by
Jon Davison
This
is a transcript of a paper given at the TaPRA Conference 2013, Glasgow.
In my paper of three years ago entitled
‘Clown Training Today’, assessing contemporary clowning’s attempt to impose its
Lecoquian model on older traditions of clowning, I concluded with the following
thoughts:
“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?”
In this paper I report on some specific
developments in clown training since then, describing possible ways forward for
clown training in a post-Lecoquian world. My aim will be to describe in
sufficient detail some of the ways that clown knowledge may be transmitted. In
doing so, I would first like to outline three broad models of training.
Firstly, the apprentice/craft model,
which has mainly been associated with clowns working either before or outside
of the Lecoq/Gaulier approach, including ‘traditional’ circus, many
‘self-taught’ street clowns, and, arguably, all clowns pre-1960. This model
privileges learning ‘on the job’, transmitting tried and tested, or codified,
material which can be directly used in performance (gags, entrées, lazzi, routines,
bits, prop-manipulation, audience-gathering techniques, etc.).
However, such a categorisation, where an
ideology of how to approach clown training
matches up with a historical period or a particular perceived style of
clowning, seems suspiciously neat and tidy. The apprentice model is in fact not
limited to ‘material’ but also includes performing ‘techniques’ and strategies
of stage presence. Andrew Davis, in his recent study of American burlesque
comedy of the 1920s and 30s reports, for example, the comedian Harry Conley:
“I use psychology on the audience to
make them laugh [...] It’s as though I am a child, a naughty boy, and the
audience is put in the naughty-children frame of mind. [...] Fanny Brice used
that technique as Baby Snooks.” (Davis, Andrew (2011) Baggy Pants Comedy New York: Palgrave Macmillan)
Such an approach is not a million miles
away from elements of contemporary clown discourses which privilege innocence,
as in clown teacher Eric de Bont’s answer to the question What is your focus in teaching “clown”?:
The second training model I want to
mention is the conservatoire/workshop model, which has come to the fore over
the last half century in clowning, and is dominated by the Lecoq/Gaulier
approach which assumes clowns are ‘personal’ or ‘inner’ and must be ‘found’.
This assumption that we each have a
clown ‘inside us’, matches up with that standard Lecoquian ‘given’, that we
each have ‘quelque chose à dire’. This
model privileges exercises in the classroom over already existing performable material.
But again, the neatness of categorising
contemporary clown as ‘inner clown’ (with the assumption that this is a binary
opposite of ‘traditional’=’outer’) is by no means watertight. According to
David Wiles’ study (1987) Shakespeare’s
Clown (Cambridge: CUP), at a certain point around the last three decades of
the sixteenth century, the idea that each civilised city-dweller of London
might harbour a rough, anarchic, ignorant ‘clown’ (the recent coining of the
term ‘clown’ refers here to the person who is ‘not a gentleman’) inside was
quite acceptable. Many of those Londoners were, of course, immigrants, former
rural residents come to the city, or only one generation away:
“The majority of Tarlton’s London
audience must have been visitors or first generation immigrants. Tarlton tapped
spectators’ anxieties about the rustic boor latent within themselves.” (Wiles
1987: 23)
But soon, according to Wiles, this idea
would wane, the idea of the duality of clown/gentleman losing relevance in a
consolidated urban culture.
But as the cultural climate in London
moved on, this privileged position of the clown would soon be challenged:
“[Tarlton’s] comedy cut across barriers
of class, proving acceptable both at court and in the tavern, because most
people could accept the proposition that beneath every exterior there lurks a
coarse anarchic peasant. By the end of the century, this proposition was less
acceptable. Court, theatres, Protestantism and many sometime immigrants had
achieved permanence. There was
less concern with original sin, more with the innate character of gentility,
and with the power of education to change the man. Inversionary anarchy, both
at court and in the playhouse, was perceived as a threat to social order. For
such reasons as these, stage clowns in
the 1590s and 1600s confronted
new conditions and adopted new working methods.“ (Wiles 1987: 23)
So already we can see that notions of
clowns as inner or outer are rather prone to historical, political and cultural
flux.
Thirdly, I would like to identify a
model of clown training in potential construction, centred on the academy,
which so far brings together reflective analysis and a version of the
conservatoire workshop model. We are, at this moment, engaged in this model.
Our own analyses are inevitably already conditioned by this new
‘self-reflexivity’ in clowning and other popular performance forms.
I have already hinted at the leakiness
of some binaries of clown discourses, such as material/personal, outer/inner,
etc. My own teaching practice, as developed at the Barcelona Clown School,
attempts to open up these leaks as far as possible, guided by a watchful
academic eye.
I would now like to take you through an
example of how this leakiness might be productive. This involves ways in which
we can teach devising for clown performance, and so involves both the
preparation of ‘material’ (our supposed Model no. 1) and the delivery of that
material in live performance (supposedly our Model no. 2). My own work in this
area has been driven in part by the practical need to redress the imbalance
created by the ‘personal clown’ Lecoq/Gaulier approach in its privileging of
presence over material. Put simply, most clown students spend a lot of time
‘finding’ clown, and next to no time on creating work which can stand up in
front of general audiences. When they do attempt to create, they find their
options limited. They can either rely on ‘improvisation’ (too risky a route for
most) or resort to elements of non-clown theatre such as narrative, characters,
and the creation of fictional worlds [Spymonkey, Nola Rae, Gardi Hutter]
(bizarrely so, since clowns tend to work against these kinds of constructs). In
a few (famous) cases [Polunin], they resort to appeals to metaphysical or
transcendental significance as a way to shore up weakly constructed material.
The devising clown performance I am
referring to forms part of an intensive clown training course of 250 hours
classroom time at ECB. Before introducing devising, we have already work for a
considerable time on playfulness, the dynamics and pleasure of the flop and
stupidity, the relationship between clown and audience, all solid Gaulierian
stuff. This is supplemented by work on the dynamics of emotions in clowning and
the beginnings of clowning with text. Also, the rudiments of the structure of
comedy appropriate to, although not exclusive to, clowning, such as: the rule
of three, correct/incorrect behaviour, problem solving, etc. In addition,
analysis of the work of both historic and contemporary clowns is undertaken
constantly.
The key point comes when a student faces
the issue of how to bring together the tasks of reproduction of devised
material and the in-the-moment and vulnerable-before-an-audience clowning.
One method of devising where this
confluence can be particularly evident is in working from an individual
student’s own non-clown performance skills. I would like to briefly describe
the method and one recent example.
1. Students
make lists of skills they have. These include performing arts techniques, daily
skills and skills they lack.
2. We (student, teacher and other students)
choose one performing skill we are curious to see. (Later we will work on the
non-skills, either creating separate material, or combining them with the high
skills.)
In one recent example I will use to
illustrate, the student had experience as a dancer from an early age, trained
in classical, contemporary, folk and popular forms.
3. The student performs their skill for
the class. They are encouraged to show their maximum ability, to show off in
fact. A skill presented in this way often has the effect on an audience that we
feel that we are seeing something special, in other words something we are not
capable of. This marks the activity out as a ‘skill’, perhaps a virtuoso one.
In our dance example, the student showed
a mixture of traditional ballet and semi-improvised street dance moves.
We are perhaps more accustomed to
associate clowning with lack of skill. However, as I hope to demonstrate, one
way to more easily attain clown ‘effects’ is to work from virtuosity.
4. Immediate feedback. The class answers
the questions ‘which bits most impressed or appealed to you most and you wanted
to see again?’ These may not be what the performer themself likes or values most,
nor the most skilled things.
In our example, we preferred some ballet
steps which were clearly recognisable and beyond our capabilities; and the most
‘grotesque’ full body moves from other styles. We ask the student to perform
these bits again.
As a clown, one must focus on the
audience response, to the extent that if they like something, one will do it
again in order to achieve the same success.
5. Further questioning. We ask ‘what is
the expected attitude, state of being or emotion of such a performer?’ This may
be obvious or not. The more restricted the skill, the easier it is to identify
the attitude: flamenco dance/pride, ballet dance/light, juggler/focus on
objects, magician/confident or dominant, and so on.
We agreed that the performer exhibited
what we interpreted as ‘seriousness’, confidence and a certain amount of pride,
with focus on a point in space. This we perceive as ‘correct’, or ‘expected’.
The concept and practice of
’correctness’ is key to understanding how clowning functions, and, together
with ‘incorrectness’, forms the backbone of much clown devising.
6. We then ask ‘what is the opposite of
this attitude?’ There are many potential opposites, so we will try them all to
find which one gives the most result.
We suggest: frivolity, smiling, focusing
on the audience. The student shows the skill with these ’incorrect’ attitudes.
Some of these appear immediately to us
to be not just wrong, but funny. Wrongness in itself can never be simply
equated to funny. The best way to discover what works is of course to try it.
And what works for one performer will not necessarily be a good idea for
another.
7. We then look at what happens when the
performer uses two opposing attitudes, one correct, one incorrect. This kind of
binarism works well for clowns, perhaps because it involves strong contrast,
another of our comedy structures. It is also a means to improvise, and in my
own improvisation work I have leant heavily on this method. Ruth Zaporah
suggests that freedom is best found within the format of having two opposing
options, as in her exercise ‘Back to Front’:
“The participants only have a few
choices, yet within these choices lie vast possibilities of
experience.”(Zaporah, Ruth (1995) Action Theater: The Improvisation of
Presence (Berkeley: North Atlantic
Books, p.86)
Having two options gives one endless
freedom, one can keep choosing to do the same or its opposite. And the limited
number of options removes the need to search for decisions. It is a kind of
pure improvisation where content is a non-issue. Again, non-content material
seems appropriate for clowns.
In our example, some switches from silly
frivolity to composed seriousness make us laugh. However, the student exhibits
such an extreme, to us, seriousness, that his silliness cannot attain such an
intensity. This will now lead us to search somewhere rather different in order
to begin to construct the basis of a clown dance number with this particular
student.
8. We next look to apply four basic
structures that are commonly found not just in clowning but in other forms of
humour too. These are:
-
Contrast
-
Rule of three
-
Problem/solution
-
Wrongness
We have already touched on contrast and
wrongness in the context of performer attitude. But as we were dissatisfied
with the results, we ask the question again, in a more general way:
‘what would be most wrong/incorrect for
this dancer? What, in general, would be most incorrect, for example, in a
ballet class?’ the student himself has easy access to several answers by
recalling what things would have got him chucked out of a class during his
training: laughing, chatting, smoking,
eating, drinking...
9. We ask him to dance and also perform
some of these incorrect actions, and decide that we like him dancing ballet
while smoking, eating and drinking. Indeed, these choices also allow him to
push his seriousness to an extreme and act as the contrast with the wrong
behaviours, such that we dispense with the need for a ‘wrong attitude’ from now
on.
10. I now work one-to-one with the
student on devising his piece. We search for maximum contrast and find that
this mostly works best when the dance and wrong behaviours are performed
simultaneously. For example, a series of assemblés
while drinking from a can of beer; a kind of changement while
nibbling a biscuit; finishing with a double
tour en l'air to the knee while smoking.
With several bits of action
now working we begin to order them. We decide that the beginning of the number
must establish the correctness and the frame of reference, also demonstrating
the virtuosic skill. We choose a musical accompaniment which reflects this, the
Dance of the Flowers from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. We use 8 bars of the music
to establish the skill, the first 4 bars being almost ‘pure’ skill, the second
4 bars introducing some ‘wrong’ moves, where body movements and arm movement
are isolated and separated from each other. Here we have an example of how to
preserve a performance skill whilst also clowning. It does not involve trashing
the skill at all.
These isolations we then
order according the rule of three. The rule of three can be understood in many
ways, for example here we establish the sequence parade in circle, then move
arms horizontal to vertical. This happens twice, and the third time the arm
movements are also ‘extra-wrong’ as they do not come from classical ballet. The
whole sequence thus follows the pattern: expected, expected, surprise.
We continue in a similar way with 8 bars
of dance while drinking, 8 bars eating and finishing with smoking as the
‘’wrongest’ of our behaviours, using the student’s highest level skill as a finale.
11. Finally, after so much structural
thinking, we come back to the present moment. Does it work in front of an
audience?
Taking care for the form of one’s
material by no means excludes the usefulness, the necessity, of actually making
the thing work in the moment.
Nor should we fall into the error of
splitting clown performance completely down the middle. Yet one aspect of what
I do in performance is the material, my plan, my script. Another aspect of my
performance is how I engage in the here and now with the real audience I have.
This conversation is necessarily made up as I go along, I must take the
audience with me, they must be convinced of my clown-ness in every moment.
These two tasks have different focuses,
but that doesn’t mean we should set them up as mutually exclusive binaries. How
can I combine this seemingly spontaneous moment with my rigorously built
material? There are some clown exercises which serve us both at the beginning
and the end of a course of study. I like to use one, the step-laugh, as both an
initiation into the dynamics of clown and as a re-training and final fine
tuning of a number before we let it loose on the general public in a public
show.
Step-laugh consists in taking one step
to cross the space, only when and if the audience laughs. If there is silence
for six seconds or so, you take a step back. The exercise is fascinating since
it deals with the in-the-moment, whether something is funny in this moment or
not determines whether the clown moves forwards or backwards. But it is this
very point, that it focuses on the ‘moment’, which frees this exercise from the
obligation to also create ‘material’. In the basic exercise, there is a kind of
‘script’, which is the step, the crossing of a space from A to B. This script
can then be understood in terms of more complex steps in a script. By
re-performing the worked out number with these rules, the student re-learns the
importance of the moment-ness, whilst hitching their material to this dynamic.
And it is this dynamic which guarantees that the number will indeed be a
‘clown’ number, and not any old kind of humour.
Again, I emphasise, none of this
excludes the importance of the beloved individuality of the clowns spontaneity.
In order to find the best ‘surprise’ in a sequence of three, for example, one
would be well advised to push oneself to crazy limits. In order to bring
richness to the contrast of emotions/attitudes, one would ideally commit
oneself fully to the play of emotions and their ridiculous effect. There is no
point using ‘anger’, for example, if anger expressed by you as a clown doesn’t
make the audience laugh. Hence, many of the choices made in the devising
process will depend on the particularities of the performer as a clown, as
someone who makes us laugh with their own ridiculousness. But what is different
to the more common approach is here that these ‘personal clown qualities’
cannot in themselves solely create a well-formed number. They need help.
Clowning is a richly anarchic and
surprising artform. But avoidance of form only serves to place on a pedestal
such qualities as the ‘personal’, ‘self-expression’, which only serve to drag
us down into the murky waters of psychology and as vehicles of oft-repeated
‘messages’.
© Jon Davison September 2013
