At the Renaissance Festival, Patch Adams, the famous physician and patient rights activist, approached them with an idea. Adams wanted to revive an old form of American entertainment: the chautauqua.
Chautauquas, popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, combined song, dance and lectures to bring fun and popular learning to those who might not otherwise have access to education.
The group's 20-odd tents, two buses, and handful of cars are currently parked at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula.
On Friday night, they wowed Missoulians with their eclectic and unpredictable combination of acrobatics, juggling, comedy, music and general vaudevillian zaniness.
Howard Jay Patterson, a founding member of the Karamazov Brothers who goes by Ivan on stage, said the revived chautauqua was motivated by the same principles as the originals.
“We wanted to bring quality performance to people who didn't normally get it,” he said. “We wanted to change the world.”
The current tour of the Northwest, which started in Spokane on July 19, has brought an array of talent to Missoula.
Faith Petric, a 91-year-old guitarist born in Orofino, Idaho, has been touring with the group since 1982.
Petric started touring on her own after quitting her job working as a rehabilitation counselor for the state of California in 1970.
Far and away the oldest member of the tour, Petric said that her age is making things more difficult.
“Being old isn't for sissies,” she said. “Your physical abilities change. You get tired whether you like it or not.”
She's going to keep coming back as long as she can, however.
“These are my friends,” she said. “It becomes a community.”
Stephen Bent, a music student at Occidental College in Los Angeles, has juggled for the group on four tours now.
After reading about the New Old Time Chautauqua in a juggling magazine, Bent decided to drop everything for a couple weeks and go.
“My first tour was the best two weeks of my life,” he said. “There are all these crazy people juggling and playing music.”
Joanne Murayama, one of the founding members and vice president of the group's board, said that membership is open to anyone and that the performers on tour change from year to year.
“We're a large pool of people that we draw from,” she said. “There are about 300 of us.”
Murayama said there are about 50 people on tour this year.
While touring, the group is quite a spectacle. Most wear outlandish and colorful clothing, as if their jaw-dropping stunts and talents aren't enough to draw attention.
Outside of the tour, however, many lead fairly normal lives.
David de la Rocha, one of the tour's bus drivers and a tuba player for the group's Fighting Instruments of Karma Marching Chamber Band/Orchestra, is an analyst for the Justice Department and an Air Force reservist when he's not driving his crazy comrades around.
He has brought his 16-year-old daughter Tasche along each of the 12 years he's toured.
Tasche is the bass drummer for the band and the tour's massage therapist.
“We're quite a collection of people,” David said.
According to Murayama, besides some professional performers, the group includes a doctor, a computer analyst, a veterinarian and others with normal day jobs.
“It's a labor of love,” she said.
According to Chaez Ray, a longtime cook for the group and former cook for the Grateful Dead, the chautauqua seeks to bring much more than entertainment to the towns it visits.
“What we really do is integrate communities,” he said. “We've had eggs thrown at us in very conservative communities, but by the time we left they insisted we come back.”
The group often tries to incorporate service projects and fundraising activities into its tours.
Last year's tour took them along the hurricane-ravaged coasts of Mississippi and Louisiana.
Murayama said that their performances in New Orleans were some of the most moving shows she has ever seen the group put on.
“I was watching the faces of little children and seniors at two different shows,” she said. “They were long, solemn and confused at first, but by the end of the show they were laughing and clapping.”
Friday night's show served as a fundraiser for Garden City Harvest. According to Laurie Strand, a fundraiser for the group, 75 percent of the revenue after expenses is slated for the organization.
In exchange, Garden City Harvest took care of promotion, according to Strand.
To keep costs down, the New Old Time Chautauqua performers sleep in tents at each destination and eat donated food when they can.
There's not much of a power structure on tour, but things still get done.
“We do all the things a normal community does,” Murayama said. “We have the same problems and we solve them non-hierarchically.”
At each stop, the group tries to bring its message of connection with one's community. Murayama said that the performance and performers are secondary to the sense of community that each show creates.
“Each performance is a meeting of communities,” she said. “The ownership of what happens is everyone's.”
From Missoula, the show heads to Polson for another show on Monday. The tour wraps up in Eagle, Idaho, on Aug. 4.
For more information about upcoming shows or about joining the troupe, go to www.chautauqua.org.
Murphy Woodhouse is an intern at the Missoulian. He can be reached at 523-5241.
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