Monsieur Baruk: A Great Artiste Or Silly As A Wheel?
The Age
Saturday April 22, 2000
Street performer Frank Baruk works a passing crowd like a kelpie herding sheep. In black leather and roller skates, and clinging to a small motorised wheel, he swishes up to people with frightening speed, twisting away at the very last moment with a flourish of balletic precision.
Most people strolling along recoil in fear as he hurtles toward them but stay to try to work him out. With a rose between his teeth, his skinny white torso exposed, Baruk comes on like an ice-skater, Christopher Dean's rev-head half-brother perhaps. His eyes, feminised by eyeliner, are disconcertingly wild.
``What I like to do is make the audience move," he said. ``If they make a circle I like to break the circle. If they make a line I like to break the line.
``I have to be totally on the limit but never over the limit. I can't crash."
Baruk, known as Monsieur Hotrod, is performing at Southgate this weekend as part of the comedy festival. He started out as a stage actor, but has been wheeling through the streets for 12 years now, ever since he built his little motorised wheel from a moped. He has performed in Canada, Japan and New Zealand.
``All the show is ambiguous. It's difficult to know if it's a show, or a crazy person. There's a lot of interaction between me and the audience but I don't speak," he said.
Baruk said he likes to play with perceptions of who is watching who. Sometimes he stops revving his little wheel and eyes off a passer-by. But he never passes a hat. To do so would resolve the delicate ambiguity on which his acts rests.
Monsieur Hotrod will hoon around the Southgate Galleria at 1.15pm today and tomorrow. The Age is a comedy festival sponsor.
© 2000 The Age