the Way of the Showman
Philosophical and esoteric perspectives from a modern day Showman.
Each season is different in its approach. S1 is essays. S2 is one book length attempt at Understanding Showmanship, S3 is conversations with remarkable Showfolk. The brand new Season 4 explores the relationship between Showmanship and Play.
The host, Captain Frodo, internationally renowned circus performer, director, writer, husband and dad lays out, in great detail, his practical performance philosophy for performers who seek to deepen the conversation with their audiences and themselves. You can find him, and more of his writing at: www.thewayoftheshowman.com
the Way of the Showman
129 - Beyond Spectacle: The Art and Philosophy of Freak Shows with Anna Maria Sienicka 3 of 4
What if the raw spectacle of freak shows holds an unexpected depth that challenges our understanding of art? Join us for a captivating discussion with Anna Maria Sienicka, a PhD student and lecturer at Paris Nanterre University, as we explore the philosophy behind these controversial performances. We tackle the question of whether freak shows, often dismissed as mere curiosity-driven entertainment, might contain a kernel of cultural significance worth preserving, much like the multifaceted allure of opera.
We venture into the fascinating parallels between slapstick comedy and poetry, uncovering how these seemingly simple forms can evolve into profound reflections on life and death. Our conversation reveals how entertainment transcends mere escapism, becoming a medium for exploring deeper human experiences. We also spotlight influential figures like Matt Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz, who redefine the freak show genre, transforming it into a platform for artistic expression that challenges societal norms.
Continuing our exploration, we examine the blurred line between art and entertainment, questioning traditional views on what constitutes artistic merit. From comic books to the French art scene's take on American freak shows, we highlight how diverse mediums evoke visceral responses that defy intellectual categorization. We also discuss the childlike fascination with the monstrous within freak shows, drawing on personal anecdotes to illustrate the primal curiosity they inspire. Finally, we celebrate the artistic lifestyle of showmen, whose unique existence on the road reflects a life steeped in performance art akin to modern-day shamanism.
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Greetings, fellow travellers, and welcome to the way of the showman, where we view the world through the lens of showmanship. I am Captain Frodo and I will be your host and your guide along the way as we continue to explore the philosophy of Freak Show with Anna Maria Sienica. She is a PhD student and a lecturer at Paris Nanterre University, and the last two episodes have also been with her, and I am continuing to enjoy these episodes as I edit them and put them together so that we are prepared for the release of all of this, and I hope that you do too. And it's interesting whenever we talk about these subjects.
Speaker 1:Of course, I do believe that we do it with tact and tone and with a lot of heart, but of course there's many of these topics that can be triggering for everyone. So perhaps we can think of these explorations of the ways of presenting humans as monsters and the way to present anyone as a freak to as a kind of a inoculation, to be able to talk about themes and topics and taboos of culture and human existence without being too scared, and perhaps that is the role that the freak show might have played in the cultural psyche, as those faithful listeners who have heard the previous two episodes, you know now about the specific sideshow tradition that existed in France and we know from movies and history about the freak shows in America and freak shows existed were also exhibited in England as well.
Speaker 1:So these things they do exist around, but not everywhere. So perhaps the freak shows can be a kind of inoculation, a kind of vaccine to calm people down. Maybe it served as that back then too. Of course it's about sensationalism, Of course there was abuse, but so there is in everything. But I'm always looking for is there a kernel of good in here somewhere, Something that's worth keeping and something that's worth spreading? And I do believe so. And I think we're getting closer and closer by talking all the way around it, Because the really great and grand things that is worth exploring are so big that we can't quite speak out exactly what it is. But I think as we enter into our third hour of this we'll get closer.
Speaker 3:That's something I encounter when I'm. That's the moral shock to work on this from an aesthetic point of view. The second problem I encounter is that it's pure entertainment, and as a famous French killjoy said, Pascal, that entertainment is what makes us forget about our human condition, about death. So it cannot be art.
Speaker 3:And the third problem, the problem that my colleagues from philosophy have with me studying freak shows as art, is that it shouldn't be and couldn't be considered art because it's something that plays only on mere curiosity. By that I mean that if you see a freak show act, it's a one-time thing. You want to see the freak, you want to see the act, and once you've seen it, there is no more. To see the Frick, you want to see the act and once you've seen it, there is no more to see, Whereas when you go to the opera to see a ballet, it's something that gives you this aesthetic emotion that can be renewed, Whereas the Frick show is, like I said, a one time thing. So do you think this the Frick Show gig, the one you do, for example is something that a person who comes to see it one time can see it another time and still feel something different? Is it something that can be renewed.
Speaker 1:It is absolutely something that can be renewed and I believe there is depth and detail to be found everywhere. We can see the universe in a grain of sand, as Blake said, and if you, I think, when you don't know very much about something, you think you know everything dunning-kruger effect they call that. So the person who goes to the opera and goes to the next opera and goes to the next opera because each time it's being renewed to the person who hates opera they're going, it's the same shit. It's fat ladies singing and it's just going on and on and on and it's dramatic and everyone is sitting there and it takes four hours, is longer than what you naturally can sit and enjoy something. So it is difficult to watch because the time is too long. It's like performance arts that takes it. People do the one I often say you can take in a performance art setting here happening. You can take a great cabaret act and you do this act, but it takes six hours. Now, it's performance art. It's not difficult to pay attention to and each bit lasts so long that you go and anyway. So I think to say to dismiss freak show or dismiss any thing out of hand and to go.
Speaker 1:I don't think that these things, that this kind of comments can be made after having delved into the subject like you are doing, because there is depth to it and on my, on my end of things, my specific act, which has it looks at the beginning, when, the first time, when you see it, when you see what I think of as the art level, when I see the artifice of it, it looks like a guy that comes in and is really bumbling and that it's like, oh okay, even before I really started, I get the lead from the microphone around my leg and I go and you think you are watching a guy that is clumsy and he wants to do something, and then he goes through his act and everything that can go wrong. You didn't think that there was that this many things present. It just looks like a microphone and and and two rackets, but by the end the little chair which the rackets was placed on belonged in the act as well. The lead from the microphone, the microphone itself knocked me on the head and and the mic stand was involved and the shoe falls off and the headband falls off and there's several things that happens with the headband, but it looks like there was nothing there, but every object that came out on stage, including the costuming, becomes part of it. But you don't think of those things, you just see the chaos and you go out. I was crazy.
Speaker 1:And then the next day you go and see it and you go, oh, it is exactly the same. I was completely deceived. And some people then will feel like disappointed and angry or like, oh, it wasn't real and uh. And then you look at it again and you go actually you were not watching a guy who was clumsy, you were watching a, something which is much closer to a dance. It's choreographed. And then you listen to the music and you go and and then I get out of the chaos. It looked like, but it fits with the music and you don't even notice it the first time, that it keeps fitting with the music and things go and you see, I fall off the situation to create the perfect timing for it to be experienced as real by the audience. This you don't see on the first step.
Speaker 1:If you are experienced in watching slapstick, you might maybe understand, you might get a sense of it, but you need to see it again, much like when you read a poem. The first time you read the poem, you're taking it all in and you don't know the turn it's going to make. Often it starts with it's tuesday. I'm sitting on the chair and smoking a cigarette and by the end we are talking about the universe and the death of my mother and it's. But it comes out of. And then, when you've done, you read it again, because now you know what it is and you can now explore what the emotion comes, because you're going deeper into it and um, and to me, part of the difference then between you know it's like a lecture.
Speaker 1:End of of the performance. Then I would say, before the act or during the act, you go. Remember that you can never trust reality. Reality is always more complicated. Because you see it, then you can swear to god that this is what happened. He fell off the stage. So it happens. Often people say to me I was there the night when you fell off the stage and I say that doesn't narrow it down, because I always do so in a sense. Then I can go.
Speaker 1:This talks about the deceptive nature of reality. We do not see the world as the world is. We see the world as we are. We pull out those things and my act is that it is a magic act in a way, then it's not what it seems to be and the people who go to the ballet and see the depth and the beauty of that there's as many aspects of this, which is the same in the repeat performance, because there too, um, most of those people, even the critics or the philosophers, because a lot of the philosophers who mention opera or whatever mentions it as a concept of opera, not because they necessarily are somebody who goes frequently to the opera, and certainly not people who go and see the current opera six times. Yes, because after you've seen the opera the first time, some of that. Now I want to see a different opera. What new can that do? And this you can find within us too.
Speaker 1:But okay, so then the idea of entertainment is something that makes you forget about yourself. I think this is true, and entertainment is something that makes you forget about yourself. I think this is true. And entertainment is something that makes you forget about your problems and of death, which art often is supposed to do. But the journal did not make you forget about or think about death either. So it's a little bit sort of arbitrary to say those things, because I would also go within what is being presented in freak shows. We constantly talk about challenge, narrowly escape, death or so. So I think that death, pain, suffering, all the most human things, which is being mimicked and pretended to a much larger degree in theatre and in opera, because opera also was completely artificially done.
Speaker 1:People were going OK, well, we want to combine the power of music with the power of poetry, with the power of the emerging novel, so we want to put these things together and in the beginning in the history of opera, it was not particularly good. It was basically people saying some stuff. And here comes the song, which is musical, is maybe closer towards that, and then it evolved into through a long period, and then you can look at that history and appreciate opera more. For who was the great achievers of the, of this and? But this has also sort of happened within, uh, within um, a freak show. But then we are back to what I the first thing that I said. Most people who work within the freak show genre are just on level one and they will always be on level one. I'm gonna put it in my tongue ah, crazy, thank you, I'm finished. And but this does not mean that it doesn't have a greater power and, looking at the work of matt fraser and julie atlas muse for those people.
Speaker 1:There are people who work here franco b or people who are working performance artists who are fully within that friction uh, with the bloodletting of franco b, or of of stellark, with this groundbreaking body suspensions or or so, because of ago, it was crazy. And all of these as examples are showing the power and potential of the elements of freak show in art, in being reinvented. But I think also it's in the current time. Now people are very suspicious to entertainment, so much so that then, and rightfully so I'm not against it in so because it is interesting, though there is maybe a difference between the alternate.
Speaker 1:There is a difference between art and entertainment, but that doesn't mean that entertainment can't have incredibly powerful artistic content which can change a person's life or make them look at their life differently or change what they do for a living because of something they saw, something that can happen through.
Speaker 1:It can also happen through a musical and through other things, and some of the people who are touched by these things are people who, for financial or just sociological reasons, does not go to the ballet like it's it's a closed off world, not just because of the fact that you have to go to the opera and all of that, but it's that this is not part of your upbringing and I think that you can, within very different mediums, find the meaning in your own existence and you will find it and you can find it. Just like comic books was not an area of neither study nor critical review in New York Times book review or whatever, until Sandman by Neil Gaiman and the Invisibles by Grant Morrison in the mid-80s for the first time. And then Mouse came out. What's his name? Who make this one art spiegelman? Then comic books started to enter into the world of art in a way that people are still saying, oh, it's not art.
Speaker 1:But this argument is being harder and harder to make because artists started to present comic books differently, and I think this still. We see it in glimpses and when you put them together, okay, where's that?
Speaker 1:like did this, and then frank or b did this, and then, um julie afters muse did this and then with my phrase that they did the beauty and beast or whatever, and you can look at and there's lots of elements.
Speaker 1:Of course you can draw in many different directions and then you can make this argument and that needs to be made, probably over and over again. I think in robert bogdan's book is one of the first books who seriously treated this and it was he was warned or whatever. This is not the topic that we talk about and I'm sure the first phds that were written about comic books had the same effect and that shows it takes the advancement of the academies happens one funeral at the time, of course, so it goes in generational things. But anyway, I think maybe I've covered some of those things. You said, yeah, but to say that something is mere entertainment or just entertainment, is this word just, it's just somehow belittled, and you go, I have the measure of everything that this is and it is nothing and I say this is a red flag for the dunning-kruger effect and you can bring out all of your knowledge in that conversation and go.
Speaker 1:you can't dismiss these things easily, like when it stacks up like that, whether it is death, forgetting yourself or um, or it being enjoyed and being joyful to watch that you actually enjoy it. That it's not, ooh yeah, so I'll stop talking, sorry.
Speaker 3:I think one of the problems I face with my research is the specific we were talking about upbringing, but the French art scene that is really unused to the freak show, even though we have our own French tradition of displaying people for profit, for entertainment, for art, which is called the entre-sorts, but it's mostly forgotten now. So when we think in France about freak shows, we mostly think about the American freak show, so something that for French people and it's of course it's with a very strong anti-American sentiment, very French, that's something less than, and also it's something more extreme. It makes me think about, I think, an interview I read with the Enigma, the tattooed man from the Jim Rowe Circus. He said that the difference between magic and the freak show is that with magic people ask themselves how is it done?
Speaker 3:And with freak show it is why is it done? Because it's shocking, it's extreme, sometimes it's dumb. Why are they doing this? And for French people, I think it's really this why, just why and we were talking about pushing boundaries, this don't try this at home vibe that the freak show has, and that's something that most French people must be reluctant to consider as art, because it provokes a very visceral reaction and, in French, thought. When it's visceral, when it's the body that reacts to what you see, it is not intellectual because you cannot reflect on it, you just feel yeah, but this is wonderful, just even this phrase not intellectual.
Speaker 1:Well, this is not even this phrase not intellectual. This is not intellectual. And you go. Did Merleau-Bonty make no difference in the world? It is exactly right. It is not just intellectual.
Speaker 1:And Freak Show is pointing us to a fact that when Descartes goes, goes we, I think. Therefore, I am, we go, yeah, that's true, but also I feel. Therefore, I am not just feeling in the heart, but also the feeling and the touch. I am sensual. This, therefore I am, because all of those things are true at the same time.
Speaker 1:It's true that we think and everything, and it is true that it is not intellectual, because what the delivery tool or whatever the mode of expression in Freak Show more than all these others, is that it really really goes after the strong emotions. It belongs in the Freak Show. When the emotion gets too strong, when it's not just the sensual titillation of looking at the trapeze artist who has the legs nude to be able to do the tricks, but when it becomes, when she takes this and turns it one step further, or when you swallow the sword or you do, or you are a freak, then you take. The emotions now that you get from this are so strong. It's revulsion, it's sexuality lust, and it is death defying, or there is blood where you're closer to death than ever, like how can you say that watching Franco bleed onto the paper where he is literally now? If he does not take this out now, then he will die.
Speaker 2:And then of course people will say, yeah, but this is not freak show.
Speaker 1:This is, then, art, it's performance, art. It's different, and you go, but this is what's happening here. But when it's taken into a different arena, you can call it something else, but it's the same thing. And if this does not invoke and make you think about and remember death, then I don't know what would make it, make it happen. But this thing that it is not intellectual, I think it's. This is true. It is not intellectual, I think this is true. It works on a different dimension of what it means to be a human being and it really takes into account the body, the deepest of emotions, the fear of death, of sexual desire, of encountering the other in any form that it comes, which is like this primal thing in us. But I know also, of course, out of all the places I have performed as well, I, well, I performed in Paris for nine months in 2009-2010, at Bobinon, in Saint-Parnasse Rue Saint-Parnasse anyway and then we performed there, and when I first started and I kind of forgot about that, but the idea I got used to getting a certain kind of reaction, and then the show that I was in for the first time divided into two kind of and opened in london at the same time because we had played the year before for nine months in london and then they booked uh, just booked that show, and we played in uh in france, in in paris, and then the same christmas period came up again in Britain and they went we need the show to go on here because it's growing still and they put it on and I was performing in Paris and then. But then the boss said we wanted to come here for this week and perform in England and I had been having the greatest time in france and I was getting fantastic reviews and so they really got my act and they thought it was very funny and great and whatever. So that was great. But then I went to england and I went from performing one night and the next morning we drove and the next night I performed in England and I was blown over so that I was. The response from the audience how loud, how welcoming, how much they laughed, how much they applauded and how they participated in it made me quite emotional so that I had to comment on it, kind of say it in the act that I'm going.
Speaker 1:I have been performing in France for the last five months and coming here is like coming home. I didn't know what I was missing, because in France and it would happen and I'm still sort of joking about it, but people would watch me and they would go. Well, you see, for a moment they lose themselves sitting in the front row and then they go. I must compose myself and struggle and you go.
Speaker 1:This is to me the picture of Victorian England when Freak Show reached its height. When people were going, we have to put cloth on the legs of the piano, because it's indecent to see the naked leg of the piano standing in the living room, whereas in the moment when everybody is this uptight, we must not show our emotion. And this time the freak show can really also flourish. I think the freak show can really also flourish. I think so. Of course, there's no other country than France where, when you flip around on the channels, most of the channels have people talking, mostly men, but those of them it's like it's people having a discussion.
Speaker 1:It's France is for me in a beautiful way. It's like an important philosopher makes a new book and it comes on the front page of the paper. Maybe not so much anymore, but intellectualism has a better standing in England, in France, than in America, where anti-intellectualism is just rampant. And it is also true that we look to America because of course they have the biggest and the best and the most. And it's like to me, pictured in the three ring circus. We already had the circus, but this is totally different. It's three circuses happening at the same time. God, that's such a stupid idea. It's just more and more and more. But more and more is not always more.
Speaker 3:I'm thinking about this extreme side of sideshows or freak shows. But when I was looking at your performances, there's something it can look painful, but it's even, maybe even, a DIY approach that the show looks like it is made with whatever materials at our hand. And my question would be do you think there is a specific kind of freak sense of humor? Because I get the impression that there is a lot of play with the possibility of failure, that something might go wrong, something that puts always everybody the performer, the audience on the edge, some kind of an art of failure that never fails. But imagine if yeah, I'm.
Speaker 1:I think failure lies as a always as a and a failure. Another aspect of failure is risk. There is risk involved. The most fundamental risk is that the performer is going to come out and that it's boring. They come out and then you go and you go. I wasted my time, I wasted my money, I was just nothing is happening here.
Speaker 1:So, like this is the most sort of I mean the risk, like the fundamental thing is, maybe this is going to be a waste of time and not be valuable to me, because this is ultimately what the show is, is the time and it's the attention for a period of time. And then the performer is the curator of this time and attention and you want to have this curation being done in such a way that the person has been enriched in some way Bodily, mentally, emotionally, in some way. This has left you enriched. It's like a transaction. I paid the money to buy the baguette. If the baguette was terrible, it was a shit transaction. So but how are we to behave in this time, when they are, when you're encountering them, and that's this risk and the risk of failure is what I play with most in my tennis thing and, of course, I am playing with failure, but I never actually fail.
Speaker 1:I'm using the tool or technique or fear of failure to create comedy. Sometimes I have had that where people see what I do and I saw people technique or fear of failure to create comedy. Sometimes I've had that where people see what I do and I saw people come to me and I do spend a lot of time working with people on acts and creating new shows and as a director, a co-creator, and then they say, oh, I want to make a bad magic act, you know and we know. I don't know if you know Otto Wesley, who lives in France of this and I go, yes, but you have, because a lot of the time their idea goes no further than doing bad magic. And I'm like a bad magic act is not actually a bad magic act, it's a really good comedy act. Because if you are watching a bad magic act of somebody, a really good comedy act. Because if you are watching a bad magic act of somebody who do not want to be bad and it's just bad and boring, then it's just a bad act and you don't get any bookings because people don't want to see it. So we are not we. It's a.
Speaker 1:The theme is failure in magic, but it still has to be a triumph of experience in a sense. So how do I do that? What is that? I think you used the word playful or you did, and this is the core of what I believe performance and showmanship is the current season that is going on at the moment. The episodes that come out are about play, so I have pre-recorded and they're coming out in amongst the interviews and chats and whatever. It's about play, and I believe that the deepest origins of performance is through human play this is not money.
Speaker 3:This, this point about playfulness, about also childlikeness. It makes me think about the figure of the monster that is that came before the freak figure. That was also a figure that was terrifying, fascinating. But the ones who believe in the monster are mostly children. So to see this childlikeness, this, the ones who believe in the monster are mostly children. So to see this childlikeness, this playfulness in freak acts for me there is something to do with this monstrous heritage that monsters are a figure for children and the freaks also somehow play on this fascination of childlike fascination for monstrous, for what is disgusting, for what is what looks like? It's clumsy, but it's not.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think there is a lot in there. I think absolutely there is something that is absolutely childlike about the freak show. It plays with super strong emotions and it plays with the kind of emotions that you feel unashamedly when you are a child, that you feel unashamedly when you are a child Fear of the dark, fear of monsters, fear of pain and fear of shame or failure or all like. It plays really strong with those in an unapologetic way. So I think, definitely, and even then the types of stories that are being told in the freak show presentations as well, they are usually really quite simplistic as well. It's um so and I think yeah, I think, I agree, I think there is something childlike in there and I think this idea of monsters or whatever because the monsters change as we grow older or so they usually take on more of a human form, specific individuals, whether it is, yeah, killers or serial killers or something, and you realize that the real monsters remain humans.
Speaker 1:The times are rare when you actually meet an animal that can kill you and when you do, it awakens something in you that you go, oh, oh, this is what reality is about. I had forgotten, but I know I met a very large predator, very large bird one time in the middle of. My wife is from Australia. We've lived there for a long time and we were in the very far in the bush and a cassowary, which is a very large bird that looks a bit like an ostrich so the larger and we're not an emu. It's got a big horn on its head and a big claws on his feet and it has made terrible damage and killed people.
Speaker 1:All of a sudden we were in the forest and this animal was in front of us and I had never been in this situation before where I was standing with someone I love and there was an animal here now which was super dangerous and we were walking on a track. And there was an animal here now which was super dangerous and we were walking on a track and it was standing right there and it goes. This is where I live and it's coming towards us and I'm like now, what do we do? They're like and the same. I think thought that I knew what I, what my role was in life, and I was performing and did that, all that.
Speaker 1:And then I became a father and in these months, when we had just had a baby, it's like a new level of reality opened up to me and going oh no, yeah, it's important that I do the shows and everything, but making sure that this little little child, that she lives, that that she does not get eaten by monsters, this is my real job, like this is. This is one more level of reality and it's, um, what is her name? Again, it's a. It's a kind of transformation, because there's a philosopher that has talked about this a lot, but there are certain kinds of transformations that you go through that you, they are not reversible.
Speaker 1:Now I am a father all the time and I can't do it and you can't quite imagine what it is like until you're actually there and you take that on, um, so there is a transformation of anyway, I am way off the topic, but um, but it's. We think we know what the world is, is is like and then you go into, because that's the thing with the freak show, it's, it's fully it can, it has childlike things, but some of the modes of presentation or so are specifically made then to grab the, grab the adult as well, whether it is it's like oh, this is the, when they have this, like they had the wild man or the wild woman, like Ika of Africa is a famous kind of banner or so, or like the wild woman, ika, and it's always got this titillation.
Speaker 1:She's wearing some kind of leopard thing and she's wearing a very short dress, and it's like you have this aspect of it which is also for the, for the adult, for the male gaze, or like. So they're presenting things which allows you to look in a certain way or whatever. Like I think it's in the diary of Adrian mole, but it's probably true Like you're a teenager back before the Internet existed and the only place where you could know that you could find naked women was in National Geographic, in these pictures of the people from other cultures without their tops off. And he's like he has these National geographics in his room because it's the only Pornography that he can get the hold of, or so I don't know what that means, but it's that mode of presentation and the show would. And then the level of reality which happens in the freak show, that there is a real person there and you're actually looking at someone. That is that is for the adult.
Speaker 1:When you then say, okay, it's a monster or whatever, and then you're born, and then the freak takes their shirt off and you see the living, deformed in quotation marks, but a non-typical flesh living and moving.
Speaker 1:And and in this moment you are encountering a monster in quotation mark, in the same way that we encountered that bird, and it changed reality for a moment. All of a sudden it's like, oh, I take my backpack on the front of my stomach and I pick up the stick and then we walk as in completely the opposite direction. But we need to go this way to get home, but to go so far away that he sort of has to chase me, and I'm hoping all he wants, this bird, or so, is to say this is where I live, don't come here. And I'm showing him, I am making all the signs to show I don't want you as the boss, I walk away from you, whatever.
Speaker 1:And in this moment that there's some sort of change when they go, oh, we have, we found this strange monster race on an island or whatever it would say in the Victorian freak show. And then somebody comes out and they are born different, with an extra arm or whatever. In the moment where, where you take it out now, you're in a real, genuine experience. That cannot be denied, because this moment now is real, it's, it's hitting you in the gut. It's making, he's making you question what's possible and all this kind of stuff. And then it is because the experience is real, even if the even if the presentation is. Is, um, that what leads you into it?
Speaker 3:or so, because maybe if they just came out and took it off, it would repulse you and you would leave, or whatever, but because you were lured in with the promise of exoticism or so, and it's the playfulness that invites you in we were talking about transformation and seeing something that completely changes the way you think about yourself, the way you think about your own life, and I remember in your podcast you said that the way of the showman is a life and a way of living, and it makes me think.
Speaker 3:About what did I want to say? Yes, that the show centers on the performance, but my question would be if the showman's entire life shouldn't be considered also as a work of art. And, to rephrase it, I would say, like, could the showman be seen as a kind of I don't know, maybe contemporary dandy? So someone who has every aspect of his life that becomes a part of the performance, that the whole life is the performance, the whole life is the show, because the showman is such an incredible figure that is always on the road, always changing the levels of reality. The work of art isn't only the gig at the venue, but the whole showman's life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there are people who have. What do they call those two guys who have claimed that everything you do is their art? What's the guy called that was in the room with the puma, with the American lion, anyway, there are people who say that life is art and everything. But for me, everything that I do, which is me in this room, here, this is where I do a lot of my stuff. This and the next room is where I have all of my books for and my props the second room is where I have the props over and this is everything that I do here is just a stepping stone towards the art, because my art does not come into full fruition.
Speaker 1:Me being in here and doing my act in rehearsal is not a show. In the same way, because to me, the definition of the show is me facing the opposite way to an audience and having something to show, something to show which affords this extra dimension of reality where we enter symbolic and poetic spaces so that we can interact. So when I am here doing this, everything is in preparation for the real moment of encountering of that, of the performance. So my whole life, which, everything that I read, whether it is philosophy or it is. It is a history.
Speaker 1:This is mainly freak show stuff for feet, circus stuff and then my magic things is in the next room. All of those things that I do in preparation is in preparation for the encounter with, with the audience, and this is when the real artist because the rehearsal is not art to me, I mean it is an artistic process and it's a necessary step because if I, if I have an idea, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that and I'm gonna do this and I don't rehearse it and it's going to go out and I want to balance all these things and then it's all gonna smash.
Speaker 1:And then I'm gonna do this, if I go out and I don't rehearse it, and it takes, and that means it won't be particularly funny or enjoyable, it won't have the perfect structure and that drives you in. It won't be effortless to watch. Maybe the same things happen, and then it would. If I did that in an art studio as an art piece, then people will go oh wow, that was interesting how he did all this, how he did all this. But if I rehearse that here and rehearse it and rehearse it and rehearse it, then I can. I can make it poetic and I can control every moment in the way that a movie that is just a bunch of footage is also kind of a movie, and. But but by crafting each moment and taking care of each visual, taking care of the light, taking care of the, we are in, in one way, creating a very large structure of artifice, something artificial, but we are doing it to tell the truth better, or to tell the truth so that it will reach you stronger.
Speaker 1:Poetry is not just a lot of words, it's every like the novel. Maybe you can say you can take out lots of stuff of the novel, and the story will still be there, but poems. And maybe then you go to the extreme, like the haiku poem, and you cannot take out one word because there are almost no words there and the only words that are left are there to create that experience. Um, now I lost my thread. What it was that I was talking about? Oh yeah, art is art, life. So I would say that my life, everything that I'm living and reading and feeling and experiencing, I can potentially then use myself as that lens to take this emotion and I can express it on stage. To take this emotion and I can express it on stage, so I express the soul-swallowing. But I read a lot about religion and the religious experience.
Speaker 1:I'm interested in this because I think it's on a spectrum with what we do. I subscribe strongly to the idea that shamanism evolved. The elements of what I do and what happens in freak show and what happens in performance, in showmanship comes, has roots in shamanism, and I believe that there is a there that we are. We are on one end of that sort of spectrum or we are connected to that.
Speaker 1:So to me, when I am doing my other because of course the acts that get booked the most are these certain acts but when I'm doing my own, longer shows, which I have less opportunity to do so I explore other other ideas and ideas that are not quite as entertaining. They're not just the three minute thing. Maybe it takes 15, 20 minutes to explore this idea, but I'm still doing it in an entertaining way, but not quite boiled down to the acts that I would do when I go on TV or whatever. When I go on TV I have to do three minutes of the tennis, but it is an 11 minute, 11 and a half minute piece. So to me I understand what people say when they say life is art.
Speaker 3:Specifically the showman's art, because not everybody's life is art, because we do simple things like eating, going to school, going to work, things like this. But specifically the showman's life would be considered a work of art because it's so different from normal lives, because it's a life that is always on the road, always not necessarily doing something new, but it's a way of living that's very different from the most usual one. That's why I'm talking about the dandy figure that always dresses up, always moves in a certain way to present a certain aesthetic and maybe in some way the showman is some kind of dandy in this sense of the word.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, there's also so many aspects of what it means to be a showman too, and it's true that the lifestyle of showmanship or of the showman is absolutely. It's a whole mode of existence which has fascinated all kinds of serious artists. I mean, toulouse-lautrec made a whole series of drawings, kind of, of the circus, and you see it in art up through history that it's a subject that is just fascinating. And in all the novels, geek Love does that to the Freak Show, probably the. There are other books about it, but this book is just something else. I just, but I'm yeah, I lost my train of thought because I wanted to show you something that that's, um, but I'm yeah.
Speaker 1:What do you fly as way of life, as a work of art? Yeah, work of art, yeah, I mean, I think it can be a subject of art and one can live one's life like that. And I know some performers who blur that line more than others. Some people don't quite switch off when they're offstage. Some people don't quite switch off when they're off stage and that's a way to be or so. But usually if you have somebody actually making a documentary or so or they're filming you backstage, they need to aggrandize, style it and present it. Can you come over here. Can you put your leg behind when you put your makeup on? Can you have the leg behind the head when you do it? Because a lot of the preparation is not the, the.
Speaker 1:In any case, the kind of art which is going on backstage or in the way that you live your life, that um is, is such a different kind of art that it's not entertainment. In that same way, it plays with and exists within, because I do feel like that, being a showman and and doing what I do, and doing what I do, it is so unusual that it feels like a little bit of a loophole in society. It's like where you go, it is possible to be like this as well, so that, and that is different it's like you've stepped outside of the normal conventions of doing things and and that is conscious so when you're taking a conscious choice to to go against what's normal could be art and I know I say so, I think the short answer is that I think that for some people, showmanship can be that they play that persona all the time and and that's, you know, like pt barnum or so that writes.
Speaker 1:I can't remember now how many autobiographies that he wrote, but five or six sort of autobiographies, because whenever he reinvented himself as a new person he needed to have a new autobiography that tells that new story. And all of them is, in a weird way, true, but they were true about something in specific. Thanks for coming along on this third ride down Freak Show Alley, sideshow Alley, and, if you are in Australia, I am currently in Adelaide for the Fringe Festival with an unbelievably excellent crew of London Calling. So if you are in nearby, please come and say hello and if you like the show, click subscribe, get the episodes downloaded onto your phone and until next time, take care of yourself and those you love, and I hope to see you along the way.