RED NOSE BRIGADE
Clown festival on deck
“It is meat and drink to me to see a clown.” — Touchstone in Shakespeare’s As You Like It
Send in the clowns.
Starting Thursday, that’s exactly what our newest festival has set about doing.
As you’ll discover at the first Edmonton Clown Festival this weekend, that mysterious brigade comes in every nose size, shape and hue. Some speak; some don’t. Sometimes you’ll be laughing; sometimes you’ll be gasping in horror.
And sometimes — as we know from the apocalyptic adventures of Canada’s starry “horror clowns” Mump and Smoot — you’ll be doing both simultaneously.
It’s a veritable clown outbreak, as festival co-artistic director Morgan Nadeau of Fool Spectrum Theatre explains.
The 20-performance debut venture includes three full-length shows, two triple-bills, one double bill, a cabaret, a workshop and an all-star clown panel.
When she and Julie Kiraly put out the word in clown circles last spring, “we were just floored,” says Nadeau, a clown herself since the debut of her alter ego Trixie in 2012. “We figured we’d get maybe six applications — we got 17, from all over.”
Ah, and from every persuasion, from broody, macabre Euroclowns to wide-eyed, red-nosed naifs. After all, if the clown world includes Bozo who gave you a fright you’ve never forgotten at your fourth birthday party, it also includes such comedy sophisticates as Mr. Bean and Sacha Baron Cohen, as Nadeau points out.
If you happened upon a hardboiled private-eye named Butt Kapinski, with his own portable shaft of moody lighting, at the 2014 Fringe, you’ll known what we mean by clown range.
The creation of L.A.’s apparently fearless Deanna Fleysher, the smudge-eyed, trench-coated Kapinski prowled through the seedy part of town (in the house seats) like a bad dream, lobbing terrible similes our way, on the lookout for whores, johns, drunken cops and sax players.
“There is one dick big enough to cwack this case,” snarled Kapinski in his Elmer Fudd voice. “And it’s me.”
Fleysher is back, with her unique high-risk show, to headline the new clown festival. “Fun for the whole family,” as Fleysher has put it before. “Provided the whole family is over 16, and totally twisted.”
There’s even a “zombie clown” on the roster. Me Mullet is the work of Toronto’s Jean-Paul Mullet, whose mouldy, black-nosed blue-haired clown incarnation, according to his website, was born in 1726, died in 1747, and washed up onshore 100 years later after a blue period underwater. We can expect choice anecdotes from Mullet’s extensive 290-year showbiz career.
San Francisco-based Amelia Van Brunt, a strikingly versatile clown cum burlesque performer, brings her solo piece In The Blue Of Evening, starring a fierce old granny struggling to retain a grip on her memories as the dementia insurgency gains traction.
Among the lineup of short clown pieces, Nadeau herself directs Boom Boom vs. The Common Colds, starring a trio of clowns — Joel Bazin, Anastasia Maywood, John Marian — from Edmonton’s Just Breathe Theatre.
It takes on the fraught clown issue of nasality with a red-nosed character under siege from a pair of aggressive “buffoon clown” viruses.
A couple of star Edmonton clown mentor/gurus are directing at the festival.
In Small Matters’s The Heavy Sleeper, under the direction of Jan Henderson, Christine Lesiak and Adam Keefe explore the marital stress-inducing world of insomnia and snoring. Michael Kennard, a.k.a. Mump of Mump and Smoot, directs another buffoon-style show, Pride and Pre-Jeu-Dice, starring two Edmonton clowns, Jake Tkaczyk and Alexandra Dawkins.
Kennard and Henderson, along with Na de au, are on Saturday’ s 2 p.m. clown panel that invades Cafe Bicyclette at festival headquarters, La Cite francophone. Bring questions as well as your deep-seated clown terrors.
Among other short pieces you’ll see during the festivities is a new “clown and dance piece” piece, The Boy and His Goodbye, created by Jordan Sabo and dancer/choreographer Richelle Thoreson, late of Toy Guns Dance Theatre.
As for Sunday’s closing night cabaret, it assembles clowns of every persuasion, style and temperament, hosted by Jesse Lipscombe.