Finding Your Funny Bone! by Nancy Gold

In 1991, I traveled to Philadelphia to the International Clown Congress.  There I met a number of other clowns, many of whom I continue to be friendly with to this day (I also met a guy who was from Rhode Island, and we had a number of friends in common, but strangely had never met-- and we've worked on a number of projects together, including 3 original circuses and a large-scale festival.  But that's a different story!)

While I was there, I took workshops with Bolek Polivka and Fred Curchack.  I also met Ctibor Turba, who intrigued me enough that in 1992, I went to Czechoslovakia to study with him.

One of the people I met there was Nancy Gold, a clown teacher and performer from San Francisco.  She was taking Turba's week long workshop, (which was opposite my Polivka/Curchak classes)  and I asked for (and received) her meticulous notes about the class.  I think I gave her my much less meticulous notes about Polivka and Curchak back too. I got a much better bargain out of the deal.

Lo and behold, she's got a recent book out, Finding Your Funny Bone!, about learning physical comedy for actors.  Nancy has been teaching at A.C.T. and Berkeley Rep for a number of years, and has compacted all of her teaching into this book.  I haven't delved into the book yet, (she's promised me a review copy though, and when I get it, I will review it right here.)

 The little that I've seen of the book from her website, it looks like it's going to be very good.  Nancy writes and teaches with a lot of enthusiasm, and the excerpts from the book show it clearly.

If you've read the book, feel free to write a comment and tell us what you think about it.

WEBSITE:  http://www.findingyourfunnybone.com
BUY THE BOOK ON AMAZON.COM:  Finding Your Funny Bone!

Dan Kamin's new book on Charlie Chaplin!

Dan Kamin, a clown, mime, and expert performer (who taught Robert Downey Jr how to be Charlie Chaplin for the movie Chaplin, and taught Johnny Dep how to be Buster Keaton for the movie Bennie and Joon) is an expert on Chaplin. His previous book on Chaplin is now out of print, very hard to find, and quite good. So I'm happy to announce that Dan has a forthcoming book on Chaplin.

Here are the details!

FORTHCOMING

The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin
Artistry in Motion
Dan Kamin

List Price: $65.00 Discounted Price: $55.25 (15% off) ISBN: 0-8108-6142-9 ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-6142-8 Pub Date: Oct 28, 2008 320 pages Binding: Cloth Availability:

Book Flyer

DESCRIPTION
From his early shorts in the 1910s thru his final film in 1967, Charlie Chaplin delighted audiences in the millions. Chaplin's genius embraced many arts-mime, dance, acting, music, writing, and directing. In The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin: Artistry in Motion, Dan Kamin examines Chaplin's fusion of these arts in his films, providing new understanding of how movement communicates, how comedy routines are structured, and how stage skills can be translated to the screen.

An acclaimed comic performing artist himself, Kamin brings a unique insider's perspective to the subject. In the book's first section, he recounts Chaplin's theatrical background, examines how and why he moves the way he does on the screen, and considers how Chaplin adapted his stage technique to the film medium. The book also explains how Chaplin's physical virtuosity led him to create the timeless visual comedy that brought silent films to their peak. Analyzing the principles behind his gags, Kamin also discusses the evolution of Chaplin's character and his unparalleled achievement in conjuring comedy from the fundamental physical laws of movement.

Chaplin's dilemma as a silent comedian in the sound era is also explored. Never repeating himself, each of his sound films represents a different experiment in which he integrated antithetical elements-sound and movement, and verbal and visual comedy. Considering these films individually reveals the sometimes surprising ways that Chaplin remained true to his silent roots, at the same time that he kept reinventing himself to keep his art viable.

Delving into the intricacies of Chaplin's incredibly sophisticated visual comedy, Kamin offers new insights into how Chaplin achieved his legendary rapport with audiences, and demonstrates why comedy created nearly a century ago is still fresh today. Lavishly illustrated with fascinating historical artifacts and many never-before-published images of the comedian, The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin provides the only in-depth analysis of Chaplin as a movement artist and physical comedian. Revealing the inner workings of Chaplin's mesmerizing art, this book will appeal not just to Chaplin fans, but to anyone who loves comedy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Kamin performs comedy shows worldwide and is a frequent guest artist with symphony orchestras. He created the physical comedy sequences for the films Chaplin and Benny and Joon, and trained Robert Downey, Jr. and Johnny Depp for their acclaimed performances.

Pre-order the book.

Find out more about Dan Kamin at his website listed below:
http://www.dankamin.com

Clown Show for Bruno Feb 27,28 in Atlanta

Acclaimed mime Daniel Stein and Dell'arte graduates Kali Quinn and Bill Celentano are featured in a new show about Polish artist and novelist Bruno Schultz (author of the classic Street of Crocodiles) Schulz was killed in the Holocaust in 1944 by a German officer. The show will be performed at Atlanta's PushPush Theatre. The play,written by author Murray Mednick, is produced in association with Padua Playwrights.


In 1978, Murray Mednick and five other playwrights, including Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes, converged on the old Padua Hills estate in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, just east of Los Angeles. The playwrights, as well as playwriting students and actors, were given free reign to re-investigate their creativity, developing writing exercises for the morning, rehearsing in the afternoon, and presenting the results in the evening.

Since 2000, Padua has become a production company that produces works as well as inspires them.

The Bruno Project is expected to tour throughout the world, Poland, Germany, the Ukraine and Israel. Guy Zimmerman’s direction uses elements of mask, clowning and other theatrical disciplines to underscore the lyrical poeticism of Mednick’s text. This timeless production will speak to audiences at all levels – young and old, Jewish and non-Jewish - but will have a particular impact on younger audiences looking for new ways to understand the Nazi genocide.

Key collaborators in the Bruno project include, playing the lead, celebrated Commedia performer and teacher Daniel Stein. After attending the professional actor training program at Carnegie-Mellon University, Stein studied in Paris with French master Etienne Decroux, and made his home in Paris for 20 years.

Daniel started his professional career as an actor with the French National Theatre, and his solo performances have toured in more than 30 countries, as well as in theatres such as the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center here in the United States. Formerly head of the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre, in Blue Lake CA (among many other prestigious teaching credits), Stein is joined for this production by two of his star students, Kali Quinn and Bill Celentano, who have made names for themselves in the Los Angeles and New York theater community. Also on board for Padua’s production of Clown Show for Bruno are award-winning designers John Zelewski (music and sound design), Ann Closs-Farley (costume design), Jeffrey Atherton (set and mask design.), and current Padua director Guy Zimmerman

SHOW DATES
Monday, February 25: Danville, Kentucky - Centre College, Norton Center for the Arts (Studio 502)
Wednesday, February 27: Decatur, Georgia - Push Push Theater
Thursday, February 28: Atlanta, Georgia - Goethe Institute Library

To find out more about the show and the theatre, visit the websites listed below:

http://www.pushpushtheater.com/
http://www.paduaplaywrights.net/

On the Padua site, there is a video (apparently not linkable) that you can view which is an interview with author Murray Mednick about the project. The video also features scenes from the production.

Who Put the B in Ballyhoo?

Carlyn Beccia is an illustrator and artist who is inspired by the world of the circus and clowns. She has been painting and performing various acts of circus baboonery since she was a wee young girl. She first tested her own creativity in the human cannonball act by projecting her sister across the room. Her sister had to have stitches, but Carlyn knew she was destined for circus stardom.

Carlyn attended the University of Massachusetts on a 4-year art scholarship and graduated in 1995. She has been awarded a number of awards from the Society of Children's Writers & Illustrators. She lives in Lynnfield, MA with two ferocious cats and her famous Strongman husband.

Last year she wrote a fantastically illustrated book called "Who Put the B in Ballyhoo", which is an ABC book that features the circus and the sideshow. Each of the illustrations is beautifully well done, and is clever and witty. They run the gamut from tigers to acrobats to , yes, a flea circus!


This is definitely a book worth having.

Carlyn has a website for the book http://www.whoballyhoo.com which features interactive games, a make your own circus poster game, and info about author visits.

She has a couple of other sites that are also circus oriented (listed below) In addition to being an illustrator, she is a crack web designer.

If you'd like to purchase the book, get it at Amazon.com



To find out about more about Carlyn's work, visit the websites listed below:

http://www.carlynbeccia.com
http://www.circusballyhoo.blogspot.com/
http://www.circusco.com

Art and Fear: an object lesson

A friend of mine sent me this quote from this book, and I thought it was so fabulous I wanted to make sure to share it.

As I'm teaching clowning this semester, this is particularly a propos. A lot of students will ask me if they are getting an exercise right or not, if they are doing it properly. With clowning, as with most forms of artwork, there is no one right answer-- there are only better answers. And there are always better answers. Your work could always be better, stronger, more grounded, more focused. The merry-go-round doesn't stop.

In the arts, there's much more to be gained from trying something out than to theorize about something.

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot--albeit a perfect one--to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work--and learning from their mistakes--the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

-from Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (And Rewards) of Artmaking,
by David Bayles & Ted Orland

More Circus Fiction

Summer Reading recommendations.

Sara Gruen's Water For Elephants
Amazon Link

Water for Elephants is a story of a Depression era mudshow that Jacob Jankowki, a down on his luck veterinary student, joins. The fictional circus Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show On Earth shows the seamy underbelly of that era of circus. The novel is a little bit on the "typical circus fiction" side, but the writing is great, and if you like the circus, you'll probably like this.

Patti Frazee's Cirkus
Amazon Link

This is also a fictional story of an old mud show, focusing more on freaks such as Mariana , the fortune teller who can turn herself invisible, Shanghai a fire-breathing dwarf, and conjoined twins Atasha and Anna. This time the circus is set in the American midwest at the turn of the century, and the circus is the Borefsky Brothers. It's a debut novel by Patti Frazee, who lives in Minneapolis. It's been getting great reviews.

John Irvings's A Son of the Circus
Amazon Link
A book about an Indian circus, with all of John Irving's weird characters (He wrote The World According to Garp). It's about an Indian born doctor who goes back to India to study circus-dwarves. It's got a lot of exposition, as Irving's books do, but there's gold there-- especially if you like Irving and the circus. Which I do. Not as much about India as you would like though.

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Search out More Books on Amazon that are circus fiction
Search out books on Amazon that are about clowns

Some Circus Fiction Recommendations

I was recently asked about Circus Fiction, so I thought I'd give a couple of recommendations. Feel free to add suggestions in the comments field below!

Amanda Davis's Wonder When You'll Miss Me
Amazon Link
Amanda toured with the Bindlestiff's when I toured with them (in 1998)
She wrote this novel (her first, and sadly her last) after that. It's about a young troubled girl who runs away to join the circus.

Amanda was killed in a tragic plane crash along with her parents on the way to a book signing in North Carolina in 2003.
She was an up and coming young writer, and showed amazing promise. It's a real tragedy.








Katherine Dunn's Geek Love
Amazon Link
Great and classic book about a touring sideshow of self-made freaks and the religion/cult that develops about one of the performers. This is a book that consistently gets very high praise, and is consistently on the list of "Best Books About the Sideshow." HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.










Angela Carter's Nights At the Circus
Amazon Link
A book about turn of the century London turns into an epic love story between a cockney trapeze artist who may or may not have wings and the hotshot journalist that is set to debunk her as they tour the frozen steppes of Siberia. I was in a recent stage production of this, and the story and novel twist of this is astonishing and beautiful. It's a slightly long read and very narrative, but oh so worth it.

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Search out More Books on Amazon that are circus fiction
Search out books on Amazon that are about clowns

And as I said above, feel free to add recommendations below.

Scary Clowns The Book

This is a small fun book of over 80 photographs of clowns in a slightly scary or macabre mode. Not all of them are scary, but enough to give those with coulrophobia a moment of pause. A fair amount of the photos are classic, but there's also a bunch of other photos that I hadn't seen before. It's definitely a great gift for the clown or clown collector among you. The center of the book has a very cool 3D pop up (pictured). I can recommend this book!

Adam Gertsacov/ Acme Clown Company

THE ACME CLOWN COMPANY Uses Popular Theatrical Traditions To Amaze, Educate, And Entertain Audiences Of All Ages.

Specialities include puppetry, clowning, commedia dell'arte, circus skills, magic, melodrama, masks, and method acting.

They perform shows, teach workshops and residencies, and coach and direct physical comedy and clown routines.

The boss clown of the Acme Clown Company is Adam Gertsacov (the author of this blog).

Adam is the most educated clown in America (barring certain elected officials.) He wears many hats, including those of a professional clown, an author and publisher, a P.T. Barnum impersonator, a flea circus impresario,and the esteemed hat of the Clown Laureate of Greenbelt, Maryland. Adam is the Festival Director for Bright Night Providence.

If you'd like to find out more about Adam's work, please visit his websites listed below:

Clown Shows and Classes http://www.acmeclown.com
An Authentic Victorian Flea Circus http://www.trainedfleas.com
P.T. Barnum Impersonation Show http://www.ptbarnum.org
House Renovation Blog About Yonkers http://www.yonked.com
Bright Night Providence http://www.brightnight.org