Clowns

Hacia la década del ochenta, la micropoética del clown irrumpió los escenarios porteños con una fuerza performativa necesaria y urgente luego de los años de terror y dictadura. Sobre este desembarco, me pregunto ¿cuál es el vector de fuerza de la poética del clown que pulsa (aún hoy) como catalizadora de otros procesos culturales más complejos? Para esbozar una respuesta, presento líneas de lectura de la historiografía teatral sobre el clown en la Argentina. Desde estas, focalizo  su técnica y filosofía, como instancias que configuran una catártica micropoética en el escenario teatral de la apertura democrática, centrandome para ello en la figura de Batato Barea.

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini (1920-1993) is one of the most renowned figures in world cinema. Director of a long list of critically acclaimed motion pictures, including La strada, La dolce vita, 8½, and Amarcord, Fellini's success helped strengthen the international prestige of Italian cinema from the 1950s onward. Often remembered as an eccentric auteur with a vivid imagination and a penchant for quasi-autobiographical works, the carnivalesque, and Rubenesque women, Fellini's inimitable films celebrate the creative potential of cinema as a medium and also provide thought-provoking evocations of various periods in Italian history, from the years of fascism to the age of Silvio Berlusconi's media empire.

In Making a Film Fellini discusses his childhood and adolescence in the coastal town of Rimini, the time he spent as a cartoonist, journalist, and screenwriter in Rome, his decisive encounter with Roberto Rossellini, and his own movies, from Variety Lights to Casanova. The director explains the importance of drawing to his creative process, the mysterious ways in which ideas for films arise, his collaborations with his wife, Giulietta Masina, his thoughts on fascism, Jung, and the relationship between cinema and television. Often comic, sometimes tragic, and rife with insightful comments on his craft, Making a Film sheds light on Fellini's life and reveals the motivations behind many of his most fascinating movies.

Available in its entirety for the first time in English, this volume contains the complete translation of Fare un film, the authoritative collection of writings edited and reworked by Fellini and initially published by Giulio Einaudi in 1980. The text includes a new translation of the Italo Calvino essay "A Spectator's Autobiography," an introduction by Italian film scholar Christopher B. White, and an afterword by Fellini's longtime friend and collaborator Liliana Betti.

It is not an easy task to understand the nature of carnival as it is shown by the many failures of the last century after Mikhail Bakhtin’s work became generally known. My book is an attempt to define carnival in relation to another entity that is always and necessarily associated with the carnival, still, easier to identify. The “Clown or Fool par excellence” embodies the carnival’s topsy-turvy attitude and transgresses all borders of reason and social order. Moreover, her repeated jumps to recover bear ritual laughter mocking the figure of Death. This is how the phenomenology of the clown par excellence and the carnival are ontologically related to each other. But, parallel to the strange fate of the clown “on stage” the carnival can become problematic as well. This is clearly visible in the Early Modern theatre of Shakespeare. The resentful exit of Malvolio leaves us confused in Twelfth Night. When the Fool disappears, others have to take on in the stormy night of King Lear. While the gravedigger and his friend, in Hamlet, are mockingly clowning, the grounds spits back a skull that already whispers: “God is dead.” This is how in Shakespeare’s plays the “decarnivalization of the world” is present on the Early Modern stage. I discuss and develop the concept of decarnivalization in order to reinterpret Shakespeare’s dramatic art.

Besides the doltishly clumsy, amusingly simple and happily idiotic type of clown, there is the evil violent clown. Violent clowns can be traced back to the (circus-)pantomimes of the nineteenth century, to circus tradition and circus literature. Thus, on the basis of the popular corpo-eccentric clown-theatre presented by the French Théâtre des Funambules between 1819 and 1846, as well as the pantomimes of the brothers Hanlon-Lee, this article presents Batman’s Joker as descendant of a specifically violent circus tradition and its reflection in literature. Baudelaire and Adorno understand the aesthetic of violence characteristic of these circus pantomime clowns as the essence of modernity. The appearance and playful rearrangement, montage and reinterpretation of historical (circus) clown elements are typical for Batman’s Joker. Thus, he can be described as a neo-modern clown of violence.


Jürgens, A.-S. (2014): The Joker, a neo-modern clown of violence, in: Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5/4, 441–454.

My Practice-­as-­Research MFA Thesis explores the intersection of the theatrical styles known as Clown and Melodrama through the collaborative creation of an original performative project entitled 'Visions of A Crying Girl', created and performed by Cleo DeOrio and myself, Jordan Rosin. The project capstones three years of intense practical training as an Actor­-Creator as part of the MFA in Ensemble-­Based Physical Theatre at Dell'Arte International. The investigation is situated at the nexus of acting & choreography, dance & theatre and draws techniques and inspiration also from my 26 years as a theatrical performer, as well as my undergraduate training in acting from Syracuse University.

The creative practice yielded substantial insights regarding how the articulation of research questions can predispose a practice-­as-­research process to succeed, fail, or change direction; how the styles of Clown and Melodrama intersect; as well as how Viewpoints and subtext can be used as tools to create theatrical work within an ensemble.

This MFA Thesis comprises two examinable outcomes; the live stage production, Visions of A Crying Girl, (an archival video of which can be found on YouTube) and this brief written report, which situates our project within a lineage of practice, articulates a conceptual theory for the project, provides a brief account of our process, and summarizes key insights and conclusions from the research as well as plans for future investigation.

Americans can be divided into two groups: those who own guns and those who do not. Although people who own guns and people who do not own guns are often separated along social, cultural, and political lines, it is unclear whether these divisions might extend to population differences in emotional experience. In this paper, we use national cross-sectional data from the 2014 Chapman University Survey on American Fears (n = 1,385) to test whether gun owners are more or less afraid than people who do not own guns. We build on previous work by testing two hypotheses with a broad range of fear-related outcomes, including specific phobias and fears associated with being victimized. The symptom perspective argues that gun ownership is a behavioral expression of fear, that gun owners need guns to protect themselves because they are irrational cowards. Although binary logistic regression models provided minimal support for this idea, there was some evidence to suggest that the odds of gun ownership are higher for people who report being afraid of being victimized by a random/mass shooting. The palliative perspective claims that gun ownership mitigates fear, that owning a powerful weapon is somehow soothing to individuals and their families. Ordinary least squares and negative binomial regression models suggest that people who own guns tend to report lower levels of phobias and victimization fears than people who do not own guns. This general pattern is observed across multiple indicators of fear (e.g., of animals, heights, zombies, and muggings), multiple outcome specifications (continuous and count), and with adjustments for age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, household income, marital status, the presence of children, religious identity, religiosity, religious attendance, political orientation, region of residence, and urban residence. Additional longitudinal research is needed to confirm our findings with a wider range of covariates and fear-related outcomes.

Originally published as The Stations of the Fool (journal article , Comedy Studies Journal, Taylor and Francis, Oct 2017,)this is an attempt to develop Victor Turner's formulation of liminality into a dramaturgic method relating to studies of clowning and fooling. It offers as a tool a spectrum of engagement through a set of defined relationships with an audience, reconnecting the discussion of Fooling as a concrete activity rather than a set of imposed symbolic attributes.

Der Tagungsband  Über den Clown kombiniert kulturhistorische Texte mit  Berichten und Interviews zum Thema ‚Clown‘, in denen berühmte Clowninnen und Clowns aus ihrer Praxis berichten. Das Buch zeigt diese vielschichtige Figur mit der „kleinsten Maske der Welt“ (S.14) in verschie
denen kulturellen, künstlerischen und historischen Kontexten und Räumen.
Herausgeber Richard Weihe verwendet den Terminus ‚Clown‘ als Sammelbegriff für „Spaßmacher, Gaukler, Schelm, Hofnarr, Trickster, Zanni, Comico, Bouffon, Tramp, Zirkuskunstfigur“ (S.265). Vom Theater kommend wurde der Clown lange mit dem Zirkus assoziiert, um sich dann ab Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts auch in den populären Medien Comic, Film und TV wiederzufinden. Etymologisch ist der Clown
ein ungehobelter Landbewohner, der in der Stadt lächerlich auffällt.

La publication du Portrait de l'artiste en saltimbanque, de Jean Starobinski, a mis en lumière un thème cultivé par les artistes depuis le Romantisme : le saltimbanque sert à attaquer l'honorabilité bourgeoise, en même temps qu'il figure le double grimaçant du créateur. L'attention de Starobinski s'est surtout focalisée sur les arts plastiques. Mais un univers avait échappé à l'attention des critiques : c'est celui de la littérature et, plus précisément, du roman. Sa richesse égale sans aucun doute l'importance des témoignages iconographiques, qu'il accompagne et qu'il complète. Car les romanciers, souvent amis des peintres fascinés par le cirque, furent autant qu'eux sensibles à la magie de la piste. Comme l'indique l'exemple de Gustave Kahn et de Gustave Coquiot (les premiers admirateurs, respectivement, de Seurat et de Picasso), le regard des artistes et celui des écrivains se conjuguent au point d'apparaître souvent indissociables. Remettre en lumière les plus beaux de ces romans revient donc à restaurer l'ensemble d'une sensibilité esthétique, qui connut son apogée entre la proclamation de la Troisième République et la Première Guerre mondiale. Depuis le Romantisme, les poètes affirment leur prédilection pour les saltimbanques, en qui ils reconnaissent leur double : Banville, Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue, Apollinaire, hantent les cirques et les fêtes foraines. Mais c'est entre les deux guerres de 1870 et 1914 que le cirque, comme tous les lieux de plaisir, devient un véritable objet de fiction.
Ce volume restaure l'ensemble d'une sensibilité esthétique : celle qui régna au début de la Troisième République, encore fiévreuse du désastre de Sedan et décidée à s'étourdir, dans Paris vaincu mais qui reste la capitale du cirque. Toutes les écoles littéraires se donnent rendez-vous autour de la piste pour encenser une représentation qui ne ressemble à aucune autre, et surtout pas au théâtre : entraînés par les déclarations de Théophile Gautier, des frères Goncourt, de Barbey d'Aurevilly, de Zola, de Mallarmé, les écrivains glorifient l'authenticité du cirque, ce lieu où les acteurs ne trichent pas et où la médiocrité se solde par la mort.
L'ouvrage est précédé d'une longue introduction sur la présence du cirque dans la littérature depuis le Romantisme, suivie d'une chronologie mettant en rapport, année par année de 1870 à 1914, les principaux événements du cirque avec les événements historiques et artistiques. Chaque roman est entièrement annoté et précédé d'une analyse spécifique. L'ouvrage comprend un index des noms de personnes.

En évoquant le milieu du cirque à Liège au milieu du XIXe siècle, Xavier De Reul (1830-1895), géologue et romancier), décrit et dénonce à la fois, dans un style "coruscant", les sévices dont les forains sont victimes et le mépris qui les accable injustement.

In her transnational plays Lenin's Shoe (2010) and Aliens with Extraordinary Skills (2010), Romanian American playwright Saviana Stănescu explores discourses of capitalist market economies, democracy, postsocialism, and gender that overlie the geographies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the United States. Staging these discourses predominately by way of the embodied performances of US migrant women from Eastern Europe, Stănescu's plays raise questions about the relationship between (post)socialist nations and the United States, and about the attendant ideologies of socialism and capitalism in the post-9/11 moment. These female characters drive change as well as navigate it, showing that gender is central to the creation, embodiment, and performance of knowledge. The focus on women protagonists as primary producers of a transnational knowledge-one that bridges US and (post)socialist histories-counters the idea that postsocialism, and especially postsocialist feminism, has remained invisible in the West, where Eastern Europe is assumed to be in the process of becoming like the West rather than representing an inherently different space, with its own set of (post)socialist knowledge.

Gérard de Nerval rattachait directement le théâtre d'ombres aux atellanes latines : « Aussi bien Caragueuz lui-même n'est-il autre que le Polichinelle des Osques, dont on voit encore de si beaux exemplaires au musée de Naples ». Un demi-siècle plus tard, le grand helléniste Salomon Reinach faisait la relation entre les mimes du monde ottoman, leurs homologues italiens et ceux de l'Antiquité, via Byzance : « Il semble bien établi que le Karagà¶z turc a hérité du mime byzantin, comme aussi, par d'autres voies, la Commedia dell'arte et le théâtre des marionnettes ». Sans doute la filiation n'est-elle pas aussi directe. La continuité est frappante cependant : à  la différence de la tragédie antique, qui dut attendre la Renaissance pour être réinventée à  l'opéra puis au théâtre, la comédie et ses masques, relayés par les marionnettes, connurent une fortune moins illustre mais ininterrompue. C'est cette permanence que le volume souhaite illustrer, en privilégiant la portée familière du théâtre, qui dessine une nouvelle carte de l'Europe des spectacles. Sur cette carte, dans ce domaine comme dans tant d'autres, l'Empire ottoman se révèle une puissance de premier plan, bien intégrée au jeu européen. Les voyageurs ne manquent pas de s'intéresser à  ses silhouettes familières, où ils scrutent l'héritage des Anciens. Notre époque a considéré ces spectacles avec la condescendance réservée au pittoresque. Au XIXe siècle, les spécialistes de l'Antiquité et de l'Orient étaient mieux avertis de leur importance. Cet ouvrage, qui réunit des historiens de la littérature, du théâtre, de l'art et de l'archéologie, remet au centre de la scène une tradition injustement marginalisée.

Esta historia de horror moderado, clínico y educativo está basada en hechos reales. Aconteció en Leondres, estado de Guanawashington y para facilitar la narrativa hablaré en primera persona.
Un día de tantos, antes del Covid 19, fui a la enfermería de la universidad privada donde yo trabajaba. Tenía una bolita en la nuca y quería que me dijeran de qué se trataba. Ahí me diagnosticaron herpes, me dieron mi receta y sanseacabó. Al menos eso creí, pero no, apenas comenzaba todo…
Cuatro días después decidí ir con mi médico particular de cabecera, ya que la bolita crecía de manera acelerada. El médico me dijo que eso no era herpes, que era un absceso infectado y que había que actuar rápido, ya que si la infección penetraba el tejido de la nuca se filtraría a la base del cerebro, donde éste se conectaba con la columna vertebral, lo cual era una situación muy grave y que mi vida estaba en peligro. Me sugirió que me internara inmediatamente.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Universidades privadas, educación, salud, salud pública, diagnóstico médico erróneo, políticas públicas, payasos, solidaridad, abscesos, intervención quirúrgica, sala de emergencias, hospitales públicos.

Η εργασία αναδεικνύει ένα σημαντικό τμήμα της καλλιτεχνικής παραγωγής του Γιαννιώτη καλλιτέχνη Απόστολου Πανταζή (1910-1996), αυτό που έχει σαν θέμα του τους Κλόουν. Με αφορμή τους καλλιτέχνες του τσίρκου, ο Πανταζής επεδίωξε να προσεγγίσει από διαφορετικό μονοπάτι την αλήθεια και την τραγικότητα της ίδιας της ανθρώπινης ύπαρξης. Στα μάτια του λυπημένου, υπάκουου ή σκεπτικού κλόουν διέκρινε όλους τους ανθρώπους που τον περιέβαλαν. Με την επιλογή του αυτή δεν διακωμωδεί, ωστόσο, τα ανθρώπινα ήθη. Οι κλόουν, αποστερημένοι από κάθε διακριτικό γνώρισμα εξουσίας, κοινωνικής τάξης, θέσης ή πλούτου, απεικονίζουν ειλικρινά και άμεσα, σε όλο της το μεγαλείο, την ταπεινότητα της ανθρώπινης ύπαρξης, τη ματαιότητα, ίσως και γελοιότητα, των ανθρώπινων παθών. Όλα μαζί ιδωμένα ως σύνολο τα έργα της Commedia dell’ arte του Απόστολου Πανταζή, ενσαρκώνουν όλους τους διαφορετικούς ανθρώπινους χαρακτήρες, σκιαγραφούν τους πρωταγωνιστές του καθημερινού τσίρκου της ζωής.

"La Escena está en los Ojos de mi Compañero/a…"

El siguiente texto sobre la posición, causa y efecto de la mirada y los ojos, tiene como objetivo la concientización del cómo usamos la mirada en escena.
Con el objetivo en la libertad en el juego dado por la mayor disponibilidad del actor y actriz. Realizo este ensayo por motivos de la “Peste Clownesca” que deja más confusión que preguntas creadoras, mas dudas que incomodidades creativas, mas resultadismo de formula que inconformidad artística a los que la indagan.

Często jestem proszony o teksty na temat działalności doktorów klaunów i Patcha Adamsa, by wykorzystać je w pracach licencjackich i magisterskich. Wszystkie są do zdobycia w bibliotekach lub bezpłatnego ściągnięcia z Internetu.
Plik zawiera listę moich tekstów wraz z linkami do ściągnięcia.

Actualmente nos hemos acercado principalmente a las definiciones del clown desde la rigidez en diccionarios, páginas web o desde la experiencia pero a pesar de que la palabra clown en torno a su traductibilidad lingüística significa payaso, hemos dicho que es preciso hacer énfasis en los  distintos contextos en donde esta práctica hace presencia. El presente escrito invita a  una aproximación desde el horizonte antropológico para entender de otra manera el arte del payaso.

This event explores spaced-out visions of outer space and its sciences in visual fictions. Moderated by two academics from the ANU – studying space narratives from the perspectives of astronomy (Dr Brad Tucker) and popular entertainment (Dr Anna-Sophie Jürgens)
An exciting round table discussion held at Mt. Stromlo Observatory will examine the communication and imaginary of science in sci-fi film and the cultural ideas it generates in performance art together with three distinguished guest speakers: the visual effects specialist and scientist Oliver James, who worked on Christopher Nolan’s 2014 blockbuster ‘Interstellar’, the special effects artist and director Stephen Chiodo, creator of the 1988 cult film ‘Killer Klowns from Outer Space’, and performance artist Le Pustra, a colourful shapeshifting conduit thriving on visual sci-fi, theatre and drag.
The discussion will be accompanied by a Synth Sci-Fi Performance, created by a creative gang from the ANU.

In this manuscript a follow-up to our 2019 study is presented, in which was argued that modern popular culture has the power to engage the public with space, and it is here in the nexus between science fact, science fiction, and entertainment that the majority of the public encounters space for the first time. A range of examples were presented to illustrate how the space aspect figures in particular contexts, and how these leverage the power of contemporary media and popular culture to engage the public with space in a more thoughtful way, with the use of space in popular culture, for example, supporting education, or allowing for the telling of stories and the exploration of various aspects of the human condition by providing a detached context for social commentary on politically sensitive issues. Here, we present three case studies with in-depth analyses on (i) the space activities of animals in African fairy tales in light of international space regulations, (ii) the role of 'good science' in the interplay between video games (as modern popular culture artefacts), space, and education, and (iii) how 'traditional' circus can be defined in space narratives, and how space narratives expand on and transcend the cultural imaginary of the circus and its comic protagonist, the clown, in particular. Together, these three case studies examine both educational and cultural aspects, and their connections to space activities, in unique ways, presenting the fruits of the collaborative energy of the co-constituted relationships of popular culture and outer space-the nexus of which emerges as a new conceptual space. The findings reinforce the importance of scientific education as it inspires and raises interest in our universe and environment, illustrate that video games as popular culture artefacts are also educational enablers of the next wave of space exploration, and highlight that space stories recognise the circus's role as a cultural agent. Together, they broaden our understanding of the various ways in which the public engages in space through culture.

Un livre qui défend la thèse que les pratiques anarchistes contemporaines, de l'altermondialisme à aujourd'hui, on des racines historiques profondes.

Le livre traite plus spécifiquement des groupes d'affinité, des armées de clowns (en manifestation) et des campements militants autonomes temporaires; le livre présente aussi les stratégies anarchistes.