Category: Clown Training

Vaudeville: Patter; Shtik; Double Talk featuring “Shaw and Lee”. Vaudeville had sight acts, comedy acts, sketch comedy, and music. The comedians generally were multi-skilled using song, dance, verbal comedy, and Slapstick. Their acts also were the comedians acting as their own stock character. In the early days of Vaudeville the comedians performed as one of…

This is a small excerpt from my new book. If you copy any of it for sharing please include: “Excerpt from Quantum Theatre: Slapstick to Shakespeare copyrights Ira Seidenstein”. The book is available now via any independent book seller or online seller via individual orders as print-on-demand. This is one short essay out of 46.…

There was a time when one said they were in “show business” or “show biz”. The performers understood that they shared a common bond with their colleagues whether they were singers, actors, dancers, circus artistes, musical theatre performers, etc. It was also a business that thrived in diversity and international artistes who traveled to perform.…

Martha Graham was one of the most prolific directors/creators of live performance. From the beginning of her company she worked closely with a diverse group of artists including her dancers, designers, musicians. She was born in 1895 and continued to direct and create into her early 90s. Graham had also worked as a dancer in…

Jazz Musicians; Scientists: People can be ‘clowns’ without doing clowning as a profession. “Non-Clown Clowns” is a concept that there are numerous people in all sorts of fields who are natural clowns but express their humour and creativity outside of the field of clown or theatre. In this case there is not a lot of…

“The Quantum Point” is what I call the magic space in time where creativity can move in any direction or manner. Physically, the pineal gland is like the embodied metaphor of The Quantum Point. In the book Clown Secret (2018, 2020) there is a chapter Co-Creating. The Quantum Point can be the fulcrum between and…

Teaching is not easy. Every teacher needs to question their self, daily. BKS Iyengar has written a fine book on teaching called “The Tree of Yoga”. A teacher needs to provide an honest history of any subject that they offer. Professionally many practitioners of theatre and performance skills recognized long ago that my method was…

Beyond the Norm in Clown Training by Ira Seidenstein, PhDThis is a brief article on the subject of Clown Training. The point of the article is to open discussion about topics that seem to lack discourse in the field of Clown Training. There are a lot of assumptions. Here I am simply providing a counter-point…

This morning I saw a cloud that was to me like a clown’s face. I will attempt over the next 40 days to write a daily blog. Short or long. This celebrates the omen I saw in the cloud or the cloud that I chose to read as if it was an omen. Yesterday my…