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CLOWNS

Clowns: In Conversation is a groundbreaking collection of interviews expanded

in this second edition to include over 30 of the greatest clowns on earth. In dis-
cussion with clown aficionados Ezra LeBank and David Bridel, these legends of
comedy reveal the origins, inspirations, techniques, and philosophies that under-
pin their remarkable odysseys.
These artists speak candidly about their first encounters with clowning and cir-
cus, the crucial decisions that carved out the foundations of their style, and the role
of teachers and mentors who shaped their development. Follow the twists and turns
that changed the direction of their art and careers, as they explore the role of failure
and originality in their lives and performances, and examine the development and
evolution of the signature routines that became each clown’s trademark. This new
edition has been fully updated and expanded, bringing in Lila Monti, Cristina Marti,
Leo Bassi, Danise Payne, Bernice Collins, Ketch, Robert Dunn, Nina Conti, Hélène
Gustin and Tanja Simma, Michelle Matlock, Shannan Calcutt, and Gardi Hutter.
Clowns is a unique and definitive study on the art of the clown, exploring
their role in the modern world – a fascinating series of discussions for students,
scholars, and teachers of clowning.
Ezra LeBank is a Professor and the Head of Movement for the Department of
Theatre Arts at California State University, Long Beach. He is a frequent con-
tributor to Digital Theatre Plus and Total Theatre Magazine. His acrobatic plays
Three and Flight have toured worldwide to critical acclaim.
David Bridel is the Founding and Artistic Director of The Clown School in
Los Angeles. As a playwright, director, choreographer, and performer, his work
has been seen in major theatres and opera houses around the world. His plays
I Gelosi, Lunatics & Actors, and Sublimity are published by Original Works Press.
Learn more at www.theclownschool.com
CLOWNS
In Conversation
Second Edition

Ezra LeBank and David Bridel

Cover image: Lila Monti. Photo by Diego Vinitzca
Second edition published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Ezra LeBank and David Bridel
The right of Ezra LeBank and David Bridel to be identified as the
authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2015
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 9781032065649 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032065601 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003202820 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003202820

Typeset in Bembo
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Dedicated to our friend and colleague Felix Ivanov
1950–2022
CONTENTS

Foreword to the Second Editionix

Prefacexi
Acknowledgments  xv
Introductionxvi

The Clowns1

1 Leo Bassi 3

2 René Bazinet 12

3 Shannan Calcutt 23

4 Angela de Castro 32

5 Bernice Collins 42

6 Nina Conti 47

7 Dimitri 54

8 Robert Dunn 62

9 Jango Edwards 68

10 Avner Eisenberg77
viii Contents

11 Aziz Gual90

12 Hélène Gustin and Tanja Simma97

13 Geoff Hoyle105

14 Gardi Hutter114

15 Bill Irwin and David Shiner  120

16 Ketch134

17 David Larible139

18 Cristina Marti149

19 Michelle Matlock154

20 Lila Monti160

21 Bello Nock166

22 Danise Payne173

23 Larry and Lorenzo Pisoni179

24 Slava Polunin192

25 Oleg Popov  200

26 Nola Rae204

27 Peter Shub215

28 Misha Usov  225

Reflections231

29 Ezra and David in Conversation with Phil Burgers233

Appendix of Terms 242

Index263
FOREWORD TO THE
SECOND EDITION

When we embarked on the first edition of Clowns, we developed a list of clowns

who were considered by a selection of our peers and consultants to be at the
height of the profession, and set out to capture their voices. As these interviews
unfolded, however, we began to learn of other luminaries in the field who had
not been a part of our original game plan. Clowns we hadn’t heard of. Clowns
under the radar. Clowns un-named in the limited academic research available to
us, or the popular or prevailing discourse. And clowns whose life and work epit-
omized the struggles of minority artists against the dominant narratives of their
art form and its practice. Little by little, it became clear that our initial investiga-
tions had been limited by primary language, geography, culture, and tradition in
ways that we had not anticipated, and not been fully prepared to challenge. By
the time we reached publication, we had come to accept that our first attempt at
gathering a representative selection of the world’s greatest clowns for our book
had, in fact, been a dress rehearsal.
In this new edition, expanded from 20 clowns to over 30, we hope you will
find a far greater breadth and depth in the examination of histories, lineages,
and techniques within the discipline. We have aimed to embrace more fully
the diversity, internationality, and multiplicity of experience that can be found
among performers at the highest level in this most elusive art form. A close read
will reveal a wealth of fascinating connections linking disparate individuals and
demonstrating the vastness of the contemporary clown world, crossing borders
of geography and generation. At the same time, we acknowledge, now more
than ever, that even this new edition provides only a taste of the rich world of
the fool. As we bridge the gaps of geography, language, history, and context to
reach into the stories of some of the globe’s great clowns, we are mindful that
other gaps remain.
x Foreword to the second edition

Our expanding explorations have also instilled in us an even deeper rever-

ence for the clown. From cutting edge to classic, political to poetic, it is clear,
in listening to these many voices, that clowns are not only essential to a healthy
society, but that they each have a vision for what the future might look like, a
vision invariably based on compassion, vulnerability, and truth. As we persevere
together through the daily challenges that seem, too often, to stifle hope, we
trust, as the Japanese clown Ketch puts it, that clowns will continue to blow the
fresh breeze of inspiration our way, refreshing and invigorating mind, body, and
soul – if only for a moment.

Ezra LeBank and David Bridel

PREFACE

We are clowns.
Clowning has always been a mysterious art to us. Every time it seems there is a
method to it – how to make a bit work, get a laugh, generate a revelation, invite
an audience into a particular way of seeing – as soon as we think we’ve stumbled
upon the answer to something, the proverbial rug is pulled out from under us,
and we find ourselves lying on our backsides, scratching our heads. Sure, there
are timeworn structures of finding the funny, but in our experience, the notion
that there are rules to clowning strikes us as… unlikely.
We are also clown teachers.
Leading our students into the unruly world of the clown, we have long grap-
pled with this paradox: how can one teach a form that resists method? What in
this ephemeral, illogical, and topsy-turvy discipline of clowning can be captured,
formulated, and passed on to those who have the desire to learn it? There are
many companion texts that have helped us absorb and articulate the practice of
clowning, rich and rewarding books including manuals of Commedia Dell’Arte
“lazzi”; clown and physical comedy exercise compendiums; histories of mime,
clown, comedy, the stage, vaudeville, and the circus; explorations of character
archetypes; and treatises on humor theory. And yet we have continued to feel the
absence of a certain essential voice, some guiding document that could support
and develop our own studio practice and provoke new creativity in the class-
room, on the street, on the stage, and in the ring.
If we were to add to the literature on clowning, to contribute something
that could be of value to ourselves, our fellow professionals and clown aficio-
nados, and especially our students, what would it include? We reflected on the
clowns we love, those who have deepened or advanced the form, reached wide
audiences, and achieved extraordinary levels of excellence and influence. What
distinguishes the most impactful of modern clowns? As we grappled with our
xii Preface

questions, we came to a realization. The clowns who are masters are themselves.
They make something wonderful out of who they truly, deeply, and simply are.
They don’t hide or conceal themselves in clown character, to appear as someone
else, or someone good, or someone right. Yes, they borrow routines, schtick,
and ideas from one another and their predecessors, and true, they frequently
belong to a long performance lineage and have learned, as apprentices, specific
techniques that perpetuate a certain tradition. And yet whatever material they
perform, whatever character they present, they enter into their clown persona
as a way of being more generously themselves. Every time we watch one of
them, we don’t view a form or a character or a concept. We see, simply, them.
It follows that the book on clowning, the guide we are seeking for ourselves,
should aim to capture, one clown at a time, what makes these individuals tick;
what their stories consist of; and how they have translated the conventions of
their artistic discipline into their powerful and singular voice. We realized that
we didn’t have the capacity to express these ideas effectively unless we went
directly to the source.
Clowns: In Conversation engages more than 30 of the world’s most extraor-
dinary clowns in conversation about their origins, inspirations, techniques,
and philosophy. The Origins section of the conversations shines a spotlight
on each clown’s youth, investigating the causal factors that led each of our sub-
jects toward the world of clowning. We examine their first encounters with
clowning, traces of clowning, circus, or related areas in their family history,
and key moments that laid the groundwork for their eventual profession. In
Inspirations, we follow the onset of the clown’s career, exploring the crucial
decisions that carved out the foundations of their style and perspective. We
discuss the role of teachers, mentors, and performers who shaped their develop-
ment, as well as the twists and turns that landed them in unexpected situations
where their careers changed direction. In Techniques, we dig through the rich
terrain of trips and slips, pratfalls and pies, and bits and scenarios that shaped
each clown’s technical palate, taking into account both inherited techniques and
original trademarks. We explore the content of their signature works, paying
special attention to accidental moments, or failures, which led to significant
discoveries. In Philosophy, we discuss how each clown’s work has evolved.
The clowns look back on long careers in order to compare past discoveries and
triumphs with the current and future chapters of their careers, and of the field
as a whole. We discuss their perspectives on clowning as an art form, and where
they believe the future of clowning is headed.
By highlighting these four central areas in each clown’s life and work, the
conversations can be read either as a collection of differing thematic assess-
ments, or as a master narrative that tells a clown’s story from beginning until this
moment. The exchanges – frank, forthright, and funny – delve into the history,
family, culture, politics, aesthetics, and intentions of our subjects, reflecting their
personalities, and teasing out the personal quirks and oddities that make our
 Preface xiii

clowns hilarious, vulnerable, compelling, cruel, exciting, and uniquely human.

Each chapter forms a portrait of a clown or clown duo, and endeavors to capture
the essence of their contribution to the art of comedy.
Clowning is minimally represented in critical literature and, as an art form,
has little academic foundation. Clowns locate traditions of their craft that exist
exclusively in custom and practice, and then adapt those traditions according
to their own impulses. We wonder: to what extent does clowning – which is
undeniably eccentric, illogical, and disobedient – facilitate the breaking of its
own form, the redefining of its own principles, and the invention of original
and unpredictable material? Does the absence of academic or text-based models
offer license and freedom to its practitioners in their continued pursuit of the
art? Or, alternatively, is clowning shackled by modes of thought and behavior
that are more restricted than other artistic disciplines, owing to a lack of critical
examination? Is there a preponderance of master/apprentice learning models,
and if so, does this limit the possibility of radicalism? Is clowning a revolutionary
endeavor or a paradoxically conservative one? These are some of our additional
questions as we journey into the field. By examining the connections and ten-
sions between clowning’s traditions and the idiosyncrasies of its practitioners, we
aim to scrutinize both the essence of these clowns and the elusive nature of the
discipline itself.
We are fully aware that the individuals included in this book form only the
tip of the very large iceberg of clown practitioners performing around the world
today. While we have attempted to honor the vast diversity among fools, we
acknowledge the limitations of our project in this regard. We are also aware that
our definition of clowning is not necessarily for the purist; we have been broad
and inclusive, and have incorporated those who have at various times performed
in the circus, on the street, in theatres, on television, and in film. Some of those
featured do not even consider themselves clowns, though we may beg to differ.
Nevertheless, there is much variety within our book. Placed next to one another,
the interviews wrestle and provoke reflections and experiences of agreeing and
disagreeing; speakers grapple with ideas and interpretations, sparking argument
and insight. Taken together, they form a tapestry of foibles, quirks, and oddities,
underwritten by serious intent.
In the classroom, we continue to wonder: how do we transmit the spirit of
clowning to our students? How do we invite them to embrace and feel con-
nected to a history, culture, and form that is so immediate and, in practice,
untheoretical? How can we encourage our charges to ruthlessly and gener-
ously share their intimate, distinct selves with an audience? This one stumps
us; we’re not sure we’ll ever figure it out. Still, our mission in this book is to
peer deeply into the world of clowning, to uncover revelations about the inter-
section between form and content, convention and individuality. To begin our
investigations, before the interviews commence, we will set out the contexts in
which these clowns have made their life’s work. From the origins of the clown
xiv Preface

in ritual ceremony to the masked obsessives of the Commedia Dell’Arte; from

the comic burlesque of British pantomime to the fantastical world of the circus;
from the silent clowns of the silver screen to the renaissance of clowning post-
World War II in Europe and the United States; from indigenous traditions to
the razzle-dazzle of Las Vegas – we will follow the development of clowning in
order to establish the lineages, traditions, and expectations that have influenced
the life and work of our subjects. Then, the clowns will speak. We invite you
to listen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been written without a great deal of logistical and
practical assistance. The authors would like to thank the following for their
invaluable contributions: Olya Petrakova and Amador Plascencia, who provided
translation for several of the interviews; Kaitlyn Wayman-Dodd, Kyla Lowder,
and Amanda Squitieri for their meticulous transcriptions from the audio files;
the American Conservatory Theater of San Francisco, Jean-Daniel von Lerber,
Philip Solomon, Dorothee Köß, Anna Bogodist, Millie Corser, Veronica Blair,
Mark Gindick, Bryan Brown, Jennifer Nock, Gabi Popov, and Charlie Varon
for facilitating initial contact with many of the clowns in the book, and assist-
ing in the collection of photos; Mike Funt, Jan Henderson, Shannan Calcutt,
Jane Nichols, Davis Robinson, and Christopher Bange for guidance on addi-
tions and updates for the second edition; California State University Long Beach
College of the Arts for providing financial support; and the CSULB Department
of Theatre Arts for ongoing inspiration and collegiality, with particular appreci-
ation to Hugh O’Gorman, Andrea Caban, and Alexandra Billings.
INTRODUCTION

The clown has been with us for as long as we have been performing. Whether
a part of sacred rituals first created in ancient societies and maintained in cer-
tain indigenous communities today or a part of the far-reaching and multi-fac-
eted modern entertainment industry, the clown’s function remains remarkably
consistent: to turn established protocols (societal, political, cultural, logical, lin-
guistic, or otherwise) on their heads, and to provoke a new understanding of,
and appreciation for, the human condition through a celebration of foible and
a mockery of power. By examining our lives from nonsensical and chaotic per-
spectives, clowns throughout time have given us a most vital permission, the
license to laugh at ourselves and our beliefs. We can’t do without them.

In the Beginning…
The original impulse to clown is connected to some of our earliest and most basic
customs. Among the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico that sustain the cultural lin-
eage of our prehistoric ancestors, including the Hopi and the Zuni, clowns have
long ridiculed and contradicted the serious ceremonies associated with worship
and harvest, marriage and death. Caked in white paint and tattered clothes,
sporting mud masks, or decorated in wildly contrasting colors, their appearance
satirizes the formal requirements of their priestly counterparts while their behav-
iors disrupt the ordered procedures of ritual. They gleefully send up solemn rites
and dances, engaging in patently ridiculous parodies of service, or indulging
in grotesque mock-sexual activities; they overeat or consume excrement in the
midst of traditional occasion; they invert and garble speech and song, turning
revered liturgy into obscene or impenetrable babble. And yet these chaotic and
apparently destructive actions are not only permitted, but welcomed and cel-
ebrated. By contrasting and criticizing sacrament with the anarchic forces of
 Introduction xvii

discord and iconoclasm, clowns stretch the fabric of human tolerance, bringing
resilience to societies and resisting our collective urges toward hierarchy, homo-
geneity, and perfection.1 Though our spiritual aspirations may be laudable, they
have been known to calcify into dogma; clowns remind us that we are equal
parts devoutness and doltishness, as practiced in falling over, shitting, and hump-
ing as we are in prayer and purification.
In the 5th dynasty of ancient Egypt, around 2500 BC, this paradoxical rela-
tionship between the sacred and the profane was solved in one fell swoop; the
priest and the clown became the same person. Described by the Pharaoh as “a
divine spirit, to rejoice and delight the heart,”2 the priest-clown’s purpose, as
became the clown’s role in countless courtly manifestations throughout history,
was to check the absolute authority of the ruler with the unspeakable truth of
his fallibility. Records from the kingdoms of India, Persia, China, and Europe
all attest to the power given to the clown – or fool – to say what others dare
not. Whether ridiculing a king or ruler, or making him laugh at his own will-
fulness, the clown maintained his function as counterweight to authority – and
was permitted to do so. “Jesters and dwarfs were the lowest of the Zhou dynasty
entertainers, but by jests and humorous indirect advice, even they could prod
their government to reform.”3 Aztec regent Montezuma II said of his jesters that
“they frequently pronounced some important truth,”4 while in his Praise of Folly,
Erasmus writes of fools: “They’re the only ones who speak frankly and tell the
truth, and what is more praiseworthy than truth?”

Medieval and Renaissance Europe

These examples suggest that as societies slowly shifted their foundations from
the spiritual to the political, the impact of clowns expanded to emphasize the
critique and ridicule of temporal power. The shifting relationship between the
clowns, buffoons, and comic players of medieval Europe with the Catholic
Church further developed this theme. Prior to the middle of the 15th century
AD, a church-sanctioned Feast of Fools existed in a number of medieval French
towns and cities at the turn of the New Year, in which the activities of lay
people and lower order clergy – improvising parodic versions of sermons and
making burlesques of any number of invocations – turned them into de facto
clowns for one day a year. In many of these carnivals, the elaborate and specific
parody of Christian lore, such as the townspeople of Beauvais’ re-enactment of
the flight into Egypt on the back of a donkey, speaks to the carefully constructed
interplay between popular festivity and spiritual teachings. But as the church
became increasingly concerned with its image as a seat of secular, as well as reli-
gious, authority, it saw overt political implications in this kind of foolery, and
those at the top of the Catholic hierarchy grew uneasy. In 1444, the Theological
Faculty at the University of Paris sent a letter to all French bishops decrying the
activities of the masquerading miscreants, who, “disguised as women, lions and
mummers, performed their dances, sang indecent songs in the choir, ate their
xviii Introduction

greasy food from a corner of the altar near the priest celebrating mass, got out
their games of dice, and burned a stinking incense made of old shoe leather, and
ran and hopped about all over the church.”5 From this time on, albeit gradually,
fools and clowns – no longer welcome in their own spiritual houses – separated
their activities from those of the church. The tension between the jurisdiction
of the church-as-state and the creative license of the now free-and-unsupervised
clowns and players became a running culture sore punctuated by painful inci-
dents, including legal action and the banning of performances.6
The Renaissance heralded a phenomenal new energy in the arts. As the
connection between performers (of all stripes) and religious or state ceremony
eroded, a new identity emerged that shifted the clown’s position in society irrev-
ocably, that of the professional artist. In case of the stage, it was the clowns and
players of the Commedia Dell’Arte, an itinerant street theatre that grew into a
highly polished indoor entertainment which conquered the courts of Europe,
that made the crucial break with the past when they first formed themselves
into a guild and instituted financial contracts with their patrons. No longer
were these players integrally connected to the power centers of either church or
court. They became free agents, answerable only to themselves, whose liveli-
hood eventually became dependent solely on their public appeal. As a result, the
commedia’s “stock characters” – Arlecchino, Pantalone, Tartaglia, Pulcinella, Il
Capitano, and others – began to exercise an unheralded artistic freedom in their
efforts to thrill, delight, shock, and amaze with their foolery. Notably, thanks
to its independence from institutions, the commedia offered the first ever plat-
form in the Western theatre for female performers, whose wit and craft was
celebrated in equal measure to their male counterparts. Comediennes such as
Isabella Andreini, playing the role of Isabella, the innamorata in the company
Gelosi, or Sylvia Roncagli, one of the first female comic servants to be known as
Columbina, became famous pioneers of artistic and economical gender equality
on the stage, paving the way for the extraordinary successes of women as actors,
managers, and stars in post-Restoration London and beyond. Freedom for the
commedia troupes did not come without struggle; however, in certain instances,
patrons continued to hold undue influence over their fates – as late as 1697 the
Italian comedians were expelled from Paris for insulting the King’s mistress,
Madame de Maintenon. Meanwhile, the church continued to hound the players
for their blasphemies, obscenities, and the licentiousness implied by the very
existence of female performers. But the tide of history had turned. By the time of
the Enlightenment in the 18th century, free theatres and a new breed of patron –
“the general audience” – had been thoroughly established.
Inevitably, and as a consequence of the economic necessities that profes-
sionalism dictated (competition, profit, market sustainability), the concept of
popular entertainment was born. Audiences had to be attracted. And the clown –
whose antics had always involved interacting with spectators in the service of
laughter – was the star attraction. Some of the Commedia Dell’Arte’s best-
known fools – Tiberio Fiorello, Domenico and Franchini Biancolelli, Evaristo
 Introduction xix

Gherardi – developed comic behaviors, songs, and mimes that became the first
of the clown’s surefire hits, pieces of clown “business” or lazzi that had audi-
ences rolling in the proverbial aisles. Of course, comic foolery had been the
clown’s stock-in-trade since time immemorial. But driven by the twin incentives
of profit and popularity, these routines reached new heights of sophistication.
Acrobatic pratfalls, tumbling, bawdy tunes, tricks with props (clothing, food,
ladders), wisecracks, elaborate set pieces, imitations, mimicry, dance parodies,
comic beatings and swordplay, situational gags – every possible dramatic avenue
was explored for its clown potential, giving rise to endless permutations of lazzi,
many of which we can recognize today in the nonsensical mischief of a Mr. Bean
or a Nola Rae.7 The content of these sketches, meanwhile, was no longer tied to
a specific critique of ceremony or hierarchy. While commedia clowns remained
rooted in a comedy of class tension (servants, such as Arlecchino, Columbina,
or Brighella, were continually trying to escape the petty machinations of their
masters, Pantalone or Dottore), the scope of their subject matter expanded
considerably. Thanks in great part to the presence of women as central figures
in the action, the broader eccentricities of human nature – love affairs, sexual
obsessions, selfishness, fantasies – became increasingly recognizable targets for
their wit. No longer was clowning devoted to exposing elevated rites or power-­
wielding regents; it became democratized, skewering the absurdities of regular
folk, “people like us” who were now forming the majority of any given audi-
ence. (Perhaps the only precedent for this kind of comic character study in drama
were the classical plays of the Romans – Plautus and Terence – and the Greeks –
Aristophanes and Menander.) Along with their English counterparts Richard
Tarleton and Will Kempe, the likes of Fiorello, the Biancolellis, and Gherardi
became justly famous for their skills, and – in case of Domenico Biancolelli, or
“Domenique” as he was widely known – rich beyond their wildest dreams; the
much-beloved Domenique died with over 100,000 crowns to his name. The
connection between art and commerce, laughter and revenue, had been forged.

Pantomime and the Circus

As the Commedia Dell’Arte began to suffer from aesthetic stagnation, a final
effort by the authorities – by now, municipal governing bodies and town con-
stabularies – to limit the activities of scurrilous comedians unprotected by official
patronage, ironically paved the way for the next great clown adventure. Banned,
in some cases, from speaking in the theatre, the players presented silent comedies
in fairgrounds (or “unofficial” popular venues such as the Théâtre de la Foire in
Paris) instead – an evolution that only served to increase the clown’s emphasis
on physical comedy. Shorn of the trappings of state support, including lavish
resources, clowning zeroed in on the basics: slapstick humor rooted in the unre-
solved love triangle of Arlecchino (now Harlequin), Columbina (or Columbine),
and the newly minted character of Pierrot, the white-faced clown. (Other inven-
tive responses to the speaking ban included the birth of comic operetta – after all,
xx Introduction

singing had not been outlawed – and the growth of popular puppetry, including
a new manifestation of Pulcinella – Punch, as in Punch and Judy.) But the lasting
consequences of the clown’s “fairground phase” were felt in the birth of two
distinctly new forms that took full advantage of the new priorities of physical
and silent humor, long after the bans that had prompted them were lapsed. The
first was pantomime, that gleefully iconoclastic romp that remains a lynchpin of
the British comic calendar to this day. In its earliest incarnations, before it even
earned the name by which it is known, pantomime was primarily an opportu-
nity for great clowns such as John Rich (1692–1761) or Joseph Grimaldi (1778–
1837) to ply their comedic trade in the theatres and music halls of Drury Lane
or Covent Garden (or in case of George Fox, 1825–1877, on Broadway), while
nominally following a narrative that, in truth, had little relevance to their tom-
foolery. The legacy of these comic spectacles can still be felt in the all-singing
all-dancing extravaganza of “Panto” that can be seen in Britain now, although
the archetypes of Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, and his coarser replacement
Clown (based on Grimaldi’s portrayal of the “Joey”) have long since disappeared.
The second new theatrical form that emerged with incredible energy at the end
of the 18th century, and incorporated the wandering clown who was searching
for a new spiritual home in the aftermath of the demise of Commedia Dell’Arte,
was to grow from humble beginnings into one of the most spectacularly popular
entertainments in history: the circus.
Initially a venue for trick-riding, whose circular performance area generated
the centrifugal force that allowed riders to stand on their horse’s backs, the circus
began to incorporate comedy in order to offer some relief from the intensity
and risk of the serious showmanship on display. Early circus clowns, such as
John Ducrow (1796–1834),8 were often brilliant horsemen capable of extraor-
dinary equestrian feats such as straddling two steeds as they galloped full pace
around the ring. But they came into their own, and won the hearts of their
audiences, when they began inventing comic business that either mimicked and
satirized the “straight” acts, or demonstrated a different approach to the horses,
dressing them in amusing manner, playing out domestic dramas with them, and
making them, effectively, into scene partners. (The tradition of clowns partner-
ing with animals continues today; Misha Usov feeding baguettes to his doves,
for example.) The enormous success of these comic interludes soon anchored
them to any and every new version of the circus, which underwent a period of
explosive growth stimulated, in no small part, by its export to the Americas. No
matter how sensational its acts, no circus was complete without clowns. In some
cases, such as the extraordinary Dan Rice (1823–1900), the clown was the great-
est sensation of all; Rice’s own One Horse Show catapulted him to mega-stardom,
until he was adjudged to be better known and more popular than Abraham
Lincoln. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, he made a bid for a Presidential nomination
of his own – in true clown style, he failed.) Through the medium of the cir-
cus, Rice, Frank Oakley (or Slivers), Felix Adler, Emmett Kelley, and a host of
other clowns achieved similarly elevated status in the United States, beloved for
 Introduction xxi

their varying styles of humor; while in Europe, Anatoly Durov, Carl Bagesson,
George Hall & Raphael Padilla (Footit and Chocolate), and the Fratellini broth-
ers were merely some of the clowns who had their circus audiences in stitches
during the heyday of the ring. A sudden flourish of brick-and-mortar vaudeville
in the 1800s (known as music hall in Britain), variety shows that combined the
earthy comedy of the circus with musical fantasia and other oddities, launched
a whole new roster of stars such as Dan Leno, Little Tich, and the astonishingly
wild Eva Tanguay, whose clown-inspired madness anticipated the post-modern
art follies of a Jango Edwards by a century. By now, the breadth of creative and
comic possibility inherent in the art form was on full display. From the virulent
satire of Durov, who skewered banks, the press, and even the Mayor of Odessa
with the aid of his performing pig; to the whimsy of Kelley, whose morose
attempts to steal popcorn from the public epitomized the poetry of suffering;
to the flamboyant spectacle of Frank Brown (Flon Bon, King of the Clowns),
whose stunts included leaping over 25 Argentinian policemen holding guns and
bayonets; to the highbrow stylings of the Fratellinis, whose 40-minute routines
at their Medrano circus, based on the strict hierarchy of White Clown, Auguste,
and Contre-Auguste, resembled mini-modernist-playlets in their sophistication
and depth; in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century, the
ascent of these and many other famed clowns to the pinnacle of their respective
popular cultures was complete. But a new frontier was about to open that would
transform clowning yet again, this time catapulting the reputation of a certain
clown into that of a worldwide phenomenon. In his remarkable journey one can
trace the influence of so much that came before and see the source of so much
that would follow.

The Silver Screen

Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889–1977) earned his comedic stripes as part of Fred
Karno’s music hall troupe (or “army,” as they were affectionately known), who
perfected the art of the stage silent comedy filled to the brim with slapstick and
sight gags (once again, dumbs how was a necessity – a response to censorship from
municipal authorities). Tapping a comic strain that harkened all the way back to
the Commedia Dell’Arte, Karno’s stories pitted the “little guy” against “the man,”
and delighted in the subversion of modern hierarchies; prisoners outwitted war-
dens, petty criminals or bums outran policemen, and the underdog wound up
with the girl. Relishing a connection with their popular audiences, these come-
dies hinted at the implicit tensions in bourgeois society, seeking to resolve them
through the unlikely victory of the working-class hero. When Chaplin, whose
personal background included two stints in a workhouse, shifted his career focus
to the fledgling film industry in the United States, he combined Karno’s comic
sensibility with his own powerful vision of the clown as a universal symbol of
artfulness in the face of overwhelming poverty. Like a brilliant Arlecchino bat-
tling an endless stream of tyrannical masters, Chaplin’s Tramp took on an entire
xxii Introduction

system of cops, toffs, bosses, industrialists, and exploiters – and won. He was the
ultimate trickster, an irrepressible fool and spirit of uncontainable mischief, who
made a mockery of orderliness and etiquette and ridiculed the capitalist contract
between the worker and the world. He also happened to possess an undisputed
comic genius, a legendary insistence on perfection, and an almost superhuman
affinity for every aspect of cinema – acting, directing, writing, editing, pro-
ducing, and even composing his own music. Thanks to the influence and the
permanence of film, he became and remains the clown of all clowns, an icon
whose impact upon our understanding and experience of comedy is incalculable.
Movies such as The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great
Dictator are thankfully always available to us, realizations of a complete artistic
vision. Today, in far-flung corners of the globe, fledgling clowns continue to
seek out the works of Chaplin, and his brilliant contemporary Buster Keaton, for
inspiration. So many of the clowns in this book, male and female alike, articu-
late the debt they feel toward these screen icons; one particularly indelible image
captures the young Larry Pisoni, Bill Irwin, and Geoff Hoyle – with toddler
Lorenzo Pisoni in tow – pouring themselves into their vehicle whenever a run
of a Keaton film is announced, magnetized by the promise of inspiration from
one of the masters.
Of course, Chaplin and Keaton were only two of the first in a glorious lineage
of screen clowns. Ben Turpin, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, WC Fields, Abbott
and Costello, the Marx Brothers, Harry Langdon, The Three Stooges, Lucille Ball,
Jacques Tati, Phil Silvers, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Monty Python’s Flying
Circus, Morecambe and Wise, Carol Burnett, Bill Murray, Rowan Atkinson,
Jennifer Saunders, Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, Roberto
Benigni, Catherine Tate, Sacha Baron Cohen, and countless others have explored
the central premises of clowning in front of the camera: subverting expectations,
behaving outrageously, debunking beliefs, and lampooning sacred cows. Many
stand-up comics have tapped into the vulnerability, the foolery, and the anarchy
of the clown, too: Richard Pryor, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Phyllis Diller, Gilda
Radner… The madness and mayhem of all of these stars has reached millions
thanks to film, television, and more recently, the internet. But it could be argued
that the overwhelming cultural dominance of the screen industry in the 20th
century was also, in no small part, responsible for a diminishing interest in stage
spectacle, and a marginalization of the circus in general, the ancient art of stage
clowning in particular. With priceless comedy available at the local multiplex or
beamed into the living room, what need was there to patronize the circus, the
variety hall, or the vagabonds on the street corner? As screen comics became more
and more popular, traditional stage clowns seemed out-of-touch or alien, and
audiences abandoned them. Even the great dynasties of the circus – epitomized by
Annie Fratellini, granddaughter of Paul – found their influence to be shrinking,
often turning to education as an outlet for their artistry. By the time Chaplin died
in 1977, precious few of his screen successors had ever experienced life as a clown
in the circus or on the stage, and the music hall that had birthed Chaplin and so
 Introduction xxiii

many of Hollywood’s greatest early clowns was long dead. And yet today, at the
time of writing, we are experiencing what could legitimately be described as a
renaissance of the stage clown, a positive explosion of clown energy that can be
felt from Broadway to Las Vegas, from the streets of St. Petersburg to the theatre
schools of the Western world. Who put clowning back on track, and dragged it
from the outer edges of our comic consciousness, where it had dwindled, back
into the cultural mainstream? For clues, we must examine the influence of the
indefatigable theatre pedagogue, Jacques Lecoq (1921–1999).

The New Wave

Originally an athlete, and fascinated by the workings of the body, Lecoq’s form-
ative experience as a young theatre artist occurred when he worked alongside
Italian stage director Giorgio Strehler and mask-maker Amleto Sartori on a
revival of Goldoni’s classic play, A Servant of Two Masters, for the Piccolo Theatre
of Milan just after the Second World War. By plunging into the “lost” art of
the Commedia Dell’Arte, the creators of this epic production (which lived on,
in various renderings, for over 50 years) not only breathed new life into the
comic masks9 of the commedia, but also stoked their own desires to resuscitate
the fundamental “territories” of popular theatre, which had slipped into insig-
nificance in the Hollywood era. Lecoq, whose greatest talent was in teaching,
opened his own school in Paris for actors and theatre artists, and devoted a signif-
icant part of his curriculum to these “territories”: mime, the chorus, melodrama,
Commedia Dell’Arte – and clown. Over the course of almost five decades of
exploration, Lecoq’s dedication to these essential components of our theatrical
heritage (never taught as history, always as living, breathing, changing forms)
found articulation in the work of his graduates. The founders of Complicité
(including Simon McBurney), Ariane Mnouchkine of Le Théâtre du Soleil (an
important influence on Gardi Hutter), Steven Berkoff, and Julie Taymor have
not only altered the face of modern theatre, but they each have also brought a
brand of populism to the stage that has revitalized the experiences of theatregoers
worldwide. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Lecoq’s students have found their
way as teachers in drama schools, universities, and actor training programs where
they continue the spirit of his work. When it comes to the particulars of clown-
ing, Lecoq’s legacy leads us directly to some of the clowns in this book: Avner
Eisenberg and René Bazinet were both his students, while the irascible clown
maestro Philippe Gaulier (“The Tormentor”), once Lecoq’s student, then a part
of his faculty, and now a lone teacher and one of the world’s leading authorities
on clown, passed on his unique brand of inspiration to Angela de Castro, Peter
Shub, and Phil Burgers, who went on to work with Nina Conti. (Sacha Baron
Cohen, the award-winning film star and comedian, has stated: “I owe my career
and the discovery of my inner idiot to Philippe Gaulier.”)
Lecoq is by no means single-handedly responsible for the rude health of
clowning in the modern era. Others who worked with Strehler, notably Carlo
xxiv Introduction

Mazzone-Clemente, founder of Dell’Arte International in Northern California,

branched out on their own and pursued parallel interests. Additional French the-
atre practitioners, including Jacques Copeau (a devotee of the Fratellini broth-
ers whose daughter introduced Lecoq to theatre in the first place) and Étienne
Decroux (who taught Peter Shub and Geoff Hoyle) stimulated a recovery in the
art of pantomime that reached its apotheosis in the work of Marcel Marceau,
whose techniques offered a quite different pathway toward physical theatre, com-
edy, and pathos – one that Nola Rae and Dimitri willingly followed, the latter
witnessed in awe by a young Ketch of Gamarjobat. Meanwhile, in other parts of
the world, clowning has prospered for differing reasons and in different circum-
stances. The founders of Cirque du Soleil – among the world’s largest current
employer of clowns – began their creative lives on the streets of Montreal with
no formal training in clown (not unlike future Cirque star Michelle Matlock, a
classically trained actress pulled into a world of silliness by her colleague Amy
Gordon, who simply insisted they were meant to be clowns). Slava Polunin, Oleg
Popov, and Misha Usov continue a rich legacy of Russian clowning whose star
names include the Durov brothers, Karandash (“the Russian Charlie Chaplin”),
Leonid Enkibarov, and Yuri Belov, whose tenure as director of clowning at the
Moscow School of Circus and Variety Arts intersects with Aziz Gual’s clown
journey. The unique investigations of Richard Pochinko, a Lecoq student who
returned to his native Canada to embrace indigenous and tribal clowning rituals
in his work, forged the development of a Canadian clown culture that led, via
the master teachings of Sue Morrison and Jan Henderson, to the emergence of
Shannan Calcutt. Barcelona, where Jango Edwards founded the Nouveau Clown
Institute, eventually to direct Anna De Lirium, is a city second only to Paris in
its clown fertility. And Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s creative lives grew out
of their respective experiences on the streets and with circuses, and the “New
Vaudeville”10 movement on two continents, independent of the studio-based
explorations taking place in Lecoq’s school. Yet Lecoq’s vision, so comprehen-
sive and far-reaching, has undoubtedly energized contemporary clowning while
keeping the discipline connected to its roots. “The clown has great importance
as part of the search for what is laughable and ridiculous in man,” Lecoq wrote.
“It allows one to denounce the recognized order.” Such basic truths point to
the motives behind clowning, motives that Lecoq was philosophically inclined
to explore. By exposing and celebrating our deepest flaws, the clown serves to
correct our collective tendencies toward hubris and perfectionism, representing
instead our innate fallibility and capacity for chaos.
Tracing some of the historical lines that connect clowns through the ages helps
to illuminate the importance of lineage and succession, apprenticeship and mastery,
to the discipline. Clown dynasties are common; the Gherardi’s of the Commedia
Dell’Arte, the Ducrow’s of the early circus, Frank Brown and father, the Durov
brothers, the Fratellini family, the Marx Brothers, Larry (father) and Lorenzo (son)
Pisoni, several hundred years of Circus Nock, the Bassi generations of foot jugglers,
and the Larible family are just a few examples of the familial connections among
 Introduction xxv

clowns, the ties that bind one generation to the next. Patrons at the early incar-
nations of Slava Polunin’s Snowshow may recall his little son’s appearance for the
curtain call, dressed identically to Slava. Initiation, whether at the hands of a family
member or a master teacher who is directly connected to the “tree” of clowning,
remains the primary entryway into the discipline. Trade skills are passed from one
to the next through proximity, repetition, and endless rehearsal, frequently begun
at a young age. Craft is hard-won through the guidance of an exacting superior.
The nature of this kind of apprenticeship was chronicled faithfully in Lorenzo
Pisoni’s Humor Abuse, in which the author-performer recalls, and re-enacts, many
of the routines that he learned directly from his father Larry, ranging from simple
trips and slaps to elaborate sequences of falling down stairs.
More recent lineages have also been essential to clowns who have had to over-
come preconceptions and prejudice in order to fulfill their talents and desires.
Female clown festivals in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in South America,
began to create opportunities and showcases for women, combating the cov-
ert sexism woven into many cultures that suggests, insidiously, that women are
not as funny as men, and inspiring new generations of clown artists such as the
Argentinians Cristina Marti and her protege Lila Monti. In 1968, the last large-
scale “traditional” circus in the United States, Ringling Bros. and Barnum &
Bailey, employed the sensational all African American basketball-on-unicycles
King Charles Troupe; years later, the circus accepted their first African American
female clown, Bernice Collins, into their Clown College, soon to be followed
by Danise Payne – both of whom graced The Greatest Show on Earth. The impor-
tance of these trail-blazing African American clowns is still felt in the continuing
success of the UniverSoul circus, where Robert Dunn, aka Onionhead – who
candidly discusses the discrimination he encountered in his youth as a black
clown – finally fulfilled his life’s passion.
But if clowning is a form that is perpetuated through a “passing of the torch,”
how can space emerge for artistic license and creative independence? Can a
young clown set out in a different direction from that of his or her teacher? The
capacity to express countless distinct perspectives is one of the signature elements
of an art form. “We should put the emphasis on the rediscovery of our own inner
clown,” wrote Lecoq. How do clowns pay homage and do justice to their lineage
while remaining true to themselves and their own idiosyncratic vision – their
own inner clown? The conversations that follow attempt, humbly, to address
these and other questions, in order to grasp the relationship of modern clowning
to its past, its present – and its future.

Notes
1 No wonder, perhaps, that the clown’s role as a “leveler” has become formalized
in certain indigenous communities; many African clowns, such as the Woloso of
Djenne or the Bambuti pygmy clowns of the Congo, fulfill the function of peace-
makers, puncturing political tensions through the use of destabilizing gestures such
as lampooning injured parties, or appearing nude during hostile situations.
xxvi Introduction

2 Quoted in Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around The World, by Beatrice Otto.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Quoted in The Delight Makers by Ronald McCoy.
6 In Russia, the skomorokhs, traveling clown minstrels of the medieval and post-­
medieval era, who wore masks and presented folk dramas, met a similar fate in the
16th century – outlawed by the Orthodox Church for being servants of the devil.
7 Mel Gordon’s Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia Dell’Arte unearths over
200 years of stage business, many originally recorded in the clown’s notebooks.
8 John Ducrow: “Prime Grinner and Joculator General to the Ring, whose Circum-
gyrations and Facetiae extraordinary will occupy the intervals between the acts.”
(Quoted in A Calvacade of Clowns, Laurence Senelick)
9 The word refers to both the physical article – the leather masks of the commedia,
which Sartori so lovingly recreated – and the archetypal characters themselves: Pan-
talone, Arlecchino, Dottore, Brighella, etc.
10 “Among the elements of New Vaudeville is that it is nonviolent and nonracist, and it
is a reaction to the kinds of theatre we don’t like.” Avner “The Eccentric” Eisenberg,
quoted in From the Greek Mimes to Marcel Marceau and Beyond, Annette Lust.
The Clowns
1
LEO BASSI

Leo Bassi. Photo by Matteo Abati

DOI: 10.4324/9781003202820-2
4 The Clowns

Recognized for his solo performances and extravagant theatre events, comedian
and circus performer Leo Bassi is descended from a long line of Italian, French,
and English comedy eccentrics. Bassi has always maintained a strong taste for
getting involved in outrageous real-life antics to stun his audience. Over the
years, he has created havoc with the Italian Air Force, German Civil Defence,
Dutch and Swiss fire brigades; conned the mayor of Tashkent in Uzbekistan,
cream-pied the mayor of Montreal, performed a circus show with 22 heavy cat-
erpillar earthmovers in Barcelona, and has been arrested 11 times in Paris. Bassi
presides over a clown church in Madrid and continues to create and perform his
original works in Europe.
Leo shared stories with us in his apartment in the mountains just outside
Madrid. (DB/EL)

Origins
Even as a baby I would see my father get made up and go into the ring. From
the very beginning my education was to be surrounded by circus people making
jokes, provoking things. I learned that if I didn’t fit in with my family, I would
be the odd one out. If I had wanted a regular job, I would have been shunned by
my family! There was always competition at the dinner table. Someone would
make a joke and someone else would have to top it.
For instance, at four years old – this is one of the memories that I have – my
grandfather had a very expensive violin, thousands of dollars, like a Stradivarius.
We were sitting around and he had left his violin on the floor, and he was drunk,
and he stepped on it by accident, and his foot went through the violin, crunch!
and it fit around his foot like a shoe. And my grandmother looked at him and
said, “It fits you quite well. Put the other one on and you’ll have a pair.” And
she gave him a second violin and he did. That was normal to me, that was the
world I lived in.
I never had to decide to be a clown. All I remember is the feeling that I had
to be right up there at the level of the rest of my family, I had to rise to the
challenge – am I as funny as my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather,
and so on. It’s very much in the blood. My whole childhood was to be in dressing
rooms and circus caravans and see everyone getting made up, and hear the music,
and know that my parents were performing.
I remember being in Los Angeles in either ’56 or ’57, at a Christmas show for
the LAPD, with circus artists and vaudeville artists from all over. I was in the
dressing room with my parents, five years old, and my father said, “There’s some-
one very important coming to see you, you have to remember this all your life.”
And this little old man came in, it was Groucho Marx. He was MCing the show.
He put on his trademark mustache right there, using a piece of burnt cork and
smearing his mustache across his upper lip. And I thought: “This isn’t a clown!”
so I went up to him and I said to him, “Why don’t you have a real mustache?”
And he answered, “Because it’s easier to eat soup with a fake mustache.”
 Leo Bassi 5

So that’s my education, that’s my past. There’s never been a decision.

In the traditional circus, nobody starts out being a clown. You have to have a
job. And the job would be acrobatics, trapeze, juggling, and so on, and you have
to do it well. That’s very serious. My father and my grandfather never accepted
that a young person could say, “I’m going to start by being a clown.” That was
against the traditional way. You had to do a job. Then, as my father said, “If
you’re good at it, you don’t have to learn to be a clown – you’re funny or you’re
not.” So in my case the foot-juggling was an excuse to be on stage, a reason to be
there. And my father was a very funny man, and as in life, and sports, the older
you get the less you can do, and so you compensate with your capacity to make
people laugh. (Nowadays I don’t do any juggling in my shows.) So when I was
25, I was the serious juggler, and my father would come on during the act as if
he was someone from the audience and wreck the show. This was the way of the
traditional circus: first, your skill, and then, your personality.
There’s a strong logic to it, especially if you consider that 100 years ago the
people in the audience at the circus were often manual people – farmers, labor-
ers, workers – and they could appreciate performers doing difficult things, phys-
ical things. They understood that. Then the performer earned the right to make
the audience laugh. But if you came on from the beginning with jokes, there was
a possibility that the audience could rebel against you: “Hey, that person’s life is
too easy – telling jokes and walking off. What can they do?” You had to prove
yourself to the audience. My grandfather was always talking about sweat. “Sweat
in front of your audience, that way they will accept you.” And once they had
accepted you, seen that you sweated at least as much as they did, or more, then
they were ready to laugh with you.
Today it’s different, nobody works as hard anymore!
There are two meaningful “first” performances for me, similar, I think, to all
traditional circus families. One was the first time that my parents put me into
their act as a kind of game or a joke, at seven years old. I played Aladdin in a
show. I remember it vividly. But it didn’t happen every day, my father made a
big distinction between what was fun and what was work, and this was just fun.
The other first was my debut as a professional foot juggler. My family had this
strong tradition, my father, my grandfather, my aunts and uncles, my cousins,
they were all foot jugglers, highly skilled, probably the best in the business. My
whole family had lived like this for generations. We were a bit like royalty in the
circus. Imagine! I couldn’t let down the family so it took a long time to prepare.
My parents reckoned that I was good enough when I was about 17, when I did
my first professional show in Berlin. It was serious, it was professional, I had
responsibility, and I was paid to do it. And there was a lot of pressure. For a jug-
gler it’s very easy to fail – you just drop something! If that had happened, every-
one would have known, the whole circus world would have heard that I was not
as good as previous generations in my family, that I had no inner strength… So
much pressure. But I pulled it off! As with everything in life, when you can meet
that pressure, when you can succeed, you become stronger on the inside. You
6 The Clowns

know that you are sustaining the historic dimension of your family and not let-
ting them down, and also achieving something personally. In fact, achieving this
kind of inner strength through technical excellence has helped me as a clown. I
became more sure of myself, stronger, harder inside, and I cared less about the
consequences of my jokes. So, the old way of life, achieving excellence before
adopting humor, makes a lot of sense. It makes you stronger and helps you know
yourself more.
A few months later, after all these years and years, 11 years of physical train-
ing, three or four hours of solitary training every day, reaching the very top as a
juggler, I went on stage and I realized, “I’m in a profession that’s going downhill.
Nobody cares about juggling; nobody cares about the circus. A soccer player is
far more successful than I am, with only half the skill. All this emphasis on the
past, on tradition and apprenticeship, doesn’t mean anything in a world where
TV and movies have taken over.” All of a sudden, I understood that I was a first-
class act in a decadent form. So I left the circus and I went to the street. I started
making street shows.
At the time, in the 1970s, not many people were doing this – it was illegal
in many places and I was arrested by the police repeatedly! – but I could feel
that I was in the right place with the right audience, young people like me,
and I was no longer a nostalgic act in a nostalgic circus, but I was on my own
adventure. Yes, people liked my juggling, but it turned out that what they
liked more were my political opinions, my satire, my provocations, doing crazy
things, and the fact that I was arrested regularly added more and more people
to my audience! Also, I remembered that my grandfather was always talking
about his grandfather and the impact of the circus in the 19th century, how
it was in fact very political at that time, it was a reflection of the country and
its struggles with unity, and so on, and I realized – well, in a certain way I
have gone back to a moment when this kind of performance was relevant, was
necessary, a voice for the working class, speaking truth to power, using humor
to destroy corruption and make political statements. Since then, I haven’t
looked back.
I started to get noticed by theatre managers and festival organizers. I’d never
worked in the theatre in my life, and I found yet another audience – intellectuals
and so forth – and that was easy for me, to speak to these people too. Slowly, I
began to let go of the juggling. I noticed that certain extremely difficult tricks
had absolutely no impact on the audience, and I was wasting hours every day
practicing them when I wanted to do other things with my time – I needed to
read about politics. So I began to remove all the most complicated juggling tricks
(while keeping some of the easier ones, like juggling a piano) and replace them
with things that would have an impact on the audience, that they could relate to.
My hero at the time was WC Fields. He was a juggler who transcended his skill-
based act in favor of something more impactful, more outrageous – for example,
his work with Mae West – and he inspired me with this kind of solution, how to
develop his persona to meet the demands of his time.
 Leo Bassi 7

Don’t get me wrong – even today I can still do some juggling acts, and it sur-
prises audiences to see this old man pull off a juggling trick! – but I only use it
occasionally. Truth is, this kind of work is not as useful any more.

Inspirations
Charlie Rivel, a very famous European clown. When I was 18, I performed for
nearly a year in the same shows as Charlie, he was the star of the show. I watched
him all the time, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was killing myself doing the most
complex juggling routines, and here was this old guy, 80 years old, just walking
on stage. I saw him perform in Munich, 2,400 people in the audience, you could
hear a pin drop – there was so much tension in the audience – and he moved his
little finger and people were roaring with laughter! And I said to myself – how
the fuck does he do that?!? So I would talk to him backstage, and he gave me
wonderful advice. “Think of your audience as your family. Be as playful with
your audience as you are with your uncle or your cousins. They may not be
yours, but they are somebody’s uncle and cousins.”
My grandfather had met Chaplin, and my great-grandfather had worked with
Sidney Chaplin, Charlie’s brother. I loved Chaplin’s Tramp, but I especially loved
Modern Times and The Great Dictator, movies that taught me that the clown could
be a vessel to discuss important political ideas – this was incredible – and the fact
that he was kicked out of the United States for his ideas, this was amazing to me.
Chaplin has influenced me a lot.
In Italy in the 1970s and ’80s I met Dario Fo many times. I have enormous
esteem for his work, not only as an actor but also as a writer. I knew him person-
ally. I saw him perform in a huge tent, 6,000 people, for the Italian communist
party’s summer festival. He had to clamber over people just to get to the stage,
and then with just a microphone, he spoke and performed for three hours, and
the people wouldn’t let him go. This inner energy, he was so full of himself, and
that was where his energy came from – an acute mental capacity, so intelligent.
Franca Rama was in the same vein.
I went to visit the Hopi clowns in New Mexico, and I was amazed and
inspired to find that they were smashing watermelons. At that time I had my
own act smashing watermelons, and I got very excited. So I went to the Hopi
shaman, and I asked him, “Why are you doing this? What is your reason, what
is the significance behind the smashing of watermelons?” And he said, “I don’t
know about you. We do it because it’s funny.”

Techniques
But the world is changing. The world of Dario Fo is not my world. During his
time, there were many intellectuals in his audience, who read books, who could
speak about complexities in politics. Today is different, a more decadent period,
not so much political awareness, so to go out on stage and make direct political
8 The Clowns

references – the audience for that is much smaller today. So I’ve had to find
other ways. I’m known for my extra-theatre activities. I’ve had big successes in
Spain with my buses. I take people on bus tours to visit corruption, for instance.
We drive up to the houses of ministers and politicians and I will discuss their
nefarious activities with the audience on the bus – it’s called the Bassi Bus – it’s
been enormously successful! Or I have my Duck Church, the Quackolic Church
– dedicated to plastic ducks. I do masses there, and many many people come,
we do marriages and baptisms and even real funerals. What I’m trying to say is
that Dario Fo’s audience is not my audience. People today are less likely to be
intellectuals, they don’t want to hear dry discourse in the theatre – but to get on
a bus and have the police try and block the road and drive up to a house and see
a minister who’s been on TV up close and personal… It’s a different way.
I invent my own stuff. I’m quite lonely, very alone in fact, one of a kind, and I
don’t belong to any particular community. I have loads of ideas, but it’s a solitary
way! I’ve found an audience, though. For instance, in my Mussolini show, which
I started in Rome, we had fascist demonstrations outside trying to break up the
show – which I always take as a sign that I’m on the right track, if you get peo-
ple angry! – and the show was a big success and they brought me back for three
months to restage it.
It takes a long time to come up with something so easy as putting honey and
feathers on yourself, for example. I ask myself, how can I give a feeling to the
audience of a certain disgust, but then turn it around and bring out a strong poetic
connotation, making the audience have to grapple with a contradiction. Maybe
it’s my juggling, now that I think about it. For so many years I’ve known how to
impact people – I’ve felt it for years, the feeling coming from the audience when
they think, “Shit! What is this guy doing?” I need this! So I need to find things,
instinctively, that will provoke that sensation in an audience. With my honey
and feather piece, I have been doing it for many years. I can make it a very angry
piece, a very beautiful piece, I can change its dynamics depending on the crowd.
Politically, I love to explore things that can’t be said, to make the audience think,
“He can’t say that!” and then, “Why can’t he say it?” It’s a lot of intellectual work,
but it always starts with a feeling – I want to hit people with emotions, with
instinctive emotions. Why does someone want to go to the circus? To experience
raw emotion. Horses running right in front of you, somebody risking their life on
a trapeze, sounds, music, texture, provoking all these enormous emotions in the
audience. I like to be savage on stage, to make people laugh and to go against the
system, to make people think about what is happening.
I love putting people in the audience, fake audience members who are really
actors, you can create really wild situations. I play with fire. I have this sequence
that makes it look like I have lost control, and I give the audience the feeling
that there is a fire in the theatre, with actors in the audience helping to create the
atmosphere, and you just get everybody running, trying to rush out! It’s a big
responsibility but I know how to do it. You know, people pay good money to
go to amusement parks to be scared by ghost trains – we love to be scared if it’s
 Leo Bassi 9

done right. So with my fire routine, I can get a lot of people to jump up from
their seats and run for the exit.
A little anecdote. Many years ago, in the 1980s, I was in the Perry Street
Theatre in New York preparing a show called Nero’s Last Folly, which included a
little number with fire. The director of the theatre told me, “In New York, for-
get it, there is no chance you can use a live flame on stage, it’s not allowed.” But
it was important to me. So I went to speak to the Fire Marshall in the precinct
in Manhattan, even though I was told I was wasting my time, and I end up in a
room with a big fat fireman, and I explain what it is I want to do, and he says, “Of
course you can’t do this. No way.” And I look at his little badge, and his name
is Italian, so I say to him, “Your name, it sounds Sicilian.” “Yes,” he says, “my
family is from Sicily.” “Incredible!” I say. “Which part?” “Enna,” he says. “But
I’ve been there! I’ve performed there!” I tell him. “And I did the same fire trick
there that I want to do here! Are you telling me that I can do something in Enna
that I can’t do in New York?!?” And the guy looks at me for a long time, and
he says, “Okay.” Nobody could believe it when I came back to the theatre with
permission to do it. And I got an Obie for that show. I’m sure that 20 percent of
that award was because of the fire trick.
It’s about creating situations in which the line between theatre and reality is
blurred. Is it a fiction? Or is something really happening? How far can one go?
I’ve done so many things like this. Shows in Italy with hundreds of people doing
things in the middle of a city, the bystanders not sure if it’s true or not true, shows
with emergency services turning up… I like to enhance these feelings of danger,
excitement, for everyone.
I sometimes think that I have to go out and do things that my family has not
done.
Maybe the strongest pieces I have done recently happened in my little church
in Madrid, this Quackolic Church that makes fun of religious revivalism and
a certain style of people, where God is this plastic duck. Well, three different
times people on the verge of dying asked for their funerals to take place in my
church. These were strong and hard and intense situations, to go into the pulpit
as a clown, with all the audience crying real tears – and myself too – and to make
people laugh at the dead person. I had to reach very deep inside of myself, ask
what does it really mean to be a clown, am I allowed to do this? Can we make
jokes at this moment? Will the family accept that? Who am I to be able to play
with life and death?
Clowns are prophets of failure. This is why we are revolutionary in today’s
world, where everyone is consuming products, everyone has to look good and
be 100 percent. The clown comes along and he or she is a failure. Proud of being
a failure! Happy to be a failure! Failure is an essential part of my recent work.
Years ago, I had a number called the Elastic Dragster, which involved a
truly enormous elastic band connected to a dragster. I’d ask a group of peo-
ple to pull back the elastic, and let go, and it would shoot this dragster for-
ward, which I was sitting inside. It would go 300 or 400 yards and was quite a
10 The Clowns

crowd-pleaser in town squares. But one day I failed to predict that the people I
asked to pull the elastic band – a group of young men – had their own pride, and
they wanted to look strong. I had a line on the street demarking the place where
they should let go of the elastic band, but these guys pulled the elastic far, far
beyond that line. I was shouting, “Please, please stop!” but I couldn’t get out of
the dragster, and they wouldn’t stop – they were showing off to their girlfriends!
Finally, at the point of no return, they let go. I reached 150 km/h! The brakes
didn’t work, I couldn’t stop the dragster, and I raced into traffic and I went under
a truck, and in the end I crashed into a sign. That ended up in the newspaper…
I could have died.
I’m a highly rational person. Even in my improvised shows, I have an invisible
structure that I can fall back on. More often, though, the improvisation works,
and leads me – and the audience – into unknown territory, and that can be
incredible. You feel a reaction from the audience – things come up, connections
that mean something to you, something from your past, your childhood… And
you follow them. Or I have some old material and some new material, and I
have to improvise how to connect the old to the new, and that’s often when the
best things happen. Movements, expressions, actions, concepts. I was onstage
on January 6, 2021, the evening of the Capitol riot in Washington DC, playing
Mussolini, and the audience were expecting me to do something, to say some-
thing… I needed to react! Of course Mussolini loved that riot! He wished he
could have been there. The audience is always helping me to understand how to
develop in the moment. They often feel a situation before I do, and they help me
to find the right direction, and I always learn something about myself. And then
after the show I get my technician to make a note, to record the pathway that I
just discovered.
It’s exciting. It’s the best profession in the world!

Philosophy
I think clowning, and humor in general, is a very democratic weapon for people
who have less power to break down the walls of authority and tradition. It’s not
just human, political concepts – there are also laws and powers of gravity, physics,
that the clown can subvert through laughter. Political, surrealistic, symbolic…
I’m an atheist and I joke about the power of religion. I’m not hurting anybody.
I often joke about myself, which is a particular quality of a clown, accepting my
foolishness, and that’s a way of embodying power that nobody can take away
from you – to break a structure, to go against the rules of society.
As a foot juggler, I’ve spent a lot of my life upside down. I used to be angry
about this, I thought I’d wasted all this time. But now I look back and I think
differently. When you are upside down as a foot juggler, you are alone. There
could be one person watching you, or 10,000. I truly believe that this has given
me inner strength and some insight into power, not just political power, but the
power of instinct, knowledge of the body, subliminal power. I have a knowledge
 Leo Bassi 11

that very few people have. So there is a physical and psychological dimension to
this, and now, aged 68, I realize that this is part of my ability.
I have an eight-year-old son. He spends a lot of time watching gamers on
YouTube. At first, I was angry, but slowly I started to look at these gamers. You
know what? They’re jugglers. You get Super Mario to jump from one thing to
another. It’s position and precision. And the gamers are joking with each other all
the time, and my son is laughing, he’s happy. A totally different world, different
context, different concept, but it’s the same story. The elements of circus can
come out in completely different ways. I’m against nostalgia, traditionalism for
the sake of it. I also think that clowns can do away with theatre and go directly
into politics! The New York Times includes a piece about Saturday Night Live or
Colbert every week, as if to say – these people are as important as the politicians
they are mocking. Clowns are alive and very agile, just not always in the place
that they were. When clowns lose contact with the real meaning of clowning,
and just hang on to tradition and nostalgia for the sake of it, they become per-
verse. (Maybe that’s the origin of terror clowns, clowns in Stephen King… The
model became defunct, so someone picked it up and used it for something else.)
But as long as there is this inner energy to combat authority, it will find a way
through humor. If a society does not have this, it means it is in decadence, going
downhill. So long life to clowns and the spirit of clowning – but not the tradition
of clowning. That scares me. We succeed by disrespecting tradition!
I have no country, no background. I’m like a chameleon. I have no language.
I have many languages. I’ve lived in Brazil, Greece, Germany, Spain. I’m at
home everywhere, nothing is foreign to me. My parents always told me that we
had a responsibility to connect with multiple people across the world. And my
political opinions have been formed by this life – equality among genders and
colors, a suspicion of institutions and governments… The circus was a very hon-
est society, very strong values. No corruption, just your position based on your
inner strength. It’s as if we were sons and daughters of the revolution, and at the
same time, every day was election day – the audience could buy their tickets – or
not! My grandfather once told me, “We’re in the same business as the Catholic
Church.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “We sell miracles to normal
people. But there’s one difference between us and the church.” “What’s that?”
“Our miracles are real. Theirs are fake.”
To clown is a way to go against evil.
2
RENÉ BAZINET

René Bazinet. Photo by Marcel Hubli/Copyright Roncalli

DOI: 10.4324/9781003202820-3
 René Bazinet 13

René Bazinet has performed in many of the most famous North American and
European theatres over the past 35 years. He starred in Circus Roncalli and
Germany’s Wintergarten, Teatro de la Fenice, and the prestigious Opéra de
Paris. He has traveled the world performing for Cirque du Soleil as one of their
most veteran clowns, and directed clowns for the Cirque du Soleil production
Zarkana. His two numbers, “Baseball” and “Western,” continue to be performed
in Saltimbanco for Cirque du Soleil.
We met René in his Montreal loft. (DB/EL)

Origins
Every case is particular, isn’t it? Every case is very particular, so everybody has
their story, everybody has their past.
I was born in Germany. I was brought up there, and I was quite … It wasn’t
easy. I was quite a difficult youth, and a mother with a single child in 1955 was
kind of weird for those people. I had what you would call today ADD. Very
nervous, very frenetic, very erratic: just a case, basically. Perhaps I got that from
my biological father, who was a musician, but I only have photos of him… I
figure that somehow it’s in the genes. Anyway, I couldn’t do anything about it.
I used to entertain my teachers. I used to entertain whoever I could. I was very
sensitive, so I could feel when people were into violence, and I would stop it by
making them laugh. You know, I was so sensitive I could feel it before it hap-
pened. So I became kind of a social worker at a very young age. I didn’t realize it
until much later. It was very natural for me to go into that field and make people
laugh. You know, because they’re violent. I’m in a violent world. I’m sorry, but I
am. That’s the way it is, isn’t it?
When I was very, very young, when I was five, six years old, I was entertain-
ing people. To survive. It’s a survival technique. I had a Jewish mentor when
I was a little older, and she described to me in detail the whole mechanism of
what was going on in Germany. You know, the sense of humor is really a sur-
vival technique for very difficult situations. Take the Jewish people. There were
some very beautiful, wonderful Jewish comics that the Germans just killed. So
I grew up in a desolate place with a lot of money but no fun. It took me a while
to understand that, but I was very young and adrift.
Being a teenager I was also very sensitive. Years later I notice, and still today,
I’m talking about my sensitivity. I haven’t killed it, I haven’t killed my inner
child. I kept it alive because that’s all there was, this inner child. In those days,
that’s all I was, this kid. And a kid doesn’t know much. He just reacts. I was very
lost. I was very compulsive, the brain completely making up stories all day long.
I was solitary in my youth, so my mother kicked me out, and I was in the streets.
The streets were my territory. But I couldn’t be in a gang. I knew what they
were gonna do, and I was trying to make them laugh instead. I just wanted peace
and harmony. Today, that’s basically what everybody wants, but in those days it
wasn’t evident, because everyone was so violent.
14 The Clowns

I hung out with gangs. I used to steal. I taught them how to steal books. It was
like the underground. My mother married a Canadian military police officer.
Sergeant Major Bazinet. He asked me if it was okay for him to adopt me, and I
said, “Well…” I was called René Fiener. My mom’s name. And I said, “René
Fiener. René Bazinet. That sounds great.” I was 14 years old. “Why not? Let’s do
this.” And then they went to Canada. I stayed in Germany in a boarding school
for a year, and then they kind of tricked me into going to Canada. “Come for
the summer vacations.” I said okay. That was it. I was in Canada. I said, “I’m
not going back to Germany?” I was very pissed about that. But it was a blessing
in disguise.
I got lost in drugs, especially psychedelics. I loved psychedelics, but I took too
many, to the point where I started thinking, “I gotta get outta here. I wanna get
out of this. I don’t really like this planet. I don’t like the people here. I just wanna
get out of this place.” But I overdosed. I stared death in the face. I stopped breath-
ing. That was the big turning point in my life. I had a conversation with voices.
They seemed like angels, but they talked very, very quietly, and they said, “Just
one little step, and you’re with us.” And then I changed my mind. I said, “Well,
maybe I was wrong. Maybe there’s something much bigger here that I wasn’t
aware of. Maybe there is something that’s calling me.” And so I asked to stay. I
remember it was four o’clock in the morning in Ottawa, and the first ray of the
sun, swoosh, struck my face, and I was breathing again, and I got a second chance.

Inspirations
When I got that second chance at the age of 18, I said, “Well, how can I say
Thank You for the rest of my life?” And that’s basically how I got into perform-
ing. One thing led to another. I went to theatre school. I tried to be an actor, but
everybody was laughing. And then I was physically so talented that people said,
“My God, this guy’s a mime.” So I studied mime. There was a teacher there at
John Torell College on the West Island, and he came from Lecoq. He created a
one-man show with me at the school. I realized, “My God. I can entertain peo-
ple without even speaking. Just through physical language I can communicate
things to people that they understand, and I can talk to them, talk even faster
than they can think, because their emotions are faster than their thoughts.” And
so I got into exploring this talent, and then the teacher sent me off with a letter
of recommendation to Lecoq, and all of a sudden I was in Paris in September
1978, and I started school at Lecoq, which was a great, wonderful gift because
he’s an amazing pedagogue. After all the LSD this guy just blew me away. “Shit,
this guy has really got his stuff together.” His neutral mask, becoming water,
becoming air, becoming earth, becoming wind, becoming Coca-Cola, becom-
ing glue, becoming acid, becoming everything, becoming the different kinds of
light, morning light, daylight, moonlight, electric light, neon light, becoming
colors, becoming everything that exists. How does it move? What an amazing
gift for me, to be nourished at that age.
 René Bazinet 15

At the Lecoq School, I met Philippe Gaulier, who was a teacher there, and
when I quit Lecoq, he quit, too. Gaulier appreciated me, and I appreciated Gaulier
because he was – you know, Lecoq was the meta-meta-master, but Gaulier was
human. He would go right into humanity. And I thought, “Wow, this guy’s
real.” It was very natural for me to be able to open up and understand what he
was teaching: as soon as you defend your personality, you’re not really funny.
You’re just defending your whatchamacallit, the carbon copy of your life. You’re
not real anymore. As soon as you defend it, you know you’re not real. After all,
you don’t defend the truth. If the sky is blue, you don’t have to get nervous about
defending the blue sky. But if you’re defending it, well, you’re not a clown yet
because you’re still hanging onto your personality and proving to everybody that
it’s a good one. So I learned with Gaulier that personality is not real. It’s just not
real. There’s something new that’s waiting for me, and if I have the courage to
go and look for it, well, this is the place.
Gaulier had a contract in Germany in the Frankfurter Autoren Theatre, and
he took half of the class that was finishing Lecoq to do a show there. I played
Arlecchino because I’m the guy who knows how to do that. And people saw me
there in Germany, me being back in Germany, my mother tongue and the whole
bit. I fit like a hand in a glove. Jacobo Romano and Jorge Zulueta. They had the
group Accion Instrumental. And they took me on and gave me a job right away.
Jacobo was living in Paris. So it all worked out because I was going back to Paris.
I stayed with him for about a year, doing shows, one after the other. He believed
in me. And I started to write text. He was into classical music, he was into Freud,
really into psychoanalysis – his wife is a psychoanalyst – and this whole thing
was very deep and it was very Argentinian, and music, and automatic writing,
the discovery of the subconscious. It was a continuous schooling for a clown.
Though I wasn’t a clown then. He used me as a performer who knew how to
write, how to play on the stage and become anything he wanted to, rather than
being funny. We created five shows from scratch in five years while I was there.
He really used me because I love creating. I have a very wild imagination. I cre-
ated and created and created. “René, what would you do? Okay! Let’s do that!”
Because it worked. It was one of those things.
So after one year, I said, “I can count my ribs.” I was very upset, and I was out.
I hooked up with Gaulier, who had left the Lecoq school, but was still in Paris
and had opened up his own school with Monika Pagneux. Monika Pagneux
was for me a goddess. She looked at me and told me everything I did last night,
just by looking at my body. I thought, “Holy shit how does she know? She’s a
witch! Just by reading the body? God! I want to learn from her.” So I took some
workshops from her, but in the afternoons I was in the streets. And that’s when
I met David Shiner.
I was doing a pantomime. I had a white face. How can I say, I did sketches,
I improvised sketches. I didn’t imitate people, I did sketches: walking in place,
finding something and eating it, and all of a sudden noticing it’s chewing gum,
then taking the chewing gum and blowing it up into a ball, a huge ball, going
16 The Clowns

into the ball, not being able to get out of it, finding a pin in my pocket, bursting
it, being stuck with it, taking it all off, then putting it in my mouth, and not
being able to get rid of it, swallowing it, and having to go to the toilet because
I needed to take a crap, and then doing the whole toilet scene … You know ten
years later I sold this to Cirque du Soleil, the toilet scene: it started on the streets
of Paris.
Hand to mouth, hand to mouth. Being in the streets is … being in the streets.
My mentor Aneta Lastik said, “Hang around with the rats too long, and you
get poisoned.” Good old Jewish wisdom. “It’s a bad environment, it’s going to
rub off on you René.” Well, I turned out to be an alcoholic. A very low career,
anything is possible, anyone can do anything at any moment, there’s no organ-
ization, it’s a free-for-all. The deepest thing that was evolving was that I got to
appreciate my sensitivity because there was magic around. When you’re very
sensitive there is magic somewhere; there are things that happen in synchronic-
ity, that you haven’t noticed before, and you start to notice it, that’s the highest
state. I went into studying Lao Tzu, I went to Taoism, I read it every morning
when I woke up and every night before I went to sleep. I went into esotericism.
“I have to understand; I don’t get this, I don’t understand this, I am a tool of this,
but I am not master of this, I am just a tool! I realize it’s magic, and I realize it’s
very beautiful, but I don’t know how to deal with it.” I might as well have been
put in a loony bin because it’s the same thing in a way. But then I met David and
he was really into meditation. At first I wasn’t interested, but he was into it, he
said, “I want you to, you gotta meditate.” So we became great friends, because
of that similar sensitivity and the similar interests and a belief that life is not only
about eating and fucking and shitting and then you have a heart attack and die.
It’s, no – there is something much greater going on. So I think that belief took
hold of me at that time – even though I was almost bipolar, really up and really
down – and it helped me to say, “Well, is there maybe a balance somewhere …?”

Techniques
I always wrote my own stuff. I always repeated the sketches that I knew, that
is, some pantomime sketches and two clown sketches, and the story I learned at
Lecoq which is called “The Crow,” which is like a mime, storyteller, making
sound effects, ya know? Becoming the crow [Makes Crow Noise] doing the crow
from far away, doing it close up, like a film technique. It was my signature piece
for many years. I played that in Tokyo as I played it in Tel Aviv as I played it in
Tunisia, and they all loved it. It was just the contact was very different in Japan
than in Tunisia, because the Japanese are very well behaved and Tunisians are
very wild. I used to work in prisons in Germany, and they don’t give a fuck
about you. They smoke and look at you, they go, “Fuck you!” So I said to them:
“Oh, okay. What are you doing? What are you trying to tell me, you? Yeah
you! I know you can’t touch me because the police are right there. The guards
are right there. Now, what in the hell is going on?” And they went: “Holy shit.
 René Bazinet 17

Somebody’s talking to me.” “Yeah! Somebody’s talking to you! It’s me!” I stuck
up my nose and said, “It’s me! What’s your problem? Why are you doing this to
me?” And they said “Holy shit!” Yeah. But that comes from the street because I
am not just a clown, I’m also a human. Don’t you fuck with me.
Until ’88 I stayed in Paris, then I joined David in Munich and we put a show
together, and then we toured for about a year and a half in Germany. We’d go
to all these little cities in Germany and do little one-night gigs. So that became
a very great friendship there and a partnership, of course, because we made
people laugh. Him solo, me solo, but some sketches together, and we had about
20 minutes, and people didn’t want to leave. So it worked. But then the circus
contacted David. And David didn’t wanna leave. He said he didn’t want to go
to Canada and do this thing. But after a year and a half, we were, I was kind of
tired, and I said, “David, come on, just go and show them what you’re made of.
Go and conquer your own country, and we’ll meet up later and we’ll do another
show together.” So that’s what happened, he became a star, and sure enough, a
year later, he’d talked about me so much to the circus, they had to contact me.
I mean what are friends for? He sent them to visit me in Paris, and I basically
sent them to hell actually. I was horrible – I was just so rude in those days. But
I was a bit alcoholic, you know? And in the morning, you didn’t talk to me in
the morning in those days unless I’d had my two double espressos, then I could
function. “What? What? You and your fucking circus, who, what the? Who is
this guy?” I was very rude and arrogant in those days, and I didn’t want to go.
I had made money with galas and variety theatres – but the circus? “Fuck that!
Who wants to join the fucking circus? Jesus Christ, it’s ridiculous! What do you
want from me? You’ve got David.” And they said: “Yeah, but David … We’re in
Los Angeles right now with Nouvelle Expérience …” They weren’t careful in those
days because a lot of agents called him and all of a sudden David didn’t want to
do the tour anymore. Big times, right? Mmm. So they called me. “Come and
visit and see the show on Santa Monica pier. Please? David is considering maybe
not doing it anymore.” “I ain’t gonna replace David.” “Well, come and see the
show.”
So I went there, and of course I fell in love with the show because Nouvelle
Expérience, I tell you, I was sitting there, and I was almost in tears. I said, “My
God, this is a magical box. The potential of this is enormous. And the show is
beautiful! And the magic that they create and produce is amazing! But I will not
jump in for David. Because David is David and René is René.” You know? And
I told them that and they got very flustered. I went back home and told them, “I
won’t do this, but if you ever do a new show, call me up.” And they did. A year
later, for Saltimbanco. Actually Guy Laliberté caught me in a very weak moment.
I was in Stuttgart in this little variety theatre, and I was playing for old ladies in
the afternoon. And I don’t know if you know old German ladies, it’s horrendous.
“The music’s too loud …” There’s all this complaining going on while you’re
playing. It was a very weak moment, and who did I see on the veranda of this
theatre? It was Guy walking toward me. He didn’t win me over, but he sent
18 The Clowns

Franco Dragone to talk to me. Franco came to visit me there in this little theatre
in Stuttgart, with all the drawings of the characters for Saltimbanco. And after ten
minutes I said, “This guy is a visionary.” And after what I’d seen they could do –
and it was his show too, the Nouvelle Expérience – now I figured I was talking to
the real man. I felt wide awake. My soul was elated because now I was talking
to an artist! Not talking to a businessman! Talking to a visionary! And he pulled
me in. He reeled me in, and he asked me, “What would it take for you to do the
show?” I said, “I’ll tell you exactly what it would take: let me play an aristocrat,
a child, a horny satire, and Death.” And he said, “Okay. We’ll write it in.” And
they did. So I said, “Okay, I guess I’m going to join the fuckin’ circus.” It was
too much of a beautiful invitation.
Four years I played in that show. All over the United States, the big cities,
then we did Tokyo, and then Europe. When I stopped Saltimbanco, I was kind of
burned out for a couple of years. Guy invited me to put up Quidam with him,
to train the Russians. (Most of the performers in those days were Russian.) So I
gave them training, how to play – I gave Lecoq training and mask and physical
and Feldenkrais. I taught these people for three years and we became a very
strong group. Debbie Brown was taking care of the choreography and we were
such a great team. There were very powerful people doing the creation, and it
was beautiful. And audiences were just blown away by that. But that was years
ago. It was a whole different epoch, a whole different time.
After Cirque du Soleil, I went back to Germany and did variety theatres. And
there are a lot of them there. More and more. So in those days, the end of the
’90s, beginning of the 2000s, I was mostly in Germany doing the variety theatre
as the maître de cérémonie, like I did in Saltimbanco. I was the guy smoking with the
tails and sometimes a cane, the whole bit – like the German 1920s, with the top
hat. I did that, plus “The Crow,” plus the sketch I did in the circus, so I was doing
three people’s jobs, in a way, and having René Bazinet in a variety show is good
business because he runs the show and does two numbers! [Laughter.]
Sometimes I did some gigs with David. He’d call me. “Let’s do our gig
together somewhere for a month or two.” And we did that too. So it wasn’t
a straight line; it never is a straight line. God writes some crooked lines! It’s
organic. It’s a process. Then I started teaching at the Cirque du Soleil studios. I
teach Feldenkrais, and then I do the neutral mask, which I love. That’s part of
my style and I insist on it. I know at the circus, when I go back there sometimes,
there are certain people there apparently that don’t like me, “Oh, René with his
pedagogy,” but I’m okay with that. Because I have to admit, if I am a director, I
am a pedagogue at the same time. I can’t separate the two. I can’t expect people
to know everything when they come to work. Sometimes I have to teach them
how to do it.
Failing is my business. As a clown, this is what Gaulier gave me. Gaulier gave
me the understanding, “Okay, it’s nice that you still have your inner child, but in
order to actually mix that into a profession, into a craft, you need to understand
why people are laughing.” People laugh when you are wrong. But you have to
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 1 table-spoon cinnamon
1 tea-spoon cloves
1 tea-spoon soda
Flour
Mix altogether, dissolving the soda in a very little hot water. Add
sufficient flour to make a fairly stiff dough. Roll out thin and bake in a
quick oven.

Ground Rice Biscuits

¹⁄₂ lb. ground rice

¹⁄₂ lb. flour
¹⁄₂ lb. castor sugar
¹⁄₂ lb. butter
2 eggs
1 tea-spoonful of baking powder
Mix the baking powder with the flour and ground rice, and then rub
the butter into it. Add the well-beaten eggs. Roll out on a board and
cut into rounds about the size of a five-shilling piece. Bake on a
floured tin.

Hazel Nut Biscuits

4 ozs. hazel nuts
1 oz. sweet almonds
Whites of two eggs
6 ozs. powdered sugar
Flour
Blanch the nuts and pound them, but not very finely. Beat the
whites to a stiff froth. Mix them with the nuts. Add the sugar. Mix in
sufficient flour to make a paste. Roll it out on a board as thin as
possible. Cut into small rounds. Bake on buttered tins in a slow oven.
 *Kletskoppen
7 ozs. flour
12 ozs. brown sugar
4 ozs. almonds
2 ozs. butter
Mix sugar and butter together. Add the flour and the almonds
blanched and chopped. Divide into small cakes. Bake in a quick
oven.

*Little Biscuits

¹⁄₂ lb. flour

2 eggs
¹⁄₄ lb. butter
¹⁄₄ lb. powdered sugar
A small tea-spoonful baking powder
A small wine-glass of sherry
Put the flour, sugar and baking powder into a basin and stir well
together. Rub in the butter and add the well beaten eggs. Mix with
the wine into a paste just firm enough to roll out on a paste-board.
Cut out in little rounds with a small wine-glass. Bake on a floured tin
until a delicate colour, like nicely baked pastry.

*Little Dutch Cakes

4 ozs. butter
4 ozs. white sugar
4 ozs. flour
Vanilla
2 yolks
1 white of egg
1 oz. almonds blanched and chopped
 Mix the butter and sugar thoroughly together. Add the flour.
Flavour with a few drops of vanilla. Beat the yolks and add them to
the mixture. Roll out the paste. Shape it into rings. Dip each in the
white of egg and sprinkle over them the chopped almonds.

Louisa Cakes
3 oz. cornflour
3 oz. flour
4 ozs. butter
3 eggs
4 ozs. powdered sugar
1 tea-spoon baking powder
Beat the butter to a cream and add the sugar. Then add one egg
at a time, beating thoroughly. Stir in the flour (in which the baking
powder has been mixed) and beat well. Bake in greased patty pan in
a quick oven from 15 to 20 minutes. Ice when nearly cold with plain
icing, p. 65, and ornament with crystallised cherries.

Macaroons
1 lb. sweet almonds
10 bitter almonds
Whites of eight eggs
1 tea-spoon arrowroot
Blanch and pound the almonds, adding to them a little rose water.
Put in a basin, cover and set aside for twenty-four hours. Then beat
the whites to a very stiff froth. Stir in the sugar lightly and add the
almonds and arrowroot gradually. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture on
buttered paper, sprinkle with powdered sugar and bake on a tin
sheet in a quick oven until a delicate brown. One or two sliced
almonds can be stuck into each biscuit.

Macaroons
 1 lb. sweet almonds
Whites of four eggs
1 lb. powdered sugar
Rose water
Blanch and pound the almonds, add to them a little rose water. Mix
thoroughly with the sugar over a fire. Whisk the whites to a stiff froth.
Add to the almonds. Grease a paper and spread it on a baking
sheet. Put the mixture on by spoonfuls. Bake in a rather slow oven
for twenty minutes.

Madeleines

¹⁄₂ lb. butter

14 ozs. flour
1 lb. powdered sugar
6 eggs
1 dessert-spoon orange flower water
Melt the butter and pour it into a basin. Add to it gradually, beating
all the time, the flour and sugar. Beat the yolks and whites
separately. Add the yolks first, then the flavouring, and, lastly, the
whites. Butter a number of little tin shapes, fill them and bake in a
moderate oven.

Oat Cakes
1 lb. oatmeal
A pinch of soda
Hot water
Mix oatmeal and soda, adding hot water to make a soft dough.
Knead till smooth. Press into a round cake ¹⁄₂ inch thick, then roll out
as thin as required with a roller. Divide into cakes with a cutter. Place
them on a hot griddle and bake till firm. Take them off, rub them with
meal and toast before the fire till they curl.
 Orange Biscuit
Several Seville oranges
Their weight in powdered sugar
Boil the oranges whole, three times, changing the water each time.
Cut them in halves and take out all the pulp and juice. Beat the
outside very fine in a mortar and add to it the sugar. Mix into a paste.
Spread very thinly on glass or plates and set in the sun to dry. When
nearly dry cut into shapes and turn over. When quite dry put away in
an air-tight tin.

*Orange Wafers

¹⁄₂ lb. sugar

¹⁄₄ lb. flour
4 eggs
¹⁄₂ orange
1 lemon
Grate the yellow rind from half an orange. Put it in a cup and
squeeze the juice of a whole lemon over it. After half-an-hour strain
off the juice.
Beat the sugar and yolks until light and creamy. Add the strained
juice and the whites whipped to a stiff froth. Sift in the flour and do
not beat any more. Drop by the spoonful on to greased paper and
bake quickly. Spread half of the wafers, when baked, with
marmalade and put the others on top of them, pressing them lightly
down.

Rice Cakes
2 eggs
Their weight in flour, powdered sugar and butter
 1 large table-spoon rice flour
¹⁄₂ tea-spoon baking powder
Cream the butter and add the sugar. Mix the baking powder, flour
and rice flour together and add to the butter and sugar. Whisk the
eggs till light and frothy. Beat all well together. Bake in buttered patty
pans.

Rock Cakes—I

¹⁄₂ lb. flour

2 ozs. butter
3 ozs. moist sugar
2 ozs. currants
2 eggs
¹⁄₂ tea-spoon baking powder
Rub the butter into the flour. Add the sugar and currants. Beat the
eggs well and add to the mixture. Mix well together and drop in
irregular shapes on a buttered tin. Bake in a moderate oven.

Rock Cakes—II

¹⁄₂ lb. self-raising flour

1 egg
¹⁄₄ lb. Demerara sugar
¹⁄₂ tea-cup milk
¹⁄₄ lb. butter and lard mixed
2 ozs. currants
Candied peel
1 table-spoon desiccated cocoanut
Mix flour, sugar, butter, currants and cocoanut well, then add the
egg and milk. If the butter is soft it will not require all the milk, for
they are better mixed as dry as possible. Put the mixture in rough
pieces on a tin, and bake in a rather quick oven for fifteen or twenty
minutes.

Shortbread
1 lb. flour
¹⁄₂ lb. fresh butter
¹⁄₄ lb. powdered sugar
Soften the butter a little and cut it into the flour. Knead in the sugar.
Roll out. Cut into shapes. Bake in a tin, on buttered paper, until a
delicate brown.

*Shortbread Biscuits
1 lb. flour
4 ozs. butter
1 egg
A little cream
Rub the butter into sifted and dried flour. Add the sugar and the
egg slightly beaten.
Moisten with a very little cream or milk. Roll out thin. Cut into
rounds. Bake on tins in a quick oven.

Snow Cakes
2 cups sugar
¹⁄₂ cup butter
1 cup sweet milk
3 cups flour
3 tea-spoons baking powder
Whites of five eggs
 Cream the butter. Add the sugar and beat well. Then add the flour,
in which the baking powder should be mixed, and the milk. Beat for
ten minutes. Whisk the whites to a stiff froth, and stir in lightly. Bake
in square tins. When quite cold, cut off all the brown outside and
divide into pieces about two inches square. Take each piece on a
fork and ice and roll in finely grated cocoanut.

Sponge Fingers or Cakes

10 eggs
1 lb. powdered sugar
³⁄₄ lb. flour
Beat the eggs together until very light. Add the sugar and beat for
fifteen minutes. Sift the flour in lightly. Bake in tins made for the
purpose, in a quick oven.

Sugar Cakes
6 eggs
1 cup butter
3 cups sugar
Flour
Beat the yolks and whites separately very thoroughly. Cream the
butter and sugar. Add the yolks. Beat well. Stir in the whites and
enough flour to make a paste that can be lightly rolled out. Flavour
with a few drops of lemon juice. Cut into rounds and bake in a quick
oven.

Whole Meal Biscuits

1 cup rich cream, sour or sweet
¹⁄₄ cup powdered sugar
1 salt-spoon salt
2 cups fine whole meal
 Mix together and knead with the hand until stiff enough to roll out
as thin as a wafer. Cut into rounds and bake on floured tins in a very
hot oven.
 Breakfast and Tea Cakes
PAGE
American Crumpets 111
” Muffins with Eggs 111
” Muffins without Yeast 113
Balloon Cakes 113
Breakfast Scones 114
Cringles 115
Crumpets 115
Dropped Scones 116
Echaudés à Thé 117
Golden Corn Cake 117
Little Breakfast or Tea Rolls 118
Quickly-made Scones 118
Scones 119
Soda Scones 119
Tea Buns 120
Tea Cakes—I. 121
” ” II. 122
” ” III. 122
” ” (self-raising flour) 123
York Cakes 123
Yorkshire Cake 124
 *American Crumpets
3 cups warm milk
¹⁄₂ cup yeast
2 table-spoons melted butter
1 salt-spoon salt
1 salt-spoon soda
Flour
Mix the yeast, milk, salt and sufficient flour to make a good batter,
together and set to rise. When well risen beat in the melted butter.
Sift the soda and stir it in dry. Put in well greased patty pans or
muffin rings, allowing the batter to rise for fifteen minutes before
putting into the oven. Bake in a quick oven.

American Muffins with Eggs

1 quart milk
³⁄₄ cup yeast
2 table-spoons powdered sugar
1 table-spoon butter
1 tea-spoon salt
4 eggs
Flour
Mix all the ingredients, except the eggs, with sufficient flour to
make a good batter, overnight. Cover and set to rise. In the morning
beat the eggs till very light. Stir them in. Bake for twenty minutes in a
quick oven in well greased muffin rings.

*American Muffins without Yeast

¹⁄₂ pint milk

¹⁄₂ pint cream
1 heaping pint of flour
 3 eggs
1 table-spoon of melted lard and butter mixed
Beat the yolks and whites separately. Stir them together. Add the
milk, salt, butter and flour. Bake at once in well-greased muffin tins in
a quick oven. The tins should only be filled half full of the mixture.
Serve hot.

Balloon Cakes
2 table-spoons yeast
4 table-spoons cream
6 table-spoons flour
Mix the yeast with the cream. Sift the flour. Work the yeast and
cream into it. Set in a warm place to rise. When risen roll out very
thin. Cut into round cakes. Bake for four minutes.

*Breakfast Scones
1 quart milk
³⁄₄ cup lard and butter
³⁄₄ cup yeast
2 table-spoons white sugar
1 tea-spoon salt
Flour
Warm the milk. Melt the lard and butter. Add it to the milk. Stir in
sufficient flour, sugar, salt and yeast to make a soft dough. Mix over
night. Cover and leave to rise. Roll out lightly, in the morning, until
about three-quarters of an inch thick. Cut into round scones. Let
them rise twenty minutes. Bake for twenty minutes.
OR,
Mix the ingredients in the morning with half the quantity of flour.
Set to rise for five hours. Work in the rest of the flour and let it rise
another five hours. Cut into round cakes. Let them rise twenty
minutes.

Cringles

¹⁄₄ lb. butter

1 lb. flour
2 ozs. sugar
2 table-spoons yeast
¹⁄₂ pint milk
2 eggs
Rub the butter into the flour. Add the sugar. Take half of this
mixture. Add to it quarter of a pint of milk and the yeast. Cover over
and set to rise in a warm place. When risen add the rest of the flour,
etc., to it. Add also a quarter of a pint more milk and the two eggs.
Mix into a light dough. Roll out to the thickness of a finger. Cut into
fancy shapes. Set them on a baking tin in a warm place to rise. Bake
when risen. When baked wash over with milk and sugar.

*Crumpets

³⁄₄ lb. of fine flour

³⁄₄ oz. German yeast
1 tea-spoonful powdered sugar
A pinch of salt
1 pint, bare measure, of milk
1 egg
Mix the salt and sugar with the flour. Dissolve the yeast in a little of
the milk and stir it into the flour. Break the egg into it, and beat
together with a wooden spoon. Then add the remainder of the milk
by degrees, making it into a nice batter.
Set it before the fire, covered with a cloth, to rise for two hours,
and bake in tin rings, on a slab of stone or marble, heated on the top
of an ordinary kitchen range or close stove. (This will take about two
hours to heat. The stone must be not less than one and a half inches
thick, or it is liable to crack with the heat. A discarded marble mantel-
piece is excellent for this purpose.)
The crumpet rings should be slightly buttered. Place them on the
stone when your batter is ready and pour into each a small tea-
cupful of the batter. As soon as the crumpet has risen, remove the
ring, and turn the crumpet over on the stone. They cook very quickly.

Dropped Scones
4 cups flour
2 cups milk
1 egg
¹⁄₂ tea-spoon carbonate of soda
¹⁄₄ tea-spoon tartaric acid
2 table-spoons powdered sugar
Beat the egg. Mix all together into a smooth batter. Fry in butter in
a small frying pan a spoonful at a time.

Echaudés à Thé

¹⁄₂ lb. sifted flour

3 eggs
2 ozs. butter
2 lumps of sugar
Rub the sugar on a lemon and when dry crush it finely. Work all
the ingredients together thoroughly with the hand. Set aside for an
hour. Then roll out the paste on a floured board. Form into little balls
the size of a walnut, rolling them with the hand which should be well
floured. Throw them into boiling water. When they come to the
surface take them out and throw them quickly into cold water. Leave
them in the water for two hours. Drain them and put them on a
baking tin in a hot oven. Bake for quarter of an hour.
 *Golden Corn Cake

³⁄₄ cup corn meal

1¹⁄₄ cups flour
¹⁄₄ cup powdered sugar
1 cup milk
1 egg
1 table-spoon butter
4 tea-spoons baking powder
Mix the meal, flour, sugar and baking powder thoroughly together
and sift. Beat the egg well, add it to the milk. Melt the butter and stir
it into the milk. Mix all together. Bake for twenty minutes in a shallow
buttered tin in a hot oven.

*Little Breakfast or Tea Rolls

³⁄₄ lb. flour

2 ozs. butter
1 oz. powdered sugar
A dessert-spoonful of baking-powder
A little milk
Stir the sugar and baking powder into the flour. Then rub the butter
into it. Mix with the milk into rather a stiff paste. Form into little rolls,
rolling them lightly on a paste-board with the hand to get them
smooth, about three inches in length, and a good inch wide and
thick. Bake on a floured tin in a hot oven.

Quickly-made Scones
1 pint sour milk
1 tea-spoon carbonate of soda
2 tea-spoons melted butter
Flour
 Add the butter to the milk. Dissolve the soda in it. Stir in sufficient
flour to make a dough that can be rolled out. Mix. Roll out lightly and
quickly. Cut into round shapes. Bake in a quick oven.

*Scones
1 lb. flour
2 ozs. fresh butter
1 oz. white powdered sugar
¹⁄₂ oz. cream of tartar
¹⁄₄ oz. carbonate of soda
A little milk, or buttermilk
Put the flour in a large basin and add the sugar, soda and cream
of tartar. Rub the butter thoroughly into the flour. Mix into a paste
with the milk, as lightly as possible. Roll it out lightly to about half an
inch in thickness. Cut in rounds the size of a large saucer, and divide
each round into four quarters. Bake on floured tins in a hot oven.

Soda Scones
1 quart sifted flour
1 even tea-spoon salt
1 even tea-spoon carbonate of soda
2 tea-spoons cream of tartar
1 large table-spoon butter
Milk (about 1 pint)
Mix the soda, salt and cream of tartar with the flour. Sift twice. Rub
in the butter with the fingers. Add the milk gradually, mixing lightly
with a knife until just stiff enough to be handled. Then turn the dough
out on to a well floured board. Flour the rolling-pin, and roll, or rather
dab out the mixture until about half an inch thick. Cut into rounds and
bake at once on a floured tin for about ten minutes.
In making these scones, the mixture, once the butter has been
rubbed into the flour, must be touched as little as possible with the
hands.

Tea Buns
1 lb. flour
2 ozs. butter
1 table-spoon powdered sugar
¹⁄₄ lb. currants
¹⁄₂ tea-spoon bi-carbonate of soda
¹⁄₂ tea-spoon tartaric acid
1 egg
1 pint milk
Mix the soda and tartaric acid with the flour. Sift the flour. Rub in
the butter, add the sugar and the currants. Beat up the egg in a large
basin. Add the milk to it, and when well mixed, stir in the flour, etc.,
gradually. Bake in a quick oven, in small cakes, in a buttered baking
tin.

*Tea Cakes—I

¹⁄₂ lb. fine flour

³⁄₄ oz. German yeast
1 oz. powdered sugar
1 egg
¹⁄₂ pint milk, very bare measure
2 ozs. fresh butter
Dissolve the yeast in a little of the milk and rub down smoothly. Put
the flour and sugar into a pan and mix them together, then rub in the
butter and add the egg, previously beaten. Next add the yeast by
degrees, stirring it in with a wooden spoon, and then gradually add
sufficient milk to make the mixture of the consistency of an ordinary
cake or stiff batter. Beat it for five to ten minutes. Set it to rise before
the fire, covered with a cloth and protected from the draught. Let it
rise for an hour. Fill two or three buttered tins half full and bake in a
very hot oven. Lay them on a sieve to cool when turned out of the
tins.

Tea Cakes—II
2 lbs. flour
¹⁄₂ tea-spoon salt
¹⁄₄ lb. lard
1 egg
Yeast the size of a walnut
Milk
Mix the salt with the flour and then rub the lard thoroughly into it.
Beat the egg well and stir the yeast into it. Add to the flour with
enough milk to make a paste, knead well. Let it rise for a couple of
hours in a warm place. Form it into round cakes on tins. Let them
rise for twenty minutes and bake from quarter to half-an-hour.

Tea Cakes—III
1 lb. flour
1 pint milk
2 eggs
¹⁄₂ lb. sugar
2 table-spoons baking powder
Mix and sift the dry ingredients together. Add the milk with which
the well-beaten eggs have been mixed and a little salt. Bake in flat
round tins.

*Tea Cakes made with Self-raising Flour

2 cups self-raising flour
1 table-spoon butter
 Milk or cream
Rub the butter well into the flour, add a little salt. Make it into a
dough with a little milk or sour cream. Roll out. Cut into small rounds.
Bake in a quick oven. Split open, butter and serve at once.

*York Cakes

¹⁄₂ lb. fine flour

6 ozs. butter
1 oz. castor sugar
1 yolk
A little milk
Rub the butter into the flour. Add the yolk previously well beaten,
and then sufficient milk to mix into a paste. Roll out about three-
quarters of an inch thick, and cut into squares about two and a half
inches square, and cut these again into triangles. Bake on a floured
tin until a delicate brown.

Yorkshire Cakes
1 lb. flour
2 spoonfuls yeast
1 egg
3 ozs. butter
¹⁄₂ pint warm milk
Rub the butter into the flour. Add the yeast, egg and milk. Beat the
whole well together. Set to rise in a warm place for three-quarters of
an hour. Cut into round cakes. Set to rise again. Bake in a moderate
oven. Wash over, when baked, with milk and sugar.
 Schoolroom Cakes
PAGE
Fruit Cake without Eggs 126
Gingerbread 126
One Egg Cake 127
Plain Sultana Cake 127
Seed Cake—Lunch 128

Fruit Cake without Eggs

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1¹⁄₂ pints sifted flour
1 lb. stoned and chopped raisins
1 tea-spoon grated nutmeg
1 tea-spoon powdered cinnamon
1 pint sour milk or cream
1 tea-spoon soda
Beat the butter to a cream. Add the sugar. Beat again very
thoroughly. Add one pint of flour. Mix the raisins and spices with half
a pint of flour. Add them to the mixture. Mix thoroughly and beat five
minutes. Dissolve the soda in the sour milk. Stir it in. Bake at once in
buttered tins, one hour, in a moderate oven.

Gingerbread
1 lb. flour
¹⁄₂ lb. butter