Bonzuko

Offline the rest of the day, lovely lurkers~ ~The Birthday Girl

altered book journal page: old photo + alice + pens

Jen, Nicole and Dani's first tableau

Go to the3220.blogspot.com to see our preliminary tableaux for 1775 movement scenes. They’re all doing scenes from The Rivals, by Sheridan. ~Jenn

Peruse this website chock full of lovely blade-work in general, but also some top-notch-looking sword canes. ~Jenn

I’ve posted about master clown Bill Irwin several times here on Daily Cross-Swords, because I was heavily into clowning as a young performer, and after taking a workshop from him way back in my formative years,* I realized he’s a true master of movement arts, let alone clowning. I also had the good fortune to see him much later on in Waiting for Godot in Seattle, which is a classic role for a tramp clown. I flatter myself that as I trained through high school and college I got some professional praise in that area of theatre, and I’m positive it was because I took that one class with Bill Irwin.

Anyway, as I move into the age he was when he taught that class way back when, I’ve followed his career as best I could. His roles in Northern Exposure and Sesame Street were very much in the vein of his clowning style, but then as the years rolled on, I heard he had starred quite successfully** in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This surprised me, as I had not heard of anything not-clowning or movement-related he had done before, and the role of George is very acting-heavy, not at all a movement-actor’s part. This brings me to why I’m writing this post today in particular:

Unbeatable Team Bonzuko watches CSI on a regular basis. Bill Irwin has a recurring role on this show named Nate Haskell. The character of Haskell is a psychotic killer, and again, it’s not a role about mastery of movement but a role about intense acting. I’ve been mulling this over lately, as he’s brilliantly scary as Haskell, but I still remember his loose-limbed clown persona, and constantly try to connect the two, or at least see if I can trace the journey from Mr. Noodle to Nate Haskell. Also it makes me wonder why he’s not doing the clowning so much anymore–I’m sure a lot of it has to do with age and ability–even a master like him must find that the older he gets, the less loose-limbed he is. But it also occurs to me that if he weren’t so brilliant, in other words if that was the only color in his spectrum, he’d have sunk into clown oblivion instead of winning Tonys and landing intense roles on blockbuster TV shows. So there are many facets to this man as a performer, and if you haven’t sampled his work, please do so. Stage Movement students, especially look at his clowning! ~Jenn

*I remember one day he actually brought in David Shiner and they showed us some “rough cuts” of what would later be Fool Moon, the amazing Broadway clowning show. He actually asked us, his class, for feedback since it was all rough. We were all like, “Um, yeah. It’s amazing. You’re amazing.”

**He won a Tony, in fact.

Here’s a sort-of badly-recorded video of him–this is one of his classic bits: you can see the “loose-limbed” style I’m talking about.

Team Bonzuko has been enjoying new Parkour-competition show Jump City on G4 lately. Here’s a clip: ~Jenn

“The kitty’s upper respiratory infection was soothed by a prescription of amoxicillin.”

~Jason

Thanks to stellar blog mental_floss for posting this lovely screentest of the late great Bruce Lee. As they say, “Prepare to be hypnotized by Bruce Lee

Behold this link from stellar blog i09 re: the weirdest fight scene magic in strange film. Yeah. So it’s weird. ~Jenn