Tony
Montanaro -- The Legacy of a Celebration Barn
My Summer "Performance for Musicians" Intensive --
And How it Came About
20 years ago I dragged my harp up to “The Barn”
to study with a dynamic performer/teacher known to folks on
the New Vaudeville circuit as the Guru of the Art of Performance.
Tony Montanaro performed as a mime, working the same circuits
as Marcel Marceau, but then expanded far outside classic mime,
developing a field he called “Physical Eloquence.”
To build a cultural greenhouse for his new form of performing
and teaching, he bought an old farmhouse in Maine, turned the
Barn into a performing/teaching space and started taking in
students.
Over the years Tony taught, directed and coached
many of America's top performers of physical comedy, juggling
and storytelling. His students range from “America’s
Funniest Home Videos” host Tom Bergeron to Sesame Street’s
Brian Meehl to ... well... to me!
At first I attended Tony’s summer workshops,
thrilled that he accepted me as a student. Later I worked with
him privately, developing shows, working on my physical relationship
with my instrument, and learning to integrate the stories in
my mind with the music I play.
Tony was a teacher from the word “Go.”
When I’d drive up to his workshop, he’d run out
to the car and start telling me his newest revelations before
I could even pull on the handbrake. “Stop!” I’d
yell. “Don’t say another brilliant thing until I
get the tape recorder running!”
His words, his ideas, his energy, his physicality
all profoundly affected my work. To this day, I bring my “Tony
Notes” to every performance and read them or go over them
in my mind to help me focus before the show.
Tony's wife, Karen, was an exotic enigma. A
ballerina, a little younger than me, with waves of long red
hair and intense eyes. They'd met performing "The Nutcracker"
ballet together, and then she'd become both a devoted student,
and his wife. I was afraid to talk to her, not sure what to
say, star-struck -- and of course, ballerinas have always intimidated
me, especially since my one ill-fated ballet lesson in the kitchen
when I was 14 ... but that's another story.
When Tony died, I traveled to Maine again for his
memorial concert. During the performance, Karen took the stage,
talked about her life and love with Tony and then, looking directly
at me -- and possibly everyone else in the theater
-- she said, “Tony is not dead. He’s here,”
and pointed to her own chest. And suddenly I thought, “Fine.
If that’s where he is now, that’s where I’ll
go find him.”
So, struggling through my intimidation, I contacted
Karen and started coaching with her, and together we looked
for and found Tony in our work together. So when Karen agreed
to co-lead my yearly Barn workshop with me I was thrilled —
and starting in 2007 we went back to the Barn with a new generation
of students — passing on the experiences that changed
our own lives as performers.
It's one of my favorite weeks of every year.
In part, to be working together with Karen, in part the intrigue
and excitement of working with students committed to challenging
themselves, in part my own challenge to trust my creative impulses
as a teacher - and to ask for -- and get -- the kind of deep,
authentic, pushing-the-envelope response that this intense work
engenders -- and in part because each day is a revelation.
And that's no exaggeration. Karen and I fell into the
habit Tony had of starting every day with his own revelations
of the work from the previous day. At first I was embarrased
to impose my own amazement, wonder and philosophizing on the
students - and felt like "who am I" to think I can
carry the creative tradition of my great teacher. I finally
decided one day to spare them the lecture -- and was blown away
when they ASKED for it!
Another thing I love is the range of student's professional
levels. The first year I'd planned to restrict the workshop
to professionals and pre-professionals (not that I knew exactly
what a "pre-professional" was), but one student turned
out to be an adult beginner. It was through her that we discovered
that 'playing level' wasn't a relevant issue in the kind of
work we were doing. Each student, regardless of level,
has their own personal challenges, and it's that commitment
to challenge that connects the students and makes them a 'group.'
The one person who had a real problem with the workshop
was a young (17-year-old), very high-level pre-professional
who became more and more distressed as we stayed away from the
instruments for the first two days. It turns out that her mother
had signed her up and she'd expected to be learning specific
harp techniques, and playing harp 4-6 hours a day. Instead,
we were working as a group and exploring performance from every
angle except our standard approach to the instruments.
Seeing her distress helped us realize how important
it is that students understand what to expect - and what not
to expect - from the workshop, so we created an extensive "FAQ"
at our online
workshop page and instituted a policy that required every
under-18 student to write a personal letter outlining why they
wanted to be in the workshop. In this way we were able
to be reasonably assured that their expectations were realistic.
(Don't ask me why we don't also require over-18 folks to write
a similar letter ... but we don't).
The next year several under-18 students requested
to come, and with the new policies, we were able prep both the
students and parents in such a way that they engaged seamlessly
with the rest of the students. This is also something
I remember from my own work with Tony: the huge diversity of
ages, skills and experience of the students - yet all working
together, all getting the same level of attention, and each
providing illumination for the others because their skills,
ages and experiences were so different. And now it seems that
that's just one more facet in the magic of the work that Tony
gave us.
Click for more info on Deborah
& Karen's "Performance for Musicians" workshop.
|