Clown/Zen: Mr. YooWho, Dancing in Joy

Late in December, Moshe Cohen, a rare clown known as Mr. YooWho, who illustrates the paradoxes found in Zen with every movement in what becomes a long dance, inhabited the Noh Space Theater at San Francisco’s Project Artaud, a warehouse artists’ residence/performance space. I had seen him only in YouTube snippets. Live, in 3D, his clown gifts explode with magic—tenuous balance, acts of resistance in the empty air (a suitcase will not move out of the space it wants to occupy), talks with a cocktail glass and a windup plastic penguin, nonwords and French phrases, music from a disembodied Above. Chants. Juggling. Whirling hoses that sing on key.

Through it all, his collaborator/accomplice, Theater of Yugen’s artistic director Jubilith Moore, slips in and out (ostensibly invisibly) to clear or deliver a prop, a role known formally as Koken (the Stage Assistant) in the highly refined Japanese theatrical tradition of which she is a flawless practitioner. She grows bolder as the performance goes on, her hand extended now from behind the side curtain in a silent demand that the clown use the prop she hands him or rejecting his next move with her still, nearly motionless stance of refusal.

In his SF Weekly review of Mr. YooWho’s Holiday, Silke Tudor says, “…Cohen, while blending the seemingly disparate arts of Yiddish absurdism and European buffoonery with Japanese butoh and kyogen…has the heart of a poet and the eye of a monk.”

The performance continues, playing itself over in my mind. I think of the constancy of motion, the implied stillness, the loss and regaining of balance, the specific magic and the way the whole performance become magics. The permission to respond. The intimacy of Mr. YooWho’s coming into the audience. The repetitions, like motifs--the immovable suitcase, the "errors" made with the same precision as the "successes," the wonder of the children that becomes the wonder of the adults.

Giggling. Tears now and then. The beautiful golden thread of a sidekick weaving, through flowers, balloons, music, and all the other forms of celebration brought alive. The joy in every turn, every change, so that there is no-thing but present time, presence. Color. The "third characterness" of that Above that sang and spoke and was music. The Tibetan-monk depth of the off-stage chant of the clown before he emerges onstage.

I love the music/object connection, how the Above begins its music with the lifting of a suitcase or a small kitbag almost arbitrarily, and, when the clown tries to repeat the gesture consciously, the music ends. Moshe comes back to that moment again and again when I thought he wouldn't any more. How it all comes out of one suitcase--endless variations and his sweet cohorts, the glass and the penguin. How the clown gives everything life and speaks with each object of creation, so that all things become sentient.

The freshness of it all, as though it is happening for the first time, and I am allowed to see it and then to let it go, in the way that you can't hold onto the notes of a song as they pass by….

You can learn more about Moshe Cohen’s sacred mischief at his website at http://yoowho.wordpress.com

You’ll discover there that he was the founding director of Clowns Without Borders USA, a group that has performed in Guatemala, Chiapas, Nepal, Kosovo, Sudan, and Haiti, in displacement camps and at war-torn sites where laughter had been nearly forgotten. He now travels widely, training clowns and those who would train clowns, teaching workshops and performing along the way.

Alas, you’ve missed his San Francisco shows this time around. You can find a few minutes of his performance at http://www.yoowho.org/gallery/gallery.html

Moshe Cohen is currently writing a book for both the professional who takes clowning seriously and for those of us who’d like to clown around more fully and spontaneously in response to what arises in the daily “now” of our own lives. He’ll provide exercises to help us all do just that. I’ll post the publication date here. Be patient.

Photos: Mr. YooWho’s portrait by Peter Cunningham; Moshe departing by Shawn Harris