(1994)

Two clowns attempt to fulfill the roles of Man and Woman, without really knowing too much about their chosen subject. However, a bizarre kind of success does result, though the subsequent offspring of this particular union is none too sure whether to get itself born into their chaotic ‘Garden of Eden’.

(1996)

A box of eggs, an inflammable frying pan, disappearing food, a pile of plates….and unique omelettes! Customer instructions in the event of an emergency: “Don’t worry – you will be provided with protective headgear”.

“CLOWN IMPROMPTU” (1998)

A silly show about spirit possession, tap dancing, suicide, sleeping, drinking tea and, of course, sex.

“MACBEZ” (1999)

"A delicious, malevolent clown perversion of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ with disquieting contemporary resonances" (Guia del Ocio de Madrid).

‘MACBEZ’ mixes contemporary and classical clown with Shakespearean tragedy, political satire, surreal puppetry and the saga of the world’s latest ‘Macbeth’ couple, Slobodan Milosevic and his wife, Mira Markovic, to create a fine balance between infantile ridiculousness and the horrors of tragedy. The hit of the 4^th Madrid International Clown Festival.

“TZIRK!” (2000)

"The show that’s all the rage" (Bares de Barcelona)

A contemporary circus-clown-music experience performed at a roller-coaster pace that grips the audience by the guts and doesn’t let go. The beautiful, the ridiculous and the dangerous meet head-on as trapeze artists, chairs, champagne, eggs, a 5cm human cannonball and other threatening objects fly in perfect time to live virtuoso high-energy Balkan Pop. A show whose preferred habitat is the packed bar on a Saturday night. (Co-production with “L’Orkestina”.)

companyia d'idiotes

Clara Cenoz and Jon Davison met in 1993 at the École Philippe Gaulier, London. Since then they have been based in Barcelona,  constantly at the forefront of the city’s recent clown revival.

Infinite play, the pleasure of risk and a complete absence of the fear of failure, lead them to create work that is both experimentally daring and hugely accessible, that has toured to the festivals, theatres, tents, streets and bars of Europe.

WHAT THE CRITICS HAVE SAID:

“They display their inner clowns impeccably” Reseña, Madrid

“Delicious, malevolent clown perversion with disquieting contemporary resonances” Guia del Ocio de Madrid

“Exceptional clown” El Mundo, Madrid

“All the rage” Bares de Barcelona

“Clever, funny and exceedingly well done” Glasgow Herald

“Absurd” ABC, Madrid 

“Mind-boggling. Passionate, contagious energy” Nottingham Magazine

Influenced since their beginnings by the teachings of Philippe Gaulier, Companyia d’Idiotes seek out the ridiculous and the absurd in everything (especially in themselves) Their explorations into the clown’s possibilities have led them to experiment with text, with objects, with language, with costume, with the body, with emotions, coming to the conclusion that the potential range of the clown is, literally, infinite and the deeper one digs into one’s clown the more there is to find and you never get to the end. They have always sought to fuse their different origins, styles and personalities. For a simple reason: every clown is unique and unlike any other. But there remain the common denominators of an open heart and complete honesty on stage, always in search of freedom and the closest possible complicity with the audience.

They have performed in London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Barcelona, Madrid and many other cities. Below is a sample of some of their work:

(2004)

Klezmer and Balkan music provide the base for a group where at any moment someone might do something silly (should music be played like this?) With no pretensions other than pleasure, sometimes we play music of extraordinary beauty, sometimes we’re the backing band for a clown with a stringless guitar, and sometimes….. should musicians be allowed to fall asleep in the middle of a song?

"Home, Sweet Home" (2003)

A box. We live in boxes and spend our lives going in and out of boxes. There are big boxes, little boxes, some harder, some softer. Then there’s the idiot box. We take things out of one box and put them into another box. If we’re bad, they put us in a  box with iron bars on the window. And if we die, it’s a wooden box. There’re match boxes and boxes of condoms. But… where do we keep people? We keep them in our heart. And the heart is the thing that’s least like a box. What happens when you put a clown of constant motion & unstoppable loquacity into a cardboard box for more than an hour and forbid them to speak? Boring? Hell, no! “Home Sweet Home” just goes to prove that old existentialist maxim that one remains free even when trapped in a tree trunk. Free: to look at the sky, or not. Clara Cenoz here proves it by reinventing her life in a one cubic metre cardboard space, a life just as full as ours (fuller, shame on us!), us humanity who are free to wander the globe, or fly to the moon, or go to the supermarket and buy any kind of bananas we want.

This is Samuel Beckett´s old-folks-in-a-dustbin meets Snoopy´s kennel. In “Home Sweet Home”, Companyia d’Idiotes returns to the clown in its purest, transparent form - just a clown, a box and an audience.

“JONNY” (2003)

Take half a dozen clown numbers and try to do them all at once, and you get an idea of Jonny ’s uniquely mind-boggling rhythm, losing track of himself every two seconds. The result: the thin line between utter nonsense and blissful profundity as Jonny lets his Id loose on an unsuspecting public. This is stream-of-consciousness in the body and soul of a clown, self-ridicule taken to ridiculous limits.Free from the constraints of dramatic logic, narrative logic, gag logic, or of making any kind of sense at all, Jonny reduces the world to its purest state: a mess. Everything he touches falls apart at the seams – objects, words, feelings, ideas, his own body....

Jonny returns the clown to its roots, incarnating our thirst for freedom, of transcending our material limits. But it’s not all chaos, there stand out moments of stillness, beautiful oases of calm and reflection upon the miraculous stupidity of the human condition.

“Don’t Play It Again, Sam” (2002)

A new musical spectacular with a completely unoriginal repertoire with something for everyone that’s bound to please no one. Yes, this is the new craze, ‘Banana Music’, a unique fusion of virtuosity and cock-ups. Picture the scene: an empty stage, a piano (only if there is one, otherwise forget about the piano), a one-handed pianist (the other hand’s stuck up his woolly glove puppet) and the sweetness of a soprano voice that the next moment screams into operatic action, demolishing musical barriers along the way. The only thing these two have in common is their (unrequited) love of music.

“LOOK INTO MY EYES!!!” (2001)

‘An exceptional clown’ (El Mundo, Madrid)

Alone she can do nothing! Her occult powers will be useless, she needs...volunteers! But do we really want to know our futures? Do we like being hypnotised? Do we want to know if we were Napoleon in a former life? Probably not, but she’s going to tell us anyway. And as an added bonus she’ll give us a psychic shower, libido-enhancing rituals, and bend any spoons we happen to have on us (no, not really, just joking about the spoons!). “LOOK INTO MY EYES!!!” is a continuous game played with the audience by a charlatan who doesn’t realise it with a foreign accent that keeps disappearing (the accent, that is), taking us on a whirlwind ride to the next life, the other side and the back-of-beyond. But don’t worry! Death is just a phase we all go through!