The American clown and comedian based in Barcelona Jango Edwards has died at the age of 73, the city’s mayor, Jaume Collboni, has reported.
In a message on his Twitter account, Collboni explains that last night “Jango Edwards, a master of clowns and a Barcelonan at heart, has left us.”
“I am sure that he will continue to illuminate the lives of the souls that accompany him. Rest in peace,” added the mayor of Barcelona in his message.
Between provocation and tenderness, Stanley Ted Edwards, artistically known as Jango Edwards, renewed the language of the contemporary clown, participated in the birth of ‘clown power’, promoted the so-called ‘nouveau clown’ and, above all, managed to spread laughter. to several generations.
Considered one of the highest references within his artistic discipline, Edwards created a school and is considered a teacher by great comedians such as Leo Bassi, Johnny Melville, Andreu Buenafuente and Guillem Albà.
Born in Detroit (United States) on April 15, 1950, Edwards began working in a prosperous landscaping company, where he earned a good living, but he quickly realized that this was not his thing.
It was the sixties and he began to find his way in varied fields, such as the theories that defended free love, philosophy, politics and religion, but finally it was the book “The fourth way”, by Georges Gurdjieff, which It opened his mind and allowed him to head towards the world of the ‘clown’, according to what he himself recounted in several interviews.
In the early 1970s, he landed in Europe and began his career in England, at the London Mime Company, before creating his own company, the Dog Breath Theater Group, later renamed Friends Roadshow.
With the Friends Roadshow, co-founded with the clown Nola Rae, he participated in the organization of the Festival of Fools in Amsterdam, a historic event that marked a before and after in clowns and in which great clowns such as Johnny Melville or Tortell participated. easy chair
Settled in the Netherlands, he arrived with his company in 1977 at the Salón Diana in Barcelona, ??a city that he visited many times during the 20th century and which ended up being his home in the 21st century.
In the 80s and 90s he created groundbreaking shows that established him, such as “Garbage” and “Holey Moley”, the latter recorded and broadcast on French national television, a country where he also lived for long periods of time.
He also worked a lot in Australia, the United States and Colombia, and in 1992 he performed at the Barcelona Olympic Games, along with Johnny Melville, Leo Bassi and Ángel Pavlovsky.
He continued creating shows such as “Klones” (1994), “Mum” (1996) or “Tony Balony” (1999), and at the beginning of the first decade of the new century he settled in Barcelona, ??where in 2004 he directed a large format show in the Universal Forum of Cultures.
Before he began to slow down, he directed Slava Polunin, Nina Hagen, Les Nuls, Vanessa Redgrave and Grace Jones, and had audiences including Catherine Deneuve, Pierre Richard, U2 Bono, the Rolling Stones, Francis Ford Coppola and Federico Fellini.
He toured Europe, America and Oceania, presenting his shows within collective initiatives, such as the Roncalli circus, with which he performed in 2000, or solo, as “WFUN-RADIO 121”, in 2001.
Later he settled as artist-in-residence at the Almazen theater, in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona, ??and made frequent visits to the Teatro Alfil in Madrid.
In his last stage in Barcelona he created, together with Johnny Melville, the Nouveau Clown Institute (NCI), in which Leo Bassi, Pepa Plana, Nola Rae and Moshe Cohen, among many others, gave master classes.
This school of clowns was the promoter of the “Jango Edwards: the man, the myth, the legend” festival at the La Gleva theater in 2020, in which the American artist was accompanied on stage by Tortell Poltrona, Mario Gas or Andreu Buenafuente , among others.
In September 2022, he publicly announced that he was suffering from incurable cancer and gave many interviews in which he did not hesitate to laugh at his own death.
In the one he kept with EFE he tried to eat the microphone, smoked through his nostrils, made jokes about his private parts and those of those present and proved to be a full-time hooligan clown.
“I’m 72 years old and I’m dying, but inside I’m a six-year-old boy, except for my penis,” he continued joking, before emphasizing, now more seriously, “I’ve been free and I haven’t wasted a day of my life”, and to encourage everyone to recover the clown that we carry inside and be free.
Edwards, who died last night at his home in Barceloneta while he was sleeping, was working until the last moment and a couple of weeks ago he finished his book “The Clown Bible”, with the help of many friends, in which he reviews his trajectory and movement of the “nouveau clown”.
Jango Edwards was romantically linked to the Catalan actress and ‘clown’ Cristi Garbo, whom he met in 1997.
