What are my intentions when I teach clown?

In a recent workshop I was saying that knowing your intention on stage changes how you impact an audience. Your intention might be to grab attention. To make laugh. Or to create a relationship between clowns.

Then someone asked me what my intentions were. So here are some of my answers:

 

To simplify clowning and understand how we can get there when we want to

To celebrate laughter and also to allow ourselves not to laugh, inviting us to find a kinder relationship with laughter

To explore how to play our feelings, our interactions with each other in real time

To explore both our honest feelings and responses, and also the fun we can have with faking, pretending and lying – and how the real and the fake play off each other

To honour and to give ourselves places to put our fakeness, our negative judgements, our blockages, our resistances, our failures, our shame

To explore the interaction between what we plan (our scripts: projecting into the future, wondering if people will respond how we want them to) and what actually happens (the performance event: the unpredictable live responses between spectators and performers)

 

And:

To open the gate to all forms of clowning regardless of ethnicity, culture, identity, family or personality

To challenge the dominant ideology in clowning that excludes and gatekeeps

To dispel mystification in how we speak and think about clown

To acknowledge the power structure already in the workshop between teacher and students

To acknowledge my privilege as a white cis het older male

To be an ally of minoritised identities in the workshop and beyond, using my power and privilege to challenge oppressive behaviour

To explore and share how clowning can reflect on, challenge, play with, or even dismantle our oppressive power structures of capitalism and patriarchy.

To acknowledge clown history and when it has been complicit in oppression

(Thanks to everyone who participated in the recent workshops in North America in Asheville, Savannah, New York and Vancouver, who inspired me to explore further and ask more questions)

What do clown teachers say and what do they do? and are they the same?

In a recent Clown Studies Course, I asked the question: What do clown teachers say and what do they do? (are they the same?) Here is a response by Fritz Alblas, which says just about all the things I (hope) I don’t say or do. 

They say that clowning will turn you into a better, more loving person, that it will make you more popular in any crowd, that you will be able to connect in deeper ways than non-clown-humans will ever be able to do, it will teach you to connect without words (very important, very incredible), it will teach you to be in and enjoy 'the present moment' much more, that you have found the key to happiness whenever you need it: just put on the nose and it will wash you clean from all dark thoughts and bad feelings, like drugs but cheaper, or hardly cheaper because you will have to depend on the teachers not to loose this secret power of the nose, because somehow you keep unlearning it without being spoon fed by them, but as long as you do, all of this is in your reach, and it's also like meditation or yoga, but better, much better. From now on everyone will find you hilarious for just showing your real self, as long as you share the real stuff it will always be funny, but don't push it. We love you when you're failing, but do do the exercise. They say that everyone can do it if only they are willing to do enough of their workshops. Also there's no real need to think or do research by yourself because the teacher has done all that for you, it's included in the price. And anyway clowns don't think, they just do and everything they do is naturally right because it comes from a childlike place of innocence. The kind of naivety with which you should also blindly trust everything they say. A clown is also obliged to reinforce the binary, or else they're being morally bad 'gender betrayers'. Also, never believe the other teachers, they got it all completely wrong. They are the teacher, they naturally don't have to be any of these things by themselves, by means of their superior status, they're just there to tell the student how to perform, act, feel, think and live. 

Clowning post-lots-of-things

As we return to being with each other in person, doing things like we did two years ago seems absurd. The world has moved, we have all changed. Old ways of understanding clowning seem even more out of date than before (and a lot of them were already decades past their best, dating from the early 1960s).

Online clowning during lockdown responded to urgent circumstances, when many of us were eager to find ways of being together and not alone. The online space did that intensely. Following that needy period, the online classes have become an option, convenient for many who cannot attend an in-person class, whether that's because of location or time or money. 

So let's ask ‘how do we do this now?’. Our unique new historical circumstances (post-BLM, post-Covid, in the midst of war) are the foundation for understanding our artform. Let’s innovate, respond and look to the future rather than rehashing tired ideas about ‘the clown’ as if it were a thing that exists in isolation to the world all around us. After all, clowning is nothing more nor less than a part of the society we live in here and now. It neither holds great universal truths nor is it irrelevant or disconnected to what ever real-life priorities press down upon us.

One way we can imagine this is to "flip the teaching".

Rather than students trying to work out what the teacher is wanting (or trying) to teach, how about if teachers wondered what the student already knows? 

This might help erase the belief that teachers have some kind of knowledge that they are here to impart to students. Those phrases that begin, “The clown … etc etc etc” in particular produce this kind of student/teacher relationship, since such pronouncements assume that “the clown” is a “thing” that exists in its own right, like some kind of “pure artform”. And if it exists then it would be discoverable, right? And some very clever people will have discovered it, and then be worth paying money to if you’re not clever enough to discover it. Then the teacher seems like a master/guru. “Masters” can get away with selling this product for a long time past its useful sell-by date. They can even sell it to other cultures, who will likely already have their own knowledge and practices, but still buy into the “power of knowledge”, as long as it’s got a red nose attached to it or labelled “masterclass”. 

But what if this “the clown” was just a silly mirage? What if clowns were just different ways people have of making fun of, mocking and disrupting their own beliefs and norms? (of course, that last sentence is full of its own assumptions about what clowns theoretically are!) In that case, we would all already know how to clown before setting foot in any masterclass. We wouldn’t need to be “stripped bare” and learn “neutral mask” as some kind of baptism prior to being re-educated in the correct way. We would just bring our own clownishness to the party and maybe have someone with some empathy and awareness facilitate a cultivation of what we already know. Or maybe we wouldn’t even need the “facilitator” at all. We could just come together and agree to clown. No money involved. Amateur. Because we want to.  The end of clown workshops as we know them. 

Then maybe we would have all manner of clowns made visible. Not just reproductions which are identifiable as having studied with teacher X or Y. these clowns would have begun their learning in their own families, peer groups, cultures, relationships (intimate ones, work ones, school ones). They would be diverse and different to each other. A new kind of “personal clown”? Perhaps, but not that theoretical personal clown based on the teaching method of vulnerability enforced by the teacher playing a “boss clown” (whether the latter is done cruelly or playfully is irrelevant, the structure is the same). Perhaps these new clowns would be “hyper-personal”. They would certainly be celebratory, confident a freely choosing to clown, rather than being doomed by ideas of failure, marginalisation and powerlessness.