My week has been full of clowns. Last week I reviewed Clowns Sans Frontier from France, and am coming to understand that clowning is not only a form in theater, but a way of life.
True clowning transcends banal interpretation as the realm of silly children’s theater, existing instead as a highly subtle psychological practice.
This week, at the sixth Annual Creative Forum for Independent Theater Groups in Alexandria, I happened upon another set of clowns: Lasse Beischer and Henri Kokko of Sweden. Their goal is different from the French group who performed in Egypt’s poorest neighborhoods, but equally ambitious: the duo set out to perform Shakespeare’s Richard III, in a combination of commedia dell’arte and self-reflexive repartee.
With raunchy scenes and liberal verse, they perform strictly for an adult audience.
The two began the evening in the classic paper mache masks of dell’arte, the 16th century form of improvisational theater the pair is indisputably influenced by. Strumming ukuleles and singing in English, the pair set the stage for what was to be a hilarious and well prepared evening of off-the-cuff remarks and signature wisecracking.
“Queen of the Nile, I love you, Kokko said, lip quivering, looking into the eyes of a girl in the audience.
Adorable in a multitude of roles – from Richard’s mother to the newly-created character of the bicycle messenger, Kokko dazzled and amused with an elated physical intelligence and responsive wit.
For his part as the dubious Richard, Beischer appeared in a slick black suit and sunglasses, more modern gangster than historical royalty. Around his neck hung thick gold chains with one of them holding a large cross. Upon close examination, however, the material of the bejeweled cross came to light; it was fashioned from a flat packet of plastic wrapped pills.
It is this attention to detail that gives the duo their distinctive style. In interaction with the audience – by far the most uproarious aspect of the work – the two are experts, mining small moments into large gags. The ring of a mobile phone, tired audience members trying to quietly leave and strange sounding laughter all became fodder for embarrassing and delighting the audience in equal measures. At one point, Beischer carried on a long scene with the security guards at the entrance to the theater, interrogating them for the whereabouts of the director of the festival in order, he said, to kill him.
“Tomorrow morning at the conference, we will find Mahmoud Aboudoma, cut him into small pieces and serve him with coffee, said Beischer.
Another joke repeated to perfection occurred at the expense of a man from Italy. “I need your help! Beischer implored the shy audience member. When he came across a not-so-shy volunteer with personal aspirations for the stage, he treated him with a headmaster’s impunity: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
The clowns are not new to Alexandria. Guests of the festival some years ago, the pair made such a strong impression they were invited to return.
The two find their niche in restaging Shakespearian classics. “If we were to try to do this here in Egypt, take apart our classic literature and make fun with it on stage – well, it would be totally impossible, said Abdel Samee Abdullah, a young director from Alexandria. “What they are doing is really special.
The pair did not restrict their antics to what was directly on hand. They delighted the audience by conjuring an image of a festival performance from the previous night, an obtuse modern dance performance by Salome Scheebeli of Switzerland. “We can be modern dancers too! the clowns exclaimed, breaking into an absurdist satire of movement which the audience responded to with thunderous laughter.
Speaking of the Swiss group, Scheebeli and co-performer Anna Tenta, presented an inaccessible hodge-podge of unrealized concepts and fractured movement. In their piece entitled “Dance Diary, the pair performed what might just as well have been a diary entry – a set of impenetrable physical codes, whose result was less esoteric than incredibly self-indulgent, far too long and not thought out.
Unable to lift their gaze from the floor, the dancers moved spasmodically about the stage with a set of gestures that failed to reach even a quiet virtuosity. A simple pedestrian vocabulary, which might have grounded the work, similarly eluded the pair who failed to communicate with the audience or each other. The soundtrack shifted with a bizarre caprice from evocative Arabic music to a digitized remix of a speech by Barack Obama.
The only redeeming moment of the work, for the audience at least, was when the dancers paused to speak. Enacting a dialogue between an insecure teacher and inattentive dance student, the work became all the more revealing – a story of frustration, the inability to constructively collaborate. The only interesting moment for this critic occurred in a moment’s stillness, when Tenta briefly landed for a lithe and elegant solo.
All in all, the forum has been off to a promising start. Split City Puppet Theater of Croatia performed Tuesday morning for a group of Alexandrian youth, stirring the audience with a combination of sentimental children’s performance in a format that might very well been a television show. Occasionally breaking into hammy song and dance, the company lip-synched pre-recorded numbers blasted over the speakers.
The sixth Creative Forum for Independent Theater Groups concludes next Tuesday. For more information, visit www.iact-eg.org. Tel: (03) 483 9999.
