Cheeky Dramaturgy: Lee Minora @ Edfringe 2017

CHEEKS

Written & performed by Lee Minora

Directed by OBIE AWARD winning Scott Sheppard

Lady Elizabeth Edwards has been making art in solitude. You are the first people she’s seen in a decade, and you are a complete disappointment!

This is Cheeks: a brutal clown show, that melds contemporary stand-up, bouffon clown and hands-on audience play. Laugh through your fear while this one-woman beast sucks the marrow from your funny bone all while taking on the tropes of our most revered female artists.

No one is safe in this weapons-grade comedy, where everything is up for grabs – except her p*ssy!

Cheeks by Lee Minora

Directed by Obie Award Winning Scott Sheppard

Venue: Silk (Venue 444)    

Date: August 5th - 26th  (No Show Monday the 14th)    

Time: 18:20 (6:20pm)

Show runs 50 minutes

What was the inspiration for this performance?

Cheeks began as a dare for me, the performer and ended up a dare for you, the viewer.

In the summer of 2016, my co-collaborator Brad Wrenn proposed a dare, that we each make a solo show for The Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

We had just finished creating It’s So Learning with The Berserker Residents: an interactive, bouffon take on the American school system. And I was hungry for more of this style called: bouffon clown. Never one to back down from a dare, I accepted and began making CHEEKS with only the bouffon clown in mind.

The word Bouffon comes from the Latin verb buffare meaning to puff or fill the cheeks with air; the practice of making oneself grotesque to provoke laughter.

The bouffon clown is corporeal and merciless, using mockery and aggression to illuminate hypocrisy and pulverize reverence. Personally, I always had a way with mockery and aggression but little chance to display that gift. As a woman, I had tried to soften those aspects of myself -perhaps unsuccessfully but nonetheless- I tried!

As a bouffon, I not only got to sharpen my comedic knife, but twist it to boot! In this form, I began to find my place as female artist and lose it simultaneously. Bouffon has a way of exposing that type of complicated truth. As I played in the bouffon style, I found a freedom in my body and an immense pleasure in my performance. A pleasure and freedom, that I realized had, at times, been missing from my practice.

As a bouffon, I was embracing all of the fleshy, carnal realities of my body and the aggressive, confrontational, aspects of my intellect. I was weaponized, grotesque and funny as hell! But while I could embrace this pleasure alone, in a lab, once exposed it quickly fell under the scrutiny of society, cultural norms and gender roles.

These became the questions of CHEEKS: can an artist make work for only herself? In isolation? Or does an artist need a viewer? Can she expunge the need for approval? Can she be the keeper of her pleasure? And even her pain?

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?

Oh, I ask myself that all the time. I think theater is most effective when it uses the superpowers of theater; therefore I create original comedic performances that capitalize on the liveness of theater performance. The work I am most drawn to is dangerous, funny, irreverent and challenging.

My litmus test as a creator is: “Could I watch this on TV?” If the answer is yes, why go to the theater? I aim to embrace and elevate the exchange between audience and performer, 4th wall be damned! No one is safe. I expunge passive viewership. Clown work in particular, deftly employs these principles. To me, the excitement that clown and its many sub-styles, capture is based in its huge capacity for failure.

The more I invite the audience to be active viewers the more I open myself to great risk and in that space is the necessity of theatre and that’s a reason to join other people in a room together. That’s something you can’t watch on TV.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I studied theater at Temple University in the United States. When I became a theater major at 18 year old, I didn't realize I could create my own work . Then I began working with a MFA directing candidate studying there named Felipe Vergara and he was the first person to ask me to create something myself from the ground up.

I continued to work with him after graduating and found an immense freedom in creating my own work. When I make my own work I can ask the questions I most interested in, I’m no longer beholden to old plays with problematic female characters, I get to follow my impulses and bring to life my own vision.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

CHEEKS is immensely interactive. I always want my audience to feel like they are in good hands, even when I’m creating a feeling of danger in the piece.

The first piece I created for CHEEKS was called “The Slap”. Part of my pallette for the show was my pleasure and my pain as a female artist. I wanted to examine if I ever have ownership of my pain or violence directed towards me. I was curious if I could get someone from the audience to agree to slap me and if I could implicate the viewer in this act of violence with their own laughter.

And the answer is yes, people find this very funny and to be fair it is wrapped in some hilarious content. But there is a certain treatment required for such a request; caring for the viewer is an important part of my approach.

Additionally, I was asking a lot of questions about my pleasure as performer while making the piece and I tried to make the process match the content. My rehearsal room has a keen

sense of play and pleasure. I’m always trying to find the game in the room, trying to make my director break, trying to let the show get ahead of me in a joyful way.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

CHEEKS is my first solo show so I can't really say if it fits with my style as a solo artist. I typically creates work with an ensemble.

I can see that the proposals I make in group collaborations are part of the same family as my solo work but in CHEEKS these proposals are undiluted. CHEEKS is my usual work on steroids.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

Well it’s a comedy so I hope people get to laugh, firstly. When they leave the show, I hope that it keeps ringing out like a bell after it’s been struck, that it reverberates in their minds and makes them ask some questions about what we agreed to laugh at and why it was funny.

That they have had an experience of being pulled between the pleasure of the comedy and the pain of what made it funny.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

The entire show is audience experience therefore they are always at the forefront of my mind. As I said above, making sure the audience feel that they are in good hands is of paramount importance to me. I need them to settle in so that they can let their guards down.

Comedy is a great scalpel for opening people up to receive a critique. So I make sure the show has a way of easing you into the participation like a warm bath except it’s filled with sharks. Ha ha.

“Fun, ridiculous and absurdly grotesque. Lee Minora’s show Cheeks is everything I love about comedy!”

- Red Bastard (Eric Davis)

Philadelphia-based artist Lee Minora, makes its international debut at Silk with PBH Free Fringe. Cheeks is directed by Scott Sheppard. Sheppard is the co-creator of Underground Railroad Game, for which he won an OBIE award for Best New American Work.

*PHILADELPHIA FRINGE TOP PICK*

- PHINDIE, DEB MILLER

*TOP 6 RACY PHILLY FRINGE SHOWS TO SEE*

- PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE, RACHEL VIGODA

Lee Minora is a Philadelphia-based, performer, creator, and stand-up comedian.

Lee has created original work with The Berserker Residents, Applied Mechanics, New Paradise Laboratories, Pig Iron and Found Theater Company where she was a founding member.

Regionally, she has appeared with EgoPo Classic Theatre, The Lantern Theater, Quintessence Theatre Group, The Scranton Shakespeare Festival and Renegade Theater.  

Scott Sheppard- is an OBIE Award winning theater artist living in Philadelphia. As Co-Director of the Philadelphia-based theater company Lightning Rod Special, he has been a creator/performer for all of their productions.

Scott is a member of the inaugural class at Pig Iron’s School for Advanced Performance Training (2011-2013) and was a creator/performer for Pig Iron Theatre Company’s 99 Breakups and a performer in PITC’s Gentlemen Volunteers (2015-16 remount). Recent credits: co-creator/performer in Underground Railroad Game (Ars Nova 2016, FringeArts 2015, 2016), co-creator/performer in Holden (Ice Factory, NYC and FringeArts, Philadelphia) and Sans Everything (AS220, Providence and Charlestown Working Theater, Boston) and Barrymore nominated performer in The Stinky Cheeseman (Arden Theatre Co., Philadelphia). Scott is also a 2016 recipient of the Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Performing Arts and a 2017 OBIE Award winner for Best New American Theater Work (Underground Railroad Game).

Dark Dramaturgy: Skrimshanks @ Edfringe 2016

Skrimshanks

Assembly George Square Theatre Omnitorium      

22:30 (23:30) 3-28 Aug (Not 16, 22)

You were raised to believe anything was possible. To never to settle for second best. Follow your heart. Now it's time to live the dream and you can't even get an interview for an unpaid internship. 

From the depths of somewhere dark and unpleasant, two distorted freaks scamper to the surface ready to hold a mirror up to your paltry existence. The frivolous frailty of your fragile life. Face your fears, laugh at your weaknesses. Skip into the night, lighter, unburdened. Witness our beautiful, disgusting bouffon double act. An exhilarating, hilariously confrontational satire on the human condition.

What was the inspiration for this performance?

Essentially we wanted to put on lots of makeup and maternity tights, stuff foam into the maternity tights and then prance about. We've been looking for reasons to justify this since that eureka moment. 

Have we found said reasons? 

You'll have to come and see the show. 

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

We both live quite near each other and there's a good pub in between. We had worked together hither and thither previously and not fallen out to an irreparable extent.  Thus it seemed like a goer.

How did you become interested in making performance?

Did poorly at school, always quite liked showing off. You don't need A-Levels to go to Drama school. Boom. 

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?

 Largely yes.  We both work in slightly different ways though we both drink a lot of tea.   I think we have a lot of common ground but have taken a leap with this show.  Improvisation is a big part of both of our processes.  However, allowing that space for the unexpected on stage is something we've really run with this time.  Not trying to mitigate against the show going somewhere unexpected is something we were both keen to push.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

Conflict. By that we mean a conflict of desires. The desire to stay and experience it and the desire to run away.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

Bribery and inducements, psychological experiments, torture techniques (no really). 

n.b. not the really bad torture the key stage 1 kind of stuff. Sensory deprivation, confusion that sort of thing. 

Do you see your work within any particular tradition? 

Absolutely. Bouffon and the tradition of mockery. The role of the fool to make us question how we live our lives. 

Within that tradition we are looking for how we do that in today's world. 

Laugh? I almost had a revelation of truth.

Dramaturgy gets Scratchy: Ruxy Cantir @ BOUFFON SCRATCHINGS

BOUFFON SCRATCHINGS

7:30pm, Saturday June 25th 2016

Main Hall, Assembly Roxy Edinburgh, 2 Roxburgh Place EH8 9SU

Tickets £7.00

The team behind Clown Cabaret Scratch Night gleefully present BOUFFON SCRATCHINGS, our first bouffon scratch night: a cabaret style den of iniquity and hilariously sharp moral musings from a variety of Scotland’s finest up and coming performers.

Plutôt la Vie, CloWnStePPing and Melanie Jordan welcome you to a feast of dark delights as our hideously charming Bouffons invite you into a netherworld of insidious pleasure... 

Featuring: Calum MacAskill, Lucy Amsden, Ruxy Cantir, Beth Frieden, Charlotte Hastings, Ronan McMahon, Sita Pieraccini, Dylan Read, Max Scratchmann, and Andrew Simpson.

You've enjoyed our clowns, now welcome to the dark side…

Bouffon Scratchings is directed and produced by Tim Licata, Artistic Director of Plutôt la Vie, Fringe First award winner Melanie Jordan and Sarás Feijoó, Creative Director of CloWnStePPinG. Bouffon Scratchings is self-funded with support from Plutôt la Vie and the Assembly Roxy.

Clown Cabaret Scratch Night has produced five

extremely successful nights since 2014 and has been invited to participate in Conflux's Surge Festival in July 2016. CCSN Special Edition will be presented at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow on Sat. July 30th 2016 as part of Surge - Scotland's annual festival of street arts, physical theatre and circus produced by Conflux in partnership with Merchant City Festival in Glasgow.

 What was the inspiration for this performance?

Sita Pieraccini and I (Ruxy Cantir) are collaborating on making a short bouffon piece entitled I am are ART. In it, an unearthly duo use a sorry homeless person as their subject matter for a new piece of live art for an eager, intellectually acute audience. I am are ART is a commentary on our inability as people to ever deal with the reality of our world in any capacity.

Sita and I were both interested in working with each other and when we started brainstorming about the things that make us laugh and tick, we naturally gravitated toward a common experience – volunteering at a festival. We both had stories that were fresh at the time, so we just went ahead with it, especially since the subject matter concerned us, as artists, as well.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

Sita and I had talked about creating and performing something together before, and this seemed like the perfect performance opportunity – a scratch night during the summer in a form that we both enjoy.

How did you become interested in making performance?

You mean in creating and devising my own work? My first courses in physical theatre in London are responsible for that. I was a decent actor, but misfit lots of roles, especially as a woman who doesn't have a dewy-eyed sensitive demeanour. In my first Neutral Mask and Clown classes, all of a sudden, I could do the thing that was aching to get out and hadn't had an outlet in drama class before. This is, of course, a much longer story, but this is a nice and concise start to it.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?

More or less, yah. We began with an image and the character duo, and went from there. The first rehearsal was creating a mask for the characters and try to get through what happens in the piece, in very large brush strokes, with bouts of improvisation. 

And after that, lots of detail work-age and building the relationship between the two characters. The form of Bouffon allows space for directed improvisation, so we've allowed ourselves that, especially when we perform on June 25th – responding to each other and to the audience in time and space.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

Laughter and mystery. That laughter that comes from an unknown place within you that bubbles out in a sound that is unfamiliar to you.

I mention Mystery because the Bouffon characters that we will bring to life are of a different world – a ferociously grotesque one that spawned terrible, yet intelligent entities. You wouldn't recognize this world, but you won't be able to take your eyes off because they remind you of something you used to know before.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

Character development and relationship building, first of all. Secondly, we are playing a lot of with contradictions – pushing one side only to reveal the other.

Black is never far from white, and so we ride that thin line that is disturbingly delicious. We'll sing you a beautiful-sounding song but with disgusting lyrics, or we'll dedicate a graceful dance to the problem of homelessness right after stretching our legs on the homeless person lying right next to us. Or something else equally as terrible, but just as true.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?

Well, I define myself as a physical theatre artist and actor-creator. I have trained and formed my perspective (which continues to evolve) in a physical theatre devising programme (Dell'Arte International) so I'd say I come from that tradition, for sure. This, of course, means very many different things for different people. 

I normally try to clarify and say that when I say Physical Theatre, I mean using the body as a highly transformative instrument and in-dweller of the Other (character). And so, my work will include: physical comedy, eccentric characterization, Movement theatre, Mask work, among others. 

With a series of stellar evenings under their belt, the Clown Cabaret Scratch Night team throws caution to the wind and takes another leap of faith to present Bouffon Scratchings, Scotland's first evening of Bouffon Cabaret.  

Bouffon Scratchings offers an opportunity for emerging and established performers to explore the theatrical territory and tradition of Bouffon; a style of performance was explored and re-invigorated by Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier at Lecoq's famed theatre school in Paris.

Bouffons are the lowest of the low.  They have nothing to lose, so are completely Free.  Their Freedom is a huge power.  Their weapons are their enormous laughter, intelligent eyes and biting parody. 

Social misfits, soothsayers, outcasts, shunned and feared... Bouffons embrace their ugliness and bless their hideous form for saving them from the hypocrisy of ‘God’s beautiful children…’.  Their performance is a vicious parody of our ‘great and good’ society.  Remember... we're all in it together...!

Their only fear is to be killed before their parody has hit home…

Ruxy Cantir @ Flux

Although she doesn't have the same immediate, grotesque

Ruxy in the past

physicality of Red Bastard, Ruxy Cantir's Pickled Republic is clearly within the same bouffon tradition as Eric Davis' monstrous creation. 

Pondering her possible decline into the horror of old age as a stereotypical East European Woman, Cantir leaps and eats and talks and argues with herself, using a chance encounter on a bus to meditate on her own love of pickled food and the fashion choices that will someday condemn her. Her character is witty, engaging and playful: even when she contorts her body to represent her aged nemesis, she is charming and only slightly terrifying.

Ruxy in the future

The bouffon - the dark clown - has a reputation for aggression. Cantir turns this rage on herself, poking at her doubts, her fear of aging. Between the laughs and the pickles strewn across the stage, she addresses a common fear of slowing becoming the very thing she hates. While she draws on her roots in Moldavia, her thoughts are familiar. The bouffon brings the hidden to light, the usually unspoken prejudices, the unacceptable. 

More Cantir, please.

The Dramaturgicon: Ali Maloney @ Edfringe 2015

The Fringe

What inspired this production: did you begin with an idea or a script or an object?
This particular show, HYDRONOMICON, was inspired by a variety of ideas. I was interested in exploring how to mould the bouffon discipline to storytelling. I was particularly struck by two shows that operated in, or around, bouffon: Red Bastard and Al Seed's Fooligan. (Aside: Red Bastard for me, was the closest I have ever been to seeing slam-dancing to spoken word, which is something I strive to achieve.) I was keen to explore the issues and techniques used by them and see how they could fit into my own style of performance poetry. 

Concurrently to this, I also had this idea of telling the story of the end of the world by flooding. Traditionally, flood myths always open with humanity bringing the wrath of the gods upon themselves; if there was ever a situation that invited the satirical sneer of the bouffon, it is this: would we deserve to be annihilated? Probably, yes.


Why bring your work to Edinburgh?
I live here so, inevitably, the majority of my formative theatrical experiences were at the Festival, so it makes sense to have aspired to perform here too. That, and I live here, so it's easy and cheap(er than it otherwise would be here) and I can sleep in my own bed rather than ten to a mattress squat.


What can the audience expect to see and feel - or even think - of your production?
There are jokes, and there are moments of utter bleakness; there are moments of flippant silliness, there are moments of terrifying truth. Sometimes these moments happen all at the same time. I want the audience to be entertained while questioning how they live, I want the audience to be taken on a narrative journey while being worked up into a revolutionary frenzy.

It is said that the ideal audience response to a bouffon show is to laugh uproariously throughout the whole show, then go home and kill themselves. I wouldn't want that to happen - the second bit, I mean, not the laughter; the laughter's ok though, isn't it? - but it's that dichotomy of response I am interested in.


The Dramaturgy Questions
How would you explain the relevance - or otherwise - of dramaturgy within your work?
As someone operating, nominally, within performance poetry / spoken word, this is something I need to address anew with each project. In some respects, performance poetry lies at the root of theatre, and yet still is establishing its own dramaturgical conventions. As an art form and a medium, it is undergoing somewhat of resurgence and yet we are still striving to leave the cliché of the unsteady voice reading awful angst from clutched and quivering pages.

Dramaturgy is of vital consideration to anyone who is doing anything on stage and in front of an audience, for that is where theatre happens. There is a tendency within spoken word to consider itself as somehow distinct from theatre (or stand-up comedy for that matter) which I fundamentally disagree with. It should be a very physical and tactile experience; anything less and it’s just someone reading off paper.

In this respect, it becomes a question of how I interpret a set of poems (or more likely, a rag-tag of fragments and platitudes) into a coherent piece of theatre.

What particular traditions and influences would you acknowledge on your work - have any particular artists, or genres inspired you and do you see yourself within their tradition?

Bouffon, weird fiction, backpacker rap, grotesque burlesque, horror, cosmic pessimism, plunderphonica, Dadaism; I enjoy, and am mostly inspired by, culture that attempts to eschew tradition and deliberately crosses boundaries. So yes, I see myself as being in the tradition of the flippant anti-tradition. I am very aware that my work as spoken word artist, as a band and as theatre are all, to a large extent, indistinguishable - and that is an ambiguity in which I thrive, but makes being booked more problematic (LOLZ).

Some specific things that I enjoy and inform my work: Lauremont’s Maldoror, Bill Burroughs, Svankmajer, blackSKYwhite, Berkoff’s Kafka adaptations, Keiji Haino, The League of Gentlemen, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Mr Bungle, Zdzisław Beksiński, Chris Morris and so on and on.

Do you have a particular process of making that you could describe - where it begins, how you develop it, and whether there is any collaboration in the process?
I keep being asked if I write the words first, then choreograph them, or if I start the other way around. The truth is, it’s a little of each but, really, it all starts with a concept, an idea or a central image. Out of that, words and movements tend to extrapolate themselves.

Despite the fact that I almost always work in collaboration (normally with musicians), a lot of the development work goes on inside my head (normally in the shower).

What do you feel the role of the audience is, in terms of making the meaning of your work?
They are there to play, and to be played with.