5 Lessons I Learned From Jango Edwards
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
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I first met Jango Edwards in 1972 at the Oval House London.
He was teaching a group of American teenagers how to wiggle their ears. It was nothing but he has those girls in a trance…They were all ready to wiggle whatever he would have wanted. Such was the charisma of this young explosive energy that had arrived in London, and later Europe..
In the years later after he had moved to the city of Flower Power – Amsterdam in the Netherlands – and started his own movement Clown Power, I had the chance to get to know him a bit better. He had come out of Detroit riding on the back of funk and Motown: raucous, shiny, glamorous and wild, but also ready to push his philosophy of personal freedom. Me, I had come from middle class Edinburgh where flower power had maybe touched a couple hundred people in the city and they were SORELY obvious. You could laugh out loud in Edinburgh in those days and people would ask what’s wrong…? Two very different backgrounds but with similar intent.
Jango was extrovert, cheeky, with women outrageously bare-faced-macho arrogant but also irresistible due to his clown persona.
I never formally worked with Jango Edwards in a rehearsed show but we collided and cooperated in various projects, improvisations and far out lunacy which sometimes got us into trouble….
Jango’s success had begun to this initiative of the Festival of Fools which started in Amsterdam and spread through Germany Scandinavia southern Europe ,and from that the spin off was enormous for a lot of us performers in that circuit, he most of all in Germany in the 80s and later in France in the 90s. He was on some TV at least once a week, performing tours of 60 gigs in as many days with an excellent band of musicians from around the globe until the mid 80s. But his message of post hippy peace through clown was what swept the European continent. A movement of refreshing new comedy mixed with rock and jazz, a cocktail celebrated with theatre support from Countries and cities. Only when the Margaret Thatcher influence of industry should be responsible for the arts did that movement peter out, whereas spontaneous and anarchic excitement in the streets was what characterized the 80s, the 90s and since was the time of institutionalized street festivals. A lot of the heart disappeared as the companies that run the world started to run festivals too more openly.
So what did I learn in those years from Jango Edwards….?
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Cherish your public – Your fans might one day be your only friends…love them, sleep with them, die for them
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Never undercharge your fee
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If it doesn’t work there’s always tomorrow, so forget it tonight.
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The ways to make people laugh are not random, they are based on formulas that one can learn.
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Clown is the future in this world of uncertainty and chaos.
Jango Edwards’ message has been and still is about waking up the world to love (which is all you need…) and to liberate personal expression from the vista of the clown. Empowering and freeing people from their restraints and setting them free. Another American Dave Wood is having a similar influence on the internet business world. Charismatic, determined and generous. Empower Network. Both Americans with a parallel message.
Why don’t YOU try blogging today for love, change and personal expression…?
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