Circus Clown Research Articles

소비자의 유행색 브랜드 개성 지각과 태도

색상은 콘텐츠의 하나로서 소비자에게 중요한 의미를 지니게 되는데 일반적으로 개인이 보유하고 있는 색상 이미지는 시간을 두고 축적된 경험이나 지식의 산물로 존재한다. 본 연구는 향후 유행할 것으로 예측되는 유행색을 중심으로 색의 이미지가 가지고 있는 개성과 의미를 파악하고 색상에 대한 태도를 분석하고자 하였다. 연구 결과에 의하면 크리스탈 사운드, 크리미 터치, 미스테리우스 빈티지, 오톰 포레스트, 카니발 등 5개의 주요한 유행색들은 비교적 독특한 고유의 개성적 이미지를 가지고 있는 것으로 나타났다. 추가적인 형용사 이미지 분석 결과, 크리스탈 사운드는 자수성가한 사업가의 이미지를 가지고 있으며, 크리미 터치는 여고생의 이미지, 미스테리우스 빈티지는 대부의 이미지, 오톰 포레스트는 일반 대중의 이미지, 카니발은 서커스 광대의 이미지를 갖고 있는 것으로 나타났다. 이중 크리미 터치는 소비자의 태도에서 가장 높은 선호도를 보이는 것으로 나타났다. 이상의 연구 결과들은 개인의 개성과 색상의 개성의 일치성을 고려함으로서 긍정적인 소비자 행동을 유발할 가능성을 보여준다. 또한 본 연구는 패션과 마케팅을 연결한 학제적인 연구로서 가치가 있으며 향후 지속적인 연구가 필요할 것으로 보인다. Colors, as a part of contents, have great implications to consumers. Each individual feels the image of colors as an outcome of the accumulated experience or knowledge of oneself. This study aims to find the personality and meaning of color images through the predicted trend colors and to analyze the consumers' attitude towards them. We found that the 5 major trend colors such as Crystal Sound, Creamy Touch, Mysterious Vintage, Autumn Forest and Carnival seem to have their own personality images. Furthermore, we discovered that Crystal Sound has an image of a self-made man, Creamy Touch a highschool girl, Mysterious Vintage a God father, Autumn Forest the public and Carnival a circus clown as a result of additional adjective image analysis. In addition, customers marked the highest preference for Creamy Touch. The research result shows that the personality of an individual and that of colors are coincide and it might bring about a positive consumer behavior. And this research has a significant meaning since it is a sort of interdisciplinary study in-between fashion and marketing and it should be studied further later.

Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema

Introduction: Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema Stephen Norris 1. The Foreigner's Journey to Consciousness in Early Soviet Cinema: The Case of Protazanov's Tommi Julian Graffy 2. The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-Editing, Foreignness, and Soviet Film Culture of the Twenties Yuri Tsivian 3. Dressing the Part: Clothing Otherness in Soviet Cinema Before 1953 Emma Widdis 4. Under the Big Top: America Goes to the Circus Josephine Woll 5. Eisenstein's Cosmopolitan Kremlin: Drag Queens, Circus Clowns, Slugs, and Foreigners in Ivan the Terrible Joan Neuberger 6. The Picture of the Enemy in Stalinist Films Peter Kenez 7. Identifying the Enemy in Contemporary Russian Film Oleg Sulkin 8. About Killers, Freaks, and Real Men: The Vigilante Hero of Aleksei Balabanov's Films Anthony Anemone 9. Fools and Cuckoos: The Outsider as Insider in Post-Soviet War Films Stephen Norris

Send in the clowns

Healthcare professionals are always seeking ways to improve their relationships with patients and, to this end, some senior hospital staff in the United States have asked a group of circus clowns to teach nurses how to introduce a sense of levity into hospital wards. This article is a review of the results.

Shakespeare Transformed: Two Comedies in St. Petersburg

Like many people who have at least once attended a production by Alexander Morphov, I had my misgivings when buying a ticket for his Midsummer Night's Dream, commissioned for an open-ended run beginning in the March of 2008 by the St. Petersburg Komissarzhevsky Theatre (named after a celebrated nineteenth-century Russian actress). Morphov is well known for radical, innovative approaches that often perplex and annoy theatrical professionals and the general public. His Shakespeare's Tempest and Moliere's Don Juan have been running in Komissarzhevsky's repertory for a few years, and are probably best described as variations on the plays known under these names. Taking extravagant liberties with the text has been practically de rigueur in much post-Soviet theatre, at least when dealing with non-native and therefore less familiar classics, as has been the use (and abuse) of avant-garde, heavily experimental stagecraft, much of it borrowed wholesale from the West. In many Russian Shakespearean productions of the last few years, directorial ingenuity has been going well beyond the kinds of revisionism that is practiced in typical high-profile English and American productions. One unfortunate result of such experimentation is that almost any Shakespearean production one encounters in St. Petersburg or Moscow may seem more of a commentary on a given play's critical and performance history than a self-contained theatrical event. I do not know to what extent the amount of innovation that accompanies many Russian productions of Shakespeare reflects directorial desire to re-think and re-invent specifically Shakespeare and to what extent it is a mere corollary of a director's overindulgence in contemporary theatrical fads. If it is the former, then I fear that most directorial revisionism is lost on the vast majority of the Russian public--whose median age is about thirty-five and who either has no previous acquaintance with a given play, or has made that acquaintance through another, also bewilderingly experimental, production. A seasoned student of Shakespeare may indeed be amused by something like the excessively stylized Hamlet that has been playing at the famous Moscow Arts Theatre for half a decade, in which the deployment of massive cuts and bizarre conventions--in the final duel, for example, Hamlet and Laertes sit at the table throwing up silverware, while others count hits, and then the rest is silence--cannot but prevent the majority of spectators, who don't know the play by heart, from understanding what's going on, let alone from comprehending why what they are watching is one of the greatest Western dramas. So, with Morphov's Tempest, in which Ferdinand and Prospero slap Miranda around for a good five minutes, while she mechanically repeats her name (a commentary on the evils of patriarchy?) still painfully fresh in my mind, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned from and enjoyed his Dream. The curtain rose on the scene with the mechanicals. Their Pyramus and Thisbe was an operetta composed by Starveling. Peter Quince, provided by Morphov with a wife, Mary, played a self-absorbed director, dreaming about the accolades his play would garner. Snout was a dead-drunk electrician who kept electrocuting himself; Snug, in blackface and multi-colored bonnet, looking like a Jamaican pot-smoker, was not slow of study, but a certifiable cretin who only mooed and blubbered. Bottom, played by the company's leading man, the charismatic Alexander Bargman (there was a touch of in-crowd humor in his willingness to take up every part) wore a butcher's apron over a fat suit that emphasized his buttocks and belly. As the distribution of roles commenced, accompanied by hilarious misunderstandings, unself-conscious puns written from scratch, gags and pratfalls, it became clear that these mechanicals came right out of the well-established Russian clownerie tradition. This performance tradition features an array of amusing characters, from regular circus clowns to endearing, silly, existentially confused and melancholy personages in the style of commedia dell' arte, or touching schlemiels reminiscent of Chaplin or early Woody Allen. …

500 Clown Macbeth (review)

Reviewed by: 500 Clown Macbeth Regina Buccola 500 Clown Macbeth Presented by 500 Clown at The Steppenwolf Theater, Chicago, Illinois. June 14-July 29, 2007. Directed by Leslie Buxbaum Danzig. Set by Dan Reilly. With Adrian Danzig (Bruce), Paul Kalina (Shank), and Molly Brennan (Kevin). Things that you need to know about 500 Clown Macbeth: first, there are no clowns. At least, not in the sense of full-facial greasepaint, oversized red shoes, and twirling bow ties. Second, the cast consists of three people-Molly Brennan, Adrian Danzig, and Paul Kalina-not 500. Third, the savvy theatregoer will recognize very little of Shakespeare's language from the Scottish play, though the casts' kilts pay homage to its original setting. The threesome is also significant, since the piece opens with the trio sharing among them, one word at a time, the dozen lines of the play's opening scene, beginning: "When shall we three meet again?"(1.1.1), concluding with a gleeful marching cadence as they repeat over and over again in unison, "Fair is foul and foul is fair" (1.1.10). Theatrical convention-Shakespearean or otherwise-goes out the window from the opening moments of the performance. As electronica by The Propellerheads plays, the audience assembles in front of a stage set only with a three-tiered scaffolding of metal and plywood. Brennan, Danzig, and Kalina enter from the rear of the performance space. At the Steppenwolf in summer 2007, they emerged from the light and sound booth to climb in, like rambunctious monkeys, over the audience, through the light rigging, eventually hopping down from the catwalks into the aisles. As they made their way to the stage, they clambered [End Page 182] Click for larger view View full resolution Adrian Danzig as Bruce, Paul Kalina as Shank, and Molly Brennan as Kevin in 500 Clown's production of Macbeth. Photo by Michael Brosilow. [End Page 183] over the seated audience members, Kalina at one point straddling a befuddled theatregoer with a foot on each of her armrests as he adjusted his disheveled kilt. Though they may not look like circus clowns, Brennan, Danzig, and Kalina are highly trained in clown, circus arts, and physical theatre, and display these skills with panache over the course of the performance. The two nods to conventional clown aesthetics in the show are the punked-out hairstyles and hair-colors of the cast, and their ears, which are painted solid red. In a post-show discussion after a performance at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center of the University of Maryland in College Park in December 2006, Danzig explained that the red ears "emphasize that the troupe is ever alert, listening for cues from the audience." Their names are apparently unrelated to 500 Clown Macbeth itself, but to the process of developing their performance personas, since the character-names have proven portable into their other ventures, 500 Clown Frankenstein and 500 Clown A Christmas Carol. The actors both are and are not portraying the central characters from these familiar narratives, and their clown names seem to allow them to detach the roles they play from themselves, and to avoid identifying with any specific character in the original piece of literature. 500 Clown Macbeth has been staged repeatedly since it premiered at Charybdis Multi-Arts Complex in Chicago in 2000. The now defunct Charybdis, which billed itself as an "artists' playground," was the perfect place to debut the cursed Scottish play with three clowns taking all of the major roles, performing on a rickety tri-tiered scaffolding-a playing space masterminded to fall apart by designer Dan Reilly. According to its Mission Statement, 500 Clown aims to deploy "circus arts, improvisation, and action-based performance to produce theatre that catapults the performers into extreme physical and emotional risk. The work shifts the audience from passive to active observers and creates a charged environment that celebrates the unpredictable power of the moment." The physical risks to the performers are clear; during one early performance, the scaffolding completely collapsed mere minutes into the show. It took several moments for the technicians running the lights and sound to realize that this particular accident had happened accidentally...

The contemporary circus: art of the spectacular

Part 1 Acknowledgments Part 2 Introduction: The Circus as an Art Form Part 3 Part I. The Creative Team Chapter 4 1 The Director and the Creative Process Chapter 5 2 Designing the Circus Chapter 6 3 Setting the Circus to Music Part 7 Part II. The COllaboration (Case Studies) Chapter 8 4 Ringling's 131st Edition Chapter 9 5O Notes Chapter 10 6 The Making of a Major New American Spectacle Chapter 11 7 The Big Apple Circus's Clown Around Town Part 12 Part III. The Performers Chapter 13 8 Circus Sets Chapter 14 9 Clowns on Clowning Chapter 15 10 Training the Artists and Building and Maintaining the Performance Part 16 Bibliography Part 17 Index Part 18 About the Author

Fandom, Failure, and Despair: An Introspective Look at Professional Baseball in Cleveland

Fandom, Failure, and Despair:An Introspective Look at Professional Baseball in Cleveland Joel Nathan Rosen (bio) Long ago, when mankind was young and wit was fresh, if someone in an audience called out, "Say something funny," Mort Sahl, the comic, would say: "John Foster Dulles." Today's last-gasp, laugh-getter for desperate comics is some reference to Cleveland. George Will, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball There is something disconcerting yet strangely cathartic that occurs when two fans of northeastern Ohio sport converge. On the one hand, these moments offer a time to reminisce, a moment to stroll through the garret of one's innocence, reliving youthful passions with another who speaks of sport in a similar dialect. And yet, amidst the joie de vivre of the moment, and perhaps in a way best understood only by anthropologists and circus clowns, there emerges a curious yet inevitable mix of gloom and desolation. There is a desperate feeling of never having tasted the forbidden fruit, of never having reveled in the ecstasy of raising one's index finger in triumph alongside the realization that the hopes and aspirations one once held were all part of an elaborate scheme that, to paraphrase those philosophical misfits at The National Lampoon, shows unequivocally that, whether one can hear it or not, the universe really can laugh behind one's back!1 More than anything else, despair is what defines Cleveland; its franchises; and its legions of adoring, hard-bitten, and long-suffering fans. It is a place of such remarkable athletic frustration and unforeseen misfortune that, in spite of its historical record of futility, has somehow managed to slip beneath the radar amid the cacophony of curses; headphone-wearing eccentrics; and countless tales of poor old Billy Buckner, Ralph Branca, and Fred Merkle. In [End Page 106] this regard Cleveland sport suffers on two fronts: its own repetitive ineptitude and its remarkable lack of national recognition. Within the invisible barricade that marks the Greater Cleveland area (a region that includes those who have taken part in its long and storied diaspora, its hell-bent-for-losing leitmotif, and its bleak owning up to the words, "I am a Cleveland fan") is a cloud cover that cannot be brushed aside on the clearest of days. In every way, Cleveland—a town that marks the passing of the seasons through a rabid and insatiable thirst for a champion—really is fate's fool, bearing witness to an unending parade of moments that simply slipped by in the course of the most bizarre set of circumstances imaginable. The antipathy that Clevelanders have always felt toward anyone who hails from south of Akron, east of Erie, or west of Toledo is palpable and can be flat-out intimidating some days, but it is only a fraction of the sort of antipathy they reserve for one another. Cleveland is and has been a town so remarkably stratified along so many distinct lines (not the least of which is the ongoing eastside-westside antagonism), that to this day Cleveland artists continue to revel in its simplicity, or at least its backwardness. This is exemplified in Joe Walsh's "Ordinary Average Guy" or Drew Carey's remarkably prescient hard-drinking, low-achieving, high-threshold-for-pain ne'er-do-well.2 Indeed, if there is any part of the Cleveland narrative that does enjoy national recognition, it is probably that odd reactive pose brought to public spaces by Robin Williams's Adrian Cronaur in Good Morning, Vietnam!, who responds to a soldier's disclosure that he hails from Cleveland with the off-the-cuff slight, "Obviously Vietnam's not that much of a change for you, then!"3 There are also the more ubiquitous put-downs such as Randy Newman's lament ("Burn on, big river, burn on") and countless Tonight Show monologues that made Clevelanders flinch when they heard that Dennis Kucinich was making a presidential run in 2004, and not necessarily because they didn't like his politics.4 On the contrary, most never made it that far. What they recall instead is the convergence of the moribund '70s and his administration's attempts to sell off...

Stagnering en transformering: die rol van die nar in <i>Paljas</i>

Stagnation and transformation: The role of the clown in Paljas This article focuses on the central problem in the film Paljas, and the role of the clown in the process of transformation that is embedded in the story. The stagnation in interpersonal relationships and the accompanying problem of identity on a personal and social level constitute the problem underlying the narrative. The youngest child refuses to speak and dysfunctional family relationships and marital problems are evident. These problems can mainly be ascribed to the spatial isolation in which the characters find themselves. Attention is therefore paid to the way in which space functions in this film. The arrival of an absconded circus clown effects transformation and healing – especially by means of his picaresque performances and the notion of play. Subsequently this article concentrates on the characteristics of game/playing as a cultural activity and on its liberating value. The clown also has definite Biblical connotations as far as the aspects of betrayal and redemption are concerned. The process of transformation as depicted in this film is completed when the child starts speaking again, dysfunctional family relationships are restored and the family is reinstated in the community because of their restored social status.

Send in the Clowns, They're Already Here

Explicit through the interlocking sinews of David Lehman's new biographi cal/theoretical homage, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, the practiced muscular definition of all potent avant-garde movement is repeatedly flexed: newness over novelty, originality over mime sis, change over stasis, and combativeness over docility. Like a knot of inge nious circus clowns locking the gaze of spectacle-hungry crowds, the avant garde must always augment definition with showmanship, keep politics from tripping aesthetic stilts, stop compact cars from blurring each harlequin into the larger, comic mass, and perhaps most tellingly, juggle a plentitude of unevenly weighted objects in the air, ostentatiously manipulating the forces of resistance. Eventually, the next act will charge the spotlight with equally fantastic flourishes?frenzied lions intent on the kill, trapeze artists whirling in the thick air, motorcycle daredevils revving across tightropes?and the no longer provocative avant-garde will be forced to drop its metaphoric balls. According to Lehman, the New York School avant-garde, a loose con tinuum of even more loosely associated poets, mingling in weaves of loose, mutual appreciation societies with Abstract Expressionist painters (Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, et al. .. .), lets loose its meta-linguistic loop-de-loops and anti-establishment ara besques through the antics of four very different performer-poets. Biographi cal vignettes of the New York School principals?Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler?characterize The Last Avant-Garde like four different gem-cuts decorating the same stone. Through a prolonged meditation on the viability of a retrospective avant-garde appraisal for the New York School, Lehman entices the reader with a plan for assembling facets, a glimpse at microscopic patterns, and a call to enter the poetic mines. Enthusiastic throughout, The Last Avant-Garde attempts the hat-trick of biography, textual analysis, and cultural criticism to proffer a thesis mingling the disparate strands of a bygone American era: that the first virile generation

Child Behavioral Distress During Invasive Oncologic Procedures and Cardiac Catheterization With the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit • 55

Child Behavioral Distress During Invasive Oncologic Procedures and Cardiac Catheterization With the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit • 55

A humor workshop program to aid coping with life stress

Following a brief review of some uses to which humor has been put, the author describes the development of a Humor Workshop program to assist people in the use of humor as a coping mechanism for life stress. Volunteers, arranged in three small pilot groups (N = 22), attended the complete course of four sessions of structured learning, plus a fifth one for retrospective discussion. Analysis of quantitative data revealed a significant increase in the use of coping humor over the duration of the Workshops, and a scrutiny of qualitative feedback and participant's comments yielded pointers to how it might be improved for future presentations. An intervention strategy based on the creative use of humor would appear to have potential value for the maintenance of mental health and well-being. KEY WORDS: Humor, Life Stress, Psychotherapy. Although the topic of humor has been debated at least from the time of Aristotle in the fourth century before Christ (Banbraugh 1963), for much of recorded history significant contributions on its use have been somewhat infrequent. During the 1960's, however, a surge of interest in this field of study occurred (cf. the Humor Movement, Korotkov 1991), with the realization that humor and laughter serve important roles in maintaining and enhancing the quality of life. It has been speculated that the overt phenomena of laughter and smiling had their origins in expressions of victory and defeat respectively, even before human beings as we know them had evolved from their earliest hominid beginnings (Pettifor 1982; Raskin 1985). It is thus posited that from early in hominid evolutionary history manifestations of humor-related behavior served specific purposes such as communication and the release of emotion. Ideas concerning the usefulness of humor can be arranged into four basic categories. Firstly, there are those involving social facilitation and control as summarized by Overholser (1992). Humor can help build relationships and maintain social bonds, as well as ease tensions and reinforce the norms of the ingroup - partly through ridiculing the outgroup. The second category of humor use is in the sphere of teaching and education. Rutkaus (1981) notes that long-term retention of subject matter is enhanced when humorous examples are included in the program, while Dolce (1984) found that encouraging people to laugh at their mistakes produced positive benefits in the classroom. Thirdly, humor can be used as an expression of veiled aggression as also in mediation - this use being found among court jesters and ritual clowns of the Middle Ages (Lieberman 1977; Haig 1986). The modern counterparts of such performers are comedians (particularly those involved in political humor: Benton 1988) and circus clowns. The fourth and final use of humor is the one with which the present article is most concerned, namely as an aid to coping with stress and in psychotherapy. Such benefits were obviously known to at least one writer of the Old Testament, who stated: A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones (Proverbs, 17:22, New International Version). In more recent times Freud (1952, originally published 1928) recognized the therapeutic value of humor, commenting that it takes its place in the great series of methods devised by man for evading the compulsion to suffer ... (p.217). His theory, discussed in more detail in an earlier work (Freud, 1976 - originally published in 1905), was that through humor people reduce their problems to child's play, but that it was a rare and precious gift that few can actually achieve. Levine (1977) presented an overview of the understanding (at that time) of some of the useful roles played by humor, and it is clear that the topic was being accepted as one worthy of serious study. Among the points made by Levine was the belief that a humorous attitude helps one feel more capable of overcoming fears and tolerating distress; it could relieve anxiety and re-assert ego mastery. …

Clown doctors: shaman healers of Western medicine.

The Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit, which entertains children in New York City hospitals, is compared with non-Western healers, especially shamans. There is not only superficial resemblance--weird costumes, music, sleight of hand, puppet/spirit helpers, and ventriloquism--but also similarity in the meanings and functions of their performances. Both clown and shaman violate natural and cultural rules in their performances. Both help patient and family deal with illness. Both use suggestion and manipulation of medical symbols in attempting to alleviate their patients' distress. Just as traditional ethnomedical systems have been integrated with Western medicine in other societies, clown doctors can provide complementary therapy that may enhance the efficacy of medical treatment in developed nations, particularly for children.

The rhetoric of romance and the simulation of tradition in circus clown performance

The rhetoric of romance and the simulation of tradition in circus clown performance

National Clown Week: 1–7 August

A television comic announces a satiric Golden Fleece Award for the faux pas of some government official. The San Diego Chicken hams it up in the stands of the baseball park. A Swiss mime troupe advertises the services of a communications corporation. All these may be more familiar to young people today than is a circus clown. These and other entertainers are all in the business of laughter and provide commentaries on current society.

Shakespeare in England, 1983

The 1983 season at Stratford-upon-Avon was exceptionally uneven. There was no detectable sense of purpose in the season as a whole, nor even within individual productions, some aspects of which were hard to reconcile with other aspects. The first half of Julius Caesar, for instance, used a bare, spacious stage with gleaming modern furnishings, including (for perfectly legitimate interpretive reasons) a television screen; but the claustrophobic second half evoked the muddy trenches of the First World War. Halfway through the season the television screen was scrapped, either in response to the unfavorable audience response or because of technical difficulties. Such a basic change shows an alarming lack of confidence in the interpretation. There were similar inconsistencies in Henry VIII: opulent costumes after Holbein clashed with brash music after Kurt Weill. In Twelfth Night, a lumberingly old-fashioned set-a gigantic tree and a pseudo-realistic rocky hillside-overwhelmed the play, obscured much of the action, and distracted from the director's aim of exploring the emotional complexity of the characters. On the other hand, all the characters in The Comedy of Errors were presented as circus clowns; yet beneath their red noses and blue makeup, the actors brought out the very humanity which the director seemed bent on eliminating. Although Measure for Measure was set in the eighteenth century, it was neither Hogarthian in the low-life scenes nor elegant in the court ones. Its director, Adrian Noble, clearly has no visual sense, or only a very crude one, and his designer here, Bob Crowley, is a specialist in visual hideousness, the creator of a New Brutalism which is spreading alarmingly at Stratford and elsewhere. Of course new approaches must be tried, and new interpreters too; but the casting seemed as hit-and-miss as the general approach. Of the newcomers to the company, by far the most consistently successful was Joseph O'Conor, whose immense experience in Shakespeare elsewhere meant that his performance in three relatively unrewarding roles-Julius Caesar, Egeon in The Comedy of Errors, and Escalus in Measure for Measure-showed an authority, humanity, and easy command of the verse which contrasted markedly with the performances of other newcomers, notably Richard O'Callaghan, who was simply too small-scale and too inaudible for parts as crucial as Lucio in Measure for Measure and Feste in Twelfth Night (which he reduced to a minor role). It was surely perverse to cast an aggressively contemporary actor, John Thaw, as Sir Toby, and then bury him beneath the visual cliches of the part-huge doublet, red cheeks, white whiskers-instead of giving him the chance to use his tough contemporary quality to cut through such cliches and perhaps make the character more interesting. But another newcomer with a markedly contemporary style, David Schofield, provided an audacious but stimulating re-thinking of Antony, Buckingham, and Angelo. Contrasts, even contradictions, are perhaps inevitable in a modern production of Julius Caesar. Some aspects of the play, such as political

The River Boat Pilot and the Shopping Mall Queen

¿m fr The River Boat Pilot and the Shopping Mall Queen by Richard Lawson When he was sober, Dexter Hopkins was quiet and sullen, a man who thought he had been born and quickly forgotten. He saw himself as a lone figure standing in an open field, and from his distant vantage point, he saw hardly more than a shadow on the landscape. He heard his voice, even in anger, coming out like the sound of melting snow dripping from an eave. His life, he felt, was a dull and harmless aspect of reality. That's why he always forgave himself. But his drunken behavior had to be blamed on someone or something, and Dexter blamed the beer itself, especially the seventh one. It was after the seventh beer that he heard himself telling about his adventures as river boat pilot. The experience was almost pleasant if he found he was telling the story to a stranger. If there weren't any strangers, Dexter heard himself telling the story anyway, usually to someone who knew he was a liar. On these occasions, he drank even more in an effort to dampen his humiliation. In the absence of strangers, Dexter did, at least, maintain enough self respect to choose someone who looked as drunk as himself or someone who hadn't heard his 29 tale in several months. And from Dexter's beer-fuzzy point of view, there was some truth in what he said. The river did provide him employment. Every half-hour, six days a week, Dexter leisurely crossed a narrow stretch of the Tennessee River. His job was directing cars on and off a small ferry boat. Justin Ferry Landing bore the name of a nearby town—a village, really—on State Route 57. Farmers hauling their produce out of the river valley to Chattanooga filled their trucks at one of the town's two gas stations, and they cashed their checks and opened Christmas Club accounts at the branch bank. Justin also claimed two churches (a Baptist and a Methodist), a combination grocery storepost office, and Shirley's Cafe and Recreation Center. In the dim light of Shirley's, on Friday and Saturday nights, Dexter drank until he could almost feel the glory. Then, he plummeted back to his toneless life in a fall that was quick and painful and made him even more sullen. The whole thing had started innocently enough—a drunken remark to a vacationer strayed from the Interstate Highway seven miles north of Justin. Like the scheduled and unchanging motions of the river crossings, the lie became a habit, and Dexter became good at telling it. He became so good, in fact, the regulars would believe, just for an instant, that Dexter really was the pilot of a river boat. But the spell was short lived, Dexter knew, and he would watch for the moment they became aware of their own rapt attention. He would see the embarrassed smile and shake of the head, and then Dexter would feel a kind of shameful nobility, as if he were a circus clown playing to a tired and sparse audience . Dexter was late, and being late made him angry. On this Saturday, the ferry's last crossing had been delayed. Dexter hadn't noticed the white Pontiac overheating . Its powerful but quiet engine had been left running, and the hot August sun had rendered the automobile a spewing and immobile hulk. Dexter had to wait with the woman motorist for a tow truck. He normally arrived at Shirley's about nine o'clock during the summer and about eight o'clock during the winter. He never got there before dusk because he liked seeing the neon beer sign sizzling in the window. On this night, Shirley's was already crowded when he walked in, and the sign had done little to unknot his rage. But as he slowly surveyed the room, he saw an unfamiliar figure sitting next to an empty stool at the bar, and a wave of excitement rose from Dexter's stomach. He took a quick breath and headed for the vacant seat. He was much more relaxed, now, but he didn...

Becoming A Clown in Bali

Frogs flourish in the wet rlcefields of Bali. Their sounds and rhythms are mimicked with vivid comic precision by clowns in the temple dramas. Continuity between performance and everyday events is a powerful element in Balinese community life. The links are reflected in numerous forms other than dancing frogs, but it was the frogs I noticed first.I arrived in Bali for a year of theatre research not knowing how I would proceed. Having been a circus clown in the U.S. I was attracted by the comic characters in the Balinese temple dramas. Eventually I moved into a small village, attended numerous performances, and became a regular follower of Topeng masked dancer Made Dlimat.Although I did not know it at the time, my presence as a spectator of Balinese temple dramas was the first step along the way to my becoming part of the performance.

The Jester and the Madman, Heralds of Liberty and Truth

I. Hardly any other mythical creature has enjoyed the ubiquity of the clown: “There are few other myths such as this one about which it can be affirmed without any doubt that they involve the most ancient modes of human expression,” wrote Paul Radin in his famous essay on the figure of the clown among primitive American Indians. “There are few myths which have retained their original characters with so few changes.” The character of the Fool, the Jester, the Joker appears in a clearly identifiable fashion in the most primitive as well as the most highly cultivated groups: among the Greeks as well as the Chinese; in Japanese civilization as well as the Semite world. The medieval juggler is the embodiment of this figure of many aspects who perdures in the theater, especially puppet theater, and in the guise of the circus clown.

The poet as clown: Variations on a theme in nineteenth‐century French poetry

The “self‐portrait as a clown” which has now become a standard allegory of the artist in twentieth‐century painting, developed particularly from nineteenth‐century models in French poetry. There was a kind of metonymic fusion of Pierrot and Harlequin, the court jester, the vagabond showman, the gypsy violinist and the white‐faced circus clown. Banville, in his Odes funambulesques (1857) was the first major poet to represent the clown as a symbolic analogue of the poet, as a tightrope walker and an acrobatic, with his “vertical” aspirations from reality to ideality. Baudelaire's portrait of the failed showman and artist as victim, Verlaine's clowns reflecting the suggestive ambiguities and plasticity of the poet's aesthetics, Mallarmé's Le Pitre châtié, Laforgue's frivolous dilettante and Hamlet‐like dandy who chooses to play the role of the white‐faced simpleton, all reveal the figure of the clown, as a blatantly proclaimed actor and champion of artifice who set himself in total contrast, physically and spiritually, with his audience and society in general. An artificial rebel against realism, he perceived more profoundly than his audience the comedy of life, that “all the world's a stage.”

The Omniscient President

With scarcely a ripple of protest a popular magazine recently carried a cover picture retouched to portray President Ford as a circus clown stepping off the Presidential airplane. The two “best sellers” on the Presidency are scathing indictments of President Nixon's staff and, by inference, of Nixon himself. In The Imperial Presidency Arthur Schlesinger, who sets the pace for many intellectuals, argues that the powers of the office must be curtailed. President Ford found his veto power quite ineffective in the closing days of the 1974 Congress. And the Democratic leadership of the $4th Congress is disussing a legislative program without reference to the President. The Presidency obviously isn't what it used to be.