|
|
 |
     
BILL IRWIN
The following is excerpted from Ron Jenkins' book ACROBATS OF THE SOUL.
Bill Irwin's baggy pants trigger a cultural memory of clowns from America's past. For silent-film stars like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin oversized trousers were signs of marginality, emphasizing their inability to tailor either their clothes or their aspirations to fit society's norms. For Bill Irwin, whose comic dances express his longing to take flight from all manners of constraint, floppy trousers serve an added purpose. They are his wings. They wave, wiggle, and flap as his rubber limbs dance with breezy abandon. They free his legs to keep time with the music's breathless rhythms. Watching Irwin's limbs move in dozens of directions simultaneously is like seeing Fred Astaire's body possessed by all four Marx Brothers at once. The zany grace and uncanny weightlessness of Irwin's movement convey a mood of liberation that is captured perfectly in the airy nonchalance of his billowing trousers.
But like the wings of a butterfly, Irwin's baggy pants are emblematic of a brief and fragile freedom. His blissful dances are always interrupted by sinister forces that try to bring him down to earth. In his signature comic dilemma Irwin struggles to resist an invisible vacuum that tries to suck him off the stage. Though he valiantly attempts to keep dancing, one of his legs is drawn irresistibly to the wings of the proscenium, taking the rest of his body along with it. Sometimes he manages to escape, but more often than not, Irwin succumbs to the magnetic pull with a mixture of fear and resignation. As it drags him across the floor and out of the audience's view Irwin feebly tips his hat to the crowd. The perpetual frustration of Irwin's efforts to soar into soft-shoe heaven gives him the appearance of an eager vaudevillian who is forever getting the hook.
In "The Regard of Flight" Irwin's invisible nemesis is joined by a pair of human antagonists who also seem determined to prevent the clown from enjoying the pleasures of his airborne choreography. The piece, which has been performed from New York City to Los Angeles, features Doug Skinner as a pianist who doubles as a stage manager and throws Irwin off balance by giving him the music cues before he is ready. A critic, played by M.C. O'Connor, leaps out of the audience to cross-examine Irwin about the deeper implications of his work. The clown's simple desires are suffocated by the intrusive blare of the stage manager's warning signal and the nasal drone of the critic's pretentious questions. The more Irwin tries to resist, the more relentlessly they pursue him. With trampolines and loudspeakers to assist them, Irwin's adversaries try to impose their ideas on him, but he refuses to give up his dreams of theatrical flight. His pursuers, however, are equally persistent, chasing Irwin through the audience as well as around the stage. The critic suddenly becomes a director and forces Irwin to act Shakespeare in his pajamas. The pianist manages to sneak his ventriloquist act into the show. And all along the unseen force is waiting in the wings to suck Irwin offstage the moment he starts dancing.
Source: Excerpted from ACROBATS OF THE SOUL by Ron Jenkins. Theatre Communications Group, © 1988.
Top banner photos: A close-up of Bill Irwin in white-face; Irwin in "Mr. Fox: A Rumination"; a scene from "Mr. Fox"; Irwin as one of his many personas. |
|
 |
 |
Bill Irwin puts his broom to good use in "The Harlequin Studies." |
 |
 |
|
In "Mr. Fox: A Rumination," Irwin inhabited the character of a celebrity clown who went insane. |
|
 |
|
This program is not available on VHS or DVD. |
|
|
