Who Loves Lucy?… clowns and frowns
Photo is of Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance. Note: In my method’s chronology of exercises there is a section “The Path of Honor” -9 exercises named after various notable clowns. One exercise is The Lucille Ball/Vivian Vance Exercise. It is described in the book Clown Secret. Chapter 2 of that book has step-by-step instructions for the whole template of exercises. Also Note: One of my practical theories is “The Lucille Ball/Vivian Vance Principle” intended originally to be applied to the plays of William Shakespeare. The other book is comprised of 45 short essays including 6 about working with Shakespeare’s plays.
Photo: From our production of The Suicide by Nikolai Erdman (1927). Actor/Producer Fred Copperwaite in the main role; and, Actress Ellen Osborne as “Father Elpidi”.
The essay Who Loves Lucy? … clowns and frowns is 8 pages. Written in a flash sometime in 2002 or soon after.
It was stimulated, as the text tells, with an early announcement of Hollywood film to be made about Lucille Ball aka Lucy. I had just begun my PhD in Education with the plan to decribe, via academic terms/jargon and methodology, my method Quantum Theatre: Slapstick to Shakespeare. That goal was to further enable publishing one of the leading publishers dealing in the Performing Arts. However, immediately after commencing my work/research towards the Thesis… life and art threw several changes my way and each one I embraced. The Thesis was completed as “From the Liminal to the Visceral – Professional Actor Training in Australia”. The PhD process was very interesting. It was in fact a Sabbatical period for me to re-examine my life in art.
Eventually teaching well over 100 workshops in more than a dozen countries. Writing two self-published books. One of those was actually written in 1996. The single copy of the manuscript, and, the floppy disc (a peice of ancient technology!) – were both lost and forgotten about… until they showed up in a group of boxes I had forgotten until they showed up more than 20 years later, around 2018. There are also now over 100 blog/essays written since 2010. Who Loves Lucy? … clowns and frowns is about the 104th blog/essay.
It is offering a few general thoughts about clown teaching. At the end of the 8 pages I will add links to a few of the blog/essays related to clown teaching, and, the learning of clown.
The original essay is in its then final draft form. Before scanning, I added page numbering; and I corrected a spelling error of ‘-ie’ to a ‘y’. NOTE: it was written more than 20 years ago. Although I found it again about a year ago and set it out amongst a lot of other material to be published but I had not read Who Loves Lucy? … clowns and frowns in over 20 years. Here it is, as is, worts ‘n all.
I.S.A.A.C. CREATIVE MENTORSHIP – part-time, long distance training – https://iraseid.com/creative-mentorship/
Some of the blog/essays pertaining directly to clown teaching:
THREE PARTS HERE IS PART 1
78. March 26, 2023 – Ira Seidenstein – Blog of 100 blogs: Title with each link – I.S.A.A.C. – https://iraseid.com/2023/03/i-s-a-a-c-blog-essays-titles-etc.html
IRA SEIDENSTEIN – www.iraseid.com –