Physical Theater

 

[Almost three months ago, I published a four-part series on theater education and training on Rick On Theater.  One article, “It’s A Clown’s Life: Lessons From Clown School” by Lara Bevan-Shiraz, was about physical theater, the topic of the two articles posted below.  “It’s A Clown’s Life” was posted in “Theater Education & Training, Part 1,” 3 October 2024.

[Physical theater can be defined as a genre of theatrical performance that encompasses storytelling primarily through the performers' physical movements, which may also include masking.  Mime and theatrical clowning have influenced many modern expressions of physical theater, and traditions such as Commedia dell'arte, as well as Asian theater forms such as Japanese Noh and Balinese theater have influenced Western physical theater.] 

“CHICAGO’S PHYSICAL THEATER FESTIVAL:
MOVING IN MANY SENSES”
by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho 

[This article, which wasn't published in American Theatre’s print edition, was posted on the magazine’s website on 2 August 2024.]

This essential gathering, now in its 11th year, doesn’t just regularly break the fourth wall; it also breaks down theatrical and global barriers.

A baby and a theatre festival: Over a decade ago, a beloved Chicago couple discovered they were pregnant with both. Their kids now run about wild, creative, free. The annual Physical Theater Festival Chicago proved a popular tween this year, boasting eight different shows, five workshops, and three virtual events across the month of July [13th-21st], and attracting over 2,000 audience participants. But you may be surprised to learn that this landmark celebration of storytelling was conceived on an unassuming flight of fancy.

Co-founders and artistic directors Alice da Cunha [actress, director, and producer] and Marc Frost [novelist, screenwriter, film and television producer and director; b. 1953] first met doing physical theatre in the U.K., and they continue to draw lifelong inspiration from sweeping curations like the London [international] Mime Festival [1977-2023]. “When we came to Chicago, Marc and I always said that when we retired, we would start a physical theatre festival,” said da Cunha. They didn’t have to wait that long, receiving a curatorial grant of $3,000 from Links Hall just two years into their Chicago residence—and three trimesters into the gestation of their firstborn, Benjamin.

[Links Hall in Chicago is a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering artistic innovation and public engagement. It maintains a facility that offers flexible programming, facilitating research, development, and presentation of new work in the performing arts.]

If anyone can tackle such a massive undertaking, it’s these two brilliant creative leaders. Da Cunha and Frost have become local theatre celebrities, known for their warm effervescence and sharp critical eye for movement. Audiences crowd around them at each show for a conversation or a Carioca “hello” (two kisses on the cheek) as the two bustle about festival tasks. Their whole lives seem to have prepared them for these moments, as they switch seamlessly between community building and company management, diplomacy and art, heart and mind, one language and another. They extend many bridges.

[Everything that comes from the city of Rio de Janeiro, including natives, is called Carioca. Cariocas are also extremely friendly and are very comfortable with physical contact, such as kissing on the cheek, which is a typical greeting.]

Each year it’s moving to see how they form a border-defying family. Da Cunha’s roots in Portugal and Brazil and Frost’s upbringing in Chicago help them create Windy City spaces that feel like home to artists from all over the world. This year’s lineup featured much-anticipated spectacles which had garnered high renown in their home countries and accolades across international festivals. These included Clayton Nascimento’s grounded and transformative Macacos, from my native Brazil: Chula the Clown’s hilarious and heartbreaking Perhaps, Perhaps . . . Quizás from México; and an array of multigenerational offerings like cinematic The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much from Voloz Collective (France/U.K.). From Chicago artists there was Scratch Night, featuring works-in-process; Theatre Y’s soul-stirring Little Carl; and an outdoor Millennium Park extravaganza with circus and magician performers. 

All the pieces this year delved into some element of play, metatheatricality, and silent imagery. Many were one-person shows; some were completely nonverbal. All fit da Cunha and Frost’s expansive definition of physical theatre: “If you close your eyes, you wouldn’t get at least 50-90 percent of the storytelling.” Bodies in space morph into anything and everything: A child’s struggle to put on a jacket transforms them into a rhinoceros in the delightful Don’t Make Me Get Dressed (by Boston’s The Gottabees). In Macacos, a Black Brazilian man realizes the stage is a space to dream and resolves to become a jazz diva, until history bursts at the seams and floods in more sobering anecdotes. And in The Man Who Thought . . ., bodies turn into walls, bullets, horses, and spilled coffee, in the style of French movement artist Jacques Lecoq [1921-99].

American performing arts often feel siloed. Genres like theatre, standup, circus, and clown self-segregate, and it’s not often you see a company deeply integrate those approaches and communities. This festival proves the value of intertwining international performance pedagogies. I felt the air shift with possibility each moment a performer broke the fourth wall, shifted genre midway through a show, ventured into self-referential territory, or pulled up audience members. Speaking with patrons, I learned that many look forward to the Physical Theater Festival each year because of this risk-taking innovation, which has become increasingly rare in a risk-averse American theatre landscape. People’s excitement around the international shows should be a lesson to Chicago, and more broadly the U.S., to continue branching out from conventional Western storytelling.

Take Perhaps, Perhaps . . . Quizás [Quizás is Spanish for ‘perhaps’ or ‘maybe’], for instance. This nonverbal one-woman show, which depends on audience participation, contains a degree of fourth-wall-breaking and engagement that is still all too rare in American theatre, and was executed impeccably in festival performances.

Dressed in a wedding gown, Chula the Clown starts out seated, penning love notes and romantic dreams on sheets of paper—then crumples them up. Her “mask”—a painted white face with arched brow—locates itself between the traditional 18th-century clown look and the 2010s boy brow makeup obsession. Hair sprouts from her head like an untamed wedding bouquet, moving with her as she jolts her head to notice the audience. She searches for a groom in the audience. Purses her heart-shaped lips and heaves a wordless sigh. Muchacha’s unimpressed. 

Gaby Muñoz, the person behind the clown, has taken this particular piece around the world for 14 years, and has several other shows under her belt as Chula, who she describes as an extension of herself. Perhaps, Perhaps . . . Quizás has a heartwrenching ending you don’t see coming: As audience participants return to their seats, the protagonist realizes the extent of her loneliness, and, as Muñoz put it, her “absence of self-love.” Muñoz based this devastation on her own experience of separation from a longtime partner with whom she lived in London and Montreal. When she returned to Mexico City heartbroken, she didn’t know many people and decided the audience would become her playmates. “People are surprised with how much they can participate,” Muñoz said. “Audiences who don’t normally do theatre become a part of it. It’s vulnerable for me like it is for them, because I don’t know what will happen—I am not totally in control.”

She said she’s seen it all: At one performance a while back, a woman protested when Muñoz selected her boyfriend as the groom. But the ending is always the same, she said: We see the beloved protagonist restart the cycle of searching for love from the outside, never from within.

“The piece aims to lighten the theme, but it’s surreal how resonant it remains—trying to find your strength with someone else, when actually you must find it within yourself,” said Muñoz. “It’s been a form of therapy to me. I am a mirror to so many other stories like mine. I find community. I know I can feel deeply in silence, and still people can understand my pain.” 

That balancing act between joy and pain also triumphed in Clayton Nascimento’s powerful Macacos. I’d long awaited this international sensation; several family friends in Rio de Janeiro had already seen the show, which has even impacted Brazilian justice and education. Nascimento’s central conceit, he said, is that “theatre is a space to dream,” and he makes full use of its possibilities, taking us through an embodied history crash course in Brazilian racism, recent murders of Black boys, and his own joyous dreams for more expansive and free living.

He begins the show in Brazilian Portuguese, with subtitles projected, contorting his body to depict white people hurling racist slurs, morphing into a Black child playing with a toy car, and relishing in the “Single Ladies” dance to emphasize Black joy. His body feels as poetic as his language, and watching him, I felt I was experiencing the genre of choreopoem afresh. Several minutes in, he stopped to address us in English, asking audiences members to share Chicago’s history of anti-Blackness.

At each place he tours, Nascimento modifies the show to suit that city, throwing in references and asking the audience to share their city’s realities. In Chicago the play ran 90 minutes, but in Brazil it often hits a sweeping three-hour mark, full of local references and a brave grappling together. This version for the U.S. aims to bridge the specificity of Black Brazilian experience with what international audiences may comprehend, offering more recognizable cultural touchstones, like novelist Machado de Assis [Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer; 1839-1908], plus context about the U.S.’s own complicity in Brazilian oppression.

Beyond Nascimento’s tireless physical prowess and agile command of form, seamlessly moving us through different theatrical approaches, Macacos delivers its message and then some. Normally you can’t measure theatre’s impact on society, the way it shapes hearts and minds in mysterious and intangible ways. But Macacos has brought forth real-world justice: After one show in Rio, a lawyer approached him to reopen the case that is central to the show, in which police murdered 10-year-old Eduardo de Jesus Ferreira by his home. Now public schools in São Paulo plan to teach his script, aiming to fill a gap in education regarding Brazil’s history of colonial violence.

[Macaco is the Portuguese word for ‘monkey’ or ‘ape.’ It’s also a racial slur against black men and women (macaca)  in Brazil.  Americans may remember the 2006 incident when Republican U.S. Senator George Allen of Virginia used the word macaca to refer to an American of Indian descent who was filming an Allen reelection rally for Allen’s Democratic opponent.  Allen went on to lose his reelection bid.]

As the one-man show tours the world, Nascimento often brings along Eduardo’s mother, Terezinha. “The people have opened their arms to her,” he said. “Look at what the theatre was capable of.” She wasn’t able to come to Chicago for the Physical Theater Festival, but did provide a letter, addressed to her son, whom Nascimento embodied.

A spotlight of mourning focuses Nascimento, whose eyes fill with the tears of saudade. He speaks her words: “Clayton told me the stage was a space to dream. So I’m going to dream with you, my son.” 

[Saudade is a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament.]

Macacos will next travel to Russia. I become misty-eyed thinking of all the places the Physical Theater Festival artists see, all the lessons they carry, all the stories they exchange, all the people they touch. Nascimento expressed his excitement about breaking the fourth wall, yearning to dream together with people from all over. Brazil poses its own tremendous challenges in conversations about race, and if Nascimento’s play could impact people’s lives there, well—I cannot deny that anything is possible. Hearing stories like Nascimento’s puts the world in context: Theatre has treaded upon dreamlike surfaces. It is only logical to expect more transformation to come from cultural exchanges, more than we could dare imagine now.

Said Nascimento, “Terezinha’s voice in the play stands in for many mothers who lost their children to violence. She becomes like all the mothers in the world. And every time this play happens, this mother can speak with her child. I have seen Terezinha along the years. And with each performance the play has allowed her heart to find more hope and see the world. The message I want to give people is: Dream.”

Even at workshops it was clear that dreaming at the Physical Theatre Festival means a great deal to Chicago residents beyond your average theatre artist. In a workshop called “The Clown and the Silence,” led by Gaby Muñoz, one participant said she didn’t have a background in theatre at all. What brought her there? “A retired lawyer needs a lot of clown,” she said with a laughing sigh.

As Muñoz put it, opportunities to play allow you to “viajar sin viajar” [‘to travel without traveling’]. Work across the festival transcends borders and ignites the human spirit, sometimes without language, always physically clear, and ever genre-bending. “I think a lot of people don’t know of the option to make theatre that way,” said Alice da Cunha.

She and Frost know they’ve done it again when they sit at the back of a theatre and listen to the audience. “That’s the most important part,” said Frost. “Listening to the audience.”

So I let the laughter and cries wash over me. The chatter in the lobbies invited me into a kind of family. Attendees who’ve been with the festival from day one mixed with those who had just fallen in love that day. Kids laughed with grandparents. Strangers speaking different languages felt familiar to one another because they’d experienced emotions through plays together, in their bodies. This sticky Chicago July, the globe seemed to move just a bit closer together.

[Gabriela Furtado Coutinho (she/her) is American Theatre’s Chicago associate editor.  On ROT, Furtado Coutinho’s writing appears in "‘How to Survive an Election: Laugh With “POTUS,”'" 14 November 2024; “‘Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias,’” 9 October 2024 (in “Theater Education & Training, Part 3”); and “‘Wish You Were Here: A Radical Access Roundtable,’” 6 July 2024.  (A more complete biography of Furtado Coutinho follows "‘How to Survive an Election.’”)]

*  *  *  *
“RUNNING AWAY TO JOIN CIRCUS THEATRE”
by Gary M. Kramer 

[Eight-and-a-half years before Gabriela Furtado Coutinho’s report on the 2024 Physical Theater Festival Chicago, American Theatre published this article by Gary M. Kramer (January 2016 [vol. 33, no. 1], part of “Approaches to Theatre Training꞉ The Mind/Body Divide,” a Special Section.  (The text below ran online as “Running Away To Join Circus Theatre,” posted on AT’s website on 16 December 2015.)]

How circus arts companies are training artists to become both actors and acrobats.

Once upon a time, so the axiom went, everybody wanted to run away and join the circus. These days, though, no one has to run away; circus is becoming more of a possibility in one’s own backyard. Circus arts organizations are popping up everywhere, and everyone from established theatrical troupes to fringe performers are incorporating acrobatics and circus arts in their work and creating theatrical spectacles. This growing trend has created a demand not only for practitioners of circus arts, but also trainers and directors who specialize in these arts from all over the country.

Jeff “Tree” Anderson is a coach, choreographer, and director who cofounded Clan Destiny Circus, a circus theatre in Asheville, N.C. He firmly believes that “everyone deserves circus.” Unable to compete with Cirque du Soleil with its huge sets, costumes, and music, Anderson and his DIY circus create workshops for ordinary people to participate in activities ranging from pole dancing to acrobatics and human pyramids, to programs where parents can learn to “fly” their kids properly. Anderson’s theatrical work includes teaching mime to show how a face or body moves when it is happy or sad.

“What does an angry face/sad body look like?” Anderson asks rhetorically. “The responses to these exercises are mental, physical, and emotional.”

He continues, “Once we have mime, we tell stories. One such performance is the cycle of the Hindu Creation Myth, or another piece, Day in the Life Mechanica, about how circus can liberate you.” His shows feature silk elements and aerials, as well as hula hoopers and spinning fire staffs.

Anderson studied mime and theatre in college and was inspired to create his acrobatic mime troupe in the late 1990s. “The genesis for all of this comes from Mummenschanz [Swiss mask theater troupe who perform in a surreal mask- and prop-oriented style] and Vsevolod Meyerhold [Russian and Soviet experimental theater director, actor, and theatrical producer; 1874-1940], a contemporary of [Konstantin] Stanislavski” [Russian and Soviet theater director, actor, and teacher – father of modern Western acting; 1863-1938], he explains. “He developed biomechanical theatre, which is a physical representation of complex internal emotional concepts, and he built these crazy sets with slides and intense physical work activities.

“What I find is that people have muscle memory from years of play and putting their butt over their head,” Anderson continued. “The play and the sense of adventure and creating a character hits on a deep childhood thing—everyone has an aspiration to be a famous performer. Doing something like circus speaks to that.”

Peter Andrew Danzig is an actor and personal trainer, as well as the founder of Theatrical Trainer, a Philadelphia-based company designed to condition actors, dancers, and circus professionals to enhance their performance. His company provides one-on-one coaching to prepare an actor for a specific role. He leads workshops for casts and teaches new skills in movement coaching, choreography, and physical theatre.

Danzig realized that the landscape for physical theatre in Philadelphia was growing quickly, with independent companies and large resident theatres incorporating acrobatics, light tumbling, and circus arts, as well as general extreme physicality and even Parkour into their productions. His training is based on kinesiology, biometrics, and each individual’s physiology.

[According to Wikipedia: Parkour is an athletic training discipline or sport in which practitioners attempt to get from one point to another in the fastest and most efficient way possible, without assisting equipment and often while performing feats of acrobatics. With roots in military obstacle course training [parcours du combattant – French for ‘obstacle course’] and martial arts, parkour includes flipping, running, climbing, swinging, vaulting, jumping, plyometrics, rolling, and quadrupedal movement—whatever is suitable for a given situation.]

“There are no longer actors who just dance—there are actors who do circus silk work [also known as “aerial silks,” among other names], and tumbling, and backflips, and are extreme physical contortionists,” Danzig explained. “But most actors are not specifically trained one way or another to address the needs of the role.” His company, then, was created to help “prepare character movement,” incorporating circus arts and physicality.

Indeed, it is common now for directors to ask performers if they have a front roll or know other forms of tumbling. Danzig recalls, “On one of my first jobs, I was asked to stand on someone’s shoulders and create shapes. I had danced my whole life, but this was something new. It was out of my repertoire.”

Learning the skills is one thing, but just as important is learning to stay in proper condition to do them on a theatrical schedule; singing, climbing, or dancing 7-8 times a week for 2-3 hours at a time means burning calories at a rate equivalent to that of a soccer player. To keep up one’s stamina, Danzig recommends conditioning exercises that range from planks and V-ups to leg lifts and weight-bearing activities that engage the body’s core.

“Actors need to think of themselves as athletes,” said Danzig. “Circus works with biometrics, so we want them to be able to bound and jump and land, and use multi-plane arc movement to address that kind of work. There needs to be upper body strength.”

A recent example of his work: He taught the cast of [Philadelphia’s] Luna Theater Company’s all-female production of Animal Farm [17 October-7 November 2024] some light tumbling and acrobatic work, including building a windmill with their bodies.

“You can’t just go to a gym and do crunches or a cardio class—it’s a different kind of conditioning and a rigorous skill set,” Danzig explains. “If the actor is climbing silks, push-ups and upper body strengthening and push-and-pull activities are much better than lifting weights and doing bicep curls.”

Also in the City of Brotherly Love is Damon Bonetti, founding artistic director of the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, a theatre company that has begun to incorporate circus. Their upcoming staging of He Who Gets Slapped (March 30–April 10), adapted by Walter Wykes from Leonid Andreyev’s [Russian playwright; 1871-1919] original [1915], is set in a seedy French circus in the 1920s, although the actual circus is only heard from offstage. Still, Bonetti—whose background is in more traditional theatre—plans to incorporate circus arts into the production. He has partnered with the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts and hired performers from local companies such as the Headlong Dance Theater and Pig Iron Theatre Company, who are adept at physical work.

Bonetti plans to use circus and physical arts to create interludes at the top and in between scenes that will involve live music and establish location, as well as create flashbacks that further or foreshadow the plot and character development. “The actress playing the show’s lion tamer bought a bullwhip and is going to learn the skills involved with cracking it,” Bonetti boasts.

While this is Bonetti’s first production with circus arts, he already is open to incorporating more acrobatics into his theatre. “Here in Philly, we have had such a rich tradition of physical performance,” Bonetti said. “Ten years ago, it was very divided between physical and classical text; they didn’t mix much. But those bridges have come down, so that you’re not just going to see a classic performance done in a traditional way. Even if it’s not a super-movement piece, you’re going to see more expressions featuring the body; it’s more visceral. With this particular play, it worked out perfectly.” Indeed, though he admitted that “it’s a tease that we don’t get to see the performance of circus,” by incorporating “interludes that are organic in the story,” he’s made circus integral to the storytelling.

Caitlyn Larsson is the director of Fit to Fly [Berri, South Australia], a company that independently contracts with theatres to provide “circus to real people.” A self-described “fixer,” Larsson travels all over the world to work with companies that want to incorporate circus in their productions.

“I come in early and start with nothing, or come in late and fix what they already have—make it presentable, make it pretty, make it understandable to the audience, tell a story, give it life, and make it more dimensional,” she explains. “I get people who can dance or do aerial—not both—and I open them up to doing more to show them how amazing they can be.”

Larsson’s work involves creating trust and a safe space for this kind of play. She tailors her work to individuals and groups, and trains performers for circus routines at their level.

“The real work is bringing character to a piece—gestures and facial expressions—and bring that to the story,” says Larsson. “If your character is climbing a fabric, why does he do that? What does he want at the top of it?”

Part of her craft is guiding actors by talking about the world of the play and creating that world’s distinctive rules.

“I have directorial training, so I pick out what they are trying to express,” she says. “People hold things they create dear to their hearts, and theatre doesn’t always work that way. You sift through the parts that work . . . I show them they have a good instinct when they have an idea or a suggestion that doesn’t quite work, but I can also take them in a different direction; it’s remolding the tidbits.”

Larsson has also performed as an aerialist and done volunteer work with Clowns Without Borders, a humanitarian organization. Hers is a hectic life, but Larsson acknowledges that the pros outweigh the cons.

“I’m OK not having many belongings,” she says. “I have three suitcases of circus paraphernalia and one suitcase of clothes. I don’t own property or have a lease. I’m a vagrant; I love to travel.” (She did point that she has a retirement account, but “no guarantees when I get old.”)

It turns out that some people do still run away with the circus.”

[Gary M. Kramer is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia who, in addition to his articles for AT, reports about film and writes reviews for Salon, Cineaste, Gay City News, Philadelphia Gay News, The San Francisco Bay Times, and Film International.  He’s the author of Independent Queer Cinema: Reviews and Interviews (Harrington Park Press, 2006), and the co-editor of Directory of World Cinema: Argentina, Volumes 1 and 2 (Intellect, 2014 and 2016).

[Readers of Rick On Theater will have discerned that I have an affinity for physical theater.  I’ve never been a big fan of clowning (see my reviews of Theater of Panic in “Short Takes: Some Unique Performances,” 28 July 2018, and The Second New York International Festival of Clown Theatre in “Some Vintage Reviews from the Archive,” 15 March 2021), but there have always been exceptions.

[I have, however, always admired the work if Bill Irwin and David Shiner (see my report on “Old Hats,” 22 March 2013).  There are other physical theater performances on which I’ve blogged, notably “Golem (Lincoln Center Festival, 2016),” 28 August 2016; I also greatly enjoyed The Street of Crocodiles by the Théâtre de Complicité (now named just Complicite), a troupe dedicated to the physical theater style of Jacques Lecoq.  (I saw Crocodiles years before I started ROT, so there’s no report on that show.

[I myself studies mime, originally for the physical discipline—but I enjoyed it so much that I actually performed it a few times.  I also coached the casts of two shows in mime when I was in grad school.)

[For several years, I was also closely associated with the late avant-garde director and play-maker Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), about whom I’ve blogged a lot, and he had an abiding interest in circus performances, an attraction which had begun in Hovey Burgess’s New York University classes when Shapiro was studying directing at the School of the Arts (later renamed the Tisch School of the Arts).

[Shapiro declared that his favorite classes at NYU had been the circus classes taught by Burgess (b. 1940), a circus clown and juggler who turned to teaching circus techniques to actors, and his productions were vert physical and often full of circus work.  But the level of physicality in his shows came not just from the circus work, but very much out of the Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99) techniques and principles to which Shapiro was devoted.

[A number of the actors with whom Shapiro worked extensively were also circus artists, such as Michael Preston, who performed as Rakitin with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, and Cecil MacKinnon, a founding member of the Pickle Family Circus and a ringmaster and clown with the Circus Flora.

[Circus performance is an immediate form: what the observer sees, as Burgess pointed out, is what is happening at that moment.  While conventional theater artists create illusions, Burgess believed, “Circus is more real.”]