FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved
| Theatre by Nikki Sheppy Preview The first clue that Don Brimsmead was the type of kid who would one day run away to the circus was the early thrill he experienced in tipping his tricycle onto two wheels and riding it the length of the driveway. He was the adventuring sort, his knees perennially covered in scabs. In this high-tech era, Brimsmead is something of an anachronism. Realizing he was miserable, he quit his lucrative Toronto job so that he could clown this winter with Calgary’s Green Fools and train this summer as a trapeze artist with the Mexican National Circus. As event coordinator, Brimsmead is among the many fools who will join the 8th Annual April Fools Day Parade, beginning at noon on Thursday at Fort Calgary. Prizes will herald the best costumes. These include tattoos, body piercing and the like from Inglewood businesses. If you have no costume, come anyway, says Brimsmead. Masks will be provided. The parade ends at Crump Manor, Green Fools headquarters, with refreshments and the spectacular "exploding guy." Brimsmead encourages people to bring musical instruments, too, regardless of skill, saying this is the one day we’re given explicit permission to be silly. "It’s funny because people get so scared," he laughs. "I remember the first parade I went to. I was very nervous about putting this costume on and being silly because you spend so much time holding it back. When you’re finally in a position to let go, you suddenly forget how to be foolish." Brimsmead points to the theories of Herbert Marcuse, a member of the 1960s intelligentsia who wrote about how much we repress in order to participate in society. "What Marcuse believes is that as civilization becomes more advanced, the need to suppress becomes greater. So you repress all your libido. That’s what you feel when someone says, ‘Here’s your chance to be a fool’ and you think, ‘Oh no. I don’t know how to do that so I’ll just stand in the parade and be a banker.’ That hesitation is the sign that we’ve gone too far in insisting on order and rationality." Teaching people how to get back in touch with their inner fool is part of the mandate of The Green Fools, Calgary’s only physical theatre troupe. In tarot cards, zero is the symbol of the fool: perfection and nothingness. Brimsmead thinks we should take a lesson from that image and realize that there’s a lot of truth in absurdity. |
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