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Perfect Timing

Alumni

Portland Magazine

Performing and Fine Arts

February 22, 2019

Michael O'Neill

Michael O’Neill ’10 (MFA) travels the world with an international organization called Clowns Without Borders. Yes, you read that correctly. All members are big-hearted volunteers and trained clowns (emphasis on trained). Years before he came to UP for a graduate degree in directing, O’Neill had gone to school to train in commedia dell’arte and was a member of the Ringling Brothers Circus, where he performed in a mindboggling 2,000 shows—700 of which were solo shows—in three years. He knows physical theater (all theater is physical theater, he argues), he knows how humor brings people together, and he knows how vulnerable a person needs to make himself to be on the receiving end of a joke.

Clowns Without Borders heads to places where people have been displaced by national disasters, political upheaval, or war. O’Neill went to Haiti eight months after the 2010 earthquake, the Philippines three weeks after Typhoon Haiyan (where he did 31 shows in 18 days, one performance pictured above), a shantytown in Colombia on the day authorities had threatened to tear it down, and South Sudan. “We go to these places to relieve stress through laughter,” he says. “The resilience of human beings is amazing.”

O’Neill also invests his training and his artistry back into the community here in Portland. He has been teaching theater for 17 years through the Nomadic Theatre Company, which he co-founded, and he is about to embark on a new chapter. He is creating a theater lab in Southwest Portland with enough space for 11 resident artists and a goal to churn out new work, provide workshop space and community, and train members in the specifics of the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte. The name of the organization is ArtBarn, and he still has two residencies available.