classic routines involving freight trains

New Digs, and name change coming (probably)

2010-11-21T07:25:00.000-08:00

Hey, I'm back.

I suppose somewhere back in Blue Lake, in the confusion that was 2009, I lost track of the purpose of this blog, or lost the will to maintain it... nowadays I'm seeing a use for it, so here we go again...

A quick rundown: I've moved back to Denver, and have just gotten myself into a house. The house itself is in reality nothing more than a new investment strategy of my mother's. She was able to buy the thing and now, she's my landlord... There's a degree to which it is a sweetheart deal for me, of course, although for the first time as a renter I have to behave as if I actually own the place, and I will be paying all of the bills, taxes, upkeep, etc. As of right now I'm in the exhausting process of moving in--repainting the office, stripping forty years of paint off of the old brick fireplace, and getting ready for all of my stuff to arrive on Monday and Tuesday. I'll try to get some photos up soon...

I'm also trying to lay the foundation for a career as an artist, starting with a couple of theatre projects: THIRD BASE!, my comedy collaboration with Jerry Lee Wallace; and a shadow-puppetry adaptation of the Book of Jonah. To support this, I'm forming a production company of sorts, although I'm not going to incorporate in any formal way — yet. I'll be applying for fiscal sponsorship through Fractured Atlas. The process of creating a producing identity for myself is making me examine my whole life and career in a new light, something I hope to touch upon in these pages soon. And it's probably forcing me to take the name "Circo de Nada" away from this blog. Because this is the name I've wanted to have for a theatre company for a long time, now. And the time has come to start my company. More on all that later... for now I need to get back to scraping paint and installing puck lights under my cabinets.

Talk to y'all soon.

At Sea, post #1: Feeding Myself

2009-01-28T12:26:00.001-08:00

The transition in my life from grad student to self-employed professional continues to be an adventure...

Being a full-time student at Dell'Arte means not having the time, energy or mental capacity to cook for yourself. So for three years, I basically ate pasta and sandwiches; granola or just bananas for breakfast; sometimes just a bunch of corn chips, a handful of whole, unpeeled carrots and a cold, pre-cooked sausage. It's turned into a rut that feels hard to escape from.

So these last two weeks, I've embarked on a campaign to get myself back into the kitchen. I bought a chicken last week and braised it; it provided five dinners. I also made a risotto — one of the most sensuous acts one can commit at the stove — with porcini mushrooms and fennel. It came out pretty good. But it is agonizing, after three years of dull simplicity, to plan and shop for these things, and it feels incredibly expensive, especially with the economy and my current state of self-unemployment. I'm really feeling the inflation of food costs. And while I'm still a committed carnivore, I'm trying to reduce my meat consumption and restrict myself to sustainably-raised, free-range meat. Michael Pollan's blog in the New York Times a couple of years ago was an eye-opener; it both alleviated my sneaking guilt at being a carnivore and made some thunderous points about the environmental impact of eating locally versus organically. I've long admired Alice Waters' local-food ethic and the Slow Food movement as worthy pursuits, both culturally and economically. So I split my shopping between the local food Co-op and the local Safeway, eschewing the WinCo that most students at my school shop at, and try not to fall into elitism about it all.

The chicken I bought last week was raised in California on a free-range farm. It weighed a little over four pounds and cost about $14 at the Co-op. If I had gotten the Free-range organic chicken, I would have paid $18. Conversely, the Premiere Brand sausages I often eat — also a NorCal product, but from conventional slaughterhouses, cost around $5 for a pack of four, and those will satisfy my desire for meat for four lunches or dinners. Was it worth nine extra dollars for the experience of chopping vegetables, separating the chicken, browning and braising it? Do those dollars cover not just the single extra meal, but the satisfaction of tasting the work of my own hands, the convenience of microwavable leftovers, and — not least — the relative comfort of the chicken while it lived?

Can any of this be expressed on a balance sheet?

Will eating well — locally, sustainably, and attentively — make sense next month? I don't know where March's rent-check is coming from...

__________________________________

Last night I made polenta and tried to revive the Marinara sauce recipe that Micah Ciampa taught me years ago. I bought some Italian sausages from the co-op butcher to serve over the polenta, some tomato paste and a couple large cans of Contadina tomato purée. I chopped an onion and sautéed it gently in olive oil. I added minced garlic; I put in some paste, not noticing that it was double-concentrated. I opened the package of sausages and noticed that they were Premiere Brand, which was not how they were labeled in the display case... I opened the cans of purée and only then noticed that they were not purée but "sauce," already full of tomato concentrate, garlic and onion powder, spices... I put them in anyway (might as well use them up.) I browned the sausages, thinking I'd use half the sauce with them and freeze half for later, keeping the sauce vegetarian... but when I went to deglaze the sautée pan with some vermouth, I put in way too much, and had to pour it off, along with a bunch of the sausage grease, into the main sauce pot... Of course I completely spattered the whole stove with red-tinted grease.

It's like I don't know how to shop or cook anymore.

I'm out of practice.

The polenta was pretty good, though...

Crawdaddy and change

2009-01-20T16:48:00.000-08:00

So, Paris is receding in memory and a new year has begun.

I spent the first two weeks of the year working on puppets, costumes, sets and props for Crawdaddy's Astounding Odditorium, a new show that debuted this past weekend and is now moving to Calgary, Alberta, for the International Festival of Animated Objects. Last spring I built a fat suit for a workshop production of the show, which then parlayed into a paying gig this month; Xstine Cook, the production designer, had to go back to Calgary to head up the festival, and left me in charge of her puppets (and everything else that had yet to be built/made for the show.) It was a great experience, working with a really talented team of painters, puppeteers and actors, many of whom are good friends from Blue Lake.

Above is a photo of me doing open-head surgery of the show's main puppet. The show as a whole both enacts and portrays an old freak show, and this puppet is one of the featured "freaks." This is actually only one of six versions of this character that appears in the show; this one is wearing a straight-jacket for a send-up of Houdini. In other parts of the show, he's fried in an electric chair, strapped to a dartboard, ripped limb from limb... he's the indestructible man! The character was designed by Xstine (pronounced "Christine") and worked onstage by David Ferney. The original production featured him only as a hand puppet, with David's arm inside his neck, but the straight-jacket, electric chair and dartboard prohibited having a hand inside. The head is made from molded latex and is both very strong and very flexible; it also didn't talk very well with just a string pulling from behind. The jaw never closed without the pressure of a hand inside, so he couldn't talk properly—he just sort of flapped his lip. So my first and biggest job was to recreate the effect of a human hand! I thought it would take a day, but it took me a week.

Latex essentially has no structure, but it has a shape. I first tried stringing elastic through the roof of his mouth, but that only pulled part of the mouth shut. I'll spare you the whole process, but tell you that the solution called for steel to overcome the latex. Ultimately, I carved a lower jaw out of wood, glued it inside the lip, and then attached a system of L-brackets and a spring to the wood. The spring pushed the mouth closed, and a cord run through the middle of the spring both pulled the mouth open and kept the spring from popping out. A steel hinge worked as a trigger on the spring. The biggest problem was that very intense glue is needed to hold all this stuff together, and the best stuff takes 24 hours to dry. So most of the components had to be assembled over the course of days, and it still felt like there was no guarantee that it would work. I'm not sure I found the best possible system, but the one I found works OK.

There were lots of other projects in this show — it may well be the most technically demanding show I've ever worked on — but this was the biggest headache. Sadly, the show no longer needs me, so I don't get to go to Calgary... though I had four months out of the country in 2008, so I'm not really complaining.

So, what's next? There may or may not be a school tour of the shadow-puppetry project Ferney and I were working on last fall, and in March, he and I will head back into writing/rehearsing his one-man show The Misunderstood Badger which I'll be directing. In May, Jerry Lee Wallace (another Dell'Arte grad) will open a self-produced clown show at the Arcata Playhouse. This show will feature the big debut of my solo clown piece, for my clown Ferdinand the Magnificent, which I then hope to tour on the streets of major west-coast cities next summer. It may also go to a festival or two back east... I'm also digging back into music, working on expanding my ragtime and bluegrass chops, and ....

I'm starting a band!

Right now it's just me and percussionist Erin Crites; our current repertoire
is pretty much just me ragging on the guitar and her on washboard. But we are also working on some New Orleans Second Line rhythms, and talking to other prospective members. The full product will involve a lot of junk percussion, and if I had to tell you what to expect, I would have to say "some kind of cross between the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Einsturzende Neubauten."

And I wouldn't be kidding...

The project for now is called "Helicopter." I'll keep you posted about new developments.

Wrapping it up

2008-12-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

And here is the first fully-finished version of my Capitano.

The last steps in the process were adding the hair, which in this case is from an unshorn sheepskin, and adding a layer of shoe wax to set the dye color and protect the leather. A small amount of a special kind of tar is added to the wax to create a tiny bit of texture and patina.

Stefano is leaving Paris tomorrow for Marseille and later Venice, where he will deliver this particular mask to my teacher Giovanni Fusetti, as a gift to thank him for his help in securing this internship and for the enormous role he played in my training at Dell'Arte.

So, today was supposed to be my last day in the atélier. But as I was working on this mask, a frequent client of Stefano's arrived looking for a mask for one of his students to use in a fencing scene. And he became fixated on my mask! So, while I was intending to spend Monday and Tuesday at the Louvre, I will instead return to the atélier (Yohan will be there) to put out one more copy of the mask. Maybe the guy will buy it! If not, it will stay with Stefano as a gift. It's an extremely gratifying way to end the internship.

I fly to LA on Wednesday. Tomorrow I will do my last stroll through the streets of Paris, since I haven't been to Montmartre yet. Which means: no Louvre! (it's apparently an absolute nightmare on Sundays.) I was also hoping to squeeze in a trip to Chartres to see the cathedral there, but that and the Mona Lisa will have to wait until my next trip here. Tant pis.

This evening I went with Stefano and Yohan to a meeting of the Société des Createurs des Masques, a new organization of prominent Paris maskmakers who are collaborating to promote their work. The organization includes Jean-Marie Binoche and Erhard Stiefel, who makes masks for Ariane Mnouchkine (neither of them were at the meeting, however.) The group has launched a fascinating project: they're all creating a mask for the character of Richard III, and in May will present the masks (and in most cases, an actor playing the mask) to each other and to the public. The point is to demonstrate different interpretations of the character and different techniques (leather, wood, resin, papier-maché) for making masks. It's a pretty cool idea. Wish I could be here to see it...

The way leather moves

2008-12-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

Carvings from Melanesia:

A contemporary painting from Papua New Guinea:

See the bottom of this post for context.

______________________________________________________

Sorry it's been so long since my last post; there hasn't been much to report.

Since I finished the major carving on my matrix, I've been steadily working the leather onto it and making adjustments to it; but the process is spread out over a few days (because the leather needs two nights to dry between the various phases) and you can only do so much at one time. So I've been working with the assistants and the other intern to simply fill out Stefano's orders for other masks. This just means doing whatever needs to be done: posing the leather on a matrix; hammering and polishing it; cutting the languettes and setting the wire. Collectively we've produced 15-20 masks in the last week or so.

It's good to spend these last two weeks just working on leather. I take breaks now and again to look at Stefano's matrices—their designs—or to observe Stefano and the others as they work on particular aspects of the craft. But it's good just to work the leather and feel how it moves under my hands, through all the different phases of the work. How different pieces of leather feel and react to the work. The density and texture that vary within an individual piece. How it changes as it dries. How some pieces polish quickly and smoothly and others take a lot more work—or finesse.

I make a lot of mistakes, but there is constant improvement. I wish I had more time here to learn about the special cases that require particular skills: Dottore masks require a very precise cut in the region of the eye, or you won't be able to set the wire; Neutral masks have to be hammered and polished so that no hammer marks are ultimately visible, because they won't have dye to hide the marks and they require, aesthetically, an absolute smoothness. These are things I've merely been told—they won't let a rookie like me make my mistakes on those masks. I will have to actually learn them for myself later.

I spent Saturday evening and most of Sunday at the Musée du Quai Branly, which is the national museum of ethnography, and contains much of Claude Lévi-Strauss's personal collection of masks and other artifacts. It's a controversial museum; the extreme postmodern architecture is pretty bizarre right next to the Eiffel Tower, and they've made some bold (if problematic) choices in terms of how you approach the artworks. Here's a link to their official "map":

http://www.quaibranly.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/plans/PLAN-RECTO-Anglais.pdf

It's certainly a more organic approach than the Classical museum architecture of, say, most American Natural History museums, and it's one that makes you get up close to the artwork. You have to go on this long 'journey' up a white ramp to get to the main collections, and there the walls are either black and invisible or sort of shapeless and beige, as if they're made out of mud. Most of the artwork is dimly lit, with very directional light. I suppose they want us to have the feeling that we are archaeologists or anthropologists ourselves. But half the time, you can't see all of the work, which becomes utterly maddening, and the whole thing actually has the effect of exoticizing the art and mystifying it, which feels like we haven't gotten over the whole "colonial" thing yet. It's pretty awkward.

But, oh my God—the artwork...

I was literally transfixed by the first things I came across: carvings and masks from Melanesia, a culture I know nothing about. The whole Oceania exhibit is astounding, and they have the biggest collection of Australian Aboriginal art I've ever seen. This consists of an enormous collection of traditional/antique stuff, but also a lot of contemporary art drawing on those traditions. There is also a big special exhibit of work by artists from Papua New Guinea of traditional themes and styles, bud painted with acrylics on canvas. Totally mind-blowing. There's one small room that is utterly filled with giant Orthodox iconography frescoes from Ethiopia, which is probably where I left my brain on Saturday night. There are enormous sections on Africa and the Americas, but honestly I couldn't handle it at that point, and I'm more familiar with that stuff anyway. So I sadly skimmed it. Sunday, I went back for the special exhibits (one on Japanese Modernism, the other of carvings and masks from the Arctic cultures of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia. Mindblowing. Mindblowing. Both of them. Then I went back upstairs to revisit the stuff I'd seen the night before.

The masks they have here are both totally different and practically identical to what I'm studying with Stefano; the Commedia and Carnaval traditions stretch way back through Rome and Greece to European prehistory. Of course, most of that history is just as unwritten in Italy as it is in Melanesia. As stultifying, rationalized western Realism conquers the globe, it's heartening to be able to touch the low-tech magic of masks and think that I have a chance of using them to illuminate modern existence.

Progress?

2008-11-25T14:24:00.000-08:00

OK, progress. Now that the leather has dried for a couple of days, the "languettes" that held the leather onto the matrix are shaved down to paper-thinness with a very sharp blade, and the matrix is removed.
A stainless steel wire is glued around the inside perimeter and the languettes are then glued around it to hold it in place and hide it.

The languette dangling from the end of the nose is also shaved down (an excruciating process, with no margin for error); eyes are cut and the mask receives its base color of dye:

It still needs a patina layer over the dye, a mustache and eyebrows, and some varnish on the inside, but finally, it can be tried on... (psych, I don't have a photo of this! Sorry!)

Anyways, it doesn't fit.

The perimeter line of the forehead and temples is cut wrong, and the whole cavity of the eye socket needs to be cut deeper. The result is that the mask sits too far forward on my face, my actual eyes are more than an inch behind the eye holes, and the whole thing points downward slightly. So I will have to go back and work on the matrix some more. This is par for the course.

This particular piece of leather is kind of a mess; I didn't set the leather properly on the matrix to get the shape of the nose or eye sockets right, the tip of the nose is a mess, and there are lots of places where I scratched the leather with my fingernails or with various tools. So it's an acceptable first draft, and a good learning experience, but it's not a very good mask.

Yet.

A side note to those of you in Blue Lake...

2008-11-23T20:23:00.000-08:00

...who might be reading this:

If you're studying mask design with Bruce, I would be extremely cautious about taking design advice from this blog. In fact, don't take design ideas from me at all. Stefano's work diverges in certain tricky, subtle ways from what we're taught at Dell'Arte and you'll be better served, right now, by listening to Bruce and the faculty around you. Know also that I think Stefano has serious doubts about the design of my mask, but that he's willing to let me try it and fail (or succeed, as the case may be.)

Thanks for listening.

Hammering and polishing

2008-11-22T10:41:00.000-08:00

Today I had to return to the Atélier, negating what otherwise would have been a trip to the Louvre. But the leather on my matrix was wet, and it was left overnight to dry a little bit, but it needed to be hammered and polished before it dried out.

The first hammering is done with a sawed-off cow's horn, above. You use the tiny point to make small but intense craters in the leather. I think the idea is to crush the cellular structure of the leather, to release the substances within, and to compress it to make it thinner and denser. You have to hit it thousands of times, without leaving gaps. It's a workout for the forearm.

This is the phase where the leather is really stretched out over the form of the matrix, and the mask begins to take shape.

The next step is to use a plastic or resin hammer (not pictured) to beat down the ridges between the craters created in the first hammering. It is then of a more uniform thickness.

You then take the horn hammer again and, turning it over, rub the smooth curved surface of the horn over the leather in a process of polishing or shining. This is the weirdest, most mysterious, and most difficult part of the process: you can't just dig into the leather or you'll effectively just rough it up and scratch it. Instead, it's kind of like you're pushing the horn to a certain depth, where the internal substances are exposed and can be released. You then push the horn around at this depth to spread these substances around. And this somehow makes the leather shine:

The leather also darkens considerably in this phase, especially as you push the horn harder and deeper. Most of these color differences will disappear when the mask is tinted later on.

This is the final and most thorough stage of shaping, and where the leather really adapts itself to the structure of the matrix. You have to struggle to work the leather along each side of every protruding surfaces, to really push the edges into shape and make well-defined lines. And you have to dig very deep into the interior creases to get shine and definition there. The forehead wrinkles and naso-labial fold on this mask are the most difficult parts. The nose is not much fun, either.

At this stage, little remains to do on the structure of the mask except to remove it from the matrix and modify the tongues of leather (which are currently nailed into the wood) so that they can hold a wire and define the edge of the mask. But it needs to dry out some first. So I will leave it out in the air until Monday.

Leatherwork begins

2008-11-21T12:31:00.001-08:00

This morning I did some final little edit-carving on the matrix, since I noticed last night, while updating this blog, that I had sanded off an important part of the brow—a major mistake, because the brow and forehead are where thoughts are conveyed. I was able to save the mistake somewhat, but it's far from ideal. Oh well. Tant pis.

Then we used the bandsaw to cut off the back, and define the curve of the mask edge. Here it is, sanded and coated with a substance to protect the wood from the moisture of wet leather:

And now it's time for leather. Here I begin by nailing the leather onto the matrix in the region of the eyes, smiling for the camera:

Getting the leather properly stretched around the nose took about 45 minutes, and it's a little crooked still (another thing I'll just have to live with this time). The long strip hanging from the nose will eventually cover the seam that now runs down the septum and over the lip.

And here's a goofy presentation of the end of the stretching stage, with a little bit of camera shake...

The mask now needs to sit overnight to dry out a bit before hammering. Tomorrow is all about hammering, shining, and finishing... and this Capitano will be ready for a test-drive!

For now, I am exhausted. I feel utterly brainless. All my mental energy, this week, went into producing this matrix. Time for a beer...

Et voilà...

2008-11-20T14:13:00.000-08:00

I finished carving today, a day earlier than I expected to. Here he is:

After the chisels and gouges would give me no more detail, I used a set of rasps to smooth out the general surface and do detail work—especially on the forehead, the lip and the naso-labial fold. Then it was an hour and a half of sanding. Stefano's only comment was, "Well, we'll see how it plays as a mask. And if it doesn't work, you can put it on the wall and use it to hang your coat."

Total carve time: 35.5 hours. I may have to go back and re-carve some bits later, depending on how the leather looks.

So tomorrow we'll use a bandsaw to cut the back of the block away and provide the line that will make the edge of the mask. We'll treat the wood to protect it from moisture, and then work some leather onto it. Yohan is glad that it is not he who has to fit the leather around that nose!

Chipping.

2008-11-19T15:44:00.000-08:00

Here's the wood as I left it overnight, with a new block glued onto the nose to provide the necessary length:

This new block eventually revealed a brutal knot and some fatal internal cracking, and had to be replaced with yet another block. After a sold 10 hours today, mostly spent on the nose, here is what the piece looks like now:

The nose is still too long, and is low relative to the eyes. It's also still too voluminous, relative to the rest of the face. Due to the lowness, I took off too much of the upper parts of the nostrils, and now I have a serious departure from the clay maquette. It will not be the same face that I made in clay—but I suppose that was pretty predictable, given that it's my first carving job. It may still play well as a mask. There are still a thousand things that could go wrong...

Sigh.

Ça vient...

2008-11-18T13:13:00.000-08:00

... it's coming.

Thursday and Friday were spent learning how to hammer the leather onto the matrix, and then polish it (sorry, I don't have any pictures of this part of the process yet, as my hands were busy.) The polishing is one of the most mysterious and frustrating things I've ever learned how to do. Leather is a very complex substance, with an amazing 3-dimensional structure—different things happen at different depths when you hammer or rub it. It's like nothing I've ever worked with before. I don't have the work in my hands yet.

Stefano arrived in Paris Sunday night, and yesterday the atélier got down to serious business. He has several orders for masks from his inventory of matrices, and a few new masks to make. And he gave me some wood to start carving with:

And here I am making my very first cuts. Notice that I'm smiling.

The smiles would not last very long.

This is my first carving experience, and it's of course totally different from working with clay because there are no do-overs. You can't add anything. You can only subtract. So here's the same block of wood 5 1/2 hours later:

And that's where I left it at the end of the day yesterday. Note that the block was not quite the right size to fit the full nose; another piece of wood will be glued on to work the 3-4 cm of the tip.

The wood is starting to feel less foreign under my hands, the tools feel more like things I can articulate with. Stefano would not let me use any saws to cut away large areas; I had to use the gouges and chisels to chip, chip, chip away at the block until the form began to reveal itself. Later he gave me some big files which help immensely with rounding the surfaces of the head.

When I first arrived yesterday and Yohan and Carolina were introducing me, I told him that I had started a clay maquette and Yohan pulled the plastic bag off to show it to Stefano. And he looked at it, serious and a little startled, and we experienced two seconds of profound stillness—the only two seconds of such stillness in the entire time I've been in that room. He then hurried over and inspected it closely, then quickly walked away saying, "well, we are starting with something very difficult here." And then he seemed to forget all about it.

Later he gave me the wood and showed me the gouges; he said, "take the ones you need and get started."

Which ones did I need? I had no idea.

This is an atélier where a lot of students and young artists come for training, apprenticeships, internships. And Stefano is not afraid to to let us dive in and make mistakes. He criticizes Yohan for telling too much, and insists that we do it ourselves. I'm really grateful that he's letting me follow my vision on this Capitano; it might well be a disaster, but I'll learn a lot about wood and leather.

After a while the gouges themselves tell me which ones I need. The wood tells me. I can see or feel the surface I need to smooth; I can close my eyes and listen to the volumes in between my fingers.

I suspect it will take 50 matrices to feel comfortable with the wood—maybe 100—but I can feel it starting.

The most difficult thing so far has been trying to penetrate a lot of wood that I know I don't need, but not knowing how deep to dig. As you saw from the first photo above, I drew a profile of the clay onto the wood, but of course the profile lines only help when you're looking dead-on from the side. How do you find those slanted surfaces, those 3-dimensional curves from above? Where is that surface on the cheeks, or the nostril? It doesn't ever touch the lines of the drawing. Ultimately, you can't try to carve the lines, anyway, you have to find the surfaces, the volumes that make the facial features; the lines are merely the intersections of the surfaces. You can only use them as landmarks. If you try to carve them, you'll gouge out some volume that you probably needed.

For me, it's been generally a matter of working on one thing—say, the bridge of the nose—until I can't see or feel it anymore, or until I cannot work it anymore without knowing something else that comes near it—say, the eye socket. So I go work on that for a while. This I skip around over the whole thing until the disparate parts start to come together. The lip helps me find the nostrils, which inform the whole nose. The bridge of the nose determines the start of the forehead. The forehead swings over the eyes and meets the temple, which devolves into the cheek, which then show me the heretofore-invisible angle of the lip.

So here is the wood after four hours today, and again after eight hours:
The nose is still the least-refined part, obviously, but the rest has gained a lot of clarity. That's Stefano in the background, by the way. So: more progress tomorrow, I hope.

The apprenticeship begins!

2008-11-12T14:23:00.000-08:00

Finally, after days of wandering around the streets—and insomniac nights, wandering around the inside of my skull—the internship started Monday.

I'm studying maskmaking in the atélier of Stefano Perrocco, a noted master of Commedia and carnaval masks. Stefano won't be here until later this week, but his two assistants, Yohan and Carolina, have taken me under their wing. Here's Yohan, working on an experimental Brighella/Larval mask.

I spoke with Stefano on the phone on Sunday, and he said he had to go to a conference in Poland, but that I should go to the atélier on Monday, someone would be there. That someone happened to be Yohan, who gave me a 1-minute tour of the workshop (including the wall of Stefano's matrices, right) then handed me a bag of clay, a plaster face positive and told me to get started! So I did. I wanted to make a classic Commedia type, since I'm working with one of the the tradition's best practitioners... my friends at Dell'Arte will not be surprised to hear that I just started with a big nose and went from there. Six hours later I had a well-begun Capitano.

For those of you unfamiliar with the process, in creating a leather Commedia mask, you start by making a clay model, as I've done here. Then you carve an exact-as-possible copy of the model out of wood (this is the tricky part); this copy is called a "matrix." You can then work the leather over the matrix, and make many different iterations of the mask. Il Capitano is a traditional stock character of which Yosemite Sam is a modern example.. He's agressive, arrogant, and often violent, though he frequently turns out to be a coward. He typically has a long, phallic nose that he brandishes like a sword, and a mustache; he's one of my favorite types to play. I'm including several photos here showing this mask's evolution; Yohan had some pointed observations about the early versions which have helped enormously. Classical Commedia masks are often quite stylized and have bizarre geometry (as you can see from two of Stefano's Capitano matrices in the background of these photos) but it is essential not to lose the human structure underneath. In the end, I have adopted some nearly planar surfaces on the cheeks, nose and brow as my stylizations, hoping that they don't obliterate the human volumes underneath. the mustache and eyebrows will be made of horsehair and added later. Here are four chronological verions of the mask:

Tuesday was Armistice Day, a national holiday here, so the atélier was closed, and I went to the Musée d'Orsay which by lovely coincidence has a major mask exhibition at the moment. It turns out that there are almost no theatrical masks in the show, but rather many sculptures and drawings by artists like Rodin and Picasso and others who used masks as an idea for sculpture and ornament. There were, however, some original drawings by Edward Gordon Craig of masks he'd designed for theatrical productions—crazy combinations of Commedia and Japanese Noh masks. Really cool. Outside the mask exhibit there were, among the many mind-blowing Post-Impressionists, some particularly mind-blowing Toulouse-Lautrec pieces. He kind of built his own Commedia universe, didn't he? Also on display are several original puppets from the Chat Noir Shadow Theatre, which were triply mind-blowing.

I've now been to the Orsay and the Centre Pompidou and already feel like I have to go back to both of them, when I had only budgeted one-day visits to each. What am I going to do about the Louvre?!?! I'm sure you all feel really bad for me.

Today, Wednesday, I finished my clay model—it's as good as it needs to be before starting on the wood—and Carolina started me on leather work. She and I will be producing a dozen or more masks off Stefano's matrices in the next four weeks. The clay, I'll note, was accomplished in 11 solid hours.

So for the last three hours of today, Carolina showed me how to soak the leather and fix it onto the matrix. Honestly, it's a lot like projecting a globe onto a two-dimensional map, only in this case you're adapting the two-dimesnional surface directly onto the terrain of the face. But the same laws of distortion and interruption apply! I'll leave you with a couple of pictures of Carolina working the leather into the creases on the matrix with a tool made from a cow's horn, and the brass nails—which don't oxidize and blacken the leather—fixing the leather onto the matrix. Tomorrow, we start the hammering...

Insomnia plus jetlag...

2008-11-07T21:27:00.000-08:00

It's 6:27 am. I've been in Paris for 46 hours...

... most of which I've been nearly delirious, or dead asleep. Except at night.

I'm developing a hatred for the custom of traveling overnight. Normal people seem to be able to sleep on planes or buses but I cannot: I can barely sleep at home. Add the discomfort of a coach seat and the excitement of new geography, and it's impossible.

Still, I've managed to get out a bit and see my neighborhood here (the 12e arrondissement, near the Bois de Vincennes) and today/yesterday I walked from here to the centre, following the promenade plantée (a rehabilitated, elevated railroad bed) to the Place de la Bastille, over to Nôtre Dame, back and forth across the Seine, through the Jardin des Tuileries, and finally over to the Eiffel Tower, where I took a few pictures. Then, exhausted, I found a Metro station and straphung my way home. But now I can't sleep! Priceless.

Return to Circo

2008-09-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

Today, at a few minutes past 1 pm, I opened up my guitar case in a shaded corner of the Eureka Town Square and started to play...

Astonishingly, to me, this was the first time EVER that I've busked solo.

The prompt was the two tunes I played at Clüb Shampoo last week, where I knew the tunes solidly, my voice was warmed up, but I still was gripping the guitar like a lobster battling a crab. I also had lingering memories of playing "La Paloma" in the Zocalo of San Cristóbal last January, and Rudi telling me that I was still hiding...

So with a sunny Sunday and nothing honestly better to do, I went out and played through what passes for my current set list — about 18 tunes, the usual mix of Doc Watson, Gary Davis, Etta Baker... and a few old tunes my Grandma taught me. I was nervous but reminded myself that if I do what I've always done, I'll get what I've always gotten... and that I need to be onstage more, and to get to the point where, picking and singing, I can physically take over the space. Stop hiding. Let myself out.

Immediately, I could feel what Rudi was saying. A caved-in chest, vacant eyes, choked voice. No awareness of the space in front of me, the buildings across the street, the people around. And I was able to let it out, some — but not always keep it out. Concentration, staying in the groove. And allowing a groove to happen in the first place.... this is the ongoing struggle.

I started with a couple of flatpicking numbers, then switched to a finger rag by Etta Baker, "Never let your Deal go Down," and immediately attracted some listeners: a couple out window shopping. They really seemed to enjoy it. When I started "Deep River Blues" they walked into the bookstore across the street, but the young lady came back and put two dollars in my case... There really weren't a lot of people out today, and a lot of businesses were closed. Next time I'll go on Saturday....

I relaxed and got into a groove on "John Murray of Lochee," which brought a lady over — my age or a little older, latin or Indian, clearly been around the block a few times. I'd seen her wandering around the square earlier. She sat on the brink embankment of the bandstand then came over and stood in front of me, and we chatted a little between songs. We were both kind of shy. I think she was just out in Old Town because she had nothing to do at home; I made up a story for her of hard times, little work, loneliness. She flirted a little. I didn't want to sing any love songs. She lingered and clapped after a couple of tunes. She gave me a tightly wrinkled dollar from the pocket of her jeans.

Most of the street life seemed to be local working-class types, who stared at me a little, looked at how much money was in my case, sometimes smiled and nodded. One guy was making a lot of phone calls from the pay phone to my right. I made up the story that he was dealing drugs. He came over and offered the lady a cigarette at one point — a roll-up from a light-blue pouch — but she said she didn't smoke and made it clear she didn't want to talk. He went back to the phone. Three shaggy guys sat 10 meters behind me on a garden wall and hung out.

My fingertips started to hurt; I had burned through most of my set list, minus my originals and a couple love songs... and so I played "Bye Bye Blackbird" and said goodbye.

It was a satisfying experience. Yet more evidence that I just need to breathe from my feet and do what I know how to do. Next week I'll go back and just try to be even bigger...

I made three dollars. I just put my guitar in the case on top of them. I'll leave them there for luck.

It was all a ruse!

2008-03-27T09:14:00.001-07:00

24 March

And so with little fanfare and much haste, I head for home.

This was decided last Wednesday, in Belo Horizonte, when it was clear that my attempts at a Brazilian internship weren't going to work out; even the teaching internship I could get at Grupo Galpão is not really what Joan and Ronlin want for me. So I am a month short of completing the project, but there is no more point in spending time and money in Brazil; I need to go home and work.

Right now I'm killing time at Garulhos airport in São Paulo; I fly to Houston tonight and to San Francisco tomorrow morning. I'll spend the night in SF with Lindsey B. Jones and drive up to Humboldt in a rental on Wednesday. (All this was left off the blog, by the way, so that I can surprise Leila, who's not expecting to see me for another month. I hope she likes surprises.)

Joan did think that a maskmaking project would be good for the internship, but she wants me to train with a master, to get mentorship and feedback. I'm really turned on by this possibility, especially the possibility of learning to carve wood and work with leather. There is a former Dell'Arte student in Sweden who trained with Sartori who's a good bet; there's also a maskmaker in Mexico City that we have a promising connection with. He's apparently a Commedia master, but knows some of the Mexican traditions as well; this is the possibility that I'm most turned on by, as my brief stay in Mexico in January proved that my work there is not done.

My work in Brazil is not done, either, and that is a matter that I will have to sleep many nights on. The Cavalo Marinho is something I want to dig much deeper into, which dovetails nicely with my interest in Maracatu and Coco. But how and when am I going to get back to Recife? Juliana and Alicio will be in Pernambuco in December, at the height of the Cavalo Marinho season, and I suppose it is possible I could come then and finish my internship doing field research. That would be a kick... but I do want to learn the leather work. I dunno.

I want to come back to LUME and work with masks. I think they want me back. When? Some unnamed date in the future. And now I have some other good friends in Campinas, the students that I lived with, who were heartbroken when I told them I was leaving.

It's weird being the honored guest; it's weird being fed and housed and made to feel like I'm the one doing the favor. They were honored by my presence and took pride in doing things for me, driving me around, introducing me to their friends, to their neighbors, to the cooks at the restaurants we ate at, to the bands we heard at Casa São Jorge.... I kept telling them that I was the lucky one, here, but they didn't seem to believe me. This sends my Protestant Guilt reflex absolutely haywire. (If you're not familiar with Protestant Guilt, it's related to the Protestant Work Ethic. It kicks in when you're afraid you're not working hard enough.)

Anyway, for now there is plenty of work on the table. I need to finish the Carnaval paper and the south American Explorers article. I need to come up with a piece for Ferdinand. And I've restarted work on my failed thesis project, which I hope to produce somewhere next winter. And of course there are plenty of masks I can make now....

Home again, home again. Jiggety jig.

==================================

26 March

Writing from a Denny's in Santa Rosa....

I spent the night in San Francisco with good friend and clown Lindsey B. Jones, who was not her usual drinking-buddy self last night; she's got a cold, and I was pretty beat myself. So we were out cold at 10:15. But it's nice to see her, and to know that her face means I am close to home.

So this is the last post from the road for this blog. I'll keep it going, because I feel like it's potential as a writing tool is largely untapped. I admit I've been lazy and a little afraid about writing publicly like this; it's hard to get into a groove, or even to know what the groove should be.

So I'll keep working that out.

Thanks for listening.

Improvisation ON!

2008-03-21T11:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I jsut got back to Campinas after two days in Belo Horizonte, where the head teachers from Dell'Arte (Joan Schirle and Ronlin Foreman) were attending a conference. And they have firmly put the kibosh on the mask proposal. I can see their point: it is basically a freelance job, and they require mentorship for the internship program. So I'm disappointed, but not upset. And I think my relationship with LUME will survive; maybe we can do a mask project together at some other point in the future.

So, now I must look for another company here to work with for the next month. There is a good possibility back in Belo Horizonte, which is a really cool city. So that's my first lead.

Stay tuned....

2008-03-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

So, LUME has accepted the mask project offer. Now I'm just waiting to hear from Dell'Arte that they have signed off on it....

Today I have to find the Campinas bus station, to buy a ticket for tomorrow to go to Belo Horizonte, a city about 8 hours away. There's a big international conference there that LUME is making a presentation at, and where Joan and Ronlin from Dell'Arte will also be making a presentation. So I'll be there for a week... hopefully, it'll be a nice change of scenery.

2008-03-13T11:12:00.000-07:00

Still raining in Campinas.

In my notebook yesterday I wrote a little of the frustration I was finding in zazen and reminded myself that this is the point I get to every time I try to bring zazen back into my life; it's fun and a challenge for about a week, when frustration sets in and I usually quit. So this is the point that Jacqueline (the woman in Mexico City who gave me the zafu) was telling me to push through. Sitting today, I could often get to a count of three before my mind wandered off for the next five minutes... progress, I guess.

I think a big part of the frustration yesterday was actually not with zazen but with my whole experience here. It's pretty clear at this point that LUME doesn't need me for much; they're a pretty self-contained operation. And unless something changes for them to give me something active to do, I can't stay here. It's that simple.

Carlos Simioni, the guy who invited me here, acknowledged this to me yesterday. When I got to the theatre, he said he needed to talk; when we were able to sit down, he apologized and said that there had been some misunderstanding about my purpose here. He didn't really realize that I needed to be here as part of my degree program.... And that was all pretty clear to me, by this point. The day before, I had faced this fact pretty clearly and decided to make a proposal for staying; otherwise I'm afraid I'll have to go to Belo Horizonte and try to finish the internship at Grupo Galpão or somewhere else.

I think, at heart, it was the language difference that made for a miscommunication between me and Simi, and I'm not angry with him. I don't think Brazil has quite the same system of "internships" (or "estagios" in Portuguese) that we do, and the formality of the arrangement wasn't apparent to him. So it more or less amounts to an unfortunate misunderstanding, but it still leavees me with little to do for LUME that will satisfy my faculty at Dell'Arte.

I made this proposal to Simi: I would build a set of Expressive masks, covering six emotions, that LUME could use as part of their general research practice. I would make twelve masks total, with each emotion depicted in a state of innocence and a state of experience. I got the innocence/experience idea from what I've heard of Sue Morrison's mask teaching; I've never tried it myself. But I've wanted to do a set of expressive masks for a long time, and six masks is not enough labor to fill out another month and a half's worth of time here. Twelve is a good number, and an immense design challenge for me. And when the masks are finished, I will lead a workshop in wearing the masks with the seven LUME actors, and leave the masks with the company when I go home. He liked the idea, although he said the company never uses masks, and siad he would propose it to the other six today. They would essentially be taking on this new aspect of their research, almost just as a favor to me. I don't know if they'll go for it, but we'll see what happens...

On a side issue, I've gotten to see LUME's main clown show three separate times in the last two days. It's called Cravo, Lirio e Rosa and features just Simi and Ricardo Pucetti, with Simi playing two different clowns. It's very funny, although it's pretty random; they get away with a lot of stuff that, if Dell'Arte students tried, would get us pelted with tennis balls or just kicked offstage. The show is basically just a couple of clowns showing up and doing some goofy things, but with no real arc or set of themes (though the things themselves are generally pretty funny, and Ricardo is a brillaint improviser). Maybe that's just my own knee-jerk Aristotelianism kicking in, demanding unity. More troubling is that they don't play their relationships consistently; Ricardo is pretty low status, and Simi (with both his characters) takes high status initially, but the relationships change to equal status a number of times with no justification, as far as I can see. Maybe I'm just being sophomoric here, and I'll have more sympathy when I've done a show of this scale and caliber myself someday....

Cats and Dogs

2008-03-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

It's raining cats and dogs right now. The usual clear hot morning of São Paulo state in late summer, with a steady a crop of cumulus clouds that sometimes build into thunderstorms, has given way to a front of some kind. It's been dark and moody all morning, and now the rain is torrential. The breeze is almost cold.

I just got up from sitting zazen. The struggle to let myself just sit, just be there with the zafu below me and the wall in front of me, is epic. I try counting my breaths and can usually only do one or two before I'm reminded of something, or some noise from the kitchen comes in and makes me think.

Noise doesn't make me think. Who am I kidding? I willingly go to the noise with thought.

Question of the day: why don't I let myself just sit? Just be there?

The answers are probably old, and that's why I don't notice them.

Blog/slog

2008-03-08T11:21:00.000-08:00

I'm getting bogged down in the effort to write a good blog.

That bit about the unicycle took me a whole day to write and then another three days to decide if I should post it, or if I should reduce that whole story to about three sentences, which might have made the point just as well while sparing you my own personal Rocky Balboa saga. And it was a distraction, really, from what I had originally sat down to write that day, which was also a story of overcoming anxiety. I think my ambitions to make this a searching account of my experience are overwhelming my ability to just write about what's happening. I'm missing the trees for the forest, as it were.

So today I'll just write about today, and not worry about how it fits into the larger pattern...

Today being Saturday, my hosts at this house in Campinas did the weekly housecleaning. They don't let me contribute much. I'm in the weird position of being some kind of honored guest, the exotic American, and they really want to take care of me. So they cook for me, they don't let me clean, and they're not charging me any rent.

At this point, though, I'm sleeping on a mattress in the living room, where the TV is on most of the time. My computer is set up on a desk near the front window; for the first week I was out here, I was sitting on a cushion next leaning on the wall with my computer on my lap. Now, for a chair, I have a strange wooden structure, on which I've placed another cushion and the zafu that I was given as a gift in Mexico City.

Did I tell you about the zafu?

Zafus are the round black cushions that Zen Buddhists sit on to meditate. It turns out the Bed and Breakfast where I was staying in Mexico City was also maybe the only Zendo in the whole town; I got along very well with the proprietess, and told her that I'd been experimenting with Zen during the last few years but was struggling without a teacher. She said, "you don't need a teacher. Do you have a zafu? Your zafu is your teacher." I told her I didn't have one, and she then insisted that I take one of hers, since she saw I had some spare room in my luggage... And she made me promise to use it, even if I was frustrated and struggling. She reminded me that frustration was part of the path... So I took the zafu and have hauled it around with me the whole time, convinced that receiving it in this way was an event of karmic significance — a great gift. And here in Campinas I've been able to use it. It's almost a regular part of my daily practice, now, with tai chi, stretching, guitar and pandeiro practice. And it's a big struggle, but I'm now trying to just embrace the struggle, and let the practice take root. I think that's what she meant for me to do.

The Zen focus was key to my ability to be funny in the Clown block my first year at Dell'Arte, and it's been key here too. In the Cavalo Marinho class at LUME I was able to achieve more focus and presence than I think I ever did in Blue Lake. That was enormously frustrating at first: did I waste my time there? Or was the (self-imposed) atmospheric pressure of The School a roadblock that has dogged me my whole life? Aren't I supposed to be a better actor now than I was in school?

OK, this was a ramble but I got out a lot of the info I've been struggling for days to write...

Instructive.

Side note on Samba

2008-03-07T11:49:00.000-08:00

The samba de roda ("roda" means "wheel" or "circle") was unbelievably cool, a bunch of guys younger than me playing songs from the 50's and 60's--stuff you hear on David Byrne's O Samba compilation. There's a huge movement to keep this music alive here, kind of like the Swing revival in the US, but without the irony and self-consciousness. It's not a masquerade, like all the "rockabilly" fans in the States who tried to look exactly like the '59 Jerry Lee Lewis (as if he were a car) during the dot-com bubble. The bandleader did have a haircut like I imagine Jim Morrison would have had if he'd lived to experience disco, but it wasn't connected at all to the music. In other words, I suppose, there's plenty of postmodern trendiness in Brazil, but it wasn't dominating the bar that night.

2008-03-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

So, the eye doctor saga ended happily, if somewhat expensively (cheaper than in America, though.) Henrique made me an appointment for the very next day, and I had new contact lenses one day later, and new glasses the day after that. A big relief. I hadn't been to the eye doctor in four and a half years... my prescription didn't change, save for a slight increase in astigmatism in my left eye. I've been using contacts a lot on this trip for performances. I carry them around in my prosthetics bag, with my red noses and false teeth, because that's what they are to me: a neutral alternative to the mask of my glasses, and a prosthetic of sorts. They allow me to access the space of the stage visually, and when I'm wearing a mask (like during the carnaval parades in Recife) they're essential. I also like wearing them when I'm drawing or focussed specifically on photography, because they give me a full, focussed, undistorted field of view that doesn't change when I rotate my head. Glasses, in general, are easier because my sight is not so bad that I need them all the time, and I like being able to take the glasses off and put them on quickly and at will. Contacts tire my eyes quickly, and they're really uncomfortable for reading or working on the computer... I also have to confess that I like how glasses make me look, which is more to the point of why I'm boring you with this stuff here: I have to contend with the fact that my glasses are a mask, a contemporary sort of Dottore that has a social significance — they confer a certain intellectual status by symbolizing knowledge and wisdom, like Piggy's glasses in Lord of the Flies. And I have to admit I'm attached to that image of myself. Call it vanity or insecurity (the beast that lurks behind the mask of vanity) or what you will. For a long time I wore a goatee for the same reason. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with people adopting these kinds of masks in daily life, but an actor has to at least be aware of them. And like any mask that confers status, they can be used to abuse others, which is something that I personally have to wrestle with: I can be a real asshole when I feel like I have to prove how smart I am. So taking off the glasses, at times, makes me confront the silly fear I have of other people by removing the weapon I guard myself with.

Then, the problem is that I can't see very well!

A zen problem that will be a physical component of the rest of my life...

If you think this was a pointless digression, let me propose that it's exactly the kind of digression that I wanted to be able to write, that made me name this blog Circo de Nada. It's relevant also because getting new glasses and contacts was something that I should have taken care of before I came on this trip--last year, even, or even the year before that. But I'm not very good, a lot of the time, at taking care of myself, and my procrastination habit has gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years. So the drama of getting new lenses was an unnecessary drama, entirely of my own making.... a circus of nothing. Maybe you don't want to read this kind of confession. But I hope that publicizing these personal problems, the way the clown has to expose what he's most embarrassed about, will help me transcend them.

An illustrative digression:

In 1996, when I was 24, just out of college and drifting around Denver trying to find meaning and purpose in my life, I dug out the unicycle that my mother gave me for Christmas in 1982 but which I had never learned how to ride. I was determined to conquer it. I started on my mother's front patio, a concrete surface that featured two wooden pillars about ten feet apart, holding up the roof. It also had a fence and some bushes which mostly hid what I was doing. I wrapped my arms around one of the pillars and tried to find a way to just keep the unicycle underneath me. As I pedaled, of course, I had to move away form the pillars, and usually only made the wheel turn 180° before my legs locked and I had to step off (wipe-out falls on unicycles are rare.) But a few times I'd get a whole 360° of movement, and after an hour or so, I had actually managed to pedal from one pillar to the other a few times, and was left with the undeniable knowledge that my mother's patio was suddenly too small a course to learn on.

There was a park across the street, with a fenced-in tennis court and a long circuit of asphalt paths, but not many places where I'd be able to hang onto something while I mounted and tried to ride. Worse, it was public. If I practiced out there, people would see me fail. But something — desperation, I suppose — in my desire to ride the @#%*ing thing made me decide that public failure didn't matter. So I went out there, and found a small restroom pavilion next to the playground with some pillars, like Mom's patio, but with more distance between them, and I discovered that the ten-foot trips became more and more frequent. One day I'd go fifteen feet. The next day, I'd go fifteen feet three times and never less than five feet anymore. The next day I'd do twenty feet... and pretty soon the pavilion was too small for me too.

In the meantime, I discovered that most of the other people in the park weren't much of a distraction. Kids would be startled at first, but get bored quickly as they saw I was only practicing and didn't really do anything spectacular. Adults usually tried to ignore me, like they were embarrassed. Not by what I was doing, but by something else, which took me a long time to recognize.

After a while I had to stop aiming for the pillars and had to venture out onto the paths and circle the pavilion. When I fell, I'd head back to the pillar I started at and try again. And after many days even that course was too small for me, so I had to face a new fact: it was time to head out onto the path that circled the whole park, because that's where I'd get the distance I needed to practice. But there were no pillars out there — so I'd now have an additional challenge: mounting the cycle without holding onto anything. Because falling off out in the middle of nowhere was now inevitable.

I learned. I struggled, sometimes beyond the point of tears, with mounting the unicycle and immediately riding away. When I succeeded, it would take all my concentration to not be distracted by the joy of this momentary success and move my focus to the still-difficult task of simply riding forward. I contended with hills, which raised the stakes — you try mounting a unicycle that immediately wants to go backward and to the left! I learned to juggle while riding, using clubs instead of balls, because the clubs gave a greater margin of error in giving me something to grab onto; oddly, riding itself was easier when the juggling took my focus. After months and months, I could go around the park twice — about eight tenths of a mile — in just under twenty minutes, without falling off, and without dropping a club. But it involved many, many falls, many drops, and many failures to mount the unicycle. All in public.

As I said, most people tried to ignore me, and seemed nervous about it. My assumption at the time is that they were nervous because I was being a freak, but what I failed to apprehend until much later was that there was in fact a deep respect they were giving me. They were embarrassed because I was doing something cooler than they were. There was one guy I got to know a little over the months; an older man, a recent immigrant from Russia named Mike. He was out power-walking, on the orders of a physician, I suppose, and we'd holler hello when we passed each other. But one day, he shouted as I passed, "Someday, I'm going to be doing that!"

Another day, a woman that I couldn't recall ever seeing before, strode past me and said, "We're all so proud of you!"

I had struggled for years to understand what circus really was; what it meant. What it did. I had tried to make juggling into acting and found that unless you're just going to make it into a metaphor, it's hard to make juggling be anything other than juggling. For example, unless you're an incredibly skilled mime, it's nearly impossible to use juggling as, say, a sword fight--because it requires so much overt cooperation between the two "fighters" that it can't usually look like a fight. The circus skills are just themselves; skills that most people won't attempt but love watching other people do. But they don't accomplish anything. They can't tell a story, other than "person X executes this trick," which is not drama. It's spectacle.

But it was the experience of learning to ride the unicycle — and failing often — in public that gave me an understanding of how circus performance functions: by displaying a transcendent skill, risking failure (and often death), circus performers provide inspiration for the audience, by transcending what is normally assumed to be human nature. By transcending their apparent humanity. And people usually just chalk it up to talent: the circus performer has some intangible gift (an inborn transcendence) that makes them special. One other person who did talk to me was a man who coached a girls' tennis team on the park's courts; he told me, "my girls sure think you're talented." I was flattered, but somehow upset; later I wished I had had the presence to tell him, "Tell them that it's not talent. It's skill, that anyone can learn. The important thing is to do what you love and work hard at it." That would have been good coaching.

I do think that there are some circus performers who may have, say, more inborn flexibility that allows them to become contortionists. But I suspect that anyone who starts stretching young enough and strenuously enough — and is willing to injure themselves in the way contortionists do — could be that kind of performer. It's their intention and their ability to work and learn that separates them from the pack. And it is this sacrifice that circus performers make which unites them with the tragic actor, in the way Nietzsche views tragic actors: as people who perform a self-sacrifice, in a public forum or liturgy, in order to recharge the life-force of the audience.

This was a long and unintended digression away from what I wanted to write about today, but since it cuts to the heart of what I'm really trying to do with my life out here, and why I called this blog Circo de Nada, I ran with it. I don't know why this powerful lesson that I learned in 1996 is something that I have failed to use, over and over again, in the years since. I don't know why the spirit of risk and discovery, and the day-by-day struggle for incremental improvement that I felt so powerfully back then was so lacking, say, in my thesis project. And I don't know why I always just assume everyone is going to scorn me when I display my humanity, instead of recognizing and respecting it.

I suppose we all had enough humiliation in Middle School to explain that. And some of the public does want performers to fail, so they can laugh with scorn — from a safe distance. But the majority of the public wants to see wonderful things, which most of them won't do for themselves. And the job I've declared for myself is to do those wonderful things.

I'm going to write more about challenge and risk, and the events of this trip, very soon.

The struggle for this Blog

2008-03-06T06:14:00.000-08:00

Folks,

A lot of extraordinary things have happened since the last time I wrote. Apologies to the one or two of you who are checking this regularly (thanks, Mom and Dad!) but it has been a bewildering time and while I clearly could use a little more discipline with sitting down to write, I haven't always been sure what I would be writing about, or even how to write it. I'm working hard on it now,though, and will have some posts in the next couple of days. Promise.

Life is messy...

2008-03-04T04:16:00.000-08:00

20 February

Any idea how hard it is to find an eye doctor in Campinas? I found a place to buy frames really quickly; it's right around the corner from where I'm living. But the phone number they gave me for an ophthalmologist didn't work; Henrique ended up driving me around the neighborhood of the university, asking at pharmacies and other businesses until we found one. As we arrived, the receptionist was just heading out to lunch, and wouldn't be back until after my class started. So Henrique took her card and made the appointment for me. Later this morning, he's going to drive me to it. What a guy! He says he knows what it's like to be in a strange place with no one to help... All my housemates here have been incredibly generous. They haven't let me make lunch or dinner for myself once yet. And they're going to take me to a club for some "velha guarda" roda de samba tonight. Amazing.

As for the workshop, my concentration and ease was better yesterday, but I'm still not really in the groove of the dance. I find that I can't concentrate on dance and the Portuguese language all at once; so when the instructors are talking about the dance, I either have to tune them out, simply observe what they do and try to copy it, in a kinaesthetic way, or focus so hard on what they're saying that I lose track of my legs. It's frustrating. And the dance just isn't in my legs yet — when we're improvising in a circle I have a hard time taking a cue and immediately beginning to just dance. Very frustrating.

2008-02-19T15:33:00.000-08:00

17 February

Today I arrived in Campinas after a long night of travel. Brazilians seem to be very into red-eye flights; I guess the airports are small enough that it makes sense to spread the flights out into the nighttime.

The Rio airport seems pretty small for such a major city--Garulhos in São Paulo is the same way. One reason: They are only airports, not shopping malls! There are a few shops and cafés, but not the embarrassment of overpriced retail that you find in Denver, Houston, or Minneapolis, where I once had the opportunity to test and buy an electronic mattress immediately upon stepping off the plane. It's ridiculous.

Arriving in Campinas after Recife is like going from Brooklyn to Boulder. At least, the neighborhood where LUME is located is clean and quiet, a landscape dominated by single-family detached homes. It's another world. Of course, in America this neighborhood would seem run-down and poor, but here it's solidly middle-class.

LUME connected me with some graduate students at UNICAMP who have a spare room to rent. I don't know if I'll be here just for the weeks of classes, or if this will be my residence for the whole stay here. My main host is Henrique, an environmental scientist. I've got a room in the back, in a small separate building... and there's a WASHING MACHINE! Amazing.

I haven't had much time to visit, as I needed some food and a lot of sleep after the night of travel. So I've had a nap, a little practice on the pandeiro, and the requisite Portuguese study session...

I have the Teach Yourself books, a general lesson book/CD and a grammar, and I'm trying to do at least one chapter in each per day. I'm also trying to read magazines, and I bought an anthology of Vinicius Moraes' poetry, to slog through with a dictionary... In Recife, I was with so many english-speakers that I feel kind of behind in Portuguese acquisition. Here I'm being forced to speak more. It's good.

Cirque du Soleil's Alegria is playing in Sampa now; I might get a chance to see it. TAM airlines is one of the sponsors, and the in-flight magazine featured an article about a clown in the show, the only Brazilian in the production. He builds his material based on games he played as a child-- a devising technique that intrigues me. Can I set up a series of games or make-believe situations for Ferdinand based on my old childhood pastimes and fantasies? Can it be a rough sequence that I can improvise through? A structuring of the Ronlinite Clown Journey?

I'm doing a lot of thinking by asking questions and not trying to answer them right away, as Dr. Bob Maurer suggested in his workshop at Dell'Arte... He says the human brain cannot refuse a question, and it will work subconsciously on them if they are consciously and verbally posed...

=============================

19 February

Yesterday was a mess of getting settled in the new town, and starting the Cavalo Marinho workshop.

It started with trips to the grocery store and the bank, and a run to LUME to get some of the luggage I had left there: a big duffel bag, which I had to carry by hand to Henrique's house. On the way, while shifting it to my left shoulder, it banged into my glasses — and they broke.

These glasses are more than four years old; getting new ones was something I've been procrastinating on for a long time... but now my hand is forced. I need new contacts too, so I'm debating just getting contacts, since I need them more for work, and waiting on the glasses. Glasses are more comfortable for me over long periods of time, though — and I confess I like how I look in glasses. The vanity of the Dottore! So maybe contacts are a way of taking off that mask and living more dangerously....

----------------------------------------------------

The Cavalo Marinho class was great; Jesser de Souza, of LUME, is a natural clown and an impressively strong and centered person. After we became acquainted with each other we played a tag-like game called Victim-Villain-Hero: a distillation of Melodrama to its essence! One person starts as the villain and casts his gaze on the victim of his choice: he then chases that person, who at any time can call on a Hero, who then chases the old Villain, who has now become the Victim. If anyone is caught, or if a Villain gets confused and chases the wrong person, they're out. It's a high-pressure way to learn the names of the group, and what Jesser was trying to teach with it was the basic mime technique of pushing and pulling space--the players, with their intentions, can move each other around. This, it turns out, is critical for the group-dance aspects of Cavalo Marinho, where a circle of musicians and audience is created, and everyone dances. Individuals move out into the space and invite someone else in, and the pushing and pulling of the invitation, like leading and following in ballroom dancing or tango, creates the dynamic space of the performance.

We learned the basic steps, which are pretty simple, though we all struggled with them. I feel quite intensely my own self-blockage here: I'm not releasing myself to the dance. It reminds me of one of the parades we did two weeks ago in Recife, where I literally felt myself standing in my own way. To a certain extent, the dance steps here (and the drumming in Recife) are a question of rehearsed technique-- like a fingering pattern on the guitar, time spent simply doing the moves is what gives one the ability to use the movement as a foundation for performance. But I think the lesson of Ronlin (and Michael Gelb, the Alexander teacher) is that if you release yourself to the activity, you can learn it faster and really just do it. But this takes enormous centering and attention (and, as both Gelb and Ronlin would tell you, repetition): in Zen, it's a whole other kind of training. And most of us are so caught up in our habit of trying to get it right, trying to look good, etc. that we hold ourselves back from learning.

How deep can I go with this kind of attention during this workshop? That's my focal question this week.

It's a natural question you may have now: why am I contending with this after two and a half years at Dell'Arte? That's a question I beat myself with all the time. As much of this as I did learn there, I think I still have not conquered the hang-up of my realtionship with schools--the politics and power structures that I've feared, loathed and respected way too much over the years. For most of my life, my sense of my own success or failure as a human being has been tied to my performance in school, an attitude instilled in me by my parents and teachers, which inspired a crash in the third grade from which I've never really recovered. The progress I made over time at Dell'Arte was largely erased by the failure of my thesis project. And it's not a coincidence, I don't think, that I choked on the most formally academic project in the work of the school. I feel like I'm just now starting to recover the centeredness and willingness to explore that I lost last spring. I am not surprised that that's happening outside of the school.

OK. It's 9:20 am. Class is at 2. I need to go look into new glasses and contacts.... but first I need to do tai chi.

2008-02-02T07:38:00.000-08:00

Hey all,

Sorry it's been so long since my last post; travel was hectic and things have been incredibly busy. There has literally been NO time to write.

The last day in Chaipas saw me catch some kind of gastrointestinal bug that had me running to the john for six straight days; worst traveler's bug I've ever had. I flew to São Paulo on the 21st and instead of trying to travel to Recife immediately, I checked into a hotel at the airport and tried to just chill out for a few days. By the 25th, though, I had to be in Recife so I bought a plane ticket and flew... and immediately upon landing here, I started feeling better. Nice to be home...

Since then, it's been a whirlwind of drumming classes, travels around the city, buying new drums, and partying during the run-up to Carnaval, which started last night. The photo here is my new alfaia and two new bells, a gongue and an agogo. I'll be parading with them tomorrow and Monday.

Today it's off to Olinda to hopefully see the giant puppets that city is famous for.

Bom Carnaval!

2008-01-20T09:28:00.000-08:00

Sunday, 20 January

Last night, after a fun show and a beautiful afternoon, the wind whipped up as darkness fell and it began to rain.

Hard not to take that as a sign.

The show went pretty well; there was some comedy at the beginning as the show was in the main plaza of San Cristóbal, in front of the cathedral. As we were setting up, a "security guard" of some sort wanted to know if we had "official permission" to do a show; the woman from Melel Xojobal, who had booked us, offered to go get some kind of permission, but since it was Saturday, the city offices weren't open. So we started the show anyway. The security guy then showed up with a cop, who looked nervous. They trued to stop the show but we already had a crown of 150 people who started jeering, and the forces of law and order stood down...

They stayed off to the side glaring at us until we left.

The music bit went OK; some people laughed and a couple of older ladies smiled and sang along. I guess "La Paloma" is a pretty old song... But Rudi said I was hiding. It's hurtful to think I still need to get commentary like that, but I suppose it's something I just have to deal with. I suppose the bit is still a bit opaque to me— I have an image of it but I guess I'm not really sure what it is yet. My first, instinctive thought about that is that Ferdinand is starring in his own personal musical, and he needs to be transported out of the ridiculousness of what he is actually doing...

So now it's time to move on.

Today will be about packing, calling Leila and trying to watch some futbol Americano, if possible. Tomorrow my van leaves for the Tuxtla airport at 5:30 am; I have an 8:30 flight to Mexico City, a 12:30 flight back to Houston, and a 9 pm flight to São Paulo. When I get there, I have to figure out how to get a bus to Recife, which promises to be pretty epic — that's a trip of more than three hours by air, so it's gotta be more than a day on the bus... And the fancy express busses that are apparently ubiquitous in Brazil are a little mysterious on the web. So I'll have to go straight to the bus station from Airport and hope for the best....

In any case, this is most likely the last blog entry until Friday, when I'm reasonably certain that I'll be safe in Recife.

So have a good week, y'all. I'll have more reflections on Chiapas by next weekend, when I start to gain some perspective...

2008-01-19T09:31:00.000-08:00

Friday, 18 January

We had Tuesday and Wednesday off; later on tuesday I bought some enamel cookware for use in a music bit. I found a pot with a lid, and a large cup, that both have two different notes, if you strike them on the bottom or on the sides. The pot lid has a nice bell tone. Between the three things, I can come up with a convincing set of major triads over which I can sing "La Paloma" (!)

On Wednesday, I went to Chiapa de Corzo, the ancient pre-columbian capitol of the region. There is a festival there every January that is pretty legendary for street dancing, masks and even transvestites. I was told that my best chance to find a traditional mask would be there.

It turns out that this was not the best day to go, but it was my only chance; there was apparently less dancing and performance than other days this week. And while I found some masks, they were way out of my price range (the good ones were 3000 pesos, or just less than US$300.) Some not-so-good ones were 1200 pesos, which was still out of my price range... The main mask used in this festival is the Parachico, which is a bearded man's face, made with a fair amount of naturalism — it looks to me like a variant on the "Cristiano" mask that is common all over Mexico. There were some Jaguar masks and some bull masks also that were much cheaper (350 pesos), but I wasn't terribly taken with them; they were all made with careful attention to naturalism, and I suppose I wanted something rougher: the dangers of expectations! I almost bought a bull mask, but decided that for my purposes, I would do better to make one of my own this summer.

The bull mask was intriguing because right as I arrived at the Zócalo in Chiapa de Corzo, I heard snare drums and fife--and down the street came a parade of little girls and young women in bright, flowery dresses, accompanied by boys in sarapés and Parachico masks. Three drummers and one flutist were with them. But out in front was a boy with a bull puppet over him — exactly like the bumba-meu-boi puppets I saw in Brazil, and like the ones I will be working with in Cavalo Marinho! the puppet was a long half-cylinder representing the body, and at the front was attached one of the bull masks.

I had, just the day before, seen a video that Rudi had of Tsotsil indians doing such a dance, and wondered what the connection was with Bumba-meu-boi, and whether the dance was pre-contact or post-contact. If it was pre-contact, what were the indigenous cattle cultures in the Americas? If post-contact, what is the connection to Spanish bullfighting?

Anyway, here was a real live bull dance. Pretty cool. There were a few others throughout the late morning, all of which had the informal vibe of a Maracatu procession. And the fife-and-drum soundrack was a lot like Otha Turner's music from the American South... cool connections, all...

The afternoon wore on and the dances seemed to die away. I needed a siesta, myself, so I headed back to San Cristóbal.....

-------------------------------------------------------------------

On Thursday we had a gig in Rudi's neighborhood--the trendy new suburb of Huitepec las Palmas, three kilometers northwest of San Felipe, the last barrio of San Cristóbal proper along the Pan-American Highway. This was a show at the local elementary school for about 60 kids, all under the age of 10 or 11. The show itself was notable mainly for being kind of slow and lazy. Clearly we were out of practice and a little rusty after three days off. But I made the discovery that until I get completely out of costume, I can't act like a normal human being--the kids see a clown. I had put on the pink suit at Rudi's house and put clothes on over it; them I put on my nose, diaper and tutu behind the outhouse on the school grounds. But when the show was over, the kids chased me over to the outhouse, and while I got the nose, diaper and tutu off, and the other clothes on, the kids could still see the link suit and wouldn't stop taunting me. I was buzzing a bit from the performance and played along.... Rudi was talking with the faculty, so I had time to kill, and the kids were relentless (and apparently had nothing better to do than crowd around me and try to pull my pants down.) So I chased them some, but it was endless. I couldn't get them to stop. After a bit I tore off the outer clothes and chased them, which they enjoyed, but there was no way out until Rudi was done talking.... kind of uncomfortable. But nice to know that I can just play with a mob of kids. They're creeped out, but a little titillated by me; it's fun developing a scary-goofy relationship with them. But I have to have something to do to get out of it. They're relentless.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Today, Friday, we had a gig at Melel Xojobal, a daycare-and-advocacy organization for homeless and indigent kids in San Cris. They are also sponsoring our show tomorrow in front of the Cathedral.

The kids here were between the ages of 1 and 4, which was very different. It was really hard to get audience volunteers who would stay onstage; one girl was actually really funny in that during the hat routine, when Rudi is trying to get her to pass a hat under her leg or around her back, she would just angrily throw it on the ground. Which was very funny. But she didn't get that she was supposed to imitate him, and she ended up crying and running offstage, as did two other kids. Very difficult. But the "slinky" routine, in which I put on a big piece of reflective, flexible tubing and move it like a Mummenshanz body mask, went really well; Rudi had encouraged me to really play it. And after 5 shows, I'm getting the hang of it. Too bad tomorrow is our last...

After the show we sat on tiny chairs and had lunch with the kids. They're all so young, and many will be below 5 feet tall when they're adults, so I felt like an absolute giant; they were also really hard to converse with — not that I have an easy time with that anyway. But I can usually exchange names with kids. I think some of these kids don't even speak Spanish at home--they speak Tsotsil. So it was weird, being this giant smiling stupidly at kids who just stared back curiously. I suppose they were also trying to process who I was, compared with the pink guy they'd been watching. Very strange.

Tomorrow I debut the music bit... Wish me luck.

Problems with photos

2008-01-15T10:46:00.001-08:00

Ostuacan: this is the temporary housing built for flood victims.
Outside Ostuacan, near Juan de Grijalva: This is the cut that workers made to drain the lake created by the landslide.
Rudi's Butt-binoculars routine! From the night gig, Saturday 12 January, Ostuacan Basketball Court.

OK, I'm having some issues publishing photos here. Sorry about that. So this post has most of the photos mentioned in the previous Jan. 15 post below....

2008-01-15T10:36:00.000-08:00

11 January

Not much to report today; we had no performance gigs. There had been a possibility of one at a school opening somewhere around San Cristóbal, but the guy never got back to Rudi about it. Kind of mysterious.

On the way into town this morning, walking down the hill from Rudi's house to where we catch the Colectivo minibus, we saw some workers in the woods; they had cut down a large tree and were hewing it, on the spot, into boards with a chainsaw! This must be how the rough beams I see holding up peoples' ceilings are made.

My first thought was, "now, that's a skill!" A good example of skill coming from necessity and subsistence. It was a far cry from the giant tin shack that we call a sawmill back in Eureka; these were workers getting and cutting the wood they needed for a job. Not cutting down a forest and selling it later.

After lunch I sat around in the Zócalo thinking about how to approach the music number that Rudy suggested at the end of our show; the problem is that my guitar is too big to fit into his trunk, and it's kind of random to just grab a guitar and start singing. I wish I had brought my ukelele. I looked for one at a music store here, but they didn't have one; if there had been a cheap one, I probably would have bought it and given it to Rudi. I was already planning on getting a Cavaquinho (the Brazilian version of the uke) later in my trip, so there was little point, really, in getting one now unless I could get rid of it — because I don't want to travel with one, and if I did, I should have brought the one I already own!

So I started thinking about ways to contrive an instrument out of junk--perhaps a washtub bass made with a 5-gallon bucket and a broomstick. This lead to a bunch of dramaturgical ideas, naturally, about building a story by which Ferdinand discovers music in the junk. It's an old idea, really, a classic bit that could be really cliché. But it turned out later on that Rudi had the same idea--maybe that I could contrive and play a glass marimba. This is very much in line with Bruce Marrs' observation that music is more within my skill set than juggling or other standard circus skills.

The problem is that we have four show this weekend with a lot of travel in between and little time to work up such a routine. I suppose it'll have to evolve onstage....

Music can also contribute to the balloon bit; I can easily "discover" the sound of a balloon squeaking and be inspired to perform the Blue Danube Waltz. I have no idea if there's enough familiarity with that music around here for people to get the joke, but the music itself is pretty funny so I'll start by playing with that!

===========================================================

Tuesday, 15 January

Gat back late Sunday night from our trip to Ostuacan; yesterday was spent recovering and running errands in the centro of San Cirstóbal.

Saturday, we loaded up and drove down to Ostuacan. In our convoy were the seven clowns from CHISPA, and some CHISPA staffers to take care of us. One of the clowns brought her husband, three children and one of her teenage son's friends. There were about 17 in all, in four vehicles. I rode in the pickup truck with four others who spoke no English; the trip had a lot of silence! WE did manage to have one conversation about sports, drugs and the recent steroid scandals in the US. I got about one sentence out every kilometer.

I'm having to think pretty hard to say anything properly. When I just start talking, what comes out is a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and French. Often the Portuguese version of a word is the first to come to my mouth, and I tend to glue everything together with French conjunctions and prepositions. It's kind of funny, but frustrating. I'm discovering that my French vocabulary is starting to disappear. Scary.

We drove down past a couple of the Zapatista "Autonomous" zones--villages and valleys that the Zapatistas control and that the Mexican government allows some peace. They have built their own schools in there, and apparently there's no such thing as property taxes in this part of the world, so they really have their own governments in there.

The landscape transitioned from the piney hills near San Cristóbal to misty cloud forests to the incredibly dense green rain forest of the flat lowlands. The flooding and road blockage was so intense that we had to drive way north of Ostuacan to get to it; the easier routes were blocked. Along the way, the road was plagued with collapsed shoulders, landslides from above, and outright faulting down the middle of the pavement! To some extent, this is pretty common on mountain roads; roads themselves tend to destabilize hillslopes and if the surrounding cuts aren't stabilized when the road is built, there's trouble. And it looks to me like the highway department here didn't invest much in the hillsopes and cuts when they built the roads.

That said, the effects of deforestation, overgrazing and monocultural farming have never been clearer to me. Ostuacan is a little backwater town, a market-node for a vast region of coffee plantations, cacao farms and cattle ranches. It lies at the foot of the northernmost range of the Chiapas Highlands, along a riverbed, with a plateau of gently rolling hills to the north. Every slope nearby that is less than 35-40 degrees has been deforested for plantation or ranching. And every inch of that land is eroding away. One of the photos here shows just a green hillside; if you look closely, you'll see linear formations in the surface of the hill that run in roughly horizontal lines; these are literally waves of topsoil that are flowing off of the mountain. The soil is deep and rich, but it depends on the root systems of forests to hold it there; the grasses and herbs that dominate after deforestation are not enough to hold it. Further, when the cattle diminish the grass and loosen the soil with their hooves, the situation is exacerbated. The torrential rains that come twice a year then just wash the whole place away. Eventually only bedrock will remain here, muddy badlands where nothing will be able to grow, and the soil will not have the years that it takes to develop. Then even ranching will be impossible. The rivers fill with mud and choke out the fish; the people will most likely leave and crowd into cites somewhere. They've mortgaged their future for a few years' profits--or, more likely, corporate or governmental farming programs have.

The floods that have devastated Ostuacan and the surrounding communities are not a natural disaster: downstream from the town, the deforestation allowed an entire hillside to collapse, damming the river. The resulting lake drowned several communities and blocked roads, which is why we had to drive so far north. I don't know how many people, if any, were killed. The lake is now being drained into another stretch of river via a cut that the authorities have made (see photos). Unfortunately, of course, the maps available of this area are rare, of too small a scale to show much detail, and probably wildly inaccurate. If I could map this for you, I would.

In the town of Ostuacan itself, the refugees who did not flee to the sports complex in Tuxtla were moved into plywood cabins built on concrete pads in the middle of town (see photos.) Kitchens are communal and there is no running water. Food stores are kept in fenced-in areas of schools and administrative buildings, and are guarded by armed security guards. A school outside of town has been taken over as a camp, where people sleep in gender-segregated "dormitorios" (classrooms) and the whole place is operated and guarded by the army.

When we drove down, we were told that we'd do four shows here--two on Saturday and two on Sunday. But the local authorities, with whom CHISPA had made the arrangements, weren't too clear on things, apparently, and when we arrived they were surprised and had no idea where we were to perform. It was getting close to sundown, so the venue was going to have to be lit; we ended up doing only one show that night on a basketball court (that was being used as a soccer pitch) with a pavilion roof and big lights. The show went pretty well. It started slowly — The CHISPA clowns don't really understand that you can't keep an audience waiting — and the energy was pretty low by the time Rudi and I were to start. We started pretty quickly and then settled into an even-paced rhythm which Rudi later said was a little slow and unvaried. But we have a relaxed groove together, one that keeps the show moving, at least, and allows for some play.

I can't stress enough how lucky I feel to be working with a such a seasoned pro who knows his routines, knows how to change them according to the situation and when to cut them, extend them, or modify them on the fly. He knows how to make room for me in his show; can play either part in a routine and can change roles or actions as necessary.

He knows how to work an audience and get kids to participate onstage. he knows how to develop a silent dialogue with a kid in order to, say, get the kid to do a hat routine or some acro — without forcing the kid to do anything. He's open to kids and their impulses. And he loves to play with them.

He also demonstrates the thinking-process of creating or developing a bit according to character. When we were decompressing Sunday night, we debriefed the shows a little bit and ended up rehearsing a new routine for two hats. He knows how to look for (and find!) the comedy in a situation.

He thinks like a clown, and it's fascinating to see the process outside of the context of Ronlin Foreman's classes.

There's a lot I can learn from him. I wish I had more time as his apprentice.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Our show on Sunday was at the school outside of town, because we woke up that day to torrential rain and the outdoor venue that had been proposed was unusable. We crowded into one of the classrooms, which was maybe five meters square, and the people sat tightly around the periphery or looked in the windows. The CHISPA clowns' part of the show was cut drastically; they did one clown/folk dance and a song. Then Rudi and I started. Our show had to be cut down, too, partly because of time and space, and partly because one of our essential props is a newspaper, which can actually be very difficult to find down here.

All in all, the four shows that were planned for the weekend were cut down to two, and the show that we were supposed to do on Friday never materialized; so out of six planned gigs so far, only three have happened, and the last two we had to really fight to do at all. This is apparently par for the course in Clowns Without Borders; in these parts of the world where resources are few and everything is improvised, life has a nasty habit of coming up short.

On the drive back, the group decided to go through Tuxtla since some of the CHISPA staff live there, and because on the map, it looks like an easier drive... Ha! We ended up on several tiny dirt roads (that were actually just mud, washing away like the rest of the place) and almost lost. Traffic lanes are only taken as suggestions, here, and in the country anything goes. The driver of my vehicle, Fredy, is a great guy but he drives with an almost religious conviction that the left side of the road has fewer potholes than the right, which made for some consternation among drivers heading in the opposite direction.

All in all, drivers here, while impulsive and unpredictable, are not aggressive and they keep a pretty light touch on the gas pedal; they're very aware of people or vehicles that might move in front of them. Small maneuvers that would cause wrecks in Denver are no problem here, and I think a lot about driving in Brooklyn, where people who learned to drive in places like this are sharing the road with aggressive Yanks and the relentless stress of the city. Brooklyn seems less random and insane in this context — but still worrisome and scary.

2008-01-11T08:14:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, 8 January

Today I assisted Rudi in a clown workshop he's teaching at El Centro Porfirio E. Hernàndez La Albarrada, a local institute that teaches literacy, conflict resolution, peace culture, organic farming, and other worthy processes. The students are literacy specialists who are working on using Clown to promote literacy. Rudi is teaching them basic scenographic structure and principles for working with props and other characters. This was his second day working with this group.

He started with some basic warmups: follow-the-leader, Sun Salutations, joint articulation and isolation. Then he led an action-mirroring game in which the group forms a circle, one person steps to the center and each person around her, in turn, does an action that she must mirror. After everyone has had a turn in the center, the focus changes: the central person must do an action which is somehow the opposite of what the other is doing. This introduces the idea of partnership--the person initiating the action must, through their action, help and direct the central person. So actions must be simple and articulate.

Next we stood, five in a line, all facing the same direction. This is an improv where there must always be two people squatting and three standing, but people must change position frequently, and do it decisively. The person in front has the most freedom, and the people in back have the most responsibility to maintain the rules. AFter this is played for a few minutes, of course, we change direction and the roles are reversed.

We then improvised, in groups of four, a series of tableaux. One person would take a position, and the other three would then add to the image. Strength of image comes from physical connection to one another, direction of energy and clarity of focus. Rudi then would give us three seconds to change the tableau.

The students were then given five minutes to rehearse their homework from the previous class, which was to do a scene with an object, two minutes maximum, in which the object is somehow transformed. The exercise brings home the difficulty of trying to effect illusions in pantomime — it's easy to appear psychotic! One's perception of time onstage is also explored, as each scene was timed with a stopwatch.

Rudi then led the whole group in a scene that he's used on stage before: he has a recording of a buzzing fly that we must all see together as it flies around us. We have to react as a group, being sensitive to the dynamics of the recording, to the fly's actions — landing, taking off, dive-bombing the group, etc. How does the group listen together? How do we follow each others' visual focus and change leaders according to the dynamics of the scene? A difficult exercise, one that requires deep ensemble, I think, to be really successful.

We then split into pairs and worked on another of Rudi's comic routines, where a #1 is trying to read a newspaper and a #2 pesters him, eventually gaining his seat, his paper, and inducing the 1 to destroy his own hat.

For me, the challenge of the day was following the whole class in Spanish! Since I was familiar with the material, it wasn't too difficult to piece together the thoughts involved. But I have to pay very close attention, and consciously follow all the words.

I'm including all this info in the blog because I'm interested in the pedagogy; as I step away from my studies at Dell'Arte, and while I aim for a career as a performer (not a teacher), it'd be foolish to think I won't be teaching this stuff at some point. It's also interesting to see the approach to the work outside of the Dell'Arte context, and even outside the context of theatre as a profession.

In general the students here are enthusiastic and creative. A few of them have good instincts for comic timing and how they play their mask for the audience. But there's a general level of discomfort with their bodies, and the couple that do have a sense of physical plastique tend to try to act with their faces and hands--the classic pantomime conundrum. Nearly all (myself included) tried to effect difficult illusions in the two-minute object scenes, although one guy kept his scene very simple and real. He was only trying to pull a box with a cord, and even made the discovery of comedy when the cord failed. Rudi singled him out for being the one who came closest to fulfilling the exercise, and seemed most in tune with the work in general. I personally felt like he was less imaginative that others, was lower in energy, and seemed less comfortable onstage. So I ask myself: how do I observe someone's process, their thought patterns, their approach to action and scenework? How did I miss the qualities in his work that Rudi saw? Was I just dazzled by the other students' external efforts?

As Rudi critiqued each scene, I was thinking about how I would approach the critique, and though we differed on some topics, Rudi and I were really in agreement about a lot of things--we just came at them from different directions.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

We found out that Thursday, we will all go to Tuxtla Gutierrez to perform for some refugees from northern Chiapas, where there has been flooding recently. The students will perform the newspaper/hat routine, and Rudi and I will perform the show that we will be doing for the rest of the tour. And we set that up and rehearse it tomorrow!

===============================================================

9 January

Today we rehearsed our show, setting up a basic structure that we will continue to adapt on our tour. The show consists mostly of Rudi's standard routines, several of which come from his solo show that he tours in Europe. He's really treating me as an apprentice, inserting me into set routines as the #2 as a way of simply generating a show. As my character comes into focus in the work, the routines may evolve and change, and we may take different roles in them. Most of this material, he says, grew out of live improv onstage; the show has evolved itself in front of audiences. For now, though, I must simply execute the routine as it stands.

We rehearsed for about 3 hours, which Rudi says is a pretty short time! We managed to do an Italian of the whole show--this first version of it will be 20 minutes long--with few glitches. It's a fair amount of memorizing for me, and I had to take pretty copious notes, especially of the more technical bits (like the juggling!) Luckily a lot of the show is me just following him and doing what he tells me to do, master-and-servant style.

This will be my first time juggling onstage in a long time, and I'm a little nervous about it. But the Alexander Technique is serving me well, here. If I breathe, expand my awareness, don't hesitate and keep my hands soft, the juggling is fine. I'm more nervous about remembering the order of routines.

My clown, Ferdinand the Magnificent, is a real weirdo — you know how some clowns scare kids? Ferdinand scares other clowns — and I have a hard time imagining how he's going to fit into Rudi's routines. I suppose we'll work it out over time; the key is just to get onstage and play...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

In contrast with Mexico City, Chiapas and San Cristóbal not only seem more Mexican, but the tensions inherent in the Mexican experience seem closer to the surface here. There are a lot more tourists here; San Cristóbal is the real darling of the Lonely Planet set right now, in terms of tourist destinations. And while I felt distinctly foreign in Mexico City, here I feel obviously gringo but thoroughly banal. The place is crawling with people like me, and is making a fair amount of money off of us...

That said, Chiapas is known in the US almost exclusively in terms of its political history, and so I come loaded with preconceptions about politics here; my copy of the Lonely Planet guide says that the political situation has mellowed somewhat, though there's still a lot of Zapatista activity here. And that's borne out immediately when you come here: in the central part of town, the graffiti is extremely political, but the cynic in me has to wonder how much of it comes from any organized political groups, and how much is even put up by American tourists! A lot of it is in English--so is it for my benefit? Is the graffiti, in fact, a tourist attraction? If anyone out there has info or opinions on this, I'd love to hear it.

There is is a lot of building going on; the LP guide says that one at least semi-positive afteraffect of the 1994 uprising was increased attention and investment from the larger Mexican community. But the barrios are as miserable as any I've seen, here or in the Brazilian favelas, and the contrast between poverty and wealth is occasionally stunning. But does the building signify actual wealth, or just speculative investment? I wonder. Will it all come crashing down, say, when Pemex runs out of oil? Or when this stops being a chic deposit-point for left-wing Eurodollars?

Am I as colonial as anyone else, here? I'm certainly not making any money, but I'm gaining experience and resumé-fodder. When I fly out ten days from now, will I have left more of value behind me — Laughter! — than I am taking away?

I feel a certain tension in myself between the theatre professional and the tourist, and that bothers me. I used to work in the tourism industry, as a cartographer and writer for Frommer's Travel Guides, and I have that post-modern awareness of the tourist-as-colonialist: that by promoting knowledge of foreign and "exotic" places, we certainly change them and make them safer for middle-class Americans. Sometimes we outright destroy them. And part of the lure of working for Clowns Without Borders is definitely the opportunity to travel and see places that have been in the news, or that are just plain exotic. Frankly, I'm a little embarrassed by my earlier Indiana Jones reference. And I take some foolish pride in carrying the Lonely Planet guide and not the Frommer's.

But I don't feel like the world must stay segregated to retain some kind of cultural or "natural" purity; we on this Earth have to find ways of living together. So we have to communicate, work together, play together. And that's what I think I came here to do.

===============================================================

10 January

Today was our first show, at a sports complex in Tuxla Gutierrez that is serving as a refugee camp for over 800 people from Ostuacan, Tecpatan and other communities along the Rio Grijalva in northern Chiapas, which flooded this winter. The complex is called the " Instituto de Seguridad Social de los Trabajadores del Estado de Chiapas" (ISSTECH.) Our contact for this performance was Alejandro Alarcón Zapata, Director General of Chiapas Solidario por la Alfabetización (CHISPA), who also happens to be Rudi's neighbor near San Cristóbal. His organization is a state office which advocates and teaches literacy; the literacy worker's we've been working with are Alejandro's employees.

Before the performance, Rudi and I were briefly interviewed for CHISPA's television program on the local Channel 10; our performance at ISSTECH was also taped. We don't know yet when the broadcast will be, but I will post that info as soon as possible. Supposedly the piece will also appear on YouTube. Stay tuned... Photos will be forthcoming, too.

The refugees were sleeping on the floor of a basketball gymnasium, and hanging their laundry out on ropes between the trees around the grounds. A flock of chickens and turkeys occupied the small, fenced-in playground. When we arrived, the people were mostly just hanging out in the courtyards and under the food pavilion. We chose the our performance area: a section of courtyard backed by the basketball gym, where the people could pull chairs over easily from the dining pavilion and surround us on three sides.

The literacy workers performed first. I was dressed and ready to go when they started; toward the end of their first number, I left the swimming-pool building we were given as a dressing room, and immediately pulled so much of the audience's attention from the performers onstage that I had to go back into the pool building and hide. But this gave me a problem: Rudi was next to the stage and was expecting me to watch the first part of the show from there; but there was no way I was going to go out there and not pull focus. So I waited, and decided that when the literacy workers finished their last number and took a bow, I'd make the biggest possible entrance I could: when they left the stage, I screamed, allowing my voice to echo across the pool, ran out of the pool area and slammed the gate, and ran screaming all the way over to Rudi, who had to calm me down. I tried some quickie-pantomime to show that some kind of Loch Ness Monster had attacked me from the pool, but I don't think it played too well. Anyway, afterward Rudi said the entrance in general was a good decision. How was I going to appear and not pull focus? There was no way. And this will be an ongoing issue on this tour.

He said that he hadn't anticipated how different a world Ferdinand is from his clown--mirroring my own anxiety about how I was going to fit into his show. But he's intrigued by the challenge and he enjoyed it tonight. Maybe he'll end up treating me like some kind of pet, or a Sesame St.-style subspecies. One technical aspect of this issue is that Rudi's material demands that I wear a hat--things disappear under it, it's involved in punishment when I misbehave, etc. And I haven't done my usual Moe Howard bowl cut because I'm traveling terra incognita and didn't want to look like a freaky gringo in my daily life... but tonight's messy hat-head is unacceptable. I have to come up with a hairstyle that can work under the hat and function somehow in its own right--maybe as a surprise reveal. I also need to have places in the costume to stash stuff, like balloons and other surprises. But the diaper/tutu combination isn't set up for that yet...

The show, as a whole, went well, considering we had rehearsed a total of three hours and didn't tech all the bits fully. He's given me a firm directive to make my own balloon bit, because me trying to do his bit is pretty lame so far. And I need to step up and personalize a couple other routines as well. We decided that the juggling routine — which was alright, just draggy — needs to be rehearsed ten times a day and done in a fight call before every show. We have no ensemble rhythm with it.

He also gave me some solid advice for getting audience participation: we had chosen a kid to come up and assist us, but when we grabbed his wrists to pull him up, the kid resisted and squirmed, and I let go of him. Then Rudi had to let go of him, and we had a hell of a time getting anyone else to come up with us. Rudi says that the kid was reacting to us well when we were "picking" him, and that he likely would have settled down once we got him onstage. But I indulged his resistance, and this made our job that much harder, even with other kids.... The moral: don't let go of the kid!

The kids in general were rowdy, but attentive, and we had a lot of them running up onstage and spanking me, etc. One legacy of this particular performance was the experience of one kid who ran onstage and goaded Rudi, who chased him back to the audience and de-pantsed him! [post-modern side comment: my computer's spell-checker, interestingly, has accepted "de-pantsed," but not "Ferdinand" or "Zapatista"... oh, brave new world...!] The audience laughed a lot, and the kid had been one of the more obnoxious ones we dealt with tonight; apparently, there's a Mexican saying: "if you call the Devil, he will come!" and Rudi initially felt like the kid had gotten what he asked for. But as the show went on, other kids continued to taunt this little guy, and he watched most of the show in tears. And now Rudi feels like he's made the kid a target for as long as he's living in this camp, and even beyond. Rudi feels awful, but it was a playful decision he made on the fly and now regrets. The kid has disrespected him, sure, but he overreacted. And the kid may continue to pay a price for a long time.

So this work has boundaries and costs.

All in all, though, it was a successful show, a good start to 2008, and this year's CWB work....

2008-01-08T14:39:00.001-08:00

OK, after a few days of vacation in Mexico City, it's time to get down to work!

I arrived in San Cristóbal de las Casas yesterday morning after a 13-hour bus ride, on which I was able to sleep very little. Travel is just too exciting for my poor nervous system... Anyway I was traveling over some of the most novel terrain in my experience (the tropical mountains surrounding the altiplano of Mexico City and the transition to tropical rain forest), and I missed it all in the darkness! But I awoke this morning as a misty dawn broke over the lowlands of Chiapas as we rolled into Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state capitol. The sun was very bright and the air moist. But nothing prepared me for the ride up the rim of the plateau to San Cristóbal — we went up and up and up until we could see an enormous green valley below, filled with cropland and lumpy, scrubby hills, and jagged green mountains looming dimly in the hazy distance. I felt like Indiana Jones just before the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Suddenly, just as I notice that we're above the level of the few clouds hanging in the valley, the soil goes from beige to rusty red, and we are surrounded by pine trees and junipers! San Cristóbal lies at 2300 meters above sea level (7200 feet?) and the vegetation is very much like the foothills outside of Denver! Later on there was a small afternoon rainstorm and I could swear, by the smell, that I was in the Front Range... ah, mountains!

San Cristóbal itself is nothing like Denver, of course... a small colonial city that is very picturesque and much more "Mexican" in feel and aesthetic than Mexico City, which is more cosmopolitan and pan-Latin, or even European (similar to Recife.) Rudy picked me up at the bus station and we had a little breakfast and caught a cab up to his house, which is well outside the city, up in the hills at maybe 8000 feet. He has built a small house up here in a neighborhood that is rapidly growing, but still feels like just a bunch of houses on the side of a mountain. His house is a fantasy, a little getaway he designed himself that looks like a jewel on the hilltop. From the front porch one can see beyond the ring of mountains surrounding the high plateau, and to the mountains beyond the verdant valley beyond...easily a distance of 50 miles. Amazing and beautiful!

I had brought a bottle of Mezcal for Rudy from Mexico City, and we sat down and discussed his plans for our little tour. Tomorrow and Wednesday he's teaching some workshops in San Cristóbal at some kind of literacy agency--more on that later, I guess. Then on Friday we'll do our first performance here in San Cristóbal before leaving to tour the northern reaches of Chiapas. It's very exciting to me. Clowns Without Borders has loomed in my imagination for years now, and it's amazing to finally be out doing it. I still don't know much about what we'll be performing, but I got a tiny taste today: a street urchin of maybe 6 years approached us at the internet cafe and tried to sell us gum and peanuts; Rudy engaged him in conversation, bought some peanuts, and took his questions, whereupon he informed the boy that we were clowns. So he asked us to do something! Rudy did a little trick with his baseball cap, balanced on his nose, then removed and restored his thumb. He pulled a sugar packet of f the kid's ear, and the kid asked him what I could do! So I juggled three sugar packets, and I think the kid thought we were pretty cool.

I have to struggle with my senses of compassion and propriety when I see kids like that, selling out of what I presume is desperation. My first trip abroad, in Russia, I gave a few rubles to a miserable-looking gypsy kid once and was instantly surrounded by 20 more, cynically pretending to cry.... And the street vendors here can be incredibly aggressive--we didn't get through breakfast without being hassled by three of them who had to be repeatedly ignored before they would go away. Rudy said he liked this kid — he was still soft. And Rudy genuinely wanted some peanuts. So he engaged the kid. It was beautiful. How can I open myself to people without cynicism? How can I simultaneously avoid the cynical and the genuinely annoying?

2008-01-01T21:09:00.001-08:00

2008-01-01T20:28:00.000-08:00

Greetings, all--

And a 2008 full of music and laughter to all of you!

This is the beginning of my blog/journal for internships and side-trips, as I travel North and South America in pursuit of street theatre and music. Tonight I'm at the airport in Vancouver, British Columbia; tomorrow I fly to Mexico, and later in January, I'll head to Brazil for Carnaval and other projects.

Stay tuned...

--Nick