Hi all clown forum friends. I am back from India and it was a GREAT experience. We were a total of 12 International clowns, I was the South African "representive clown" and there were clowns from the USA, Canada and India.
We did clown performances in Mumbai, Aurangabad and Goa. We did theatre and stage shows, meeting and greeting, promotion, hospital visits, shopping mall appearances, workshops and even a "singing telegram" type gig where we were grouped into two clowns per group. We then had to "deliver invitations" to specially selected people from the press and newspaper, TV and radio personalities. Cliff, or rather Mr. Stripes and I was in a team and we managed to deliver an amazing 5 invitations in 3 different buildings in Mumbai, a total of 10 hours in make-up and clown character to do, perhaps a total of 30 minutes of clown silly-ness. The traffic in Mumbai is nothing like any of us have ever seen. Put all the cars in Cape-town, Durban, Jhb and Pretoria during peak hour on, let's say Pretoria's road and perhaps you can get an idea of what it was like. It sometimes took up to 2 hours just to travel the (about) 17 km's from our hotel to the theatre where we performed.
We really was treated like super rock stars. When we performed at the new shopping mall in Aurangabad, about 700 km's from Mumbai, we had body gaurds. If you needed to go to the toilet, 4 body gaurds made the trip with you from the "green room" to the loo. But our audiences was GREAT and very appreaciative of whatever we did.
This was the first ever clown festival in India and understandably there was some "hiccups" but Martin "Flubber" Da Souza is very keen and sincere to make the next one even better than this one.
How can you become part of this festival? Well at the moment it is still a "by invitation only" type festival but preference are given to clowns who are members of the World Clown Association. So come on fellow clowns, why don't you consider becoming members of the WCA?
See the website:
www.worldclown.com By becoming a member you will receive a monthly magazine called "Clowning Around". It is packed with educational clown material and lot's of resourcing from advertizers selling all kinds of clown stuff. For more info you can also contact me at
pietbubbels@gmail.com
