Born in 2001 the Tony Clifton Circus when Anthony Jerome Clifton, an italoamerican artist whose aesthetics can be described as "life is strange" meets Nicola Danesi De Luca and Iacopo Fulgi.
When trying to find poetry, a constant line of research to the work of the Tony Clifton Circus it comes to be not as easy as it seemed, what they are looking for is to put on stage the rareness, the anomaly; they want to make us laugh but also to hold it in.
They want to be recognized and appreciated but they think that the best way to do it is not being kind, they want the audience to look forward to seeing them, bringing into scene something more embarrassing than a fun thing.
From this premises their shows are born, these are true shows, their own experiments, they love mixing the most elemental craziness with comical tricks.
At the beginning there is the irrational enjoinment that is born when bringing into scene this show ... from here everything is born for the pleasure to play like children and like children they don’t ask whys, neither what does anything mean… doing what they feel like is the most important thing…
With lots of love and with some hate.
TCC
Das Kapital
The Marx brothers are three guys. 1) Karl Marx speaks Italian with a German accent, he also speaks other languages with a German accent. He only speaks German when he gets angry. Karl Marx wearing a Santa Claus jacket and a fake belly He is also wearing jeans and sneakers. Karl Marx stinks like a crusty punk begging in front of your supermarket. 2) Friedrich Marx, is actually Friedrich Engels, but for reasons related to his work, he has changed his last name.Friedrich rarely speaks. When he speaks, it's in French, very bad French. Friedrich Marx is dressed in an elegant suit, a men's suit and he has a fake gold watch. As Karl with the Capital, Friederich has a fixed idea, an obsession: pussy. He does not necessarily talk about women, but rather about the pussy. He proportions life according to this word, he evaluates life with this term. Almost all his world is mastered with this word. 3) Groucho Marx Groucho Marx speaks English, he growls in English. Groucho mumbles and growls in a deep voice. Groucho means 'grumpy'.Groucho loves British cooking and has the unusual hobby of growing lettuce. Groucho is also a singer when he is drunk, he likes to perform in public. Groucho sings a song, maybe Madonna's Material Girl or People are Strange by the Doors ... Groucho drinks beers or other spirits, and sometimes he smokes too. Synopsis and intention The Marx brothers are a trio of jesters, street entertainers who only want to do their job, because after finishing their work, they will finally be able to go back to their lives. But this work never ends, and probably there is nothing after work, there is only work. The three Marx brothers do not give up, their job becomes a mission: they live to show that if the work exists, the work could also end one day. And maybe the next day, life begins. So far, this has never happened: the work has never been completed, and so life has never started. Sometimes, in difficult moments, the Marx brothers are afraid that one day the work really could end. By dint of their work, they begin to seriously doubt that after work, there could really be something else.The Marx brothers are now tired of these paradoxes, they are fed up with this epic, the search for capital, this work that never ends, the evidence of this banal religious psalm. They are tired of saying it and living it. They are tired of the evidence of things. The only way that the Marx brothers find to break these doubts is to apply the logic of the revolution: a revolutionary act that breaks the inexorable mechanism that unites them in life. To break the chain. And that's how they decide to kill themseves
Hula Doll
Hula Doll, a show of extreme comedy or better comic extremism, poised between nonsense and provocative performance. On stage two acid clowns, a musician and a bunch of objects abandon themselves to their playful fantasies no less than to their black instinct. The result is a disordered mosaic of freedom and frustration, visceral laughter and punches in the stomach, poetry turned into blood and extreme stupidity to become thought. The show unfolds through verbal provocations and apparently absurd actions with the aim of creating a situation that is progressively more and more disarming, so much so that it can induce a state of involvement in the public that makes it believe that everything, in theater as in life, is possible. Ideally dedicated to Tony Clifton and Leo Bassi, Hula Doll is a show of difficult cataloging, his comedy wants to be rubbish, his drama touches intellectual pornography.
Rubbish Rabbit
For years we have been making people laugh. To us this has always been the most beautiful thing that we could possibly do...We entertained ourselves, the people were entertained, and not only, we were paid for it. Eventually, we didn't entertain ourselves anymore. Being a clown had become a profession, a job like any other. It became inevitable to ask ourselves... why do we continue? Our frustration grew seeing that for the others, the organisers, the public, our colleagues, it all went splendidly. Everything great... the old tricks, the old magic, the old jokes, the same routines repeated thousands of times...It is as if the public needs to be reassured, cuddled, distracted and prefers to see something already known, something that allows them to shut off their brain and zone out into a passive, dull roll. In this age... this already exists. It is called television. If a person goes into the street and stops to watch a show or even purchase a ticket, maybe this would grant something more, something perhaps, different.Furthermore, we believe, it is absurd to ask of a clown assurance. A clown is not a stuffed teddy bear... a clown is crazy, different, free. He is able to give, or rather sell, madness, diversity, and freedom. This is our aim in Rubbish Rabbit, to be crazy, different, free. In this anxiety for change, we have found, unconsciously, as exceptional models: children. They are crazy, different, free, And what do children do if they are left alone: chaos, noise, destruction. Yes, this.... this is what we desire in our show: to be children... to do everything that comes to the mind without thinking why!!! For this reason, in Rubbish Rabbit, we break for the most part nearly everything that passes through our hands, we shoot each other, we throw ourselves on the ground, we dance, we fight with our giant stuffed animals....simply because we enjoy it. To be sure, to see it in action will not be in anyway reassuring...
Mission Roosevelt
Let’s start from the idea that you are not an audience and therefore this is not a show.This is an experience, or better, an experiment – and you will be actors, guinea-pigs and sole lucky beneficiaries. MISSION ROOSEVELT aims at crossing a urban space, making a journey and leaving a trace, a coloured mark on the ground. We want you to enjoy the forbidden pleasure of using a taboo object. Using an object for the first time - maybe this is enough and justifies it all. The wheelchair is the mean and the object in MISSION ROOSEVELT, symbolizing all that does not concern us but now belongs to us, a metaphor for disadvantage by which conquering the city. A urban experience, a collective performance where the audience, sitting on wheelchairs, turn into a small platoon a joyful war machine.
Production Tony Clifton Circus - co-production Lieux Publics - with the support of SACD / Auteurs d’espace publique, La Paperie – Centre National des Arts de la Rue d’Angers, L’Atelline – Lieu de Fabrique Arts de la Rue Languedoc-Roussillon - Productions Bis
Christmas Forever
Santa Claus is a saint. He is an old man. He is similar to God. He is a try. He is a super-hero.It is an advertising. It is the absolute symbol of our tendency to the excessive consumption. It is one of the divinities of the Olympe of the collective imagination. But it is also a dream of childhood packaged, depressing because vulgarly exploited. Juste like the current world : our world is not depressing because of wars, terrorism, poverty or of the arrogance of the power, but it is it to have made disappear magic, dream, childhood, fable...Every child, when he discovers that Santa Claus doesn't exist, understands that he is growing, and that then things are not so beautiful and magic than previously. It is one of first disappointments of the life, one of the first myths to collapse, the end of the poetry, the death of the fable... a fondamenal stage to join a society based on nothing. But, in all this, Santa Claus, how does he feel ? What does he really think about his work, about his mission? Does he believe in himself ? And what about his controversial relationship with reindeers ? What makes the Santa Claus when it is not Christmas ? Does he feel depressed ? Does he feel happy not to work, and enjoy a peaceful existence on a caribeenne beach? Certainly that nobody recongnize him without his costume... He lives probably a life as many of the others. Santa Claus does thus exist....
produzione Tony Clifton Circus co-produzione e residenze: ZTLpro (Italie), AREA06 - Rome (Italie), Soliera Arti Vive Festival - Modène (Italie), Armunia - Festival Costa degli Etruschi (Italie), Lieux Publics - Marseille (France), Les Ateliers Frappaz -Villeurbanne (France), Le Fourneau - Brest (France)
Cagnara TV
Cagnara TV is an experiment in the use of television as means of show communication, where the content is the festival sceptically considered as an object. In Italy, there is nothing as real as television and nothing as false as a live show. Where “false” stands for “independent of reality” and “real” for “dependent on reality”... the meaning of this, is up to you to decide. The content of the show is determined by the elements of the festival or the city T.C.C. is performing for: shows, artists, audience, debates, public and private meetings, location and festival staff. At the same time, it will all be commentated, distorted and rewritten by T.C.C with a fast pace, a cynical disenchantment and spectacular enjoyment as to draw the attention of an heterogeneous audience, stranger to theatre but eager for something new and unusual. Cagnara TV lends itself to - and prostrates before –countless ways of fruition: screen, video, television.It is, at the same time, a live artistic action, a video performance independent of the object of its study and an account of the festival/event, useful for any present or future use..
Spiderman is Back in Town
What is a Superhero ? What is the collective imagination ?
An unlikely Spiderman,pathetic and defeated, is suspended at tens of centimeters above the ground,wrapped tight, with a roll of cellophane, to a column in the middle of an urban crossroads.The image has a force at once sublime and terrible,but the real show is in the reaction of the passers-by,encouraged (by a carer who accompanies the Superhero) to take advantage of this incredible oppurtunity to be confronted with the normality of the defeat of the invincible.
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