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.

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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!

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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...

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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.

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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....