Torbeck DEc 11th evening

the rain is coming down, and outside under the balcony, a group of the local residents, along with SarahLianne, Elisa and Brandon are singing songs in beautiful harmonies.  Here is a story that I wrote earlier this evening. No doubt in the next few evenings, the others will start adding their stories to mine…

Dec 11th, Torbeck evening.
We are staying at the rectory in Torbeck where on the balcony we create and rehearse the show that we are going to play tomorrow.  We will be winging it but we have been able to put together a loose structure that should be fun and full of humor. At 5pm we take a walk down the rocky dirt road through the neighborhood doing a little parade to announce our presence and invite the kids of the neighborhood to the rectory courtyard for a little play and workshop, which we intend to do every evening between 5 and 6 pm by which time it is completely dark.  As I type away on the balcony, Brandon is downstairs playing mandolin with hand claps accompanying alongside a local teenager who has brought a conga drum out of somewhere. We had the big parachute up which was exciting for the 40 or 40 kids and young adults who have come in. Our intent is to do a bit of the show every day and to teach little mini workshops, and on our last day here to get some of the kids to perform as well. I get surrounded by kids after doing a simple disappearance of a rock and sneezing it out my ear. I soon find myself with 20 little hands asking me to pull it out of their ear, out of their hair, out of all kinds of different places. I balance my baseball cap on my head, and then tell them that tomorrow I will teach them how to balance things. We have created some momentum that no doubt should continue through the week we are here.
There is a rough moment in our parade when a man comes up to us very upset and angry demanding to know where is our legal authorization to do our manifestation-our parade. There is strong alcohol on his breath.  He doesn’t really want to hear any explanations, he is convinced that we have invaded his country and made it our playground, basically that we are not respecting his country. He starts telling me that he cannot come to our country and do this without legal permission, so what gives us the right to do that here.  Of course he has a point, and he knows it as he tells me that he worked for 23 years abroad.  No one is going to simply let him into the US and allow him to parade down the street making music, or at least so he feels.  No doubts about it that first he would need a visa and a passport, have to get fingerprinted, photographed just to get in the country. His confrontation has gathered a little crowd.  Eventually I am able to explain to him that we are here to do shows in the schools for kids for noel (xmas)., and that we were simply coming out to play with the children and to invite them to the rectory.  He accepts my explanation, walks away telling us to go play there then. Which we do.

AYiti, don’t call it Hate-i

Just a short short note here from Port au Prince, to say that I have started a new blog where for the next two weeks, you can read about the Clowns Without Borders expedition. I am here with three other performers, Elisa, Brendon and Sarah Lianne.

So if you want to read on, click on in on clownsinhaiti.wordpress.com

clowns without borders, Ireland-In Uganda

I was just reading the accounts of Clowns Without Borders-Ireland, their blog from the trip to Uganda where they are performing for Sudanese refugees in camps mostly run by the UNHCR. If you are wondering what the concept of sacred mischief can be, here is one extreme. There is little I can say to put it in perspective more than urge you to click on the link and read on. Amazing work, hard work, work of wonders. Here is a brief excerpt. They are my heroes this week, and showing me the way, as I get ready to fly to Haiti to go on expedition myself to perform there with 3 other wonder clowns….we will blog too, check the Clowns without Borders-USA website for updates.

Thursday 6th December

These IDP and refugee camps we are visiting each day are full of so many untold stories. We sometimes go into them expecting misery, braced for the appalling; these places where happiness seems unthinkable yet the camps are full of hope, comedy and sweetness. We clowns each have our special moments with people in the camps; we connect, interact, play and just be with these amazing warm children who melt you with their eyes and big smiles.

Conversations about Clown, Julie Goell

Julie Goell is a wonderful clown performer and teacher. I had the opportunity for this conversation right after her show in the theater in the round of the Cococabana SESC in Rio in Brazil.

Julie and I started by discussing clown and traditions.

Julie: The badkhin, come back to your own tradition (Jewish).

Moshe: tell me about that

Julie : The badkhinis (plural)…, the badkhin is the wedding jester. I don’t know the tradition in depth, but I know that traditionally they would balance a bottle on their head and do all kind of antics, limbo in the circle…

M: was this during the ceremony or afterwards during the celebration?

J: during the celebration. Reception Juggling was done by the badkhanim, and a tribute to the bride, if you can get some very old recordings…the musicians are playing and the “…

Oy the bride the bride the bride…she’s crying she’s crying
Oh she’s looking so sad
Because she is leaving her mama and papa….
Oy she’s going to make a good wife …
But everybody cry, cry with me

It’s kind of a litany, fake crying

M: Is this supposed to be sad or funny?

J: funny, extemporizing rhyming verses for the family that make fun of everybody, people in the town….

M: what is clown

it’s a way of looking at serious things with a humorous slant, it’s a way of looking at life, tragedy…(laughter)…seeing irony in it, seeing humor in it, seeing what would topple other people, always keeping the eye for humor on the bad things while they are happening to you even, and that generates material, potential material, a sense of failure, other things…that winds up in your work la mort.

M what do you think about the nose?

J: I think it’s great. I’ve been using it always with the students, and I almost used it today (in the show) .because I like what it does. When I have too many things happening around my face, be able to ….I have absolutely nothing against it. It’s a great tool and it works well in performance.

Do you use one?

M I don’t use it, but I carry one around with me. I use it at the airport, I use it when I go through security and they want to frisk me.; or In other public situations where I want the instantaneous clown mask.

A friend of mine says that language of clown is feelings. I like to talk about clown as a language of heart and spirit as opposed to an intellectual discussion. What would be your response, or reflection?

J: It seems like a clown creates their own world and defines everything about it. Hopefully can make the audience see the world that they are in and from that point they have their own special kind of logic. It’s out of the box, but it’s in a circle of logic. Keith Johnstone has a circle of logic he applies that to improvisation, clowns it is really good if they stay within a circle of logic, they can be very off the wall on the way but feeds into their own line of thinking. So in a way, it is oddly consequential. You take the audience along your line of thinking if you can get them to follow it. Then you are really communicating.

M: What I mean when I say heart and spirit, is where the energy is coming from in the performer

J: I felt it tonight. A great deal of spirit connection happening. And as a musician I really feel that. To me making music is when those things you are talking about happens to me, more than sitting in a congregation doing responsive reading.

………..

Conversations about Clown and Zen, Amplify and Expand

This conversation with Roshi Egyoku took place during my six weeks (Jan-Feb 2007) as an artist in residence at the Zen center of Los Angeles. A few times a week, we would sit down for a half hour chat to examine the relationship of Clowning and Zen.

What happens when a moment in Clown Performance is striking the audience as particularly funny? If the context allows for it, one tends to play with the moment, exaggerating the situation (amplify), improvising (expand) around the theme, to take the funny further. One could say that :

Moshe: you expand and amplify it.

Egyoku: Exactly. It is a wonderful thing. That is right in line with meditation, because that is what happens when a person meditates in a way.

M: You amplify and expand?

E: Yeah they do, actually they do without realizing it. Life becomes the moment. It is an exquisite thing. And then you connect with that.. That is what you do, you take this little moment. And it grows like that, and that ties right in with Zen because that is the experience of meditation, that is actually what happens: being able to rest in this moment, and to be able to taste it and appreciate it. To just be there with the moment, and that is what the clown does, you have to really be there. You are staying connected and at the same time you are communicating.

E: The other thing I think is interesting, we have this expression, we talk about it with anger but I think that it applies here too: I roll all negative experience into my practice, and we can also say: I roll all positive experience into my practice.

M: So in meditation you call up this anger?

E: You don’t call it up, you just sit with it. You just take it as part of the whole as opposed to ‘this is not supposed to be there.’ This is what I think the clown is doing, I see this, everything is just taken in, it becomes a clown moment. There is nothing that is not supposed to be there.

M: Right anything can be clowned.

E: Exactly.

M: So would you call these parallels to Zen.

E: I would call these parallels to a meditator’s experience. Zen is really about meditation, it is about sitting, we don’t call it meditation, we call it zazen, or just sitting. Vipassana also has this sitting. Some of the Buddhist practices don’t have a lot of sitting. I think it is this quiet meditative experience that allows us to touch the deepest places of life, of one’s self in life, because that is what you got to do.

M: There are many levels that you can touch, the clowning can also remain relatively superficial.

E: It is the same with sitting.

M: Sometimes they stay in their mind thoughts. As a teacher, can you tell that?

E: yes. One of the ways it comes up is what people bring up to share. You can see that this is so STRONG, they haven’t yet got that we are going to leave all that aside.

M: After months, years…

E: Sometimes it is years. Sometimes it is just different levels of it. It is hard to let go of what is going on up here ( gesture to the head) because that has been real for us. That is what is real! (Laughter).

Conversations about Clown and Zen, Intuition-Inner Wisdom

 This conversation with Roshi Egyoku took place during my six weeks (Jan-Feb 2007) as an artist in residence at the Zen center of Los Angeles. A few times a week, we would sit down for a half hour chat to examine the relationship of Clowning and Zen.

In the clown world there is a strong reliance on one’s intuition or what you might call Inner Wisdom.

Roshi Egyoku at ZCLA. photo: kuku

M: intuition/inner wisdom, what is
that from your perspective?

E: It is our knowing. We talk about not-knowing and there is also the knowing that comes out of that place.

M: that might be our accumulation of wisdom from past lives?

E: Who knows what that is. It is like a profound wisdom that is who we are, and I think the clown accesses that a lot. It allows us to respond appropriately to any given circumstance. Because that is what you are doing. Your bag of tricks, that may or may no be you, it just depends on what is coming out of the situation. Something guided you, that is beyond all the studies, and learning and training that you have done. I mean that is how I always function here, I go by my gut, it’s the gut thing.

M: Common sense

E: Yes, I just sit back, something comes up and that is where I am going, and I go with total confidence. Someone may ask how can you be so confident? But I know, that is the way, my whole body is telling me that that is the way, that is what you need to do. Sometimes I surprise myself, because I find myself yelling at people. I used to see Maesumi Roshi do that, I’m not doing it because he did it. It would just come out of me, and then I would step back and ask myself where did that come from. I realized, and trusted it, that there is a wisdom coming out rather than telling myself to cut that out…laughter….
I think you do that.

M: yelling?? No, but on stage I have to trust my intuition, or I am likely to step out of my clown world.

Conversations about Clown, Aziz

Interview: Moshe and Aziz (Mexico) in a noisy restaurant in Rio de Janeiro. Interview conducted in Spanish in December, 2006; during the Anjos Do Picadeiro festival, translated by Moshe into English.

Aziz performs as a traditional circus clown, and then in a surprising twist ends his show by sitting down and taking off his make-up in front of the audience, taking off the mask so to speak, to reveal the human being that becomes this clown.

M: What is clown?

A: Clown is an individuality, is an unique person who could not be the same as another. It is encountering and discovery of yourself. The clown is to meet your own person and to share it. It is a way to open yourself up, to accept your virtues, and your failures, your positive and negative sides, and your circumstances. Clown is what is in this moment within the current circumstances. It is nothing more than the experience of a human being in one moment in a given circumstance he or she is in with the desire to share a dialogue about that.

M: For you, Is there a spiritual connection to clown?

A: Absolutely. When one talks about ‘being’, one is talking about a spiritual connection. The clown is a form of discovering your spirituality, and a way of living the encounter and communion with yourself and others. Spirituality, like life is not all the time. Like happiness, it is not present all the time, but sometimes. The clown’s lives with one, but the part of playfulness and performance is not present all the time. It lives and then it dies; and then it lives again. It is circular. It is born and then in dies, and then it is born again, completely linked to the spirit.

M: would you agree that clown is a language of the heart?

A: Completely. The heart and the communication of feeling, and not of thinking. The clown communicates feelings, not thoughts. The clown develops emotional intelligence through the heart which is completely connected to spirituality; they (heart and the spirituality) are together.

For that reason I am not interested in what the clown says. Language is a limitation of the head. The heart, feelings are not limited. To communicate via the emotional intelligence, with the intensity of emotion that is here (pointing to his heart). When you communicate with the heart, there is no reason why a Turk and Chinese person shouldn’t understand you.

Conversations about Clown and Zen, The Three Tenets. take 2.

The Three Tenets-Zen Perspective.
During conversations with Roshi Egyoku, we looked at the parallels between clown and Zen. One that comes up is how Roshi Bernie Glassman’s Three Tenets can be applied to the spontaneous aspects of clowning…

Moshe with Boobysatva (Bernie) at ZCLA 07. photo: kuku

Bernie is known as a pioneer in the American Zen movement. One element he has brought to the Zen world is the practice of street retreats and the Retreat at Auschwitz Birkenau. His approach on how to take on these retreats are to follow these Tenets.

Not Knowing-Open space of not knowing.
Bearing Witness-Deep listening
Loving action, healing action. Roshi Egyoku commented that this is really is a Unifying Action-Action that serves the whole.

The practice of Not Knowing involves letting go of all preconceptions and knowledge, so as to bring full awareness to the situation at hand. As preparation for the 5 day retreat at Auschwitz/Birkenau, one is required to prepare by watching films, and reading books about what took place during the holocaust. Once in the retreat, however, one is asked to let all that knowledge fade out, and the focus is on awareness in the present moment; what feelings sitting in this place calls up. The witnessing triggers the recall of some of the knowledge one has accumulated, at the appropriate times.

A further question to Egyoku about the origins of these Three Tenets brought this explanation:

These three tenets are derived from the 3 pure precepts of Buddhism but the language was such that we thought that needed to be recast.

Do Not do Evil-do not separate yourself out
Do Good-Deeply Listening to what is going on .
Do Good for others. What is the action that serves the whole.

The Three Tenets-Clown Perspective

A Clown performance is very much a constant practice of the three tenets. The performer is usually at his or her best when they are completely present on stage playing the moment, in other words they are not thinking about what they are doing next, or what comes next. One can say that this thinking would take them out of the place of Not Knowing/Bearing Witness but even more important, the audience can feel this slight absence of the performer’s presence.

Another aspect for a clown performer, and one of the greatest delights, is when an unexpected situation occurs, and everyone in the room is aware of it. The focus on what will happen next is usually palpable in the room. If the performer operates from instinct and intuition, the situation becomes an opportunity for great humor to be shared in the room. These three tenets speak to one’s ability to allow one’s intuition to guide the performer’s actions. The Clown operates from a place of not knowing, and bears witness to the situation at hand. The clown’s resulting actions are most often unifying actions as the humor involved is both a loving action, and the laughter it generates serves the whole unifying the audience through laughter.
A good example is a story from Cirque Du Soleil’s Kooza performance last weekend (as told to me by my friend Maica). In the show there is a wonderful pickpocket number. The Magician goes into the audience looking for a volunteer to bring up on stage. That evening, the performer chose a man who really was uncomfortable. Once on stage, as the performer was addressing the audience, the man eyeing a back staircase escapes the stage and starts to make his way back to the seat, a spotlight following him through the audience. The performer caught by the situation spontaneously launches into a spiel about how that volunteer wasn’t quite right and he is going to find a better one. The evening before, the show I saw, the volunteer stayed on stage and participated in the act. The volunteer taking off, according to Maica, was very funny, as the Pickpocket worked the situation for maximum comic effect.
Moments of spontaneity in Clown performance hold such strong humor potential because it is most often clear to everyone that it is an unexpected moment, and the audience is keyed in to see what will come out of the situation.

Clown and Zen, The Three tenets. Take 1.

It has been a few weeks now that I am posting these discussions about Clown and Zen, about Clown with other performers.

Today’s topic of discussion are ‘the three tenets’ which are deeply engrained in the zen world. Roshi Bernie introduced them to me. I discovered an intriguing parallel between these tenets and how a clown often works on the stage.

Looking to describe this, I shifted into internet search mode with intent to discover some absolute descriptions from the master rather than paraphrase away.
Lo and Behold, the Google Search brings up an amazing variety of three tenets. Page 1 doesn’t even mention zen. So the conversation about clown and zen can wait a day. Instead I believe a detour is in order, and so I present the search results as a slice of contemporary culture that brought sly smiles to my eyes.

Professor Holman’s ‘Exploding Text’ presents. . . The Three Tenets …
Nay, whatever comes / One hour was sunlit. . . , from your About.com Guides, Bob Holman and Margery Snyder.
poetry.about.com/library/weekly/aa080597.htm - 25k - Cached - Similar pages

Community Guy - Jake McKee » The three tenets of viral marketing
For many years I’ve talked about three tenets of viral marketing - namely what needs to happen in order to make something “go viral”. …
www.communityguy.com/741/the-three-tenets-of-viral-marketing/ - 41k - Cached –

Vitality, Connection, and Change — The Three Tenets of Chi
Three central ideas provide the essential platform that support all the rest of feng shui’s concepts and principles. These ideas involve Chi, the “stuff,” …
www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Vitality_Connection_and_Change_–_The_Three_Tenets_of_Chi.html - 40k - Cached - Similar pages

Festivus and the three tenets : humor : CafePress.com
tenets. Festivus and the three tenets. From Celebratus R Us. From the Designer …
www.cafepress.com/…/-

The Lean Executive - Three Tenets of Lean for Knowledge Workers
Three Tenets of Lean for Knowledge Workers discusses three ideas: using knowledge workers to measure results, not tasks; replace simple jobs and complex …
www.leanaffiliates.com/three_tenets.htm - 19k - Cached - Similar pages

The Three Tenets of Monetary Policy: Lebanon, 1991-2003 — Azar 5 …
Monetary policy has three tenets: a stable money demand function, a well specified velocity of money and a reliable money creation process. …
emf.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/1/95 - Similar pages

The Three Tenets at DOCUMENTDUMP.com ^ RWCS.COM
The Three Tenets · Libertarian Socialism · Anarcho-syndicalism · Autonomist Marxism · Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com …
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The Three Tenets of Rap « ukweli
The Three Tenets of Rap. These are the three most basic statements I have taken from rap music:. 1. I am important. 2. I have sex with many women. …
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The Three Tenets of CKI
The Three Tenets of CKI. Go Back >>. Service (sur-vis) n. an act of helpful activity As a sponsored program of Kiwanis International ( a community-service …
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COLUMN: The three tenets of liberalism - Opinion
Well, liberalism functions on a three-tier system supporting a multitude of causes. …
www.utahstatesman.com/news/2006/09/13/Opinion/Column.The.Three.Tenets.Of.Liberalism-2269277.shtml - 41k -

Conversations about Clown and Zen, The Whole Interconnected

 This conversation with Roshi Egyoku took place during my six weeks (Jan-Feb 2007) as an artist in residence at the Zen center of Los Angeles. A few times a week, we would sit down for a half hour chat to examine the relationship of Clowning and Zen.

Moshe: One common thread in different forms/lineages of clowning is the connection the performer has with their audience, whether it is on the stage, in the ring, on the street, at a party. The so called fourth wall between the stage and the audience doesn’t exist. This creates a sense of connection, a whole universe.

Egyoku: I am unclear about this “fourth wall” – what are the other 3 walls? The interconnection of all life is, of course, fundamental to Zen.

a note:  The other three walls are the walls that surround the physical stage in a theater.

also: Pete, a Lakota man who spoke at ZCLA’s 40th anniversary celebration, talked about the great parallels he saw between his people’s way of thinking, and that of eastern religions. The commonality he elaborated on most was the connectivity between all things.

photo by kuku