience the most important thing you are trying to do?

I have to connect with them so that they can connect with each other and become one temporary collective celebratory animal.

You know that scene where the dads laughing his head off but still remembers to glance across at the family and mum and the usually surly teen and the two younger kids are laughing and as are everyone around you.

That moment of freedom for the dad and everyone as they find themselves unexpectedly celebrating in a crowd or audience.

That's the most important thing I am trying to do.

Is there a delicate balance between brave and daring and not offending the audience to the point of alienation?

See answer one, "Risk and redemption"

Touching moments - what have people said to you after a show?

"I haven't been going out because I've been very depressed but I dragged myself out today to join the world and I saw you and watched you and you made me laugh. Thank you very very much for showing me I still can."