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’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!
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.
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 “Dead 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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, Pavel 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.)
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.
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.”
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.
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, where there are few 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.
Grada Peskens is a sure winner onstage. She found unlooked-for depths in Knut Ostradal’s ‘sad clown’ act, and delved into 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.
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.
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!
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 Corporeal Mime that he developed with Étienne Decroux. She starred in the highly-eclectic Friends Roadshow back in London, and became Jango Edwards’ first partner when he joined the group.
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?