The show grew over the next five years, including teaming up with the clowns Pierantoni, Kestern and Geronimo Medrano. He saw Chocolat as a potential star dancer and mime, and was proven correct when his first show, "The Wedding of Chocolat" was a huge success. In 1888, their partnership was ended when Henri Agoust, the manager of the Nouveau Cirque, hired Chocolat as the star of a nautical pantomime. Rafael's stage name of Chocolat was given to him at this time by Grice. The new duo would go on to public notoriety when they began performing with the Nouveau Cirque of Joseph Oller in Paris during October 1886. A colour illustration by René Vincent, c. The duo of Foottit and Chocolat performing in the skit "Spider". He hired him as his manservant and handyman and then made him his partner in some of his numbers, in which Rafael would act as a stuntman. The famous Auguste Tony Grice discovered Rafael working the docks of Bilbao, impressed by both his physical strength and his dancing. Rafael did not enjoy this life: on several occasions he deserted Grice, then returned when he could not find employment elsewhere. Grice would occasionally incorporate Rafael into his acts, such as in his parodies of American minstrel shows, but didn't make Rafael an apprentice. In Bilbao he met Tony Grice, a travelling English clown, who hired him as an assistant and domestic servant. He worked in the quarries of the Basque Country, then moved to Bilbao where he worked odd jobs, such as dockworker, then as a porter at the train station. Īt around the age of 14 or 15, Rafael fled the Castaños. They made him sleep in the stables, and gave him no education. Rafael was the only black person in the village, and was mistreated both by the Castaños and the villagers. The Castaños, like many Spaniards with colonial connections, were anti-abolitionists and flouted the law by declaring Rafael a "servant". Cuba had banned the slave trade in 1862, and under international law Rafael technically ceased to be a slave at all the moment he set foot on European soil, but nonetheless the Castaños treated him like one. Ĭastaño brought Rafael to his family's household in the village of Sopuerta in northern Spain. When Rafael was still a boy, she sold him to a Spanish businessman named Patricio Castaño Capetillo for 18 ounces of gold. His parents were slaves in a Cuban plantation from which they escaped in 1878, leaving their son to a poor black woman who raised him in the slums of Havana. According to historian Gérard Noiriel, "Padilla" may have the matronymic of his former Spanish master's wife. Rafael Padilla (sometimes Francized as Raphaël Padilla) was born sometime between 18 in Cuba, possibly in Havana. He was the first black clown to play a lead role in a circus pantomime act, and with his longtime partner George Foottit they revolutionized the art of clowning by pairing the sophisticated white clown with the foolish auguste clown. Rafael was an Afro-Cuban descent and was one of the earliest successful black entertainers in modern France. 1865/68 – 4 November 1917), a clown who performed in a Paris circus around the 1900's.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |