Animation.

Animation.

It exists in the clowning world. And the cabaret world. And the circus.

And when you're doing all three as I have been at Teatro ZinZanni for the last few months, it exists there too. In spades.

Animation.

I've talked about it before here.

It's kind of a super charged version of mingling. It's "working the room" with intent.

It's testing the waters, gauging the temperature, getting your feet wet.

It's stepping on to the killing floor and playing.

It's fun.

You're not grabbing the whole room and commanding attention. You're subtly infiltrating across the footlights. You're not drawing attention to yourself. You're insinuating your character into the atmosphere. You're delicately infusing some antic spirit onto the proceedings.

You're basically just moving about psychoanalyzing the audience while you entertain them.

But Animation, especially when you're doing "Victim Work" like I am at ZinZanni, selecting involunteers to join you onstage later on, has an important purpose. You are vetting future scene partners.

So the first animation of the evening, before the show officially starts, is perhaps the most business like. You're touching shoulders, sensing senses of humor, checking for canes or crutches or accents that might make it difficult if you cast them later on. A readiness to smile, to laugh, combined with a slight reticence is usually what I'm looking for.

When a few of us are doing it concurrently, as we are in the current show Love, Chaos, Dinner at Teatro ZinZanni, there is a palpable lift in the air, a slight intensification of the chatter that seems to say: Yes, the fourth wall is down, this is not television and the lunatics are running this particular asylum.

Veronin being Veronin.

While I'm making light hearted barbs and trading gratuitous compliments with patrons I'm also keeping an eye on seating, social groupings, family dynamics. While 7 foot yodeling dominatrix Manuela Horn glides around the room in her 1st Act beer maiden outfit she is also making decisions about who to use in her whip and leash number later in the evening when she's suited up in full patent leather and red lace regalia. The Maestro himself, illusionist Veronin is silently animating, giving people the giggles and the creeps in equal measure.

Meanwhile acrobrat Ben Wendell of The Duo Madrona is high five-ing kids as his security guard character "Bruno". It's not too loud. It's conversational. It only gets the attention of a darkened booth over here or a table of bachelorettes there. But sometimes I think that it is the clearest barometer of what that particular audience's character is going to be.

Manuela and I at the afterparty.

Oddiences

They're all different. They're made up of completely separate and distinct individuals. But somehow, every night, the combined character of the group congeals into a single entity, that night- and that night's only- audience. It is the most talked about subject amongst us back stage.

"How are they?"

"I like them."

"They're a little..."

"I know, right?"

"They'll warm up."

"They're weird."

"It's an oddience."

For one of the numbers I'm doing now in ZinZanni, called "East Side Story", a musical send up of West Side Story which features a dance, a knife fight and a heart wrenching- and hopefully funnybone tickling- death scene I need an involunteer to play a Riff/Tybalt inspired gang leader. The bit gets pretty ridiculous and he quickly becomes an audience favorite and for the rest of the evening he will most assuredly be getting hearty slaps on the back from his co workers or extra squeezes from his girlfriend.

But he doesn't know that yet. He's just a member of the crowd, enjoying the evening. And I'm probably animating near him- but not with him. I want to see his reaction when I play with people around him not to him. What you laugh at is a clear indicator of your personality and I still want a bit of that deer in headlights look when I pluck him from obscurity later on. It is a very secretive casting process you are engaged in with one person while you are being funny with 5 others. 

I'm not phony. I'm mega-phony.

Meanwhile animation gives you a chance to see each group's pecking order, each families hierarchy, even each section's level of drunkenness. You gather this information as you include them in a little conspiracy- a shared intent to not take ourselves too seriously tonight, suspend our cynicism along with our disbelief and have some fun.

If you've been doing it as long as I have you develop some material. Go-to gags that fit just about any situation. Entendres you can double, compliments you can turn on a dime, seemingly in the moment observations that I've used before but give a certain underlying hesitancy to so they seem newly minted. 

He Who Is The Most Relaxed, Wins.

So I noticed something the other night. I was leaning too heavily on some of these tried and true tropes. So I let go. Of course there is a level of expectation as you approach a table. You're in an outlandish costume. Your mustache is painted on with what looks like a sharpie. But rather than animating at people I animated with them. I just walked on to the floor and took what came to me. I just responded in character. In this case mad movie director Cecil B. DeGrille. And new material came. It always does when you're relaxed. When you replace the inner monologue that commands you to keep dazzling them with your cleverness shouting "What do I say next? How can I make this funny?" with a calm voice that simply says: "Breathe. Listen. Respond."

I was watching the NBA champion Golden State Warriors on a replay of a game after the show the other night. I was watching Stephan Curry doing his thing. "Steph being Steph" they call it. Another spectacular highlight laden performance. And I was struck by the fact that in the middle of that 94 by 50 hunk of wood, his stage, his killing floor, with all that attention and the highest level of athleticism and defensive skills in sport pitted against him, he was clearly the most relaxed player out there. Not pushing to make a clever pass, not relying on what he knew had worked the last time, not doing anything by rote. Just breathing, listening, responding.

Sure, there are gems you hold on to. Stuff you pull from your bag of tricks. But my favorite moments in animation come when I'm as surprised at what I say as the patrons are. That we share, in that moment in time, the creation of a new bit. Then it's up to me to remember it, to hone it and perhaps even add it to my arsenal. But every situation, every audience is different.

They all deserve my best. But sometimes- I never thought I'd say this- less really is more.

Cheers.

The Involunteers.

The Involunteers.

This one goes out to my victims. The Involunteers.

I just returned from a five month gig in Seattle at Teatro Zinzanni. I was playing the mad movie director Cecil B. DeGrille. The show was called Hollywood Nights and in it Teatro ZinZanni doubled as "Chez Francine" a fabulous French restaurant presided over by none other than the divine Miss FrancineReed, blues legend and longtime partner in song with Lyle Lovett. Our concept was that on this night of all nights the biggest Hollywood director, Cecil B. DeGrille is coming for dinner. The restaurant staff (all played by an international cast of sensationally talented performers, each with their own amazing act) are thrown into a tizzy. I come in and immediately decide that Chez Francine is the perfect location for my next cinematic masterpiece. That's the set up. Besides a lot of comedy and lots of intros and outros throughout the evening I'm responsible for the audience involvement part of the show.

And that means victims. Lots of them. 

97 shows.

6 victims per show.

That's 576 complete strangers I invite to join me in the spotlight.

576 random elements that I must select as fodder for funny.

576 unpredictable, usually raucous, sometimes delightful, often inebriated involunteers I must cast in the "movie" sections that presage each course of ZinZanni's 5 star meal.

But what to do with these sometimes unwilling, sometimes overly garrulous, sometimes shy, sometimes belligerent  patrons who have paid more than a hundred dollars to escape the world or their wives or themselves and enter the 105 year old Spiegeltent that is Teatro ZinZanni?

I arrive for rehearsal a week before the rest of the cast and they put me and fellow former Cirque du Soleil clown Joe DePaul in a room with a stage manager to take notes and away we go. For six days we jam. We crack each other up. We brainstorm. (Okay, sometimes it's just a drizzle but you get the idea.) We have to come up with three bits that involve audience members that will be interspersed throughout the three hours of what ZinZanni calls Love, Chaos and Dinner. Of course there will also be juggling, trapeze, contortion, something called the Chinese pole, even an opera aria. But at the center of it all are the three audience involvement sections. That's me. Me and whoever I pick. 

 

We're lucky. The evening's concept is built around Cecil's megalomaniac film director so we have the pantheon of movie clichés to work with. And there is a formula. These are, when all is said and done, games. Party games supported by props and lights and fabulous costumes, yes, but games. And one rule: the victim must win. I can make fun of them, I can embarrass them but in the end they win. They get an ovation. Their loved ones love them more. They survive, the unscathed stars of the evening. In the lobby after the show I see them, all smiles, getting high fives and adulation from other patrons who weren't lucky enough to be selected. It feels good.

Megaphoney

 

Choosing victims is an art. For my first bit of the evening we create a piece in which I cast an extra to play a part in a kind of Downtown Abbey/Masterpiece Theatre scenario in which he must first become a butler and then say a line and deliver the Queen her royal tea. The queen dies (It's Helen Mirren's stand-in's dummy) and my victim must revive her. Hilarity ensues. The victim's victory comes at the end as we actually film him, at this point holding the ankles of a spreadeagled Queen aloft making "a sound that is filled with joy, anger, confusion, regret, triumph and sorrow".

At the end of he evening we will actually show a trailer of the Cecil B. DeGrille movie with our real victims from that evening spliced in. 

Basically the formula with victim work is a lot like what I've discussed in these pages before: getting a clown in trouble. Every involunteer gets a couple fairly easy tasks and then an impossible one. And "real people" are a strange lot I found. You never know what they're going to do. And that's what makes it so damn fun.

 

But how to pick them?

Usually you forage. During what's called "Animation" you move among the tables. You touch shoulders. You make funny. You check for wedding rings or canes. It's psychology at 100 miles an hour. You go with your gut. For my second bit of the evening I need a couple who don't know it yet but by the end will be kissing in slow motion in a love scene at a Moscow train station. 

I want fun- but not crazy. I want slightly reticent- but not painfully shy. (Nothing kills laughs like seeing someone in agony under a follow spot.) 

You use your radar. This bit worked best when it was an older couple who were perhaps celebrating an anniversary (my record was 47th) and still have that little spark in their smile. The victory moment in this bit was of course the kiss and when it worked right 300 people let out a chorus of awwww's. This lead directly into the audience dance section of the show and when the feeling was there it was true magic. 

 Going for the juggler.

 Of course that bit was later in the evening, after I'd had a chance to smooze and covertly vet them. But the first victim was selected from afar as I awaited my first entrance in The Producer's Booth, tucked behind a window that gave me a good view of the crowd. Body language, attitude, pecking order, engagement were my only barometers on whether someone was going to be a joy or a jerk. Actually by the end of the run it didn't matter. Even the jerks were a joy. 

 

-->Of course there are stand outs among them. I'll never forget a man's wife who, when I asked her husband if there was anyone in the world he had a special chemistry with, yelled out from the audience "His mother!"  It brought the house down.

I remember too the guy who I cast as one of my samurai- I had a bit with three victims playing villagers in a Kurosawa style epic that culminated in cutting a cabbage in half in mid air with my katana-  who came to the show twice and both times I cast him again (not recognizing him) in the same role. 

Cabbage cole slaughtered.

 

So thank you victims, each and every one. As soon as I pulled you out of the safety of your seat and onto my tightrope in the center of the room the energy in the room quadrupled. Every time I leave a space for you to do something or ask you a question the audience knows we are all moving into unknown territory. We all await my response to your response together. And after twenty or so shows I'm pretty much ready for whatever you're going to say. If I've picked the right victim you'll become my unwitting straightman, setting them up so I can knock 'em down.

So that's a wrap on Hollywood Nights at Teatro ZinZanni. Thank you, involunteers. Take a bow. 

遊 Play.

A recent article in The Japan Times concerning the findings of a group of researchers using "baby-cams" to capture footage of babies playing jokes on one another with no ulterior motive than to get laughs was the kind of underwhelming revelation that goes viral these days.

It struck me as a bag of grant money thrown into a well to prove gravity.

Of course babies like to cut up when they get together.

They've just been through a major experience.

Being born is at least one of the top five things you can do in your life.

There's bound to be some stories.

It must have been scary.

And humor is how we frighten the scary away.

So when they put a group of babies in a room and the red light of the baby-cams starts glowing they must be like a green room full of comedians after a bumpy flight in from Denver.

Dismantlings.

What I found interesting is that the games the researchers observed the tiny tikes making up were fundamentally the same games we clowns play in Kooza.

The simple yet perfect patterns of three.

The creation of expectations and sudden dismantlings.

The there it is, there it is, there it isn't rhythms.

As clowns we often refer to the various sections or to use an acting term beats of our time onstage as games. What is the game now? Are we moving on to a new game? Or best yet: I found a new game. Games are fun. Especially if played with absolute conviction. But in order to participate in any way you must first be willing to play.

The fact that babies are working the room before they can walk across the room is no surprise. What perhaps those same researchers should be looking at is why those of us more ambulatory (and potty trained) humans can lose the awareness that everything we do can be a form of play.

Ohtaki Hunter

Between Osaka and Nagoya I had a couple of weeks off from the circus and went to the southernmost tip of Japan, Yakushima Island.

UNESCO has designated Yakushima Island as a World Heritage Sight. It is easy to see why.

Because of a fluke in the geography, the gulf stream and I'm sure a thousand other factors it is both sub tropical and sub arctic at the same time.

What this means is that you can be hiking amongst pines and junipers and turn a corner and be amongst palm fronds and sand and turn another corner and be plunged into a land of ferns and moss.

All within a hundred yards of one another.

The trail maps look like something Tolkien might draw up.

Primordial doesn't begin to describe it. I tried, failed.

Momoko and the path taken.

Yakushima is also famous for two things: Ancient cedars or cryptomeria (the Jomon Sugi is estimated to be 7,000 years old and is protected from huggers like myself by a network of exquisitely laid out trails) and ohtaki or waterfalls. I became an Ohtaki hunter. But there was neither the time nor the stamina to bag them all.

I stayed in the little town of Anbo half the time at Yakushima San Shu and the rest of the time in Onaida at the Shikinoyado Ryokan with Kentauro San and his lovely family.

After a week of not performing in a sold out big top Ken San asked if I wouldn't mind making a appearance at his kid's school.

"You're a clown. Can you do something funny for them?"

Little did he know I had been jonesing for an audience during all those grueling hikes to the ohtaki.

Sure, I wanted to play.

And this would be as pure as you can get:

1. Walk in room.

2. Forget language.

3. Play.

A couple of hours later I was drenched in sweat and ready to go play "Ohtaki Hunter" once again.

Screaming and Playing.

遊 is the kanji for play in Japanese.

Variations of this can be found in such meanings as "To amuse oneself", "to blow life into" and even "to do nothing".

Since a lot of what goes on in the martial arts would qualify in the scratching your head while rubbing your belly category, perhaps play is the perfect way to deal with the difficulty of doing two opposing things concurrently.

For example the game we play in Iaido; presenting a calm exterior while at the same time demonstrating a life or death encounter.

Cool on the outside.

Coiled on the inside.

Playing.

In fact, when someone engages in any of the martial arts, be it kendo, judo, iaido, kyudo, whatever, it is said that they play the particular art.

Someone plays kendo.

When they start class they say "let's play."

They may be trying to score points by bashing each other over the head while screaming their bone shaking kiai but inside all that gear kendoka are playing.

And the best players win.

Play Ball.

The Setting:

The 35,000 seat Fukuoka Yahoo Dome.

The Teams:

Team Fuji Television.

The undefeated victors of every Cirque du Soleil/ Fuji Television game since the beginning of the partnership six years ago. Athletic, smart and wearing lots of micro fiber stretch pants, plus they bolstered their roster by enlisting a hulking security guard who used to play pro and a bus driver with his own batting glove.

Team Kooza.

A rag tag band of guys with a passing acquaintance to baseball. Riggers, follow spot operators, sound ops, lighting designers and a cook. A Russian acrobat in right field playing for the 2nd time ever. And on the pitchers' mound, a clown.

The Fans:

In this giant room that dwarfed us all and made me think how wonderful it must be to be a major league baseball player and get to play on this gigantic astro turfed stage, a group of no more than 30 filled the air with cheers and chants.

They did the wave.

A singer and a trapeze artist had pom-poms. Sergey, master of the hand to hand act, screamed himself hoarse.

The Game:

Softball.

From the pitcher's mound it was pure psychological warfare.

A game of very precise catch with one major difference: A guy with a stick is trying to bash the hell out of the ball just before it reaches its destination in the catcher's glove.

Getting it by that person is pure play. Towards the last couple of innings Team Fuji was changing their batting order to get their best hitters up. They didn't want to be the team that ended their winning streak by losing to these bad news circus bears.

Plus there was a trophy.

It got serious.

And quiet.

I was glad I had the iaido to fall back on.

To drop back to stillness before each pitch.

To remain cool and coiled concurrently.

To play.

The Final Score:

Fuji Television 1

Team Kooza 3

Kooza Photos by Miron Rafajlovic.
Yakushima School Photos by Kentaro Mizoguchi.
Yakushima bridge photo by Momoko Shimokado.
Softball Photos by Billy Riske.

The Japantagonist

There was a traffic sign in Edinburgh I shall always remember.

There's probably hundreds of them all over the British isles but this is the one that always floats up to the top of my brainpan when I'm traveling. It was on Princes Street in the shadow of the Scott Memorial and it said "Changed Priorities Ahead."

A day on the San Francisco Bay with Lol Levy and Nancy Gold hit the spot.

I now find myself, after a couple of weeks back in San Francisco sleeping in the comfort of my own bed and sailing Valhalla with friends and re-haunting my old haunts, in Japan for my next campaign as the King in Kooza.

And though I haven't actually seen it, I feel a new sign flashing in the private Shinjuku behind my eyelids:

"Changed Expectations Ahead."

I used to have 2 horses. Now I have this pair of shoes. Call it even.

Here's what I expected.

I expected to find wonderful similarities, universal truths revealed.

I expected to stumble across fascinating bridges between East and West.

I expected common grounds and shared proclivities.

What I found was differences.

What I found was the inscrutable at its most inscrutiest.

What I found was all the keen contrasts to everything I've become used to.

The virtues of one culture, completely absent in the other culture become the virtues of that culture.

Teamwork Under The Fuji Dome

The 3000 Person Metronome

Where we have individuality, they have teamwork.

Of course a member of the audience at Kooza would never laugh at a fart joke because it may single them out as someone who laughs at fart jokes.

Meanwhile our bandleader Jim Lutz reports that when Japanese audiences clap along with the band during the teeterboard section of our show they clap in perfect time.

In North America and Canada for that matter he would have to warn the band "Stay with the click track, these people will lead you off."

In Japan 3,000 people keep perfect time.

Teamwork.

Human Pachinko

Turn Signals

We drive/walk on the right. They drive/walk on the left.

This adjustment, especially when walking in the crowded subways of Tokyo has been particularly challenging.

And I should know better.

It is the sword, after all, that created this difference.

Didn't use his turn signal.

It seems that during the Tokugawa era the prevalence of duels was getting to be epidemic. The reason was that the inadvertent bumping of swords (worn on the left for quick drawing since there was no such thing as a left handed person) was grounds for an immediate challenge. The Daimyo royalty was killing themselves off because they had to negotiate the narrow byways of old Edo and kept knocking the delicate honoki wood sayas (scabbards) of their swords and this was grounds for an immediate duel, the results of which the offended samurai could only hope for a one in three survival rate. The opponent either drew faster than you- you're dead, or slower than you- you live, or you draw at the same speed in which case you both die.

So the Shogun decreed that walking to the left was mandatory to avoid all that accidental banging of hardware.

The practice exists to this day.

So I have to keep remembering to default to the left when negotiating the hallways and escalators of the Tokyo underground.

Of course there are always exceptions and mastering the slight shoulder turn/dip that works as a kind of body turn signal is one of the many skills one attains just getting to work everyday.

Ultimately, this is an island culture.

And each person seems to be a little master of detail.

Our Dog Dresser's Notes and Set-Up.

Genius is in the details.

The Burnished Mirror

And at work we learn of more differences.

The Japanese culture thrives on responsibility.

The Shinto roots show clearest when you notice that people won't respond to racy material (that has been the stock and trade of we clowns in Kooza) depending on who they came to the big top with.

You're not going to laugh at a scrotum scrunching ball hit if you are sitting next to your dad.

But if you came to the show with a gaggle of your best girlfriends, you may.

Speaking of Shinto: I have loved learning more about this non-religion religion that has no scriptures, reveres both nature and previous generations avidly, relies heavily on the imbibing of gallons of sake and the principal item in the shrine (we have one at Esaka dojo) is a burnished brass mirror.

So instead of a cross, which, let's face it, is a torture device or a book as you might find in the gilded alcove of a Moslem mosque or a Jewish temple, the thing you find yourself bowing to is a simple round mirror.

And of course it must be regularly polished to keep it's reflective property. Reminding us to forever keep polishing ourselves as we tread the path of life.

How's my hair?

There is also woven into the Shinto ethos the concept of purification and renewal.

The 108 "hindrances" one develops in a year may be erased- I guess to make room for fresh new ones- with the simple ritual of a few claps and the ringing of a bell.

Mind you, Shinto is not without it's uglinesses. The Japanese soldiers at Nanking were Shinto too but what religion is without it's perversions?

Our big top was even blessed by lavishly costumed Shinto priests in a ceremony that included all of us and featured the breaking/drinking of a giant wooden cask of delicious sake poured into those square wooden cups that are impossible to drink from without “purifying” all down the front of your shirt as well.

Nothing helps the religion go down like a slug of sake.

Playing Koi

Another major difference is the reticence to show any outward emotion.

Again a virtue that is hard to appreciate at first.

Especially if you're a clown.

But the virtue of restraint is woven into the daily routine.

The most obvious manifestation of this is that eye contact is at a very high premium here.

And I have come to realize that I thrive on eye contact.

For me it's one of the few perks of being a stranger in a strange land.

Being able to look out at the unfamiliar- and the facial recognition software in my brain has yet to calibrate for all these Asian faces so everybody looks unfamiliar- even those I've seen around a lot at the tent- helps me connect to the strangers that swirl around me and not feel so alone.

But these people are masters of eye contact avoidance.

I find myself seeking it on the subway like a drowning man looking for a life preserver.

I finally give up and cast my eyes downward only to glance up to find someone staring at me with such intense concentration that it feels as if they are trying to memorize my face for a future test.

But when I return their gaze the eyes dart away like koi from a rock thrown into a pond.

The Four Ages of Man on the Maranouchi Line

Blame and Blammo!

Onstage we've noticed another difference. The laughs that stem from bodily functions and sexual innuendo have not crossed the time zones well. Here the laughs are born out of the sudden shift of responsibility; blame gets big yucks. Causing embarrassment to someone else is funnier here than doing something embarrassing.

It seems emblematic of a cultural difference that now instead of having our female "involunteer" nail fellow clown Colin Heath in the cajones with a steak, I do the honors and then hand the offending T-bone to her as clown prince Sean Kempton and I hit a gesture that says "She did it!"

To be Here is to be a Witness to the Weirdness.

Still, I'm thankful for all of these various differences.

They have served to wake me up.

To rattle the cage of my own complacency of confirmed expectations and really see things.

To rewire my mind's eye and freshen my perspective.

To sharpen my awareness and seek the deeper clues of behavior hidden in the restraint.

To avoid antagonizing and begin to accept the fact that yes, I am (big) in Japan.

Where I Am.