Clown Casting

SCLOWNS is a new international clown company made up of experienced and new performers, based in London. We are looking for two new performers to join us, to perform in “The Spaghetti Horse”, a full-length show recently premiered at Stratford Circus in London and supported by Arts Council England.

We are looking for performers to fill the following two roles:

1.Clown (whiteface)
Performer profile: strong clown presence and ability to work with both traditional and contemporary clown styles. Must be able to work with both physical performance and text (any language). Other skills an advantage, especially magic or circus; musical ability a bonus.

2.Horse (front end)
Performer profile: ability to work as a team, must have good physical performance ability. Other skills an advantage, especially dance, mask and puppetry.
Performers will be expected to rehearse one week with the company and then be available for international festival dates between May and October 2011.

If you are interested, please send an email including a brief CV to: info@jondavison.net
For more information: http://www.jondavison.net/sclowns.html

The Spaghetti Horse is a dramatic tale that combines slapstick, live music, eccentric dance, circus and panto, which will both fulfil and challenge your expectations of clowning. The show is aimed at a popular audience of all ages and designed to be performed in the round in a 14-metre diameter performing space which duplicates the classical circus ring.

SCLOWNS draw on contemporary and traditional clowning - original yet familiar, subtle yet grotesque, anarchic yet formulaic, hilarious yet heart-rending, oafish buffoons yet refined artists.

The Spaghetti Horse is conceived and directed by Jon Davison. The show developed out of the three-year International Clown Project involving participants from Britain, Spain, Italy, USA, Canada, Portugal, Colombia, Germany, Tadjikistan and Brazil, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The Spaghetti Horse is co-produced by Stratford Circus, and is supported by Central School of Speech and Drama and the Escola de Clown de Barcelona.

Casting para Clowns

SCLOWNS es una nueva compañía internacional de clown formada por clowns experimentados y nuevos.

Buscamos dos nuevos clowns para actuar en “El Caballo de Espaguetis”, un espectáculo recién estrenado en Stratford Circus en Londres.
Buscamos clowns para los siguientes dos papeles:

1.Clown (carablanca)
Imprescindible una presencia fuerte como clown, y la capacidad de trabajar con estilos tradicionales y contemporáneos de clown. Debe tener habilidad en la interpretación gestual además de textual (cualquier idioma). Otras técnicas serían una ventaja, sobre todo la magia o el circo. La habilidad musical sería también deseable.
2.Caballo (parte delantera)
Imprescindible la capacidad de trabajar en equipo, y buena habilidad en la interpretación física y gestual. Otras técnicas una ventaja, sobre todo danza, máscara y títeres.

Habrá una semana de ensayo con la compañía y hay que estar disponible para actuaciones en festivales internacionales entre mayo y octubre del 2011.

Si estás interesado, por favor envía un email con un currículum breve a: info@jondavison.net
Para más información: http://www.jondavison.net/sclowns.html

El Caballo de Espaguetis es un drama clownesco que reúne la acción, la música en directo, la danza excéntrica y la pantomima, que a la vez confirma y pone en duda nuestras expectativas del payaso. El espectáculo se dirige a todos los públicos y se representa en un círculo de 14m que recrea el espacio del circo clásico.
SCLOWNS se inspira en el payaso contemporáneo y tradicional – original pero familiar, sutil pero grotesco, anárquico pero disciplinado, hilarante pero poético, bobalicones pero artistas.

El Caballo de Espaguetis está ideado y dirigido por Jon Davison. El espectáculo surgió del Proyecto Internacional de Clown que durante tres años reunía participantes de Gran Bretaña, España, Italia, Estados Unidos, Canadá, Portugal, Colombia, Alemania, Tayikistán y Brasil, apoyado por el Arts and Humanities Research Council.

El Caballo de Espaguetis es una co-producción de Stratford Circus, apoyado por Central School of Speech and Drama (Londres) y la Escola de Clown de Barcelona.

The Spaghetti Horse

Some photos of the process of making The Spaghetti Horse.

Clown Library

I've finally found the time to put this online: a bibliography of clown, including a fairly comprehensive list of books and online resources. More to come soon!
Por fin he encontrado el tiempo para poner esto online: una bibliografía de clown, con una lista bastante completa de libr...os y recursos en la red. Habrá más próximamente!

You can also consult the library on my website here: http://www.jondavison.net/library.html



Books


Numbers, Scenes and Gags

Baugé, Isabelle (1995) Pantomimes, Cahors : Cicéro Éditions.

Ceballos, Edgar (1999) El Libro de Oro de los Payasos, Mexico D.F.: Escenología. (Note: this is basically a translation into Spanish by Margherita Pavia of Remy’s Entrées Clownesques)

Denis, Dominique (1985) Le Livre du Clown, Strasbourg: Éditions Techniques du Spectacle.

Denis, Dominique (1997) 1.000 gags de clowns, Strasbourg: Magix Unlimited.

Gordon, Mel (1983) Lazzi, New York: Performing Arts Journal.

Lane, Lupino (1945) How to become a Comedian, Frederick Muller.

Musson, Clettus (2003) World’s Best Clown gags, New York: D. Robbins & Co.

Page, Patrick (1977) 150 Comedy Props, Patrick Page.

Rémy, Tristan (1962) Entrées Clownesques, Paris: L’Arche.

Rémy, Tristan (1997) (trans. by Sahlins, Bernard) Clown Scenes, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.


Autobiographies and Biographies

Bellos, David (1999) Jacques Tati, London: The Harvill Press.

Boz and Cruikshank, George (1846) Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, London: Richard Bentley.

Buten, Howard (2005) Buffo, Arles: Actes Sud.

Chaplin, Charlie (1964) My Autobiography, London : The Bodley Head.

Cogollos, José Pavia (2005) El Cuerpo y el Comediante: Chaplin y Keaton, Valencia: Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.

Findlater, Richard (1978) Joe Grimaldi: his life and theatre, Cambridge: CUP.

Fisher, John (2006) Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing, Lodon: Harper Collins Entertaiment.

Fratellini, Albert (1955) Nous, Les Fratellini, Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset.

Grock (1931) Life’s a Lark, London: William Heinemann Ltd.

Karandash (1987) Karandash, Moscow: Москва искусство.

Kelly, Emmet and Kelly, Beverly (1996) Clown, New York: Buccaneer Books.

Martin, Steve (2008) Born Standing Up: a comic’s life, London: Pocket Books.

Marx, Harpo (1962) Harpo Speaks! New York : Limelight Editions.

McKinven, John A. (1998) The Hanlon Brothers, Illinois: David Meyer Magic Books.

Patkin, Max and Hochman, Stan (1994) The Clown Prince of Baseball, Texas: WSR Publishing.

Popov, Oleg (1970) Russian Clown, London: Macdonald.

Poliakoff, Nicolai (1962) Coco the Clown: by himself, London: Dent and Sons Ltd.

Rheuban, Joyce (1983) Harry Langdon: The comedian as Meteur-en-Scene, London and Toronto: AUP.

Romanushko, Marga (2008) Leonid Yengibarov: clown eyes of a poet (клоун глазами поэта), Moscow: Москва Гео.

Rumyantseva, N. M. (1989) Clown and Time (Клоун и Время) Moscow:Москва искусство.

Slavskiy, R. (1980) Vitaly Lazarenko, Moscow: Москва искусство.

Webber, Kimberley (1996) Circus!: The Jandaschewsky story, Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing.


History

McManus, Donald (2003) No Kidding!: Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater, Newark: Delaware.

Rémy, Tristan (1945) Les Clowns, Paris: Grasset.

Robbins, Norman (2002) Slapstick and Sausages: the Evolution of British Pantomime, Devon: Trapdoor Publishing.

Schechter, Joel (1985) Durov’s Pig, New York: Theater Communications Group.

Schechter, Joel (1998) The Congress of Clowns and Other Russian Circus Acts, AK Press.

Towsen, John (1976) Clowns, New York: Hawthorne.

Wiles, David (1987) Shakespeare’s Clown, Cambridge: CUP.


Theory and Analysis

Beeman, William O. (1981) “Why Do They Laugh? An Interactional Approach to Humor in Traditional Iranian Improvisatory Theatre: Performance and its Effects”, in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 94, No. 374, Folk Drama (Oct. – Dec., 1981), 506-526.

Bouissac, Paul (1972) Clown Performances as Meta-semiotic Texts, Language Sciences, 19, 1-7

Bouissac, Paul (1997) The profanation of the sacred in circus clown performances, in Richard Schechner and W. Appel (eds.), By Means of Performance, Cambridge: CUP, p.195.

Goudard, Philippe (2005) Anatomie d’un clown, Vic-la-Gardiole: L’Entretemps éditions.

Little, Kenneth (1993) Masochism, Spectacle, and the “Broken Mirror” Clown Entree: a Note on the Anthropology of Performance in Postmodern Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Vol.8, No. 1 (Feb., 1993), 117-129.


Teaching

Clay, Alan (2005) Angels Can Fly, a Modern Clown User’s Guide, Newtown, Australia: Artmedia Publishing.

Gaulier, Philippe (2007) Le gégèneur/The Tormentor, Paris: Éditions Filmiko.

Wright, John (2006) Why Is That So Funny? London: Nick Herne Books.


Anthropology

Makarius, Laura Levi (1974) Le sacré et la violation des interdits, Paris: Éditions Payot.

Wright, Barton (1994) Clowns of the Hopi, Arizona: Northland.


Applied Clown

Adams, Patch (1993) Gesundheit!, Vermont : Healing Arts Press.

Adams, Patch (1998) House Calls, San Francisco: Robert D. Reed.


Miscellaneous

Miller, Henry and Miró, Joan (1999) La sonrisa al pie de la escala, Barcelona: Circulo de Lectores.

Pierron, Agnes (2003), Dictionnaire de la langue du cirque, Editions Stock.


Where to buy clown books

Good clown books are not easy to find. Many are out of print, so below are included some websites that deal in second hand books, particularly in English, Spanish and French, as well where to buy Philippe Gaulier's book direct (in French/English, or Spanish editions).

Iberlibro
Librería Yorick
Alibris (UK)
Filmichiko (Gaulier)


Other Resources

Blogs and Websites

Clown Alley - Pat Cashin's blog, bursting with info, photos, videos and knowledge.
Circo Méliès - full of well-researched articles on cinema and clown, circus and vaudeville, with some excellent video links.
Clownlink - a wide variety of news from the world of clown from a North American perspective.
Clown Brasil - informative clown news from Brazil.
All Fall Down - John Towsen's (author of "Clowns") recently revived blog, with some interesting source material.


Films and Videos

Baks - a truly outstanding collection of films of clowns (several full-length): Yengibarov, Popov, Beby, Karandash, Grock, etc. (in Russian).


Museums and Libraries

The Clown Museum (Somerset, UK)

Club de Payasos Españoles y Artistas de Circo

Emmett Kelly Museum

The American Vaudeville Museum

Clown Training Today: an historical survey

(This is the text of the final paper of my 3-year Fellowship at CSSD, given at the TaPRA Conference at the University of Glamorgan on 9/9/2010, and again at the Collisions Festival at CSSD on 8/10/2010).

The use of clowning in actor training has become increasingly established over the last half century. Its position seems relatively consolidated, although very little serious analysis of its methods has been carried out. What has been written is almost exclusively coloured by an acceptance of post-Lecoquian assumptions about how clown works. I argue that it is time to take a far broader view, one which recovers clowning history pre-1960. In this paper I will examine how two seemingly diverse cultural events - the Clown Congress in the Soviet Union in 1959 and the founding of the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in France in 1956 - mark the beginning of a common process which was to strip clowning of the power of the grotesque by creating a style of Clown Realism, in a move that mirrors the rise of Naturalism in legitimate theatre a century previously. I aim thus to deconstruct our present-day assumptions about what clown is, which have fractured into “art-clown” and “anti-clown”. My conclusions will offer guidance for a renovation of clown training.

The move towards Clown Realism since the late 1950s split clowning down the middle. On the one hand we have an infantilised, safe children’s entertainment, with hardly any social status. Clowns in this category earn a living, but are held to be unfunny by large sections of sociey. (Incidentally, this risk-free, safe clowning has had the effect of shifting the clown’s danger and riskiness to be projected onto a dark version of the children’s clown, the evil clown, feeding the fashion for coulrophobia, or fear of clowns.) On the other hand we have the art clown, whose pretence to the status of artist stands in direct opposition to the status-less infantilised clown. This bid for seriousness has gone so far that some claim: "It's okay not to be funny. Clowns do not have to make people laugh" (Simon 2009: 31). The divide is sharply expressed by Eli Simon’s haughty comparison: "these Bozo-type clowns... are not the soulful clowns you will likely develop using this book" (2009: 4).

So what is responsible for this situation where clowns are deemed not funny, either by society or by themselves? Why, how and when did clowns become tamed and lose their power?

In 1959 in the Soviet Union, it was this question, “why are clowns no longer funny?” that led to the First National Conference on Clown Craft, known popularly as the Congress of Clowns, “to consider the low level of comedy at the circus” (Schechter 1998: 15).

That year an assembly of circus clowns, critics and government officials had been convened by Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev, after he found the circus lacking in satire. (Schechter 1998: 5)

Circus historian Yuri Dimitriev held up as a model the most important Russian clown in Tsarist times, Durov, complaining: “What you do now is trivial by comparison” (Schechter 1998: 15).
The clowns protested that it would be impossible to emulate Durov today: “Who will be the subject of our parody? The government is marvellous” (Schechter 1998: 15-6).

The result of the congress was that “clowns mocked low-level bureaucracy, as well as idlers and incompetent doctors, with state approval” (Schechter 1998: 20). In other words, although clowns were given back some of their historical rights to parody, their targets were strictly limited by the Party.

This shift was not only about safe targets for parody, however. It was accompanied by a stylistic overthrowing of the old regime, the grotesque. Its most enthusiastic ambassador was Oleg Popov:

The ancient art of clowning, with its methods and its rules for constructing the entrée and with the working method of the red-haired comic, is dead, above all because the spectator wants to see a real, natural man. The appearance in the ring of degenerates, paralytics, rheumatics, idiots, madmen and maniacs (and it is precisely this which is the basis of the burlesque red-haired comic) does not rouse the interest of spectators (Popov 1970: 91).

Popov urged a break with the past:

Let us move on to the Fratellini. Wonderful artistes, they perform in the age-old manner of buffoons, a thick layer of make-up on their faces. They are perfect connoisseurs of human nature, sharp and intelligent. But they do not try to reflect anything in their performance except such faults as stupidity, clumsiness, absent-mindedness. As a result it is hardly surprising if the most common outcome of their conflicts is a slap in the face. And the spectator hears a positive deluge of slaps. Certainly I understand that the Fratellini are the guardians of an old circus tradition, a tradition respected down the centuries. But the times demand that this tradition should be broken and it is this that accounts for the appearance of the realistic clown (Popov 1970: 93).

Albert Fratellini

On the other hand, the new Soviet clown

looked for new, less extravagant means of expression … The spirit of clownery joined more and more harmoniously with that of the other acts which were trying to create a realistic appearance (Popov 1970: 81).

Oleg Popov

But this new clown was already under attack. Popov’s 1955 visit to the West led Bernard de Fallois, prefacing Tristan Rémy’s Les Clowns, to find the new realism lacking:

At the occasion of one of the first shows in Paris by the Moscow Circus, the clown Popov explained in a press conference that clown comedy in the West expressed the class war. The white clown was capitalism and the auguste the proletariat. For him, the Soviet circus had put an end to this unpleasing opposition, such that laughter no longer came from malice and oppression. Now, it is true that Popov’s number, in the great tradition of Russian augustes de soirées – talking, whistling, joke telling clowns -, was without malice. He was even of a great kindness. But neither did he make us laugh. He had replaced the laugh with poetry. The clash, the emotion of the art of clown were absent. What Popov had not seen was that the duo of the white face and the auguste had never had the sense which he was ascribing to it (Rémy 1945: XVI).

***

Meanwhile, Jacques Lecoq was founding his school, in 1956, and 4 years later finding that clown was the most popular area of study with his students, reaching a peak at the end of the decade:

He ascribes this interest as being deeply rooted in a quest for liberation from the 'social masks' we all wear... it has at its heart a subversive and radical dimension which chimed with the spirit of 1968 (Murray 2003: 79).

As with most of Lecoq’s ideas, Jacques Copeau had got there first. Curiously, it was to the Fratellinis that Copeau turned to inspire his students. In his forward to the Fratellini Brothers' autobiography, he wrote:

What I call your pure style is technical perfection and especially muscular perfection in the service of a spontaneous and sincere feeling. What I call the "gentleness” in everything you do is the smile of your unsullied natures. (McManus 2003: 31)

Copeau’s idealised concept of clowning has survived to this day, which is odd given he himself was brought down to earth when he saw their rehearsal and performance techniques were not based on some kind of innocent playfulness, but on set routines.

As Donald McManus points out,

He [Copeau] greatly admired their improvisational ability, for instance, but the form of improvisation that his school developed, and that is still used in theater training around the world, serves an entirely different purpose from clowning. Rather than recognizing that clowns like the Fratellini based their improvisation on an understanding of structure and character as well as an acute sensitivity to the audience's perceptions of these aspects, improvisation in theater pedagogy, as developed by Copeau and his disciples, focuses on “freeing” students from their intellectual selves. (2003: 38)

Lecoq didn’t even bother to idealise circus clowns. For him they are already “limited”, in Simon Murray’s words, who states on Lecoq’s behalf: “the circus clown … has little to offer theatre” (Murray 2003: 79), though without elaborating on what those limitations are supposed to be.

Despite dismissing clowns, Lecoq retained the red nose, which has since become a symbol of clown itself. Red noses have a long history, but it was Albert Fratellini in the 1920s began the vogue for the outlandishly-sized prosthetic version that was copied the world over.

The irony is that the symbol of the most grotesque of all clowns was to become the symbol of the new, authentic contemporary clown. By using the red nose Lecoq neatly seemed to demonstrate that clown is mask. John Wright describes the process:

We see ‘Le Flop’ in the actor’s eyes and the little mask of the nose directs our attention to them. We want to look behind the nose to see who it is that looks so stupid and we find ourselves looking into the actor’s eyes. The red nose becomes ‘a tiny neutral mask for the clown.’ (Wright 2002: 80)

Helena Otaegui, a clown student in the International Clown Research Project directed by Jon Davison

The red nose is thus made to appear responsible for our perception of the performer’s flop, ignoring the fact that one can clown without a red nose.

An even more unfortunate consequence of this assumption that the red nose is necessary to clowning is that it is also sufficient. This results in actors in red noses who not only fail to be clowns but also fail to be actors, a fact that would be visible to all if they took the nose off. In this case, the nose does not reveal the performer’s flop in a clown way, but instead disguises his failure to convince as an actor. Fooled into believing we are watching a clown, the audience excuses poor acting.

***

Continuing along the path that leads from Popov’s “real, natural man” via Lecoq’s “liberation from social masks”, we arrive at clowning’s alliance with those practices and ideologies that claim to produce authenticity in performance or behaviour, as in this advertisement for workshops by “Nose to Nose”:

We prioritise authenticity in the learning process above the acquisition of external skills. We believe the expression of this inner authenticity is the ground for learning clowning (Nose to Nose 2010).

But what is this link between clowning and authenticity?

Trying to succeed, sooner or later I must fail. If I accept this failure in full view of you, the audience, you laugh. This creates the effect, for the audience and for the performer, that something that is usually hidden is being revealed. This revelation convinces us that what we are witnessing is in a sense more authentic, more real or more true than what we normally come across (our “social masks”). We might call this ‘clown presence’.

Louise Peacock claims that “the concept of performing truthfully is common in clowning” (2009: 107). But the question is, is this a revelation of a “true truth”, or is it simply a theatrical “Authenticity Effect “?

Philippe Gaulier, the master of modern clown teaching, has a different answer:

Theatre equals the false, lies, fibs, spiel, invention, untruths, mystification, tall stories, deceit, treachery, imposture, simulation, falseness. Consequently, the kingdom of the apocryphal, of the inauthentic, and of the supposed, rejoices. It is the triumph of artifice, subterfuge, adornment, costumes, masks, buskins. This land is more joyful than that of the authentic, the true and the sincere (2006: 177).

The debate mirrors that of a century earlier between Naturalism and melodrama. Shepherd and Womack define the Naturalist ideology by its refusal to accept artifice:

Plot smacks too much of deceitful artifice, of hidden control… The good naturalist author doesn’t interfere by plotting: he just allows people to be people (1996: 283-4).

Naturalism’s pretence to create performance that does not pretend, but instead is somehow “true”, found its own kind of actor training:

The “Method” appears to offer a uniquely modern solution to the supposedly age-old problem of repeatedly making it real. But the notion that the problem here is a problem is fairly recent. It dates from a period which has learnt to think that in a person’s head social rules conflict with instinctual drives, where intellect represses desire… The Method, designed initially to solve a rhetorical problem – how to produce truth-effects on a stage – comes, in a culture inhabited by psychoanalysis, to be a method for liberating the truths of the person (Shepherd and Womack 1996: 286).

With this perspective, we can see Eli Simon’s recent The Art of Clowning, with its claims that “you will be deeply connected to truths rather than just gags" (2009: 6) as a kind of “Clown Method".

My worry is that it is this kind of clowning that Mark Evans is referring to when he observes Copeau’s concepts to be already entrenched in the actor’s training:

Talk to any student actor at an established drama school and they will tell you about the animal studies they have been doing, the neutral mask work which underpins their movement work, the group and ensemble exercises they do, and perhaps the classes they have had on commedia dell’arte or clowning. These exercises are the backbone of contemporary actor training, deeply informing much of the student actor’s development, shaping and building their psycho-physical technique … Copeau’s ideas have become part of the international language of occidental actor training. (2006: 117)

***

My main purpose in exploring the ideological shifts in clowning since the 1950s is to develop clown training and performing appropriate to our own historical moment. At the end of our exhaustive overhaul of a half century of contemporary clowning, what kind of clown training do we end up with?

At CSSD in London, where I am a Creative Fellow, and the Escola de Clown de Barcelona (ECB), of which I am a co-founder and Director of Studies, I have had the opportunity to apply new criteria to clown and actor training, as a consequence of my last three years of research.

The syllabus at ECB has been refined to focus on the particular needs of the clown student. This has meant relegating to the background mask, improvisation, and theatre games.

Instead, pre-clown training consists of relatively rule-free activities, such as walking in the woods, jumping (with or without ropes), chasing, dancing and laughing. Such activities have virtually ousted all theatre-as-games from the curriculum, and are partly inspired by Roger Caillois’ category of vertiginous games

which are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is .a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.

Various physical activities also provoke these sensations, such the tightrope, falling or being projected into space, rapid rotation, sliding, speeding, and acceleration of vertilinear movement, separately or in combination with gyrating movement. In parallel fashion, there is a vertigo of a moral order, a transport that suddenly seizes the individual. This vertigo is readily linked to the desire for disorder and destruction, a drive which is normally repressed (2001: 23-4).

Work on clown presence has multiplied, but has moved away from exercises that must be verbally explained beforehand to the student and then fed back on afterwards. Instead, the teacher leads, provokes, goads and tempts the student into a state where to clown is the most obvious way to behave.

Finally, thorough research into clown dramaturgy and how to teach “how clown works” from the outside in, as well as an inner process, allows us to pass on vital knowledge to students creating their own material based on far stronger foundations than mere improvisation, thus remedying the lack of devising tools that is a legacy of the Lecoq era. Clown students have for too long been in the untenable position of having to be their own authors but with nothing to say, as powerless as the children’s party clown who has no access to the grotesque.

In fact, the mechanics of clown writing are simple to learn: mistake, accident, wrongness, surprise, inappropriateness, contrariness, all are synonyms for what clowns do, within a framework of contrast, the rule of three and problem-solving. At CSSD writing students even work as teams of clown writers in the same way sitcoms are crafted.

Full-time courses at ECB also include research projects covering clown history, theory and cultural studies.

We can now make new clown performance that recognises our history without rejecting wholesale the clown revolution of the past half century. And with so much to keep us busy within our own field of clown, we no longer need stray into others’ territory, whether to define ourselves in terms of other genres - theatre, mask, circus or poetry - or to appropriate non-clowns such as Samuel Beckett to our cause. We can rest content with our own necessary and sufficient condition of clowning, as Gaulier has it: “A clown who doesn’t provoke laughter is a shameful mime” (2006: 289).



Works cited

Caillois, Roger (2001) Man, Play and Games, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Evans, Mark (2006) Jacques Copeau, London: Routledge.

de Fallois, Bernard (2002) Preface to Rémy, Tristan (1945), Les Clowns, Paris: Grasset.

Gaulier, Philippe (2006) The Tormentor, Paris: Éditions Filmichko.

McManus, Donald (2003) No Kidding! Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater, Newark: University of Delaware Press.

Murray, Simon (2003) Jacques Lecoq, Routledge.

Nose to Nose (accessed 14/08/2010), http://www.nosetonose.info/approach.htm

Peacock, Louise (2009) Serious Play - Modern Clown Performance, Bristol: Intellect.

Popov, Oleg (1970) Russian Clown, London: Macdonald.

Schechter, Joel (1998) The Congress of Clowns and Other Russian Circus Acts, AK Press.

Shepherd, Simon and Womack, Peter (1996) English Drama, a Social History, Oxford: Blackwell.

Simon, Eli (2009) The Art of Clowning, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wright, John (2002) “The Masks of Jacques Lecoq” in Franc Chamberlain and Ralph Yarrow (eds.) (2002) Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre, Oxford: Routledge.

Wright, John (2006) Why Is That So Funny? London: Nick Herne Books.

SCLOWNS present "The Spaghetti Horse"

SCLOWNS
present
“The Spaghetti Horse”
a new full-length clown-theatre show
Sunday 17th October 2010
6pm
Tickets £9 / £6
at Stratford Circus
Theatre Square, Stratford, London E15 1BX
Box Office: 0844 357 2625

http://www.stratford-circus.com/events/theatre/spaghettiHorse.htm

A dramatic clown tale of a spaghetti-stealing panto horse, combining slapstick, live music, eccentric dance, circus and panto, which will both fulfil and challenge your expectations of clowning.

SCLOWNS draw on contemporary and traditional clowning - original yet familiar, subtle yet grotesque, anarchic yet formulaic, hilarious yet heart-rending, oafish buffoons yet refined artists.

conceived by Jon Davison
devised by SCLOWNS
directed by Jon Davison and Clara Cenoz
performed by Jon Davison, Danny Schlesinger, Elisa Gallo Rosso, Bienam Perez and Martin Kaspar
horse choreography by Barry Grantham
props and costume by Elisa Gallo Rosso, Keith Orton, Caroline Townsend and Mike Beele
co-produced by Stratford Circus, supported by Central School of Speech and Drama, the Escola de Clown de Barcelona and the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

More information:
http://www.jondavison.net/sclowns.html
sclowns@jondavison.net
tel. (+44) 07796 155 546

Clown Devising at "Cal Clown"

Here are two numbers from the show performed by students on the Professional Clown Course at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona, in "El Local", a bar in Figueres.

They show that in just 5 weeks (of an 8-week course) it is possible to be performing clown material that really works.

By "really works" I mean performances that make an audience laugh spontaneously at the stupidity of the clown (and not, as I have seen so often, at the concepts, fantasies, ideas or ideologies that many performers try to sell whilst trying to clown).

I mean numbers that are carefully constructed along clown principles (and not according to narrative, character, or vague ideas of improvisation or "self-expression").



At the Escola de Clown, we have created a course of studies that is taught by an integrated team of teachers. They are not an odd collection of individuals who each teach "their vision" of clown and who make the students start from the beginning every time they have a new teacher. They are instead concerned with leading the students through a process that passes through all the key moments: playing, pleasure, relationship with the audience, failure, form and structure.

There are many places where you can study with a single teacher, or with a mixed bag of teachers, but I think this place is still unique in providing a truly professional training.

Summer Intensive Clown Course

One-Month Summer Intensive Course
2nd-29th August 2010

A residential course with a total of 144 hours of classes, spread over four 6-day weeks.

Course Fees
Tuition: 750 Euros
Full food and board: 750 Euros
Total cost: 1,500 Euros

This course offers a broad training ranging from the pleasure of play, of life, which is the driving force of Clown, to the creation of Clown numbers in the final performance. We will work through the various stages of the Clown process: openness, pleasure, humility, freedom, craziness, ridiculousness, imbalance, status, generosity, the flop, intelligence and types of intelligence or stupidity, sharing with and giving to the audience, the mirror effect, the relationship with other clowns (solos/duos/trios/ensembles) and with the audience, admiration, sincerity, focus, surprise, energy, failure and success... How to speak as Clown? How to dress as Clown? How to think as Clown? Ways of creating a Clown number: from improvisation to a script, with text or without, traditional or contemporary, with or without music, with or without props. What is the difference between performing for adults and children, in the street and in the theatre? How to work from your own personality and knowledge in order to create a number. The rules of humour. The Clown and other disciplines (music, dance, circus, etc., according to the student’s interests), and theoretical studies (history, analysis, theory).

There will be rehearsal space and time outside of the hours of class, and during the weekly free day. The course is designed as a whole, and the teachers work as team, meeting regularly to assess the development of the students as a group and individually.

The classes are given by a team of teachers directed by the founders of the School, Clara Cenoz (Director) and Jon Davison.

This is a course that offers the possibility of understanding the Clown from the initial stages up to what is the aim of all clowns who wish to work independently: the creation of one’s own numbers, which will provide a basis for beginning and continuing to work prfessionally. Our objective is for the student to complete the course with their own criteria on what is Clown, having experienced a variety of contexts and teachers of differing styles, and feeling able to generate their own work and adapt it to a range of professional demands, whether in theatre, street, hospital, etc., and to different types of audience.

The basic requirements to attend this course are: the commitment and interest necessary to complete the course. No previous experience is necessary. The minimum age of students is 18. We admit up to 16 students to the course.

Escola de Clown de Barcelona,
Cal Clown,
Romanyà de L'Empordà,
17773 Girona,
Spain
www.escoladeclown.eu
info@escoladeclown.eu
tel. (+34) 872 004 898
móv. (+34) 622 110 537

First Thoughts about the End

My three-year research project on clown/actor training is coming to an end. What are my final questions?

Here are two that are occuring to me at the moment:

1. Does Clown/Actor training work?
2. What is the best name for a new Clown Company?

Though they might not seem related, these two problems encapsulate everything I’ve been questioning over the last two and a half years. The first question brings me back to something very essential, perhaps the big question for a clown/actor/peformer, which is about how we actually perform. How do we do it? How do we prepare for it? And what exactly is performing? Diderot’s paradox and Stanislavsky’s search for truth, as well as most 20th century and previous methods of actor training, are concerned with the same issue.

I’m happy to have come back to such a simple question, because it allows me to throw onto the rubbish heap a lot of nonsense that I’ve come across lately, particularly in the world of academic practice-as-research. I recently received an email from some students who were canvassing opinions and reactions amongst staff and students, on the concept of “abandonment”. We were asked to relate this to our own performance practice. Obviously, we can find just about everything within the world of theatre or performance, but that doesn’t make it important or worth researching. Picking a word at random from the dictionary and then researching it in a performance context does not make any sense. It addresses no issue of pressing interest to performers or audiences.

Despite some interest in new technology, mixed-genre, or site-specific work, etc. even these current fashions do not in any way bear upon anything of real interest. But then, of course, such thumb-twiddling is easily bred in academia. The advantage of asking irrelevant questions is that no-one will challenge you on them, since no-one will be interested. On the other hand, asking whether actor training works will be swiftly challenged.

My second question has been gaining in importance over the last couple of months since we decided to convert some of the clown numbers we’ve been workshopping into professional-standard performances. If this research is to have any use, it must prove itself to improve the quality of clown performance. Anything else is purely academic.

The problem of finding a suitable name encapsulates several problems. The split in the clown world between those who are seen to be not funny and those who have pretensions not to be funny is vast. I see no point in adding any more clowning to either camp or faction. The only way forward is down the middle. But how? The status of clowning today is wretched. It is either denigrated or hijacked. How can clowns reclaim our own art and still engage with society as a whole? How do you describe good clowning in a way that people will recognise?

… to be continued…

Clown Prosthetics and Amputations

A man strolls down a busy market street a few days before Christmas. He seems unremarkable enough, hands in pockets, nonchalant, dressed in a black suit. He passes a small child, who suddenly cries out in horror. Or is it disgust? The child’s big sister turns to see what has occured. She screams. A group of kids on the other side of the street take note, and clutch each other in disbelief: are they laughing, are they afraid, are they disgusted, or all these things at once? Adults begin to take notice, too, a crowd forms, blocking the man’s path. He stops, turns, seems unsure what to do. He is surrounded. What will happen? And then, slowly, he begins to dance, steps to the left, steps to the right. Lifts his left leg into the air, lowers it, then his right leg, and whilst it stays positioned at the horizontal, his middle leg begins to rise as well. He begins to spin on his left leg, his other two flailing in the air. In a grand flourish, he crosses his legs in a complex knot, all three of them intertwined. The audience, roaring with laughter, applauds and pushes forwards to toss coins into the man’s hat that he has left on the ground. And Christmas continues.

The three-legged man is a traditional and often used routine in the clown’s repertoire. The above anecdote is a slightly idealised account of my own early experiments in Barcelona and Arkhangelsk in 2005-6 with Clown Prosthetics and Amputations (Davison 2006), which included, as well as the three-legged dance, a song with telescopic arms, a rant by a bodiless head, a keyboard piece by Stravinsky for 11 fingers, and others.

Clown history gives us an endless list of examples. In the category of prosthetics we have: the circus entrée where the clown finds that there are two too many feet sticking out of the end of his bed (Rémy 1962: 78-80); Chaplin, in Limelight, reprises the routine where his legs keep shrinking and growing (Chaplin 1952); and Steve Martin’s The Great Flydini who pulls assorted objects out of his flies, having one arm inside his costume to control and feed the objects out, and a false arm hanging at his side (Martin 1974).

Amputations would include: Laurel and Hardy’s Block-Heads, where Ollie mistakenly thinks Stan has lost a leg which is simply tucked under him as he sits (Laurel and Hardy 1938); Rik Mayall and Ade Edmonson’s chopping off prisoners’ legs in The Dangerous Brothers (Edmonson and Mayall 1991), and Ade losing his head out of a train window, then using it as a football in The Young Ones (Edmondson and Mayall 2004); or the long tradition of circus clown guillotine sketches (Webber 1996: 54-5).

As well as adding or subtracting, we can also re-arrange external members and internal organs: Hanswurst moves Mockinpott’s heart from his bum to its proper location (Weiss 1972); The Goodies had reversed feet (Goodies 1970); and Harry Hill first uses a false arm to leave his real arm free to manipulate his puppet, then in order to use two puppets switches the false arm to the wrong side of his body and finally removes his dummy’s head and puts a tennis racquet in its place, then turns the racquet round to reveal a painted face of the dummy, all because the dummy can’t pick up the racquet to play inter-species tennis (Hill 2005), which is as good an example as any of just how far comedy can go in rearranging the world and still make sense and has led some to claim that Harry Hill is a post-modern comedian, though long ago Sandy Powell had confused head and arse on his dummy: ‘I know his face but I can’t put a name to it’ (Powell 1992).

Paul Bouissac, defining profanation or the breaking of unwritten rules as the job of clowning, considers circus clowns’ to be ideally placed

circus clowns would then specialize in such demonstrative actions performed in the ritualistic mode which is the only way in which the unthinkable and unspeakable can be actualized within the system....Questions concerning the borderline which distinguishes humans from animals, or the precise moments when human life starts and is terminated, or the structure of identities, are questions which call for answers necessarily involving some amount of arbitrariness (Bouissac 1997: 199).

As Mat Fraser has it in Thalidomide the Musical: ‘It’s not my identity, it’s just my body’ (Fraser 2006).

Clearly clown is not the only genre that plays around with the body in this way. But what distinguishes it from the rest is that the transformation is perceived as ridiculous. Not only are these body-parts wrong (wrong place, wrong number, etc), they are also funny.

Indeed, one way of defining clown is as self-ridicule: laughing at myself, I make the audience laugh. I can ridicule my behaviour, my feelings, my movements, my speech, my thoughts, my beliefs and, ultimately, my own body. I can laugh at my own body because it behaves wrongly (I bump into something), or because it moves wrongly (I dance eccentrically), or because it looks wrong, which is what concerns me here.

If I look my wrong body fully in the face, as it were, its wrongness produces an alienation effect between me and it. The effect of ridiculing my own body means that I break my bonds of identification with it (and, by extension, with all bodies). I can no longer say, ‘I am my body, which is normal and perfect and just like everyone else’s and is a transparent medium for living.’ Clowning reveals that the body is not transparent. It is opaque, as it is a physical obstacle to getting what one wants. It fails to work properly.

But at the same time, clowning reveals the body as transparent, as it is voided of its illusory naturalness or rightness. We see through the trick: the trick of pretending that our bodies are real, unchanging or even necessary.

When I began working with three legs I found that two pairs of trousers and a broomstick were already enough for me to fool myself and see three legs. The issue was: how complete does the transformation have to be in order to be convincing? Or, perhaps more accurately, how convincing does the effect have to be in order to be pleasurable to an audience?

Watching the three legs in the mirror, I know it can’t be real, but what I see is telling me it is real. This produces a veritable shiver of excitement. If I were ever to end up believing the three legs were actually real, then this shiver-effect would probably disappear. The theatrical and comic effect of the three legs (or any similar transformation) seems to rely on the fact that we know ‘what is real’, and when we see ‘what isn’t real’ there is a clash between this knowledge and the perception.

Melissa Trimingham (2004: 89) makes a similar point when discussing Oskar Schlemmer’s creating of stage illusions: ‘success relies upon the audience knowing how it is done but finding the sensation of “believing the impossible” to be irresistible’.

And John Langshaw Austin defines this philosophical perspective by resorting to just such stage illusions.

Next, it is important to remember that talk of deception only makes sense against a background of general non-deception.… It must be possible to recognize a case of deception by checking the odd case against more normal ones (Austin 1962: 11).

And when the plain man sees on the stage the Headless Woman, what he sees (and this is what he sees, whether he knows it or not) is not something ‘unreal’ or ‘immaterial’, but a woman against a dark background with her head in a black bag. If the trick is well done, he doesn’t (because it’s deliberately made difficult for him) properly size up what he sees, or see what it is; but to say this is far from concluding that he sees something else (Austin 1962: 14) (Author’s emphasis).

The clash between what we expect and what really is there not only produces laughter, it can also produce pain. Many amputees suffer from severe pains in the region where their missing limb was. Recent medical research (Lotze et al. 2001; Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998) suggests that in spite of the brain receiving visual evidence which tells it that there is no arm there, the part of the brain that is responsible for initiating movement still operates normally and sends out instructions to move the non-existent arm (as the brain itself has suffered no damage). The conflict between one part of the brain saying, ‘left arm, lift!’ and the other part saying ‘there isn’t any left arm!’ may then produce paralysis (of the phantom limb, the limb that is not physically there but is perceived to still exist), and this paralysis produces the pain.

The most effective treatments are thoroughly theatrical and involve fooling our perception of reality. Using a prosthetic limb helps reduce pain, as there is then something to move and to see moving. A mirror-box may also be used to reduce pain. The patient puts their existing arm inside an open-topped box which is divided down the middle by a mirror. When you look at the mirror, you see the reflection of the arm, and it appears in the position where the missing arm would be. This visual information then agrees with the brain’s intention, removing the conflict (Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran 1996).

We can even feel sensations in a fake limb:

Hide one hand under the table, resting palm down on your knee. Then ask your helper to tap, touch and stroke with their fingertips the back of your hidden hand and the table top directly above the hand with an identical pattern of movements, for a minute or two. About half the people who try this find that the table starts to feel like part of their body - as though the hand is transferred into the table. ‘What this is telling you is that the brain's body image is amazingly plastic,’ says Vilayanur Ramachandran. ‘You've grown up with this body and yet the table gets assimilated into your body image.’ Just as an amputee might experience a phantom limb, says Ramachandran, our entire body image is a phantom - something the brain constructs for convenience (Cole n.d.).

So, if removing a limb doesn’t remove the brain’s capacity to intend to move the missing limb, then would the addition of a limb lead to the brain adding a capacity to move, for example, a third leg? Is the brain wired to respond to only two legs, two arms, no more and no less? Dr. Jonathan Cole, a researcher at the Wellcome Trust, thinks that ‘the brain is wired for two legs, but there are papers on the very rare syndrome of patients' feeling they have three arms or legs, known I think as supplementary limb syndrome’ (private email correspondence).

Corresponding with Dr. Cole, it struck me how we were curious about the same things. But how can this be so? Medicine is in the business of creating or restoring normality, or equilibrium. Clowns, on the other hand, are in the business of creating imbalance, they delight in disrupting normality, and find heightened presence in gross misrepresentations of the body. As a clown I am aware of my own pleasure in the freedom to misrepresent, but what might be the motivations, the pleasures of the prosthetician?

Oliver Sacks, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, certainly exhibits a taste for the bizarre: ‘One … patient, under my care, describes how he must “wake up” his phantom in the mornings …. Only then can he put on his prosthesis and walk. What other odd methods (one wonders) are used by amputees?’ (Sacks 1986: 64). Is the prosthetician’s vocational motivation a nurse-like drive to relieve suffering? Or, more darkly, do they have forbidden fantasies imagining taking off that spare leg at bed-time and laying it down for a rest? Personally, I always store my false leg standing up.

Sacks has of course famously been transferred to the stage by Peter Brook. But it was in the earliest accounts of amputee experiences that I found particularly inspiration for my own work. William James’ case studies of American Civil War amputee soldiers’ experiences date from the point in history when a large number of amputees start to enter general society. Medical science had advanced enough to be able to save a soldier’s life by cutting his leg off, rather than letting him die as a result of his wounds. First accounts of phantom limb pain date from this time, as does the medical fascination with prosthetics.

One such man told me that he felt as if he had three legs in all, getting sometimes confused, in coming down stairs, between the artificial leg which he put forwards, and the imaginary one which he felt bent backwards and in danger of scraping its toes upon the steps just left behind.

The lost foot also sympathizes sometimes with the foot which remains. If one is cold, the other feels cold. One man writes that whenever he walks through puddles and wets his sound foot, his lost foot feels wet too (James 1887: 249-258).

Could I feel my third leg more? I resolved to improve my performances by trying to make more connections between brain and third leg. Or perhaps I should say, connections between my body and third leg. I worked on initiating the movement of the false leg from the same place as I initiated movement of my real legs. Any student of Feldenkrais will tell you that the further away from the centre of the body that you initiate a movement, the less efficient it will be. Movements that begin from the pelvic-abdominal region are far less energy consuming (Feldenkrais 2002). They are also more theatrically effective. Beginning the movement of the third leg from the body-centre had a vastly superior effect on an audience. By exaggerating this procedure, and doing the same exaggeration when I moved my real legs, I could achieve some kind of equality in the quality of movement of all three. This resulted in a wave-like movement that began in the abdomen and flowed out through the legs.

We could say that this created movement that was more organic, more connected, perhaps more authentic. But clowning is no more allied to concepts of authenticity than it is to falsification. This is demonstrated by another important movement, of a very different order, that I added to aid this evening out of movement quality. Since in order to move the third leg I had to move my right hand and wrist, which holds the end of the stick which is the false leg, this wrist movement was partly perceptible to the audience through my right trouser pocket. I therefore copied this movement with my left hand in my left pocket, whenever I moved my (real) left leg. This acted as a kind of decoy, removing the clue to the false limb.

Which brings us to respond to that age-old actor’s dilemma – ‘Is it real or is it pretence?’ – with a clear ‘both’. Clowning openly manipulates the authentic and the fake in order to be convincing. More radically, clown finds its success in failure, in wrongness, and points to a mode of performance that thrives on the inauthentic or unbalanced body, and ultimately on a disidentification with the body. This absence of body-success, far from being a hindrance to presence, becomes that which produces that presence. Clowning may thus offer a fast-track to finding this presence-in-absence, avoiding the trap that the serious performer has historically sometimes fallen into of having to pretend that what she is performing is ‘really real’. Clown may therefore offer the performer the opportunity to achieve presence via acceptance of the failure to be present.


References

Austin, John Langshaw (1962) Sense and Sensibilia, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bouissac, Paul (1997) ‘The profanation of the sacred in circus clown performances’, in Richard Schechner and W. Appel (eds) By Means of Performance, Cambridge: CUP, pp.195-9.

Chaplin, Charlie (1952) Limelight, Warner.

Cole, Jonathan (n.d.) Phantom limb pain, Pain and the Wellcome Trust. Available at: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/pain/microsite/medicine2.html (Accessed 22/04/09).

Cole, Jonathan (2006) private email correspondence, 18/02/2006.

Davison, Jon (2006) Clown Prosthetics and Amputations, MA thesis, University of Kent.

Edmonson, Adrian and Mayall, Rik (1991) The Dangerous Brothers, BBC Enterprises.

Edmonson, Adrian and Mayall, Rik (2004) Bottom – Mindless Violence, Mr. and Mrs. Monsoon Video.

Feldenkrais, Moshe (2002) The Potent Self, Berkeley: Frog, Ltd

Fraser, Mat (2006) Thalidomide the Musical, Battersea Arts Centre.

Goodies, The (1970) Fun Outlaws, BBC. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOCSqXSGnoM&mode=related&search= (Accessed 22/04/09).

Hill, Harry (2005) Hooves Live, Avalon Television.

James, William (1887) ‘The Consciousness of Lost Limbs’, Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1: 249-258.

Lotze, Martin, Flor, Herta , Grodd, Wolfgang, Larbig, Wolfgang and Birbaumer, Niels (2001) ‘Phantom movements and pain: an fMRI study in upper limb amputees’, Brain, 124: 2268-2277.

Martin, Steve (1974) The Great Flydini, on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, NBC, probably September 1974. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hixIKtSWHXk (Accessed 22/04/09).

Laurel, Stan and Hardy, Oliver (1938) Block-Heads, MGM.

Powell, Sandy (1992) Heroes of Comedy, Channel 4, 31/01/1992.

Ramachandran, V. S. and Hirstein, William (1998) ‘The perception of phantom limbs, the D. O. Hebb lecture’, Brain (1998), 121: 1603-1630.

Ramachandran, V. S. and Rogers-Ramachandran, D. (1996) ‘Synaesthesia in phantom limbs induced with mirrors’, Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 263, 377-386.

Rémy, Tristan (1962) Entrées clownesques, Paris: L’Arche.

Sacks, Oliver (1986) The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, London: Picador.

Trimingham, Melissa (2004) ‘Sehr geehrter Herr Schlemmer’, in Performance Research 9(1): 81-98: Taylor and Francis.

Webber, Kimberley (ed.) (1996) Circus! The Jandaschewsky Story, Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing.

Weiss, Peter How Mr. Mockinpott was cured of his Suffering, in Roloff, Michael (ed.) (1972) The Contemporary German Theater, New York: Avon Books.


Author Posting. (c) Jon Davison, 2010.
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Jon Davison for personal use, not for redistribution.
The definitive version was published in Performance Research, Volume 14 Issue 4, December 2009.
doi:10.1080/13528160903553053 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528160903553053)

Review: "The Art of Clowning", by Eli Simon

It's a sad day when people who are so clueless about clowning are actually publishing books telling us how to do it, such as this from Eli Simon's "The Art of Clowning" (2009, New York: Palgrave Macmillan): "It's okay not to be funny. Clowns do not have to make people laugh." (p.31)

Simon talks a lot about truthfulness, but there is very little of it in this disappointing book. His haughty dismissals of the "maniacal clown who freaks out the neighourhood" set the tone for a book that has pretensions to superiority: "thsse Bozo-type clowns... are not the soulful clowns you will likely develop using this book." (p.4)

However, the exercises and advice that follow do not measure up to such claims, running along the lines of tired old impro tasks like "take an object and transform it". Hardly a case of "you will be deeply connected to truths rather than just gags" (p.6)

I fear that there will be many who will use this book as their bible, delighted to be relieved of the responsibility of actually being funny, and will fool themselves into believing that their uninteresting and formless work is full of truth. In other words, it may contribute to the continued lowering of standards in clowning today. Books sometimes do have an effect, as we aw a few years back in Spain with Jesús Jara's "El Clown: un Navegante de las Emociones", which resembles Simon's work in its insipidness and false claims to deep insight, and has misled countless clown students.

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, Week 11, 12-15/01/10

A new year, and an intensified schedule awaits us. We are now working in a more focused way, intent more on devising and rehearsing 4 or 5 of the clown numbers that Tristan Rémy collected. They are: The Bottles, William Tell, The Cake in the Hat, The Broken Plates and The Hidden Apple. We also agreed to present a private showcase on 4th March at CSSD.

We also decided to re-incorporate the key elements of clown training that we developed over the first two years of the project. And as we now have a three hour session every Thursday, we have time to spend an hour or so on preparation for rehearsing proper. Our warm-up is based on vertiginous play, play with virtually no rules. I have written extensively on this elsewhere, so I won’t go nto details now. We follow this with some fundamental clown exercises, such as step-per-laugh or ball-clap.

In this first session of the year we sped through all five main numbers, and opted to concentrate on two of them for the coming week: William Tell and The Bottles.

As well as some regular and long-standing members of the group, we welcomed the addition of a dramaturg, Hary, who will be shadowing us over a 6-week period as part of his studies into clown and circus dramaturgy and direction. This is an exciting and very pertinent moment to have him with us, as his interests and experience coincide with where we are at this stage.

I have also put out requests for a props-maker, a costume-designer and a lighting designer to work with us.

Works cited:
Rémy, Tristan (1962) Entrées clownesques, Paris: L’Arche.