“Shakespeare was a vaudevillian!” rang the anarchic cry of the Flying Karamazov Brothers, a troupe of jugglers who assaulted the text of The Comedy of Errors with the assistance of a unicyclist, a belly dancer, a baton twirler, a trapeze artist and a slack-wire clown. By the time their irreverent production had made its way from Chicago’s Goodman Theatre to the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles, a lot of people were talking about “new vaudeville” as a significant trend in the American theatre—but few were prepared to pin down just what they meant by the phrase.
On a superficial level, vaudeville is simply a marketing term used to impose an illusion of unity on a disparate collection of performing artists. Between 1890 and 1930, American producers like Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward F. Albee discovered they could profit by presenting variety artists in a circuit of theatres they called vaudeville. Similarly, today’s producers are discovering that uncategorizable performers such as the Karamazov Brothers and Avner the Eccentric (a clown who also appeared in The Comedy of Errors) have considerable commercial potential. Both enjoyed successful appearances on Broadway (Avner’s solo show continues on Off Broadway’s Theatre Row) as well as at theatres nationwide. Add to this the popularity of “postmodern clown” Bill Irwin, the growing respect for carnival barker-puppeteer-minimalist Paul Zaloom, San Francisco’s support of the one-ring Pickle Family Circus and the appearance at Lincoln Center of trained seals and break-dancing clowns under the tent of the Big Apple Circus—and suddenly the “new vaudeville” becomes a movement.
Underneath the media packaging of this phenomenon is a genuine renaissance of theatrical artistry. The Goodman Theatre’s Comedy of Errors was praised for its entertaining zaniness and damned for its trashing of Shakespeare’s language, but the most artistically intriguing issue raised by the production and by the trend it epitomizes is the emphasis on performance skill. Physical virtuosity is celebrated, not as an end in itself, but as a means of illuminating emotions and ideas. There is an attempt to integrate the art of the actor with the art of the athlete. The Karamazov jugglers never mastered Shakespeare’s heightened language with the dexterity they were able to apply to their flying props—but in the audacity of their attempt to do both, they suggested the unfulfilled possibility of the actor as an acrobat of the soul.
The performers made innovative use of their skills to create exciting visual metaphors for the broader actions and emotions of the play. American actors are noted for (and limited by) their Method techniques of evoking emotion; but in The Comedy of Errors when champion baton twirler Sophie Schwab wanted to express the anger of Adriana she hurled her baton with the same swirling fury that animated her verbal accusations. The tossing of insults afforded the kind of thrill elicited by a circus knife-thrower. Sheer technical skill infused the acting with an emotional edge of danger.
Rhythmic skills were also tapped in the production’s attempt to interpret Shakespeare through circus. “Juggling is music—rhythmic, visual music,” explains Paul Magid of the Karamazov Brothers. In their attempts to coordinate the rhythms of their juggling with the rhythms of Shakespeare’s poetry, the Karamazovs made music by bouncing clubs off xylophones and drums. To enhance the precision of this visual music, they developed a form of musical juggling notation. “A three-eighth note is a double spin,” says Magid. “A half-note is a triple spin and an eighth-note is a single spin. If you get good you can even read the score while you juggle.”
From a wider perspective, the juggling added a magical quality that was appropriate to the dreamlike landscape of Shakespeare’s comic worlds. A fantastical production number celebrated the play’s comically harmonic resolution. The improbability of the plot’s outlandish coincidences was mirrored by the improbability of hundreds of flying objects making music as they flew through the air. The delightful defiance of plausibility in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy was matched by the joyous defiance of gravity in the jugglers’ spectacular finale.
The Comedy of Errors is not the most sophisticated version of what has come to be called “new vaudeville,” but it is representative of one of the movement’s central paradoxes: It is built on a foundation of highly disciplined physical technique at the same time that it is fueled by an irrepressible spirit of comic anarchy. Robert Woodruff, who directed the production, was impressed by “performers who had an amazing range of skills.” His actors, on the other hand, enjoyed the opportunity to use those skills to assault a classic text. “The credo of new vaudeville,” says Magid, “is to do anything you can get away with.”
The cast of The Comedy of Errors forms one of the most recent branches of the family tree of new vaudevillians. Their backgrounds and interconnections before and after their involvement in that production provide a kinship history of the movement. A single example of the genealogical possibilities begins with Wendy Parkman, the trapeze artist in the cast. She is a member of the Pickle Family Circus, an alternative one-ring circus in San Francisco, where Bill Irwin once performed as a clown. The Pickle Family Circus was founded 10 years ago by juggler-clown Larry Pisoni and designer-juggler Penny Snider—the two met while performing with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The Mime Troupe became the mother of the Big Apple Circus as well, when Paul Binder left the San Francisco troupe and eventually established the one-ring show that now performs regularly at Lincoln Center. One of Big Apples former clowns is Michael Moschen, who has performed with ex-Pickle clown Bill Irwin at Dance Theater Workshop, New York’s primary showcase of new vaudeville talent. DIW premiered Moschen’s Obie-winning Foolsfire company, and recently presented The Theater of Panic, featuring Geoff Hoyle, another alumnus of Pickle Family’s clown alley.
The artistic interconnections are endless, and they establish a clear link between the new vaudeville performers and the experimental theatre of the ’60s. While early vaudeville artists were content to perfect their art in the conservative confines of their producers’ circuits, many of the new vaudevillians are innovators who were motivated by a desire to break out of the traditional structures of acting that were available to them in the realistic theatre. They embrace the politics and aesthetics of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Bread and Puppet Theatre, groups that go back to the traditional arts of mime, circus and puppetry to create new alternative theatre. Before founding their own alternative circuses Binder and Pisoni worked on a San Francisco Mime Troupe show called Frozen Wages that used the metaphor of fewer and fewer jugglers coping with more and faster flying objects to depict the dilemma of assembly-line factory workers.
Pisoni maintains a sense of social conscience in the Pickle Family Circus, although he notes that “we are not as overt or rhetorical as the Mime Troupe. The values we portray are equality between men and women on the stage, and the nonviolence of clowning.” Performances are given to raise money for day care centers and environmental groups, and there are no animal acts. “No one can ever really know if an animal wants to perform,” says Pickle Family juggler Judy Finelli. “We can only be sure that people want to perform.” These principles are embodied in a chimp act in which the chimp is played by a man in a simian costume who makes a monkey out of his trainer.
The restless dissatisfaction with traditional avenues for expression in the theatre that is shared by many new vaudevillians is exemplified in the early career of Bill Irwin. He moved from a conventional acting program at UCLA to experimental theatre training with Herbert Blau, to the Ringling Brothers Clown College, to the Pickle Family Circus, to the avant-garde Oberlin Dance Collective, before blending these diverse skills into his own indefinable brand of metaphysical slapstick. “You are talking about renaissance people who have developed simultaneous expertise in different areas,” notes DTW director David White, speaking of Irwin and his cohorts. ‘New vaudeville’ is a grand miscellaneous category that encompasses some of the most important theatrical work being done today.”
The current link between experimental theatre and circus arts is not without historical precedent. Twentieth century avant-garde artists have often turned to circus and music hall techniques when searching for ways to revitalize their theatre. Bertolt Brecht was influenced by the techniques of German cabaret clown Karl Valentin. Jean Cocteau engaged the Fratellini Circus Clowns for one of his plays. Vsevelod Meyerhold embraced the skills and aesthetics of the popular arts as a cornerstone of his approach to theatre. The Russian experimentalist engaged a troupe of Chinese jugglers for one of his productions and staged another with a Harlequin character performing a highwire ballet.
In 1912, when Meyerhold was attacked for his experiments, critics accused him of “cabotinage,” from the French verb cabotiner, which means to “barnstorm” and play to the grandstand. Meyerhold was rebelling against the emotional realism of Stanislavsky’s work at the Moscow Art Theatre, and wanted to create a physical form based on musical, gestural and visual rhythms rather than naturalistic logic. He was striving to return to the roots of popular theatre and looked to the concrete skills and broad physical acting of circus, commedia dell’arte and Russian vaudeville as an inspiration. “The juggler reveals the total self-sufficiency of the actor’s skill with the expressiveness of his gestures and the language of his movements,” wrote Meyerhold in an essay extolling the virtues of popular entertainment techniques as an education for Russian actors.
“Physical virtuosity is celebrated, not as an end in itself, but as a means of illuminating emotions and ideas.”
Perhaps in its impatience with realism, its reliance on commedia-style characterization and its impulse toward performances that celebrate theatricality through the mastery of circus and vaudevillian skills, the current phenomenon of new vaudeville might be better termed a revival of cabotinage. If so, the modern performer who most strongly echoes Meyerhold’s uncompromising search for new theatre forms through old techniques is Bill Irwin. Irwin recently received a five-year MacArthur Foundation grant to support his experiments, which lie in the intersection of clowning, postmodern dance and silent film comedy. The Regard of Flight, Irwin’s 1982 performance at the American Place Theatre, satirized the idea of creating new theatre at the same time that it created it, and in doing so, it epitomized many of the concerns and techniques of the cabotinage performers who are Irwin’s contemporaries.
Moving out from the proscenium to interact directly with the audience is an important aspect of cabotinage. Irwin underlines this desire for audience contact by setting up the conventional proscenium stage as his enemy. In a mock academic lecture about the meaning of “new theatre,” Irwin’s collaborator Doug Skinner speaks of “a profound mistrust of the proscenium,” and throughout The Regard of Flight Irwin is comically resisting a mysterious force emanating from the proscenium arch that tries to suck him off the stage.
In an interview with The New York Times, Irwin described an audience-involving technique that originated in the circus. “One of the classic clown gags is to pick out a specific laugh in the audience and react to it, which inevitably draws another laugh. In clowning you’re always breaking through that fourth wall that separates audience from actor, and that’s what we’d been trying to do all along in New Theatre.” A similar aesthetic is expressed by Paul Magid of the Brothers Karamazov: “We listen deeply to the audience,” he says.
The liberating surrealism of Irwin’s imagery also evokes Meyerhold’s cabotinage. “I originally became interested in clowning as a form of American Kabuki,” states Irwin. “It’s very surreal and dreamlike. In coming up with new material I try to tap that dream nerve.” One of the most dreamlike moments in his show was achieved when Irwin created the illusion of walking down three flights of stairs as if they existed inside of a trunk. The beauty and the comedy of the illusion was created by the power of pure mimetic technique. His ability to create the surreal through sheer physical skill is reminiscent of Michael Moschen’s manipulation of light and crystal globes in a hypnotic act from Foolsfire that elevates juggling to a mysterious art of motions and shapes.
The clowns of the Big Apple Circus achieve a similar sense of surrealism unthinkable in a three-ring circus. As a counterpoint to the aerial acts, they present a clown’s dream of flying that includes the appearance of a live elephant with butterfly wings. The pathos of the clown’s defeat when the ringmaster tells him there are no butterflies in the circus erupts into glorious triumph when the clown rides away on the winged pachyderm. In this and other routines, the Big Apple clowns use their physical ingenuity and mastery of character development to transform themselves into surrealistic magicians of cabotinage at the intersection of poetry and circus.
An interesting development in the past year has been the cross-fertilization of American and European cabotinage. Dario Fo, the Italian political clown, traces his style of satire back to commedia dell’arte and the strolling players of the Middle Ages. Fo is a broad physical performer who has often appeared in his own political farces. When his Accidental Death of an Anarchist opened on Broadway, one of the comic roles was played by Bill Irwin. Meanwhile in San Francisco, a different adaptation of the same play was being produced at the Eureka Theatre, relying heavily on American artists who were accustomed to working in the physical style of cabotinage.
The writer who adapted the West Coast version of Fo’s play was Joan Holden, who has worked for years creating scripts for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Her bold writing style for Accidental Death was complemented by the uninhibited comic acting of Geoff Hoyle, who played the lead role of The Fool. Hoyle is a Bay Area clown, steeped in the traditions of French mime and British Music Hall. He sees the ability to create instant physical characterizations as a crucial skill for acting in Fo’s plays.
“He is a histriomaniac,” says Hoyle of the lead character in Accidental Death. (The term would be equally applicable to Fo himself, who originated the role in the play’s premiere.) “The hobby of the histriomaniac is playing parts. He impersonates people: a judge, a captain of police, a bishop. The role requires an ability to snap into caricatures based on real life, the kind of thing Peter Sellers and Richard Pryor have done. It is an external, physical style that is the basis of the popular arts.”
In his musings on the nature of the histriomaniac, Hoyle is articulating one of the key concepts associated with the acting style of cabotinage: the importance of broad physical characterizations inspired by commedia dell’arte and the clowning of silent films. Although this performance style is not a part of mainstream American acting, performers like Irwin and Hoyle are demonstrating that their techniques can achieve a depth of characterization not ordinarily associated with physical clowning.
“Clowns are beginning to develop characters and situations in their own strong dramatic terms,” notes John Towsen, co-director of the New York Festival of Clown Theatre, a critically acclaimed showcase for comic artists who are taking clowning in new directions. (This year’s festival will run from June 10-30.) “For centuries the clown has been a peripheral figure in drama, but to give the clown a full evening in the theatre is to say (with Edward Bond) that Lear’s Fool is just as captivating a chap as Lear. We used to have clowns who secretly wanted to play Hamlet. Now we have clowns who think their own characters every bit as interesting as the Prince of Denmark.”
With clowns like Dario Fo writing plays that suit the talents of kindred histriomaniacs Bill Irwin and Geoff Hoyle, there is a growing interest in the verbal skills of cabotinage. Physical techniques of juggling, slapstick and mime are easy to categorize, but the verbal techniques of clowning are more elusive. Irwin has discovered in his work that “verbal and physical humor often spring from the same source, The idea of a dilemma is usually central to both.” Hoyle says that he is also “moving towards a synthesis of physical and verbal comedy’ linked by the clown’s impulse to “unmask sham and expose hypocrisy.”
Taking the fools of Shakespeare as one of her primary sources, writer-performer Merry Conway has catalogued with great specificity the verbal techniques of the clown. Conway, in collaboration with the Massachusetts-based Shakespeare & Company, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to investigate the art of the fool. Examining the texts of characters like Touchstone, Feste and Lavache, Conway discovered repeated instances of linguistic trickery which she identified as “quibbling, paradox, innuendo, alliteration, rhyming, false syllogisms, comic stychomythia and evasive turning away of the point to irrelevancies.” Next Conway invented a series of verbal games that helped actors develop these comic skills, and created an original theatre piece out of the results. “The fool has a constant need to dissolve reality,” says Conway, who used the linguistic clown devices to create a level of verbal surrealism that parallels the visual surrealism of physical clowning. “The fool disagrees that there is a linear, cogent, straight-lined reality that is the only truth. He reminds people that there is a reality that they cannot see, that cannot be proved.”
One of the clown exercises devised by Conway was called “The Minister of Nonsense.” It involved people pretending to be experts and giving absurd monologues on their areas of expertise. This type of charlatanism has a long history that found its American apotheosis in the form of medicine show quack doctors. Paul Zaloom is the postmodern heir to the medicine show tradition. He combines the patter of a carnival barker with the theatrical fraudulence of a TV advertiser in his one-man shows (Fruit of Zaloom, Crazy as Zaloom) of “trash animation.” Using found objects like car parts and broken appliances as his props, Zaloom creates a satiric performance that might be termed a “theatre of debris.” Some of the debris he collects is from U.S. Office of Civil Defense. Playing the role of a government employee, he tells his audiences about the useful books and documents about nuclear defense that can be purchased from Uncle Sam. People think of Zaloom as a political satirist, but he modestly admits, “The Pentagon is writing my material for me. I just present it.”
Patched together from the debris of American culture, Zaloom’s theatre is an overtly political example of cabotinage, but there is an implicit social dimension to the work of all the practitioners of this art. America’s obsession with mastery and control is being simultaneously celebrated and mocked. The jugglers, acrobats, dancers and mimes use their skills to push the limits of possibility to their furthest extremes, but they also ridicule their talents with ironic displays of well-timed ineptitude. In the Big Apple Circus, for example, the clowns parody the accomplishments of the equestrians and acrobats. When one of the clowns achieves a moment of flight toward the high trapeze, another falls flat on his face beneath his partner’s flying feet. Combining comedy with skill, the clowns fly and fail at the same instant, expressing their audience’s dreams and fears in a single moment of inspired buffoonery.
In the mid-19th century, it was common for American circus clowns to achieve this kind of rapport with their audiences. Clowns dressed as Uncle Sam performed political satire and improvised with the crowd. But the Ringling Brothers and P.T. Barhum transformed the circus from an intimate display of horsemanship, skill and satire to a three-ring extravaganza of sparkle and glitz. The three-ring circus is a peculiarly American phenomenon. Nowhere else in the world is the artistry of circus performers commercialized so extravagantly. The skills of jugglers, clowns and acrobats are virtually lost in a dazzling spectacle where quantity overwhelms quality. The current revival of circus skills in the theatre is a rebellion against this dehumanization of circus techniques.
The new vaudevillians’ refusal to be categorized is also part of a revolt against the commercialization that helped to degrade the popular arts in the past. In America, being pigeonholed is the first step on the road to being marketed as a commodity, and many artists resist that temptation. When Geoff Hoyle was asked if he was a “new vaudevillian,” he wondered what one of his heroes would have said in response to a similar question: “Ask Harpo. Was he a member of a trend? What was he trying to do in films? Was he just going for gags? He would probably just have given you a honk with his horn and hit you on the head as his reply. He was a total anarchist. He took everybody apart, because they represented structure, and once you impose a structure it becomes repressive.”
With their anarchic aversion to repressive structure, the practitioners of cabotinage share (with conceptual artists like Robert Wilson) an impulse to cross boundaries that separate dance, theatre, music and visual art. They even share some of the same themes. Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach begins with a train and ends with a spaceship. The Big Apple Circus begins with a horse and ends with the flying trapeze. Both are surrealistic, non-linear and in their own ways spectacular investigations of man’s reach of the impossible. The difference between these two versions of America’s quest for flight is in their highbrow vs. lowbrow uses of humor, music and technology. While Wilson employs the resources of high tech, the circus relies on the pure physical skill and human ingenuity. Wilson’s opera is accompanied by the electronic music of Philip Glass; the circus performs to the steamy rhythms of a five-piece jazz band. Wilson’s wit is ironic and detached; the circus’ sense of humor is more down-to-earth. Performance art and cabotinage are expressions of similar impulses, but the latter is grounded in the grit of the fairground and the sweat of an entertainer working the crowd.
From Shakespearean jugglers to circus elephants with wings to Bill Irwin’s Keatonesque Kabuki clown, the practitioners of cabotinage are transcendent in their mastery of physical skills, but earthbound in their comedy of human imperfection. Using aspirations for the impossible as fuel for slapstick, these acrobatic anarchists are like Icarus with a clown nose, laughing at his melting wings as he prepares for a pratfall and thumbs his nose at the sun.
Ron Jenkins, a former circus clown, teaches at Emerson College and recently received a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard University to study European traditions of comedy.
