by Jon Davison
This is a transcript of a paper given at the TaPRA Conference 2014, Royal Holloway University
Abstract
This
paper will outline some of the options open to us today for the analysis,
interpretation and writing of the history of clowns and clowning. It begins
with an overview of the more commonly found forms of clown history, the
‘monumental’ and the ‘anecdotal’, together with their aims and limitations. It
then goes on to explore an approach to clown history which places clowns and
clowning within their social, political and historical contexts. How might such
a perspective bear upon how we understand such widely differing historical
manifestations of clowning as clown performers in Shakespeare’s company, the
New Woman clowns of the 1890s, or issues of lineage and genealogy in the spread
of roles such as Pierrot, Clown or Auguste across the worlds of clowning,
pantomime and commedia?
And
how might such an examination affect how we interpret contemporary clowns and
clowning, whose stories and histories have tended to be self-written, from
Jacques Lecoq to Slava Polunin? Can mapping distant clown histories provide a
model, methodology and indeed the courage to confront our own period and
practices with a critical eye?
In
conclusion, this paper argues for a critical and rigorous approach to clown
history which demonstrates a healthy scepticism towards clown practitioners’
self-mythologising, guided by the clown historian Tristan Rémy’s observation,
in Les Clowns, that ‘Clowns,
notably, have a propensity to mystify’ (1945: 381).
Introduction
I
have two main points:
First,
that most ways of doing clown history have been utterly useless.
Second,
as a result, we are asked to rely on stories and myths with no basis in reality
such as sad clowns, inner clowns,
clowning as healing, women can't clown and other such mystifications, in
order to try and understand clowns and clowning. In other words, bad history
produces bad theory.
In
this paper I want to present an overview of a history of clown history. What
has clown history been ...so far in history?
I’ll
briefly look at different common presentations of clown history and ask what
those concepts (of what history is) produce, in terms of how we are then able
to conceive of clowns.
In
their place I want to suggest a more critical kind of history which places
clowns and clowning in their political and cultural contexts. In order to see
what such an approach might produce, I propose a brief look at some historical
and contemporary clowns.
- What
is clown history?
Clown
history isn’t just a question of history, whether that is a history of clowns
or of their practices. It also concerns philosophy and theory, or how we think
about and theorise what clowns do or are supposed to do.
Victor
Vladimirov, Director of the Moscow State College of Circus and Variety Arts,
speaking at the 1993 World Clown Congress, asserted that:
“In
order to have any movement forward in clowning, you have to have a philosophy
of clowning. In order to have a philosophy of clowning, you have to have a
history of clowning” (cited in Bruce ‘Charlie’ Johnson (2010) ‘History and Philosophy’ in Clowning Around, March/April 2010).
Monumental History
Foucault’s
take on Nietzsche’s three classes of history put monumental history in the
first type:
the
second of the Untimely Meditations called “monumental history”: a history given
to re-establishing the high points of historical development and their
maintenance in a perpetual presence, given to the recovery of works, actions,
and creations through the monogram of their personal essence. But in 1874,
Nietzsche accused this history, one totally devoted to veneration, of barring
access to the actual intensities and creations of life. The parody of his last
texts serves to emphasize that “monumental history” is itself a parody.
(Foucault,
Michel (1971) Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History in Foucault (1991)The
Foucault Reader, p. 94)
By
way of an example, here is Clown Bluey doing Nietzsche’s second kind of
history, the monumental one:
So, where did clowns originate from? Right through
ancient history there have always been men (and women!) who have had the
ability to make others laugh…
Ancient Egypt 5000 years ago used to keep African
Pygmies known as Dangas in the Royal Courts to amuse the Pharos and Royal
Families…
Ancient China had clowns attached to the Imperial
Court as long ago as the Chou Dynasty (1027-221 B.C.)… One is named as Yu Sze,
who was clown to Ch’in Shih Huang-ti, who built the Great Wall of China…
Ancient Greece had clowns who wore short tunics
(“chiton”) which were grotesquely padded at the front and rear and knitted
socks like tights…
Ancient Rome had several types of clown. Some were
known as Sannio ... Another clown was Stupidus (hence our word stupid) which
was Latin for mimic fool…There was also a lower form of clown who was known as
Scurra …There were yet others known as Moriones…
In Malaya, clowns exist today who are similar to ones
who performed thousands of years ago. They are called P’rang …
A well known clown existed in Turkey in about 1440 …
His name was Nasr el-Din who was court jester to Tamburlaine (or Timur) the
Mongol Conqueror. ..
In the East, a strong tradition of Jesters existed and
indeed goes back further than that of Europe, certainly as far as the 8th
Century…
In the 1700′s, Italian Commedia del’arte al improviso
(professional improvised comedy) was imported into this country…
In 1778, there was born a man who, by his own
personality, skill and sheer hard work was to snatch the Harlequinade away from
the Harlequin and hand it firmly to the Clown. The man was Joseph Grimaldi …
Prior to this, in 1768, Philip Astley opened his
Amphitheatre, the first “circus”…
The Auguste appears to have made his appearance in the
middle of the 19th Century and many tales are told of his origin…
If
you map these monuments of clown history you get this kind of thing:
Timelines
make us think in terms of cause and effect, one thing leading to another. Which
is another kind of concept:
Evolutionary History
In
evolutionary history, the assumption is that nothing can exist without having
grown out of something which existed before. This gives us a sequence of generations, where each new generation can only
come into being because of the existence of the previous one, and is supposed
to retain some of its characteristics. It is a family resemblance model.
One of the most popular examples of
evolutionary history in clown studies concerns the commedia dell’arte. This
probably has everything to do with the fact that there are a range of
characters with names, which cross historical and national boundaries. It
already looks like a family migration.
The
problem here is that, for instance, whilst ‘Pierrot’ might be, linguistically
speaking, the French form for ‘Pedrolino’, this tells us nothing of why
Deburau’s Pierrot does not resemble an Italian Pedrolino of previous centuries.
In other words, family trees don’t explain why particular manifestations of
clowns actually occurred when and where they occurred.
At
worst, they entertain the idea that the elements of a clown are somehow
contained within that clown, essential inherent, not historical, and can be
passed on in some kind of genetic way.
At
best, such genealogies create connections which are highly disputable:
‘The
clown, being of recent tradition, has no ancestors beyond a few generations. ‘
(Rémy,
Tristan (1945) Les Clowns, p.14)
A
third form of history is one of the most popular with clowns themselves.
Anecdotal history
Clowns
are notorious for encouraging self-aggrandising myths and legends about
themselves. As the clown historian Tristan Rémy’s observed, in Les Clowns, that ‘Clowns,
notably, have a propensity to mystify’ (1945: 381).
Everything
from claiming to have invented a clown number that has been around for
centuries (most clowns), or a costume likewise used by all (Chaplin)to having
cured spectators or children of not being able to walk (Charlie Rivel),
deafness (Grimaldi) or from dying (Fratellinis) to posing as the ‘philosopher’
clown (Grock, Polunin). The same stories attach themselves to different clowns,
cropping up in autobiographies over the years. In Grock’s case, even, one story
of daring-do was lifted straight from the pages of a novel.
Perhaps
we should include in this category such free-floating myths as the ‘pathetic or
tragic clown’, invented by Modernist painters and authors at the end of the 19th
century and maintained by moody teenagers, morphing into the trope of the evil
clown at the end of the 20th. This is more a case of a kind of mock
‘clown theory’, but in a historical discussion I think it pertinent to point
out that theory’s own particular history. And most importantly, that it has
one!
Finally,
in this list of pop forms of clown history, we have:
Erased history
The
attempt to erase clown history occurs, of course, in a particular historical
moment.
‘the circus clown [...] has little to offer theatre’ (Jacques Lecoq
in Murray, Simon 2003: 70)
‘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, Oleg 1970: 93)
Or
Fellini, in his mock-documentary of 1970, The
Clowns, who pronounced the clown to be ‘dead’. [play video]
Allusive history
Something
all these kinds of history have in common is that they merely allude to
clowning, rather than specifying what clowns do, such that we might be able to
think about them. Instead, they allude from the vantage point if a
pre-established myth, or ideology, if you like.
The
anthropologist Paul Bouissac, who has written extensively over several decades
on clowns and clown theory, says most clown history only alludes never
specifying what clowns did or do thus depriving us of a means to theorise about
what they do. Bouissac is concerned how this useless history of clowns and
clowning prohibits any kind of theorising about clown performance which would
have any kind of historical perspective, and much of his work is driven by a
desire to describe and then analyse how clowns produce the effect they produce.
The
historical literature generally deals with biographical and chronological data
and their interpretation, and offers little information on the precise
behaviour of clowns as performers. A trick may be mentioned out of its
immediate context, or part of a costume may be described, but the circumstances
in which they were used are not given.
Bouissac,
Paul (1976) Circus and Culture: a
semiotic approach, p.153.
Bouissac
accuses a range of commentators, including anthropologists, psychologists,
artists and film-makers, of ‘second-hand knowledge’. These commentaries make
the mistake of assuming that clowning can be summed up by merely listing some
of it’s obvious features, without understanding the structures and forms by
which it organises itself (Bouissac is a semiotician, by the way). As in this
example, in S. Tarachow’s Circus and
Clowns:
“The clown does incredibly stupid things and
never seems to learn; even in the judgment of the child he is stupid. Equipped
with a broom, he tries to sweep away a circle of light cast by a spotlight, but
never succeeds. He follows a bauble suspended from his own headdress. He
engages in endless bickering or problems with another clown, problems and
quarrels that could be settled in a moment if either clown showed an ounce of
intelligence. Other clowns act out the most fantastic childish indulgences. One
might endlessly break dishes, another eat enormous amounts of pie. Another is
abysmally dirty. Sometimes the dirty clown creates a comic situation in which
the superego is gratified. The clown removes a fantastic number of dirty shirts
and finally arrives as a spotlessly clean one. There is a good deal of
aggression as well as masochism. They strike each other, quarrel, fall, trip.
The slapstick and bladder are prominent.”
All
of these statements are true, but their sum total is a very poor account of
observable sequences
(Bouissac
1976: 153-4)
Bouissac’s
own analyses instead focus on the specific cases of individual clowns.
It’s
almost as if no-one wants us really to have a proper history of clowns and
clowning. Now why would that be?
So,
how could we do better?
Let’s
have a brief look at some specific examples
Take
the history of women clowns.
- What
is women’s clown history?
Bruce
‘Charlie’ Johnson tells of an instance in 1990 of a variety arts magazine
editorial complaining that women were taking the men’s clown jobs because they
were more popular. The author
implied
that women were hurting the art of clowning. He supported his position by
claiming the only woman to star in a circus until recent times was Annie Oakley
and that female clowns had not existed until late in the twentieth century.
(Johnson 2010)
Two
myths are implied here already. One, that women clowns don’t have a history.
And two, that women are not, or should not be, better clowns than men. This
latter complaint about women clowns taking the men’s jobs would of course be an
extreme form of erasure. Simply put, they should ‘disappear’.
Johnson’s
written reply to the editorial disputed this view of history, citing Evetta
Matthews, who appeared on an 1895 Barnum & Bailey Circus poster. And
elsewhere, in Early Female Clowns
(2000), Johnson lists: ancient Greek female Dorian Mimes in the 7th
century BC; medieval glee-maidens; Mathurine, a seventeenth century jester at
the French court; and the role of Columbine in Commedia dell’Arte.
Johnson’s
defence of women clown history is to be applauded, but as we can see, he has
had to have resort to those forms of history I have argued are non-functioning.
He inserts female figures in the list of monuments. This doesn’t get us very
far. Nor does mentioning Columbine. Despite being a part of the commedia
‘family’, women clowns don’t really ‘count’ in those family trees of pierrots,
harlequins and others... Which would beg
the question: how is it that in recent times suddenly female clowns were ‘born’?
Evetta Matthews
But
if we dig a little deeper, and look not just for allusions to women clowns, but
specifically what one of them did, we can get somewhere more interesting.
The
poster Johnson mentions announces ‘Evetta, the only lady clown’. On the
surface, this looks more like a publicity gimmick playing on the novelty value
of a woman appearing as a clown, quite the opposite of an acceptance of women
clowns in circus.
But what did Evetta actually ‘do’? Here is a
contemporary account:
Mathews boldly sat down next to male audience
members, made faces at children, and danced, tumbled and twisted ‘like a rubber
doll’ while in the arena. Press releases noted that she had ‘all of the new
woman's fads’ because she rode a bicycle, swung Indian clubs, ‘and does
everything a man does to keep herself in proper trim.’ [From ‘A Very New
Woman,’ unidentified newspaper clipping, 1896, Circus World Museum] (Davis
2005: 5)
The description is really an interpretation
lacking specific details of how she constructed her performance, or what meaning
it might be intended to have. But if we look at Matthews’ own words, they
confirm that she consciously saw herself as being in tune with the progressive
times:
I believe that a woman can do anything for a
living that a man can do, and I do it just as well as a man. All of my people
laughed at me when I told them that I was going into the ring as a clown; but
they do not laugh now when they see that I can keep an engagement all the time,
and earn as much money and more than they can in their branches of the
business. [From ‘A Very New Woman,’ unidentified newspaper clipping, 1896,
Circus World Museum] (Davis 2005: 5)
The
context is of course the New Woman movement, and circus performance was one of
several public arenas which women were claiming:
starting in the late 1890s, ‘New Woman numbers’
were a frequent part of the largest circuses: women, clad in ‘becoming’
bloomers, ‘of the most trim fitting, advanced new woman dress reform pattern,’
played all roles in the arena: ringmaster, grooms, and object holders.
Janet Davis (2005) ‘Bearded Ladies, Dainty
Amazons, Hindoo Fakirs, and Lady Savages: Circus Representations of Gender and
Race in Victorian America’, p.2.
From this perspective, Matthews’ clown is not
just a freak one-off.
So can
we theorise that the actions of women clowns in the 1890s and 1900s produced
progressive models of women? Unfortunately things are not so simple.
Lulu the clownesse
Here is a description of Lulu the clownesse:
Lulu, in her
extraordinary pre-dinner evening dress, but still in her clownesse’s wig, mounts a fixed bar installed in the centre of
the ring by two riders, and she bends backwards to place her sweet, cheeky face
with its strange smile between the rustling frills revealed there beneath, which suddenly frame the inverted oval of her
little face, delicate and wicked – her mouth calling – between her
black-stockinged legs and white umbellate petticoats.
Champsaur, Félicien (1901) Lulu, Roman clownesque p.653
The clown is purely fictional, from a novel and
pantomime by the generally despised vaguely pornographic author, Champsaur. When
fictional clowns are described in more detail than real ones, we know that
clown historians are in trouble.
The most obvious lesson, though, is that we would
need to know much more about what each of these clowns did and how they did it,
in order to distinguish between clown as new woman and clown as male erotic
fantasy.
- Clown history today
What
can these lessons in clown history teach us today when we come to look at
clowns nearer our own time?
I
suggest that, following Bouissac, we first observe what clowns do, and pay no
heed to what they, or most others, say, before beginning any kind of analysis.
A
quick browse through contemporary women clowns, for example, might reveal that,
while most, in a post 60s liberated world, might claim genealogy, as it were,
with Evetta rather than Lulu, nearly all do at least one of the following
things:
- Dress as a man [Annie Fratellini]
- Impersonate a ‘monument’, whether male
[Nola Rae] or female [Gardi Hutter]
- Deal with supposed ‘women’s issues of
romantic love [Pepa Plana], marriage [Caroline Dream], or beauty [Clowns Ex
Machina]
- Exceptions are rare: [Clara Cenoz, Kate
Pelling]
Likewise,
if we look at contemporary male clowns, we find what they say doesn’t
necessarily match what they do.
By
‘what they say’ I am here referring to which discourses are used to explain,
frame or theorise on the fundamental questions of ‘what clowns are’ or ‘what
clowns mean’. Which is what, I would say, history is for. These discourses may
be employed by the clowns themselves, by audiences, reviewers, commentators or,
as here, academics. The discourses appear in programme notes for shows,
interviews with the media, facebook clown groups, workshop blurbs, and so on.
Let’s
take the case of
Slava Polunin
What
do they say? And what do they do?
Polunin himself, has the
following:
in Russia under Brezhnev Licedei was an
island of spiritual freedom in the country where there was no freedom at all.
(Polunin 2001)
I prefer when comedy and tragedy are together (Polunin
2001)
I had a dream to turn it into a contemporary art
form, to make it more than just fun for children. I thought there was something
more profound, a mystery, a modernity in it. (Polunin 2011)
It’s that ‘more
than’ which is the key to selling this particular ideology. ‘More than’,
together with its sibling, ‘not just’, are of course fairly poor rhetorical
devices which disguise the fact that you are unable to say what the ‘more’ bit
is. It remains unsayable, mysterious, ideological.
And he is followed by a steady stream of fawning middlebrow theatre
critics, such as Alexander Kan, Arts Editor of
the BBC's Russian Service, who interviewed Polunin on his return to London in
December 2011, with Snowshow, which basically strings together those old clown
numbers from the 80s:
Slava Polunin is proud to be a clown. But when
you look at what he does you see much more than conventional fooling
around of a circus jester. His work is deeply rooted in contemporary
avant-garde theatre and dance. (Polunin 2011)
Other tropes from such critics are the delight in spotting the winks to
serious modernity:
The foolery on display owes something [...] to
Beckett (the proceedings begin with a Godot-style visual gag about hanging
yourself). (Paul Taylor in The Independent,
23rd December 2011).
Louise Peacock interprets the noose gag as
follows:
Around
[his] neck is a rope, carrying with it the full symbolic force of the noose.
Simply and directly, the notion of mortality and, perhaps, of life’s
unbearability (Sartre’s ‘Anguish’) is communicated to the audience. (Peacock
2009: 81)
If we are in the game of
interpretation, then a more level-headed analysis might suggest that there are
two main possibilities here. One, that the nooses are ‘just nooses’, and the
gag works because it’s impossible for either clown to be hanged. Or, two, that
clowns are in the habit of messing about with the serious stuff of fears, death
and our inability to make the world as we want it. Either way, there is nothing
special about this scene to set it apart from other clowns. But of course, if
one expects to see Sartre, then Sartre one shall see.
As both a clown historian and a clown performer
myself, I can honestly assert that I see nothing original or exceptional about
this gag. So either all clowns are existential geniuses or none of them are.
But in no way does this number mark Polunin out.
Even the critics of Snowshow make use solely of
allusive description:
When he made Snowshow
in 1993, it was soon after the fall of communism, and the grimness of that
world lent its weird population of tramps an edge and pathos that now has
dissipated. [...] And now, how does it fare nearly 20 years on? [...] The pace
is excruciatingly slow, and I have to admit that this time round, many years
after my first amazed encounter, I felt the slowness, and the cosiness, rather
more keenly. [...] At any rate, I felt that I remembered, seeing Polunin in
this long ago, something more hesitant, isolated and withdrawn in the
performance. (Ismene
Brown in theartsdesk, 29th
December 2011)
Perhaps the most telling data, though, aside from
the raw evidence of the actual clowning onstage, is that provided by online reviews
by audience members. A quick perusal of current online reviews by spectators
(not a scientific survey, admittedly) reveals an almost equal divide between
mostly 5-star and 1-star reviews. And although the comments are diametrically
opposed – typically ranging from ’clowning at its most sophisticated’ to ‘pretentious tosh’
(ticketmaster 2011) – they are agreed on one thing, that the issue is meaning,
and not how funny the clown is.
Conclusion
I hope I have gone some way in showing how our
received notions of clown history are misleading. Instead, I propose we view
clowns and their clowning as specific practices, occurring in different moments
in different societies, being shaped by those moments and societies. In other
words, clown history is part of all other histories: cultural, social, political,
economic, technological, ideological and so on. If we simply set our sights on
what clowns did and how they did it in each historical moment, and how what
they did was inter-related to those moments, we might end up with a clown
history which is more complex and probably more intriguing than the potted one
which re-hashes the march of empires or the regurgitation of tired ideologies
of unequal genders, masks, or mystical inner selves.
© Jon Davison 2014
