Laugh at Danger

Preview article on hardcore clowns, The Dirty Brothers, published in the Sun-Herald.


They have been labelled "kamikaze clowns" by the Opera House and one of the performers in the sideshow troupe The Dirty Brothers admits things sometimes get out of hand. “Our shows always create a bit of an OH&S nightmare for theatres,” the Great Gordo Gamsby says with a laugh.

“It’s always fun filling out those forms for theatres. When you start talking about how we’re going to be climbing up a ladder and angle-grinding sparks onto somebody … that just raises all sorts of issues.”

For Gordo, whose signature act is to pierce a hatpin dressed in Hawaiian flowers through both of his cheeks, it's all part of the job of creating theatre that strives to make beautiful and evocative images.

“People like to see others push their bodies to the extreme and do things that they couldn’t fathom doing in their own mind,” he says.

The Dirty Brothers will be performing their new show, The Dark Party, as part of the Sydney Comedy Festival. They form part of a recent resurgence of sideshow performance, in which groups like the Jim Rose Circus and Tokyo Shock Boys have gained worldwide popularity.

The three Melbourne based performers (who share a collective history in theatre, circus and commedia dell‘arte) have recently come from packed houses at the Adelaide Fringe where they performed their dark clown routine.

“Sideshows did die out for a while – but it’s no longer 'pay your ten cents and gawk at the freaks'. Now it’s based on more rock'n'roll sideshow with an emphasis on creating extreme visceral theatre,” he explains.

“It’s all about creating images and we’ve taken pieces of our own lives with characters and we’ve built a show around it as much as we can."

Gordo is joined by Shep Huntly, who plays a broken man at the end of his tether, and Patrick Bath, the dark and fun-loving clown (who leans towards the more traditional clowning character).

Using silent films and famous Buster Keaton skits as inspiration, the group are aware of the centuries old sideshow tradition they follow when travelling troupes would shock audiences with anything from bearded ladies to fire eaters.

“We like the audience to make up the story in their own minds and we try to get the audience to really feel for the characters. So when you see me putting a screw through my face, you’re actually feeling the emotions the character is going through.”

Gordo waited until he was an adult to try his more extreme stunts. "I didn't do any of that stuff as a kid and I don't like seeing it as self-mutilation - it's more about creating art. I do it to create images," he says.

So is there anything this kamikaze clown won’t do? “Shep attaches a car battery to his nipples and I tried that once. I don’t want to ever do that again.”


The Dark Party plays at the Sydney Opera House from April 29 to May 3. Phone (02) 9250 7777 or see sydneyoperahouse.com.

How embarrassing

Did not qualify. Last. Sixth. Did not qualify. Did not qualify. Last. Fifteenth. If you saw the look on the faces of the SBS presenters including Jane Flemming and Les Murray during the closing ceremony of the Athletics Championships in Osaka you would know what I was talking about. It looked like something had dropped on them from a great height and it wasn’t gold.

The Australian athletics team delivered what is probably one of the worst performances at an international meet in recent memory and we are now only eight months out from the Beijing Olympics.

The Australian Sports Commission, the Federal Government’s agency responsible for implementing the national sports policy released figures that showed that the Australian taxpayer spent $6.3 million on athletics in the last financial year.

More than $580,000 was spent specifically for the lead up to the Osaka meet which was to allow “medal potential athletes and their coaches to spend more time in Europe for valuable training and competition in the all-important European Grand Prix circuit events”.

It’s no wonder that the SBS Commentary team was totally lost for words.

It appears that many other commentators are also lost for words. Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair and Piers Akerman who are always quick to condemn failures in the arts sector have been deathly silent about the abysmal failure of the athletics squad.

As recently as June, Tim Blair led a scathing attack on arts funding in NSW by suggesting that if the health sector is in such a bad shape, maybe they should apply for arts funding grants. “Health department needs a big slice of this action. It should be easy enough; application forms are available online and Arts NSW has lots of cash to throw around,” he said in The Daily Telegraph.

Blair has also made consistent attacks on performing arts groups, such as Circus Monoxide, a troupe that travels around regional NSW entertaining kids and families referring to the performers as ‘creatively unemployable’.

Bolt has similarly condemned publicly funded arts programs, most notably the Melbourne International Arts Festival and Piers Akerman consistently takes aim at the ABC.

Central to all of their arguments is that ‘your’ dollar is being wasted and that any failure by artists or arts organizations is wasteful. This is surely remarkable double standards by commentators such as Blair, Bolt and Akerman.

Imagine the contempt they would have for Opera Australia, the Sydney Theatre Company or any other arts organization if performers gave the same excuses as the athletes did in Osaka

Australia’s best sprinter, Josh Ross was reported to have been afflicted by homesickness, depression and was too fragile to compete at his best and ended up coming home early without any success.

Other athletes used similar excuses of not having done enough preparation or hadn’t done the right preparation. If an opera singer in any major Opera Australia production had been in a similar predicament and suddenly sung off key due to a ‘lack of preparation’ abuse would be hurled at them from audiences, it would be critically slammed by the mainstream media and commentators would be quick to draw blood.

The Australian public expects a lot of our professional sports men and women and many of us share the highs and lows without a hint of antagonism towards the public sponsorship which aims for excellence on the world stage.

Attacks by commentators on artists or arts organizations if placed on agencies such as the Australian Institute of Sport would see them quickly face the wrath of the Australian public. Somehow, abusing artists is an easier point scoring tactic but is just as less justified.


Image credit: Jupiter images

Clowns, ambulances and right-wing creativity

It's been a mad few weeks for Arts Journo. Since taking on an editorial role at Arts Hub, I find myself doing so much writing, writing, writing, writing (yes, welcome to full-blown journalism indeed) that the blog is suffering, suffering, suffering.

However, it is absolutely marvellous and the scope of news I cover has just blown out from Sydney theatre and arts to news from all corners of the country and internationally as well.

Each day I receive a good fifty or so press releases of events happening all over the shop. What is most interesting is seeing where the press releases come from. Substantially, the majority are from Melbourne and Sydney, but there is now a huge amount that come in each day from Brisbane as well as regional areas of eastern states.

There is a decent amount that comes in from Darwin and Adelaide but very little from Tasmania and barely anything from Perth - which I don't quite understand.

On top of this, I am reviewing more and more for The Daily Telegraph which is due to put its arts coverage online pretty soon. It's actually a very challenging gig. Trying to get the tone just right and ensuring that I don't assume too much, as I would if I reviewed for the blog.... not to mention that word count factor and photo sub-editor issues.

And then there is the fact that the editorial section of the paper seems to be going on a bit of a rampage against the arts as a whole. The opinion editor, Tim Blair, is particularly fond of waging war on the arts as you can see from this article and this article. In his business, the arts are a pretty easy target, especially when using phrases such as 'your money'. But Blair this time even manages to shoot two birds with one stone - the under resourced health system and the arts.

"While unimaginative types see an ambulance gridlock as just another example of the state's useless healthcare system," Blair says, "my highly refined creative sensibilities allowed me to perceive the same scene as art."

He goes on, "The interplay between ambulance-hoppers and frustrated RNS nurses possibly recalled the works of Samuel Beckett. Post-modernist types would truly have grooved on the simultaneous immobility of patients, ambulances and the NSW health department alike."

(More Jo Stromgren than Beckett, but hey, what's the difference???)

And then he states that, "in the wake of this week's static on-site hospital performance, NSW Health Minister Reba Meagher blamed 'significant' underfunding by the Federal Government. Well, if money is the problem, here's at least a partial solution: the health system should apply for an Arts NSW cultural grant."

His tirade against the harmless regional touring Circus Monoxide is particularly perplexing. (And it isn't the first time either that he has taken aim against the clowns, as you can see here and here.) I have a sneaking suspicion that our friend Mr Blair might have had a terrible childhood incident and now suffers from coulrophobia. Hopefully with all this great touring by Circus Monoxide all those kids in regional towns who love the circus and the clowns won't suffer the same fate as Blair.

But from his excellent idea of a performance piece with ambulances and patients waiting, I think we might have a budding choreographer on our hands. Maybe there is a frustrated artist under that right-wing cloak of his. Indeed, if he could take that extra step and put together his two pet hates - the health system and clowns - he could really be onto something!

But thankfully the Sydney Morning Herald has been keeping tabs on the bizarre opinion pieces in the Telegraph and printing some good comeback journalism.

And just to remind you all - the forum on Lee Lewis' essay on cross-racial casting is in Sydney this weekend. To tantalise you, here is an extract of the essay that we published on Arts Hub today. Word has it that one of the companies mentioned in the essay are very angry with the essay and refuse to engage with the debate.

Bring it on, I reckon.