The American clown and comedian Jango Edwards died on Friday August 4 in Barcelona, after cancer at the age of 73, according to his French press officer. “Jango Edwards drives each of his shows into an enormous delirium, revisits the burlesque with incredible energy”, wrote Le Monde in 1987. The one who modernized the art of the clown is also known for his crazy interventions in the cult show of the French channel Canal “Nowhere else”, alongside Antoine de Caunes.
Born in 1950 in Detroit, Stanley Ted Edwards discovered the clown in the 1970s. He began to perform in Europe and had a triumph in France where he starred at Le Splendid for nine months between 1987 and 1988.
“He will continue to illuminate the lives of the souls who accompany him”
The master of clowns is also the founder of the “new clown” movement, and in 2009 created an institute dedicated to this practice in Barcelona, where he had lived for a few years with his wife, Cristi Garbo. The mayor of the Catalan city Jaume Collboni paid tribute to him on Saturday on X (formerly Twitter), hailing “the master of clowns and this Barcelonan at heart”. “I’m sure he will continue to light up the lives of the souls who accompany him,” he added.
Jango Edwards also performed on the stage of the Splendid Saint-Martin café-théâtre in Paris in 1987. Le Monde still wrote about him that he was the one who “walked his own shows on the five continents” that he imagined, “provoking each time the same astonishment at the density, the finesse, the vivacity of his art. Nothing seems foreign to Edwards: mime, commedia dell’arte, circus and rock. A brilliant clown, he borrows from Walter Mitty the taste for composing, with dizzying speed, incredible silhouettes.
Jango Edwards had just finished writing a book called “The Clown’s Bible,” according to his publicist, Claire Gontaud.