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The ambitious first annual CoHo Clown Festival provides both a stage and a home to Portland’s interlocking communities of clown, circus, and other physical-performance artists. It’s part of the legacy of Philip Cuomo, late artistic director of CoHo Productions, and it’s designed to crystallize Portland’s physical-performance community.
While the festival is all about the “by artists, for artists” approach, physical comedy is not about reaching some sort of hidden in-group. CoHo’s communications director, Laurel Wilde, notes that the majority of the festival’s audience so far has not been to a previous CoHo production.
Three experienced clowns opened the performance section of this long festival. Emily Newton, an Australian-born veteran of 10 years in physical comedy, spontaneously contemplated a large wicker basket from Goodwill (doesn’t everyone do this?).
Then, Newtown was wheeled out on stage in that basket as “Big Baby,” trying to figure out how to communicate nonverbally with the audience. The bibbed, toothy infant, in all their cussedness, engaged the audience (plus, the character’s silly trajectory out of the basket and into some grown-up shoes was likely familiar to all parents, and even some to pet owners).
The darker and more hallucinatory act Mind Blown, by Box of Clowns artists Jeff Desautels and Laura Loy, began in Salvador Dalí’s 1963 Perpignan train station. From a promising beginning like that, the two clowns, with simple props, created a world of birth, bubbles, phonograph records, the solemn death and funeral of an egg, and a return to the womb.
Does this make sense? Of course not: Richard III this is not. And it isn’t designed to be. You can get a fix of Death of a Salesman elsewhere. Strap in, look around, take a deep breath, and enjoy the ride.
SEE IT: The Coho Clown Festival plays at the CoHo Theatre, 2257 NW Raleigh St., 503-220-2646, cohoproductions.org. Various times Thursday-Sunday, through Oct. 9. Festival passes $50 (includes one red clown nose) to $200.