Jim Moore, colleague of and paparazzo to a generation or two of street performers and new wave vaudevillians, has a new photography exhibition in New York running through next week. You’ve probably seen Jim’s work even if you don’t know it, and many of you also saw him in the Academy-Award winning documentary, Man on Wire, where he swivels his head with the best of them. (BTW, this movie is available on Netflix instant play.)
For the 98.3% of you who can’t get to Jim’s show, here are a few goodies. First of all, here’s Jim’s web site.
And the press release for the show:
[The usual Scribd note: click on icon in upper-right corner to view document full-screen; click again on same icon to return to blog.] Jim Moore Press Release-finalpdf
And here are all the nice things Jim made me write about him for his show catalog:
Like all fine photographers, Jim Moore has more than just a keen eye and polished technique. For over four decades he has displayed a sixth sense, a knack for being in the middle of the action. No, Jim, was no Robert Capa or Eddie Adams, dodging bullets in some war zone to get his shots. Instead, he was living and breathing the world of — what should we call it exactly? — the eccentric performer, including but not limited to the clown, juggler, wirewalker, magician, busker, sword swallower, puppeteer, new vaudevillian… that ancient tribe that has been delighting and astounding audiences since pre-historic times, and whose singular skills and presentation make a statement that resonates louder than ever in this age of mass-produced entertainment.
Jim began as a street performer in the 70s and made it his business to know everyone. And to photograph them. He saw their shows, sometimes even performed with them. Above all, he lived the life. Whether he shot you in performance, on location, or in his studio, he’s always had that uncanny ability to capture the essence of these highly individualistic characters. The result is a remarkable visual history of some amazing people. Enjoy!
And here’s a short slide show with some sample shots:
All those popular entertainments that we associate with physical comedy — circus, pantomime, street performance, to name just a few — have always been the poor cousins of the so-called legitimate theatre. A few centuries back, when ruling royalty wanted to clamp down on public expression, they only granted theatrical licenses to a couple of theatres, relegating everything else to the streets and the fairground.
Conventional theatre history is often just the narrative of what was approved for performance at respectable houses such as Drury Lane and the Comédie Française, everything else a mere footnote. Great dramatic literature was indeed showcased at these theatres, but on the other side of the proverbial tracks an alternative tradition flourished, given the name commercial theatre, popular theatre, or even people’s theatre… all depending on who was doing the giving.
When I was at NYU, I was lucky enough to study with Brooks Mc Namara, a young professor who thought this alternative performance tradition worthy of consideration alongside the greats of drama and the trendy experiments of the post-modernists. His efforts were occasionally derided by colleagues who thought such pursuits trivial, but pursue Brooks did, teaching what I’m pretty damn sure was the first graduate-level course in Popular Entertainment and, over the course of several decades, inspiring countless students to take the field seriously.
Through his teaching, mentoring, scholarship, stewardship of the Schubert Archives, and a dozen or so excellent books, Brooks was the prime mover in bringing popular performance traditions into the mainstream of theatre scholarship. Readers of this blog would probably find a lot to like in his books, especially Step Right Up! An Illustrated History of the American Medicine Show and American Popular Entertainments: Jokes, Monologues, Bits, and Sketches.
We lost Brooks McNamara earlier this month after a long illness. He was my mentor at NYU, the man who turned me on to all kinds of possibilities, the man who taught me more about writing than anyone else. He was my editor for Clowns and I had looked forward to sharing this blog with him; in fact, this blog’s banner is made from a vintage circus poster Brooks gave me as a wedding present. I know he would have been excited by the blog, but sometimes fate’s timing is downright rotten.
One more word about Brooks, which has nothing to do with physical comedy and everything to do with basic human decency. During my years as a graduate student at NYU, I paid off my tuition by working as an assistant editor on TDR (The Drama Review), an NYU publication where Brooks was an associate editor. It was the early 70s, and everything was political. Vietnam and Watergate dominated the news, but power issues permeated grad school programs and theatre magazines as well. Disputes were common and I was involved in more than my fair share of them (okay, maybe I was a bit of a hothead back then). Brooks usually ended up as the arbitrator, and unfailingly he did what was right while at the same time showing political smarts well beyond my youthful abilities. In other words, when push came to shove, a good man. He will be missed.
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Update: My friend Arnie Aronson has written a very nice tribute to Brooks, with more biographical information, which you can find here.
I grew up in show business — as a child actor in New York City television in the late 50s — and my first performance ever was in a skit with Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason on the Red Skelton Show on CBS a few days after my 7th birthday. Lorenzo Pisoni also grew up in show business — in the San Francisco-based Pickle Family Circus, to be precise — hanging out in company that included clowns Geoff Hoyle and Bill Irwin, and performing and touring widely in an act with his father, Larry Pisoni.
I remember enjoying my childhood career and yet at times hating being the freak, the weirdo kid with the long hair who disappeared from school to go into rehearsal. Looking back, I often wished I had grown up “normal,” whatever that means, yet at the same time I enjoyed being special. As time passed, I forgot about it. It was another me who lived a lifetime or two ago … though I still took pleasure in occasionally dropping the names of a few stars I’d worked with (otherwise I might still be a virgin).
Just to push the comparison a bit (and to drop another name), here are photos of me with Julie Andrews and of Lorenzo with Willie the Clown. Don’t know who that is? None other than Bill Irwin.
But I didn’t come from a show business family and my involvement was on a part-time basis. Lorenzo Pisoni, on the other hand, not only lived the circus life, not only worked season-long in an act with his father, Larry Pisoni, but actually performed as a visual clone of his father in an act that also featured a life-sized puppet that was Lorenzo’s spitting image. I can’t help but think of Buster Keaton growing up in his family’s vaudeville act, The Three Keatons, likewise dressed to match:
If that ain’t a recipe for major therapy bills, I don’t know what is.
Take a look at this slide show of Pickle Famliy Circus photos to get a feel for what I’m talking about. Can you spot the puppets?
[The usual Scribd note: click on icon in upper-right corner to view document full-screen; click again on same icon to return to blog.]
[A big thanks to Terry Lorant for allowing me to share those excellent photos with you. They’re from The Pickle Family Circus (SF: Chronicle Books, 1986), one of your better circus books, which Terry co-authored with Jon Carroll. Check out more of Terry’s work at his web site.]
Update (1–23-10): Last week I saw that an old 30-minute documentary on the Pickle Family Circus had shown up on YouTube broken down into several segments. Today only the opening segment was there. Hmm… Here it is:
The happy result of Lorenzo’s, er, unorthodox upbringing, is Humor Abuse, his one-man autobiographical show that just completed a successful New York run at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Co-written with Erica Schmidt, who also directed, it deftly chronicles the child’s perception of a strange but wonderful world via words, slides, and re-enactments of the comic bits that defined their existence. Simply put, the show is quite well crafted and well performed, tough and sweet at the same time. It reminded me of Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show, Come Sleepwalk with Me, still running in New York (through June 7th). Pisoni is a clown and Birbiglia a stand-up comic, but in essence they are both excellent storytellers whose humor serves their content. Lorenzo’s content reminded me all too well what it was like to grow up too fast, to always be in the public eye, to love and resent what you’re doing.
Although Lorenzo early on offers the disclaimer that he’s not funny, the clown pieces he does perform are top-notch and interwoven nicely with the narrative. I had never seen Larry’s sandbag routine, which he featured in his one-man theatre show, and it is quite spectacular. Wherever the clown stands, a sandbag — which gives every impression of being heavily (perhaps lethally) weighted — releases from the rafters, misses his head by what seems to be inches, and lands on the stage with a large thud. Try as he might to find a safety zone, he can’t, though of course he always escapes actual impact. The act manages to be thrilling, scary, and hysterically funny, all at the same time.
The show did, however, leave me with one reservation I can’t quite shake. Lorenzo is often critical of his father’s dictatorial ways, and depicts him as at times a lonely, perhaps even bitter man. I don’t know Larry personally, but that’s not the point. I’m just left uneasy by attacks, even mild ones, on someone who can’t be there to defend himself. Maybe I’m just worried that my son the stand-up comic will start doing a show about me! (No, we didn’t perform together.) It’s like that uncomfortable feeling you get when a friend starts trashing their ex to you; you want to be supportive, but you know there are two sides to the story. That being said, the show does come across as an honest, non-vindictive attempt to deal with the past, and I think it succeeds admirably. If it ever tours to a theatre near you, be sure to see it.
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OK, that’s just my take on it. You can read pretty much all the reviews on it at the Critic-O-Meter blog.
