Angels Can Fly, a Modern Clown User Guide Review

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(More customer reviews)This book has been around for a few years now, and I find I do re-visit it occasionally, and recommend it to those who are serious about understanding what is at the heart of clowning. It's a curious volume in that there are really three books in one here, but not laid out one after the other. Instead, the three interweave and take the reader from practice to philosophy via fiction.
What really kept me reading at first was the novel telling the experiences of a bunch of street performers. Though not strictly clown performers, these characters wrestle with how to "be in the moment", how to reach the audience through honesty. These are struggles that can rarely be communicated unless you've actually been out there and done street performing yourself, and the fictional mode seems to be the best way to get give at least some impression of what it is that drives us to seek out strangers in the street and do silly things for them and then get them to give away their money.
The exercise sections are comparatively sparse, but that is no bad thing. Very rare is the book on clowning that contains vast amounts of good practical advice, but there have been quite a few examples of the genre in recent years that have fallen flat on their face.
The third section brings us a range of thoughts from several other performers as well as Alan himself, and gives the aspiring performer something to ... aspire to!


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Angels Can Fly, a Modern Clown User Guide, includes a mix of fiction which follows the adventures of ten clowns, some personal anecdotes from clowns from around the world, a total of 50 practical clown exercises, and some theory on the nature of modern clown. Clown is a fascinating, diverse, complex and exciting art form, which has existed around the planet for thousands of years. Like any art form it has to evolve to stay relevant to the culture nurturing it, and at the same time, and by its very nature, clown teases and turns upside down the cultural patterns and boundaries around us. This book is an attempt to chart the growth of modern clown, and to promote the process by providing, not only practical exercises for individuals and groups, but also reference points for thinking.

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