Modesty and embarrassment are as foreign to Red Bastard as a fitness
trainer. The bulbous, belligerent red monster is the creation of New
York-based actor-writer-director Eric Davis. Already lauded as one of
the premier clowns of our time, Davis has received new acclaim as Red
Bastard.
It’s led him to some unexpected places, too. At a show in Montreal,
Davis found his hand in an audience member’s pants, wrapped around his
testicles. In Slovenia, he had a reticent woman remove her underwear
and then climbed under her dress.
“He’s kind of the id expressed,” says Davis from New York. “He comes
from this collective unconscious that tosses around in our heads. He
exists in all of us as we’re going to sleep, poking at the things we’re
nervous about. He runs the generator for our dreams.”
Red Bastard is Davis’ take on the bouffon—a theatre term coined in
the 1960s by mime, actor and teacher Jacques Lecoq. While clowns aim
for the audience to laugh at them, the bouffon targets the
audience.
“It really is about my pleasure and who I’m attracted to. You can
say it how you want, but it’s like ‘Who do I want to fuck?’…It’s very
in the body,” he says. “It wants to eat and consume. And not just
food—ideas, people and energy.”
Davis found the shape of his bouffon quickly. Taking the heaviness
of a butcher he played in college, he designed his “body.” It turned
out to be a universally appealing shape, noted for its similarities to
ancient fertility figures. “I don’t think he’s really an earthly
thing…In the last year/year-and-a-half, I started calling it a comedy
monster. That’s a good description of what it is.”
Co-written with Sue Morrison of the Institute of Canadian Clowning
in Toronto, Red Bastard was at first a character to develop ideas
around. Now, the show is about interaction with the audience. Davis
embraces the monstrous parts of Red Bastard and relishes deviating from
the scripted text. “There are themes within it, but it’s not like
watching Bill Maher talk about American politics. It’s becoming more
about the social experience about being in the room with this
thing.”
Davis struggled to figure out what this show was about. Even now, he
stumbles and stops mid-sentence trying to find the right words. This
search for self is part of what makes Red Bastard—as shocking as he
can be—so appealing. “It’s a craft of knowing yourself so well…I’m
thinking, and learning, as time goes on, about who I am as a performer
and who I thought that I was supposed to be or wanted to be.”
To better understand himself, Red Bastard treats the audience as his
students. Conversing with them, he finds out their dreams and goals,
determines their social mores and gets you to re-examine them—all in
a party atmosphere. “Some people feel threatened. Some are delicious,
lovely and delightful. Some are sexual…It’s a charge for people to
see who they are.”
Manipulation is the other key to Red Bastard’s success. His tension,
rhythm, parody and constant caressing and gesturing of his body pulls
the audience in various directions. “I have a strong sense of where the
audience is. It’s not my thing to take an audience beyond where they’re
willing to go. I’m not going to psychologically damage my audience
members, but I’m willing to walk to the edge of their comfortability.”
This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2, 2009.
