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Bookchat: Backatcha, Europe -- Launching My Book in Barcelona [1]

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Date: 2023-04-19  

My previous book covered seven years of this story in 122 illustrated pages, but my latest book spends 640 pages describing 50 years of worldwide theatrical history, before, during, and after the initial Festival of Fools in Amsterdam during 1975. It also features hundreds of colorful illustrations, restored and processed by art major moi - Johnny Melville, my co-writer, is (and was) involved with almost every Fools Festival event since 1976, which made him the perfect partner.

I was a Painting/Drawing/Graphic Design major who saw that this local eclectic “Great Salt Lake Mime Troupe” was creating a new synthesis, and was in a position to join them on the production side -- alongside a theatrical professional from New York who saw the same compelling things.

The answer is pretty simple: Dancers and musicians went to the University of Utah and Westminster College because they had world-class programs that taught and trained young professionals in those fields. The magic of airline travel brought prominent artists from New York and Los Angeles, with the result that they could study with Frank Zappa, Stanley Sussman of Julliard, or members of the Alwin Nikolai Company. All of us in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Utah were encouraged to step up and participate with the best in their chosen fields.

My real name is no secret, (as Agent Double O Soul once sang,) and is occasionally seen in the following essay. My honorary cousin Ellid (we share the same surname) writes many personal essays, so I’m following her lead. There are a few pages about me and my perspectives in the current book because my co- writer was baffled why a Dance Company/Jazz Band from an obscure mountain town like Salt Lake City became ‘stars’ within the international theatrical circuit that encompassed Amsterdam’s Festival of Fools.

Welcome to bookchat! Where you can talk about anything; books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

The COVID pandemic helped keep the progress of our book on-track for 3 years. I was a Night Owl before 2020, but am definitely an Early Bird now, since I’ve had to regularly communicate with Europe, eight hours ahead of me, and almost stopped going out in public AT ALL, except for necessities. Even now, I wear a mask in public, whether shopping, visiting the art scene, music gigs, or concerts. After four vaccinations for COVID, and a Flu shot, there are still no vaccinations against Paranoia.

Those last few months of final edits and typo corrections made it seem like our metaphorical finish line was deliberately receding away from us as we approached it, but we finally published “Amsterdam’s Compleat Fools” in the early summer of 2022, with kind and effective help from the U.S. Copyright Office, which may surprise some people, but is true!

I scheduled a couple of public presentations as our book was officially released. One of which was on progressive KRCL 90.9's RadioACTive drive-time show, and a live in-person presentation at the prestigious Leonardo Museum, formerly the main Salt Lake City Library, which now hosts Ken Sanders Rare Books in its West Wing.

Johnny was also a featured guest on Barnaby King's online Clown Spirit show. In addition, we also produced a cheaper three-part eBook version, which I put on a newly-purchased tablet computer to show folks in Barcelona, Spain, site of our official book launch in September.

A flight attendant friend of mine arranged a “Buddy Pass” for my travels, which saved me some money, but caused two and a half extra days of travel on the way back home, because of my “standby” status - a hard-learned lesson that won’t be repeated anytime soon. The outward-bound journey stayed on schedule, though, and I got a night’s sleep before Barcelona’s Festival of Fools 2022 began its performances.

Barcelona is a party town, and people come from all over Spain and Europe to have fun. This Festival of Fools was held in a half-dozen theaters, which favored neighborhood audiences, but required attention to TV, Radio, and Newspaper coverage by Albert the promoter to help curious tourists find our venues. (More about that aspect later.) Barcelona’s subway system is excellent, though, and it isn’t too difficult for strangers to find their way around. NOTE: I always wore a mask in the station or on the trains.

One exception to easy navigation was an area called the Gothic Quarter, near the harbor, with extremely narrow streets (about the width of a car) no sidewalks, and residential buildings four to five stories high One can barely see the sky, directions are a mystery, and no exterior landmarks are visible. I stayed there for a short time, and sent a shipment of books to that address. Once they arrived by truck, we had to haul twenty-pound boxes by hand up MANY flights of stairs, then haul them all back down to a taxi for their final drop-off at Lluisos de Gracia (Theater of Grace) further inland.

Barcelona's famous Rambla is a great place for people-watching and glimpses of Antoni Gaudí's amazingly original architecture. The bicyclist above is approaching the Gothic Quarter -- but that is no alley in the distance, but a typically narrow street named after Gothic King Athaulf, brother of Alaric, who sacked Rome in 410 C.E. and whose descendants established the first royal family of Spain. There are Roman-era ruins nearby too. (Photos from a mis-printed calendar in my personal possession — all photos in this essay are by Double O ... er -- M.E. except where noted.)

On my first jet-lagged day, I had lunch with a Dutch juggler named Jeoren Van Der Lee, or Jerome, but one of our students was named Jerome too, so he didn’t mind that I called him ”Yori,” his nickname in Holland. Later, I followed Johnny to Cercle Catolic de Gracia c/ de Santa Magdalena (Circle Theater) and saw Jeoren’s workshop, meeting the students who were attending the N.C.I. (Nouveau Clown Institute) which had started earlier in the week, lugging my five-pound book in a valise in order to show it to anyone I happened to meet, including Rebecca Stute, Clive Booth, and Moshe Cohen, who are all mentioned in its pages.

Jeoren was also a waiter and actual cook in his piece “Chez Cirqaurant,” co-starring Lola, our favorite member of Albert’s promotional staff, who paid the bills during our premiere party at Circle Theater.

Jeoren’s juggling workshop was a revelation – he had all kinds of good juggling equipment, but his lessons were all about simple throws and manipulations using one or two objects, emphasizing the beauty of rhythm. Less than a half dozen of the eighteen students had juggling skills, but the whole class learned a great deal. I watched them delightedly from the side, while tossing various items from Jeoren’s stash for some personal fun. HOWEVER, once I began integrating Jeoren’s lessons, my basic primitive moves started looking actually good, and even elegant, despite being out of practice for several decades. The friendly students responded to me like I actually KNEW something, but the most important thing I knew was that Jeoren was a remarkable teacher!

The N.C.I. (Nouveau Clown Institute) was comprised of students and professionals of various ages.

I made note of the students’ names and got to know most of that talented bunch during the festival, their ages running from late teens to middle fifties. When class was over, we went to the theater’s café on the first floor, where I met dozens more people that first weekend – starting with old friend Stan (Jango) Edwards, of the old international Friends Roadshow, who had arranged the critically-successful appearance of the Great Salt Lake Mime Troupe at Amsterdam’s initial Festival of Fools during 1975, and put us up, or rather put up with us, at his former base near Detroit, Michigan on our way from SLC to JFK in NYC where we got on the plane for Europe, and stayed for long periods of time.

(L) Jango Edwards, alongside wife and translator Cristi Garbo; (C) Jango offstage, coming from, or going into a taxi; (R) Jango onstage with Nouveau Clowns and collaborators Knut Ostradal, Anna de Lirium, plus Nola Rae, his first partner from the Friends Roadshow in 1972.

Jango was in charge of the N.C.I. and de facto MC of the entire festival. He was the main focus of the news media for a sobering and grim reason: He’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and true to his long history of hustling, made his “last year of life” the major selling point of 2022’s Barcelona Festival of Fools. He also utilized the term “Dear Clown Walking” quite a bit in publicity.

My other Amsterdam friends who came to Barcelona had also worked with Jango early in their careers. One of his ex-wives also convinced Johnny and I to ask him to write the foreword of our book because of his central position in Fools History, which he did. I sent Jango a physical copy early in the process, which was also a factor in the festival securing financial help and theatrical spaces from the City of Barcelona, according to a call from him one midnight. (Remember that 8 hour gap in time?) Anyway, I only spent a few hours with Jango during my three weeks in Barcelona, while Johnny spent considerably more time as an administrator, co-ordinating the daily chaos with him via computer and “Fools Fone.”

Our first night featured Angel Amieva and his lovely wife in a pair of delightfully outrageous set pieces called “Fly and Butterfly,” plus “Priest and Nun,” but an unfortunate family emergency took them away for the rest of the festival.

Barcelona's Festival of Fools meant public performances from Fridays through Sunday at the four different theaters mentioned previously, with N.C.I. workshops for the students learning from skilled professionals starting mid-week -- like Virginia Imaz, Vanessa Kamp, Grada Peskens, Moshe Cohen from San Francisco, Diana Gadish, Tony Heimer, Kurt Ostradal, Tania (Anna de Lirium) Simma, Nola Rae (O.B.E. -- same as the Beatles,) and Vienna, Austria’s Fools Brothers.

(L) Silent magician Carolina Feliu later visited Nepal with Barcelona’s “Magic Andreiu,” who raises money for Katmandu’s displaced children, and is in our book under “Clowns in Service.” (Center & Right) Wickedly-funny Virginia Imaz was the absolute hit of our first weekend.

Johnny had approached former New Yorker Adam Gertsakov about writing a review of Amsterdam’s Compleat Fools, and he came through for us. www.clownlink.com/... When I met Adam that first weekend, it turned out that he had toured with friends of mine from the Big Apple called the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, who are coincidentally mentioned in the book too! We both went up to Virginia and congratulated her.

No taxis were running during our first Sunday because of Catalan Independence Day, so Jango Edwards was unable to come to the Circle Theater, and co-author Johnny Melville had to take over as MC in addition to his regularly-scheduled performances. The N.C.I. also came through spectacularly!

An Aside: Catalonia was granted official autonomy in 1814, but the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship was not kind to the region, or Barcelona. I repeatedly walked though George Orwell Plaza, named after the 1984/Animal Farm author who volunteered to fight for the local militia while writing Homage to Catalonia (1938) -- this plaza still has bullet holes in the walls from Fascist firing squads. There were also vile Russian Z’s spray-painted on the city’s historic cathedral, plus Russia Kills Children painted on the orcs’ embassy. I witnessed workers unsuccessfully trying to remove that graffiti, but am also glad to report that there were no major arrests or violence during Independence Day parades and demonstrations on September 11, 2022.

There were movie nights on Mondays at a modest Civic Center in the Drassanes neighborhood, not far from the tourist-trap Rambla, but with better bakeries, shops, and an eatery named My ****ing Restaurant a few doors up the street. One other place, Teatro LaGleva, was near the de Gracia area, my favorite part of town, and was used for "Up Close and Personal" interviews.

Movie nights featured films by (L) Peter Shub, originally from the USA, (C) Johnny (“Mobex Chimp”) Melville is seemingly speaking with (R) innovative Russian clown Slava Polunin, who emigrated to Versailles, France in the early 1990’s, but unfortunately banked most of his money in his native land and was unable to join us in Barcelona because of sanctions. Peter and Slava are both incredibly good solo artists and are featured in “Amsterdam’s Compleat Fools” as part of our “Pack of Jokers” for that reason.

Slava Polunin initiated the Mir Caravan, where many of Amsterdam’s Fools joined dozens of Soviet theater companies on a tour from Moscow to Blois, France in 1989, greeted by the Berlin Wall falling along the way. Slava, and some Amsterdam Fools, were also part of another Mir Caravan in 2010, featuring renowned director Vaslav Havel’s final play. According to my sources, he would have gone along with the tour if he could, but died soon after seeing them on their way. Mir 2010 traveled from the Czech Republic, Germany, France, and Belgium -- ending in Moscow, Russia. (There is a chapter in our book about this subject.)

Johnny and I were scheduled to lead off the public shows by introducing our book on September 17 and 18, with copies for sale on a table in the Theater of Grace’s lobby, facing the wonderfully pleasant Plaza del Nord. My friends Nola Rae from London and Grada Peskens from Amsterdam showed up that week. Nola already had a copy, which was reportedly being intensely perused by her artist-husband Mathew Rideout back home. Thankfully, Grada helped me prep for my appearance onstage -- sharing a stage with her is always a winner, as our students gleefully discovered in their workshops. (More about Grada Peskens below.)

Launching “Amsterdam’s Compleat Fools” at Barcelona’s Festival of Fools 2022 in “Lluisos de Gracia.” (Above) Photo by Maria of the N.C.I. on Sept. 17; (Below) Photo from Sept. 18, via promoter Albert, who issued that backstage pass to me during the previous week.

More about the de Gracia neighborhood: Johnny Melville gathered the N.C.I. for a “Street Theatre Boot Camp,” (Johnny’s spelling) on September 15. Nola had already started her workshops, but walked along with us while I was taking pictures of Johnny’s satirical tourist group as they gawked at the shops and sights around de Gracia, visiting more than one plaza and making hundreds of people laugh on a perfect evening in this prosperous area, which was primarily devoted to raising families.

Our N.C.I. students, Nola Rae, and Johnny the Guide are about to meet some curious police in Plaza del Nord as the Street Theatre Boot Camp begins their tour of de Gracia. Permission had been previously granted by City Hall for several weekly ‘animations’ on Barcelona’s streets during the Festival of Fools, so the meeting was amicable.

I took many a break outside during our sojourn in De Gracia -- food, drinks, and snacks were relatively inexpensive throughout the pleasantly-shaded but airy neighborhood, that was totally unlike the Gothic Quarter. Folks were friendly and relaxed too. One thing that especially impressed me was a casually-dressed street band who paraded around Plaza del Nord, playing, among other songs, Kate Bush’s surprise hit Running Up That Hill, duplicating the ‘breathing’ sound of her Eighties synthesizer with accordion and muted horns in perfect synchronization. By coincidence, our book mentioned her name because she studied theatrics with Johnny’s late friend Lindsay Kemp, who was also David Bowie’s theatrical teacher, and our initial entry in the “Pack of Jokers.”

(L) The Nandayapa Brothers (AKA ‘Cotton and Mop’) from Mexico City via Goa, India, performing on Plaza del Nord outside Theater of Grace during the weekend of Sept. 17 & 18; (R) The N.C.I. “Tour Group” on another plaza in De Gracia about 1 km south of our theater on Sept. 15 — Photos by M.E.

Now that we are metaphorically back at Lluisos de Gracia, I can write about the performers I saw there. First of all, everyone in Barcelona knew about our star of the weekend Tortell Poltrona (Jauma Bullich.) He was a native Catalan and traditional clown, which made him doubly suspect during Franco’s dictatorship, when Spanish police were not as friendly as they’d been to us, to put it mildly. Monterrat (Montse Poltrona) Bullich and Jauma married when they were both teenagers, raising a wonderfully accomplished family. I gleefully met with both of them, before and after the shows, and also one of their grand-daughters, who cheerfully translated for us when needed.

Tortell Poltrona led off with a well-honed act about an ‘every man’ who attempts to speak his mind through a cantankerous microphone that frustrates his every move and gets tangled up in his clothes. Echoes of the dictatorship were abundant, but the audience was gasping for air with laughter at his seemingly inexhaustible antics. Grada, our onstage ‘cleaning lady,’ absolutely LOVED working alongside Jauma during other moments, and the feeling was mutual between these theatrical veterans.

Montse and Jauma are in a special section of our book because of their organization entitled Clowns Without Borders, which began during the hideous Balkan Wars in the 1990’s. Those traditional jokes and scenarios, which stretch back centuries, still have the power to make people laugh in refugee camps and disaster zones when they have no other reasons to laugh about anything.

The people of Spain love and appreciate comedy in many forms, which is mostly why Jango and Johnny eventually based themselves there, instead of Amsterdam. Leo Bassi, as seen in our Pack of Jokers, was born into a traditional Italian circus family who had emigrated en masse to New York after WWII, but now lives in Madrid. Adam Gertsakov also relocated from NYC to Barcelona, as I mentioned before.

(L) Anna De Lirium during her solo show on Sept. 16. She was in the festival until its end on Oct. 2nd; (C) Diana Gadish has a spare, but effective, visual style that underpins the rich emotional content of her material; (R) Catalan audiences have more experience with political BS then they like, and applauded when Grada the cleaning lady swept Diana’s silent but obvious demagogue offstage. N.C.I. students also showed selected original pieces on both weekends.

Grada Peskens is a sure winner onstage. She found unlooked-for depths in Knut Ostradal’s ‘sad clown’ act, and mined her past as a trained dancer for her solo number Sex, created for another festival devoted to women beyond the age of sixty. Needless to say, Sex brought down the house, much like Virginia Imaz’s work had done the previous weekend -- that’s Barcelona! Everybody was happy to see Grada the cleaning lady.

(Center) Grada the cleaning lady set up Jango’s lead-in to the finale, but purposefully strode back onstage for some unplanned vocal improvisations after he carelessly tossed his chair into the wings at stage left, where she was busy preparing things. Luckily, Tortell Poltrona ‘saved’ this volatile situation by bringing another chair from stage right at the perfect moment, making everybody laugh, onstage and off. Grada the cleaning lady would NOT accept any abuse from her old collaborator Jango, and he didn’t throw any more furniture either.

Jango ended every show he attended by leading the N.C.I. in a group pantomime while Charlie Chaplin’s song Smile, from 1936’s Modern Times, was playing. He talked the words of Leon Russell’s Singing My Song to You as a karaoke solo with ‘canned’ backup, followed by a lunatic shouting song-and-dance number called Cabaret Cabron over the musical track of YMCA from the Village People, with enthusiastic support by the N.C.I. gang before bringing out the rest of the cast for a curtain call.

(L) “Cabaret Cabrón” translates (nicely) as “Illegitimate Cabaret,” another one of Jango’s patented jokes -- These official graphics came my way via Albert the promoter and are NOT my work. Pictured (Clockwise from the upper left) are: Johnny, Jango, Virginia, Joren in a fright wig, Jeoren as the chef in ‘Chez Circaurant’ and Carolina with her cards. (R) Note the tribute to Gielijn Escher’s “Fool Moon” logo.

Hauling my five-pound book around town and sampling those 640 pages with all and sundry at every chance, along with our onstage presentations, proved to be effective strategies. We sold every copy for a very acceptable profit to the public and to fellow Fools by the end of the second weekend. Trying to sell something like our book in a niche market reminds me of John Saxe’s poem The Blind Men and the Elephant -- only Johnny and I are metaphorically in some dark room with a putative pachyderm and don’t want to step in the wrong spot!

Vanessa Kamp (R) moves like nobody I’ve ever seen. She translated for Nola Rae (L) when the latter was interviewed in front of the Barcelona press plus an interested audience for “Up Close and Personal.”

After another round of films at Drassanes Civic Center, I went to my final festival event at the tiny Teatro LaGleva to see a scheduled interview with Nola Rae. To my surprise, Jango was also there to do an interview with the local press. I hadn’t thought to lug my 2.2 kg demonstration book along with me, but showed the reporters eBook samples from my tablet computer while we were waiting in the lobby for Jango to get ready to tell about his journey from being a landscaping grunt architect in Detroit to being an internationally-known clown in London, Amsterdam, and Barcelona. Spanish comedienne Pepa Plana showed up as his interview was ending, which made him smile broadly. She and her husband would share a jolly meal with Nola, Albert, N.C.I. students, and myself afterwards, right before she started her work for the festival in the upcoming weekend.

Nola Rae, ably assisted by translator Vanessa Kamp, then described how her mother and father left Australia so their talented daughter could study Dance in London, when it was an acknowledged hotbed of World Theatre (Nola’s spelling.) She described how her subsequent career led to studying directly with Marcel Marceau in Paris, mastering the art form of Corporal Mime that he developed with Etienne DeCroux. She became the star of eclectic Friends Roadshow back in London, and became Jango Edwards’ first partner when he joined the group.

(L) Nola Rae in Amsterdam circa 1974; (R) Nola Rae at the London Mime Festival circa 2004 — Images from “Amsterdam’s Complete Fools,” used with Nola’s permission.

Nola enjoyed a long career after leaving Friends Roadshow, and received Queen’s Honors, namely Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) for her body of work, especially the London Mime Festival (which has a full chapter in our book) that ran from 1977 to 2023 and employed many Amsterdam Fools over its history.

I decline to say much about those two and a half days of traveling back to Salt Lake City that I endured because of my Buddy Pass. Thank goodness for that inexpensive, but excellent, airport hotel in Barcelona. I wrote a Bookchat Diary about the MCU movies that played on the planes enroute, but also suffered a HELL-acious cold* at home from one of my flights, despite constantly wearing a mask onboard, plus in lobbies, taxis, and the airports, except for meals. (*verified by testing)

Since this is a forum for Readers and Book Lovers, I can gladly recommend a few books about Mime, Dance, Music, and the Fools Field in the comments.

Does anyone have stories to tell about travel plans that have gone amiss, or perhaps some positive Serendipity instead?

Any marketing advice for my book Amsterdam’s Compleat Fools?

“Herd” any Elephant Jokes since the Sixties?

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