ClownBlog

Clown Workshop in London

2011-02-21T20:10:00.000+01:00

I am pleased to announce the next clown workshop I shall be teaching in London. Hope to see you there.

Clown Workshop
19th and 20th March 2011
10am-5pm
£150
at Chats Palace
42-44, Brooksby's Walk,
Homerton,
London E9 6DF
(5 minutes walk from Homerton Overground station)

For two days we will live intensively the world of the clown, regaining the pleasure of play, learning to feel and enjoy our own ridiculousness. Converting our habitual fear of ridicule into pleasure of laughing at ourselves, we can use it to make others laugh and experience the freedom of the clown.

When you really look, most things are ridiculous: our bodies, our movements, our ideas, our emotions, our words, our relationships, the universe. The only aim in clowning is to turn failure into success, fear into laughter, suffering into joy. We don’t need to change ourselves, just look at everything from another perspective. It’s a human thing to do, so anyone can do it. Although only a few will choose to dedicate their lives to it, anyone can experience the clown.

This workshops serves both as an excellent introduction to clown, and as an opportunity to refine your clowning. It is also a taster for those considering studying on our longer courses at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona (the cost of a weekend includes the right to a €100 discount on a one- or two-month residential course at the Escola de Clown). This is one of a series of clown workshops being held around the world, organised by the Escola de Clown de Barcelona and taught by Jon Davison and Clara Cenoz. Other venues will include: Barcelona, Madrid, Girona, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Milan, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Lisbon, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Bucharest, Budapest and more. Details to be announced. If you would like to organize a clown workshop near you, please send an email to jon@escoladeclown.eu

The Escola de Clown de Barcelona offers a comprehensive clown training programme covering both practical and theoretical aspects of the clown arts. We offer in-depth and wide-ranging training, given by teachers of varying approaches who are active professionals, working as performers, teachers, directors, and researchers. Check our website for details of our one- and two-month Professional Clown courses: www.escoladeclown.eu

Companyia d'Idiotes: "Clown Klezmer"

2011-01-25T14:49:00.000+01:00

Clara Cenoz and Jon Davison as "Companyia d'Idiotes" and "Hop!", perform "Clown Klezmer", at the 2006 Madrid International Clown Festival and in La Serilla in Barcelona in 2005.

Review: "Angels Can Fly", by Alan Clay

2011-01-24T18:51:00.000+01:00

This book has been around for a few years now, and I find I do re-visit it occasionally, and recommend it to those who are serious about understanding what is at the heart of clowning. It’s a curious volume in that there are really three books in one here, but not laid out one after the other. Instead, the three interweave and take the reader from practice to philosophy via fiction.

What really kept me reading at first was the novel telling the experiences of a bunch of street performers. Though not strictly clown performers, these characters wrestle with how to “be in the moment”, how to reach the audience through honesty. These are struggles that can rarely be communicated unless you’ve actually been out there and done street performing yourself, and the fictional mode seems to be the best way to get give at least some impression of what it is that drives us to seek out strangers in the street and do silly things for them and then get them to give away their money.

The exercise sections are comparatively sparse, but that is no bad thing. Very rare is the book on clowning that contains vast amounts of good practical advice, but there have been quite a few examples of the genre in recent years that have fallen flat on their face.

The third section brings us a range of thoughts from several other performers as well as Alan himself, and gives the aspiring performer something to ... aspire to!

Clown Casting

2010-11-26T10:58:00.000+01:00

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

2010-11-15T14:32:00.001+01:00

Some photos of the process of making The Spaghetti Horse.

Clown Library

2010-11-13T14:36:00.002+01:00

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

2010-10-09T10:59:00.006+02:00

(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"

2010-10-05T09:47:00.003+02:00

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"

2010-05-20T12:11:00.002+02:00

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

2010-05-18T12:14:00.002+02:00

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

2010-04-29T14:28:00.001+02:00

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

2010-03-30T13:20:00.002+02:00

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

2010-03-29T10:14:00.005+02:00

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

2010-01-18T17:59:00.000+01:00

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.

Clown Workshop at Shakespeare’s Globe, 16/12/09

2009-12-18T13:49:00.000+01:00

The main purpose of this workshop was to teach basic clowning to the students on the MA in Shakespeare Studies. I was also interested to find out how clown works in the Globe, and how clown teaching works in this space. I wouldn’t address the very particular question of actual clown roles in Shakespeare, but instead explore what clown training can offer to the actor. The principal question is, what embodied knowledge and techniques can the clown-actor advantageously bring to the particular conditions of the Globe stage?

Clowning starts with some advantages in this space, as one of the keys to clowning is the immediate and here-and-now contact with the audience and the space. The clown is a master of direct address. Without this complicity, the clown is nothing, as her performance must take off without reliance on character or plot (though these may co-exist with the clown).

Initial clown training is geared towards finding this pleasure of being “naked” before the audience. Indeed, it is this very vulnerability that the audience will love you for. So how is this vulnerability to be achieved? By failing. We all fail constantly, but the clown admits it freely. Such candidness wins hearts and minds, and allows the clown to remain onstage despite failing continually. He has nothing to fear, he is indestructible. Of course, not all Shakespearean roles are clowns. But when the actor can build upon the shoulders of the presence that clowning brings, he will be as if fearless.

The Globe is an eminently easy space to work in. Its conditions naturally lend themselves to all of what I have just described. I have pretty much given up on most theatre spaces as being unworkable for clown, but this one is ideal. It has much in common with the circus, and also with the street. Actors and audience are in the same light, and the audience can be on all sides. So nearly everything I have previously said about the reality and honesty of the circular performing space can be said about the Globe. It does possess something of the fake-ness of theatre, though, that circus doesn’t have, due to its raised stage and the secretiveness of the tiring house. But I can live with that!

Reading up on some of the reports of actors who have worked at the Globe, I am struck their starting point is generally diametrically opposed to mine, as their initial feelings are that the Globe is a difficult space, and one to fear, as they can see the audience! However, their conclusions, having performed there, are much the same as mine. (Carson and Karim-Cooper 2008)

The Globe seems to be a relatively slow space. By this I mean the time taken for what the actor is doing to arrive to the audience is quite slow. About 3 seconds. I do think of it in terms of seconds, meaning that it feels I need to give that time to a gesture, or line, for it to be seen, understood, or ‘read’. Fixed points here feel comfortable lasting around 3 seconds. Other things that feel right here are playing with profile and face on positions. Before working in this space, one of my questions had been, ‘can we do the same things here as we see in most clown workshops in small classrooms where facial expression and understated action are convincing?’ In answer to this, I see that the same kind of subtlety is certainly possible, but that the understatement and facial expression doesn’t work. That’s a relief to me, as these are some aspects of contemporary clowning that I have grown to dislike. The Globe seems to erase the possibilities for low-key irony, hurray!

The usual range of basic clown exercise worked without problems on the Globe stage: playing for an audience who finds you ridiculous presented no real problems. I have one remaining doubt, however, which is the use of the red nose. At the time of the workshop, I felt that it didn’t really work in this space, that it even blocked our vision of the performer’s eyes. But looking at some of the video afterwards, I think it depends more on the other things I have mentioned. Also apparent is how colour and simplicity of costuming are vital here. It is a space of sombre colours, despite the decoration, and I think, as always, the brighter colours (yellow, red, pale blue) and simpler forms will work better here.

Works cited:
Carson, Christie and Karim-Cooper, Farah (2008) Shakespeare’s Globe, a Theatrical Experiment, CUP.

Clown Workshops: how do they work?

2009-12-17T17:50:00.004+01:00

Classes
I have taught clown for nearly 20 years, and have always thought a lot about the best way to do it, looking for ever more effective clown exercises. Recently, however, I’ve begun to reflect on how people actually receive clowning knowledge, and just how divergent that process is from standard educational practices today.

I’ve never liked those hand-outs that tell the student exactly what they are going to learn, or what they have just supposedly learnt, with their aims and objectives all worked out beforehand. They remind me of watching the news on TV, being vaguely aware of some pre-packaged information gliding through my consciousness. In one ear and out the other.

Some recent clown teaching experiences threw some light on just why I feel like that. I realised that students are often fooled into believing that they have learned something, when perhaps they have not. This happens when the information or process is presented in a highly conscious and rational way, which enables the rational brain to understand, and thus thinks that the information has been learnt. But the brain has perhaps only understood the rational part: the aims, etc. In performance workshops, that commonly happens when the teacher explains the aim of the exercise before asking the students to do it, then gives feedback afterwards, and often gives the student the chance to repeat the exercise and, supposedly, improve. The end result is that everyone feels it’s been a jolly good class. But I would question whether anything lasting has been learned, at least in my field, clowning.

Another trick used to give the illusion of learning is to place these aims in a seemingly logical order. Surely it is better to learn to walk before you can run? But maybe not! A student recently commented to me that he wished he had learned a particular, very simple, element of clowning before having to present a performance in public, as it would have aided him in his performance. Maybe so. But I suggested that it might work the other way round. Perhaps learning a simple technique before realising its importance would be useless: perhaps it is better to think, “shit, I wish I’d known that before!” since this realisation would fix the experience in the memory, both consciously and in the body.

So perhaps we learn better back-to-front. It certainly seems more appropriate to clown, but maybe it is equally effective in other fields. Who knows, clowning might have a serious contribution to make to education in general.

Research Workshops
I've been running these workshops for two years now, but it's only recently that I've become fully aware of what they really consist of. A normal workshop works like a class as we know it: there's a teacher and some students, and the teacher has knowledge the students don't have and communicates it to them. (I'm not going to bother to discuss that particular relationship right now, which some people find problematic, quite simply because I don't have a problem with it.)

These research workshops appear to be like classes: there is someone with greater knowledge, who takes the others through a series of exercises designed to learn how clown works. So what are the differences?

Firstly, in the research workshop I don't have the responsibility to teach anyone anything. Instead, we use the teaching relationship to investigate how the learning process works. So I will propose an exercise or other activity, the students will carry it out and I will be looking for answers to some of my questions, such as "what's the best activity to help us get into a good state for clowning?" or "what's the best way to learn a written clown scene?". I will ask students for their reflections on this, often letting them do the detailed thinking whilst I concern myself with over-arching issues and ways of drawing together all the discoveries. In this sense the relationship resembles that of the researcher in science with his research assistants. Then, when I feel I have some answers, I move the process on, whether all the students have actually experienced the discoveries for themselves or not.

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 10, 10/12/09

2009-12-11T13:16:00.001+01:00

I began this last workshop of the term with what had always been my usual way: asking everyone for their thoughts since last time. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done that, I’m not quite sure why, perhaps I gave up due to a lack of response?

My next question was, ‘how should we proceed? What is the best way to work with the entrées?

Some requests were:
Perform the action-without-words version.
Learn all the steps first.
Don’t mess around with the basic action, the numbers are already good and we probably won’t improve on them to begin with.
Work in order: first learn the text (alone), second learn the actions (together), third perform it as a clown (your own clown), fourth find the relationships (together).

I’d go along with all of those.

Each clown in The Bottles has an objective which defines their role. Loyal wants the show to go well. Clown wants to show off his trick, and August wants the bottle. In this session we worked with just these three roles, so let’s leave the two counter-augusts aside for the moment.

All these objectives must be really clear to the audience, and if each clown can make us laugh just by embodying their objective, things will go fantastically. When working together, it’s the relationships which are important. One way to milk that more is to wind each other up! The conflicts happen because each role sticks to their own objective. Don’t give in! At the same time, you must leave each other space, setting up your companions so they can shine. It’s what is expressed so well in the French term ‘faire-valoir’, usually used to denominate the clown who makes the august look funny. But it applies equally to all kinds of clowns. This is real playing, in Gaulier’s sense. No role is deliberately out to sabotage another, but simply wants what he wants. I mentioned Meisner recently. And here we are again with some very simple, Meisner-ish instructions for the actor.

So what the audience witnesses in a good clown show is the performers themselves, and not their interpretations or ideas. We feel the performers, as people, and we laugh at their stupid desires, feeling and thoughts. In a bad show, we only see the performer’s ideas, their constructions that they want to show us, their own desire to show us their clever creativity, and we are very quickly bored.

In this session we worked on the first part of The Bottles, up until just before the entrance of the two counter-augusts. We did 8 different versions, rotating the roles, and began not only to get a grasp on the action, inevitably, but, more importantly, to glimpse the subtleties of the relationships. I strongly believe that these entrées are highly delicate and subtle pieces. But if you play them with characters, they descend into cheap imitations of clichés of clowns, that no-one wants to watch. They become parodies of clowns. But if you play them for real, they become delightful studies of human behaviour.

Thus we come to the end of the first term of the third year of the project. What lies ahead? I would like
- Serious rehearsing of the entrées and get them performed as much as possible.
- Settle on a Method of performing/rehearsing.
- Analyse the entrées to make them learnable.
- Revise other actor training, Meisner, etc.
- Continue to devise with tables and chairs.

In addition, there is new work to be started:
- Clown music: what is it?
- What can we learn from Commedia dell’arte scenarios?
- What long forms are appropriate to clown? Hollywood movies, Wagner, Mozart, Black and White Minstrels?

Works cited:
Meisner, Sandford (1987) On Acting, New York: Vintage Books.
Rémy, Tristan (1962) Entrées clownesques, Paris: L’Arche.

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 9, 3/12/09

2009-12-04T12:34:00.000+01:00

One of the best numbers in Rémy’s collection is The Bottles, which is one of the 12 scenes that remain unpublished in English translation. In order to start work on this little masterpiece, I decided to dictate it directly to the performers, instead of writing out the full translation first. Would dictation work better than reading? I wanted to find the best way of transmitting this material, the best way of learning and assimilating it.

So I talked 5 clowns through the scene, translating from the French, into English, whilst someone else did the translating from my English into Spanish, as I didn’t think I could cope doing a double translation. We needed to do that twice before anyone really got the idea of how the number works, and so the conclusion is that it isn’t a very efficient method. For the next new number, I will try preparing an already-analysed version, where the principal real actions are highlighted, and grouped into sections so that the form can easily be grasped. For example, how many times does the august interrupt the clown before the latter first makes the bottle disappear? This would then be a script more appropriate for clowns than just the entire spoken words and stage directions all recorded without attention to structure.

The session in a sense was a dismal failure as a result, though it is now clear how (not) to proceed. A clear case of learning through failure!

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

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 8, 26/11/09

2009-11-29T12:22:00.001+01:00

Back to William Tell, as we have a gig. We decided to try out our recent experiments on the numbers by performing one at a cabaret at a squatted pub in Bow, The Rose and Clown. Three of us are available, so that’s the cast. So this workshop began by being dedicated to a straight rehearsal of the three performers, with three other participant directing and aiding the process.

I had various questions I wanted to answer as a performer. How can we play as clowns the seemingly high status and less stupid roles? Do you have to ‘be’ that kind of clown in order to play that role? Or can anyone do it? Do you have to ‘construct’ a clown role? Would that make it into a character rather than a clown?

After running the scene through a few times, the question of language came up. One participant thought it was outdated and asked for a non-naturalistic and therefore, in her opinion, false delivery. I personally think the available English translation is not particularly well written, in an American English that nonetheless tries to retain some kind of period (1920s) Europeanness, which ends up as a linguistic mishmash.

But I don’t agree that the two performance mode options are naturalistic and convincing, or theatrical and false. Nor do I think I outdated. Comedians use this kind of language, often repetitive and standardised. What I am looking for is something that both convinces and is theatrical.

We experimented with making the august role high status and knowledgeable, the one who drives the action, whilst the clown became the victim. It worked better in some ways for me, playing clown, as it was nearer to my natural style, but for the august it was introducing too much psychology. It had become a constructed character.

...you don't have to worry about being a character. You have one thing to do and concentrate on. That is the character. “That’s the character?" Ray asks. Yes. “So you don't have to play at being the character, it's right there in your doing it." Meisner (1987: 24)

All this led us to the simple conclusion: ‘play it as ourselves’. And with our real names. This proved easy, satisfying, fun and funny. We still disagreed, though, about whether this was naturalistic or not. I thought it wasn’t, as there was still plenty of theatricality. We were convincing and playful and ourselves. We were playing for real.

We then shrank the prologue into a direct presentation by Loyal of the demonstration of shooting, introduced as the result of the fellowship research investigation. The idea behind this was that this introduction was truthful and real, following on from us playing the roles as our real selves.

This session, though it began as a regular kind of rehearsal, had become something more complex and interesting: a rehearsal that was asking some fundamental questions about how acting works. These questions addressed the issues of the relationship between the actor and he role, which is the central question in this research project. I had a feeling now that we were at last having the conversation I had been waiting for over two years for. We were even asking, ‘what happens when actors play clown texts and vice versa?

The next big question, having decided to ‘be ourselves in the role’ (easier said than done), was whether and how I could transfer this knowledge back into the realm of orthodox theatre and acting? Are we moving back towards other methods of actor training, and if so, which? Meisner comes to mind first of all, as do David Mamet words.

The performance. Basically, it was a rough gig. We didn’t stand our ground and remain true to ourselves-playing-the-roles. There is no excuse for this other than to look to our own performances. Having said that, there were some mitigating circumstances. The idea of the introduction didn’t work. I don’t think introducing clown, as clowns, ever really comes off. It’s far too clever. A clown presenter can exist, but he wouldn’t say much that made sense. We also altered the ending, due to problems with props, at the last minute.

But more than this, the cabaret context was not in our favour. What is it about cabarets that escapes clowns? I have been performing in and watching quite a few over these past weeks. They are superficially different kinds of places, ranging from smoky squats to west end burlesque. But they still seem to have something in common, and it is a something which doesn’t sit well with clown, perhaps.

In order to analyse what this is, I tried comparing these spaces with other spaces where I did feel that clown was the natural order of things. My most recent example, and one where I have performed and worked quite a lot, is the tent at Cal Clown (Escola de Clown de Barcelona). So, what are the differences? In the tent, the performers have a circular stage of 11 m diameter, with the audience seated on all sides apart from a small entrance. The performer thus has a lot more space than the audience does. This relationship is marvellous and gives the performer a sense of freedom to expose all to the audience. And everything is seen.

In contrast, in a cabaret, the performing space is tiny, much smaller than the auditorium. Cabaret needs the minimum space for one or two people to stand. They don’t need to move. The performance style that this results in is one that doesn’t reveal truths to the audience. I’m not sure what it does do, but for me the cabaret audience is looking for something negative, parody or satire basically, which is not something vulnerable and honest, but instead a more critical and darker view of things than what a clown brings. The cabaret performer is typically saying to the audience, ‘look at this, isn’t it awful?’ Pretty much the opposite to the clown, whose line would be, ‘look at this, isn’t it amazing?’

Maybe I have given a too harsh judgement, but I am genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of this, to enable us to perform clown in this setting, if it be possible. If not, then we won’t. Having set cabaret and clown against each other, I would also say that perhaps there can be something of cabaret in clowning, and that it might appear principally in the white-face clown. Or maybe even more so in the solo clown, the eccentric. More of that another day.

Works cited:
Meisner, Sandford (1987) On Acting, New York: Vintage Books.
Rémy, Tristan (1962) Entrées clownesques, Paris: L’Arche.
Rémy, Tristan (1997) Clown Scenes, trans. by Sahlin, Bernard, Chicago : Ivan R.Dee.

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 7, 19/11/09

2009-11-20T22:12:00.001+01:00

In this workshop I wanted to try another of Rémy’s entrées, The Cakes in the Hat, one that is structurally less clear than William Tell. This one doesn’t have two separate parts (prologue and action). But two functions are present. We can extract the action (the cake trick done twice) from the remainder, which provides the context of the clown trying to show his skill, and the august trying unsuccessfully to emulate him. Here, the august has more of an objective, though at first he as in William Tell, simply reacting to the proposals of the clown. But the august soon wants to adopt the same objective as the clown, of doing the cakes trick, with disastrous results.

Our rehearsal method was to first block the piece without using any of the dialogue. The question is, how much can we do without the spoken words? I excluded the use of pantomime as a substitute for words (especially those gestures that seek to make others do as you wish, such as signals for ‘come here’, ‘wait’, etc.) Also forbidden were non-verbal sounds. And finally, all the performers must appear to be normal, intelligent people, and not imbeciles.

All of these warnings originate in my seeing these boundaries crossed time and time again by clown students and performers. How many countless times have you seen clowns tell each other, and the audience, what to do? Or use pantomimic gestures, as if the audience were so stupid they didn’t understand! Each performer, as in any theatre, must only worry about their own role, and retain their independence, allowing their partners to be themselves, thus creating the conditions for drama, conflict and fun. Likewise, performers should leave the audience to comprehend by themselves. After all, they are just as intelligent as you are.

We then had a kind of ‘action-script’. Anything that appears in the text, but is not an actable action, must be omitted. So we don’t attempt to act any non-actions. What is a ‘real action’, then? The first one in The Cakes in the Hat is when the august hides his hat from the clown. That’s real, in that it can be done by the real body in real, present space. And we can add the motivation in the way that we do this action. But without the action this would be impossible, to show only the emotional drive for the action but without the action itself. In the moments immediately after his real action, we can add some more business that is a consequence of the real action. In this example the clown shows his lack of interest in the august’s hat, and the august is offended. But it would be impossible to show only this ‘offence’. Moving on, we will need to get to the next real action, and so on.

Having got this far, we then added back in some of the spoken text, but only if you feel that the words will add to the audience’s pleasure.

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

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 6, 12/11/09

2009-11-13T14:16:00.001+01:00

Halfway through this term and we move on from devising new numbers to the problem of how to perform already existing material. These are not just any old bits of clown ideas. They are texts of actual performances given by some of the leading clowns from the Golden Age (c.1890-1945), as recorded by the clown historian, Tristan Rémy, in Entrées clownesques. Rémy’s collection has been translated into at least English, Spanish, German and Italian, but the Spanish version (a Mexican edition) is out of print and the English one only contains 48 of Rémy’s original 60 numbers and a heavily truncated preface. I have no idea why this is so, as some of the very best scenes are omitted, most glaringly Les Bouteilles, a masterpiece for 5 clowns.

I have worked with some of this material in the past, but now seems to be the moment to really take the bull by the horns. We begin with William Tell, and the first question is, ‘how do we begin?’ The other main question is, ‘how do all three performers remain true to their ‘own clown’ whilst interpreting clearly defined roles?’

A first analysis of the text leads me to split the piece in two. The first part consists of a kind of prologue, where the scene is set and the clowns become known to us. The second is the action proper, consisting of the trick played on the august by the clown. In the first part, each of their individual desires, needs or, if you like, super-objectives, are exposed. We are talking theatre here, where an actor will want to know what his role wants from the scene.

We have M. Loyal, the ubiquitous circus owner or director, so-called after the famous circus-owning family of the Loyals, and thence used as a generic name for this figure. The English term ‘ringmaster’ doesn’t really capture the same connotations. Strictly speaking the ringmaster takes his place at the centre of the ring in order to direct the horses who canter around its perimeter. Loyal’s place is more at the barrier, the entrance to the ring. Loyal’s desire is that the show go well, that the audience are happy.

Then we have the clown. In the terminology of the time, this is what we understand as the white-face clown, and not the red-nosed one. His role is to drive the action, for it is he who habitually has something to show, something to prove, even. This may be a piece of music, or a magic trick, or anything that involves skill, fantasy or pretention. Clown entered the circus in its early days, and has taken many forms - acrobatic, musical, verbal - according to the fashion of the times. Determining just why fashions come and go is a tricky business. But we can often identify factors such as circus architecture, censorship laws, war, or depression. For example, in 1864 the law in France changed to permit circuses to present spoken dialogue.

The gibberish of the heirs to the English clowns lost favour. Now the comedy of situation could be added to the comedy of gesture and attitude … French clowns could play scenes with several characters in a language the audience understood. The comedians of the French ring could now vie with the clowns of the English spirit. (Rémy 1945)

Speaking clowns, sometimes referred to at this time as “shakespearean clowns”, such as Tom Matthews, had indeed been popular in England in the 1850s, since the passing out of favour of Grimaldi-style “total clowning”. But any thoughts that this new style of clowning is any less vulgar or explosive than its predecessor are dispelled by Baudelaire’s comments on seeing one, probably Matthews, in Paris:

The English Pierrot arrived like a tempest, fell like a sack, and when he laughed, his laugh shook the theatre: that laugh was like a happy thunderclap…Where Deburau dipped a finger in the milk, the English plunged both fists and feet. (Baudelaire 1855)

If England had Clown, born of the genius of Grimaldi, the French had Pierrot, made famous by Deburau. But even such a national treasure was doomed to passing trends. Talking of Kalpestri, the successor (c.1860-80) to the Deburau family style, Isabell Baugé considers this to be the beginning of the end of the Pierrots.

His style was vulgar and gross. In any case, the fin-de-siècle audience had abandoned the mysterious creation of Deburau for a more macabre and decadent Pierrot, who was disquieting rather than comic. (Baugé 1995: 11)

It was the turn of acrobatic pantomime to rule in the 1870s. Rémy is quite scathing in his comments on the Hanlon-Lees, the greatest exponents of this form, considering it a style performed by specialists, often without much innate comicity. The Hanlon-Lees Brothers rose to fame through the appeal of

their fantasy-worlds, diabolical rather than spiritual, emphasising strength, precision, illusions, props, miracles, and a violent upside-down world. (Remy 1945: 53-4)

Their biographer, John A. McKivern, gives specific details:

In “Pierrot Menuisier”, Pierrot sells upholstered coffins to people. When he kills a man for declining to purchase, he is hunted by the man’s ghost wearing the coffin he had tried to sell him. As gendarmes approach, Pierrot fires a gun and hits a pregnant cat producing a hailstorm of kittens falling on the stage. (McKinven 1998: 34-5)

So what was it that brought about a turn of fortune for the Hanlon-Lees, for they had been around for a while, debuting in London back in 1847?

For over a century English pantomimists had been celebrated in France for their eccentricity, their awe-inspiring rough and tumble. The Hanlon-Lees startled even English audiences… Violence was a characteristic of their work from the very beginning; it was one of their greatest attractions in the eyes of Parisians…in 1872. (Thomas Walton in Entortilationists, quoted in McKinvern 1998: 34)

But it is Émile Zola’s comments of 1876 on the 13-month successful run at the Folies-Bergère of their show Do-mi-sol-do, that suggest their humour chimed with the post-Franco-Prussian War climate:

This exotic art provoked the only laugh of which we were capable at that moment, a laugh without gaiety, convulsive, full of fear. (quoted in Rémy 1945: 57)

The descendents of such mayhem might be spotted much later on in the cinema of Mack Sennett and his Keystone Kops, or the TV of The Young Ones. In our history of clown, however, I have dwelled on the dark violence of the 1870s merely because it is the storm before the calm. For it is the next decade which brings us to the third clown of our trio, the august.

The success of the august was born of a reaction by the mass public against the solemn and over-fabricated style of acrobatic pantomime. Through his freedom of action and the spontaneity without which he could not fulfil his role, the august led a protest against the select and stilted milieu of the circus of the second Empire… Demystified and explained, the mechanics of the Hanlon-Lees and their successors were becoming banal. The shows at the higher quality circuses were becoming serious and people were beginning to get bored of them… (Remy 1945: 83)

Rémy attempts to unravel the various myths and legends about the origin of the august clown, dedicating a whole chapter to “Birth of the August”. Being a historian dedicated to unearthing as much truth as is possible, Rémy is suspicious of the clowns’ own words. In fact, clowns at first regarded the august as a terribly inferior role, and only later, when the august gained popularity, claimed to have been the inventors themselves. Rémy regards the clowns’ own memoires to be vastly unreliable evidence. So let’s stick to the facts.

His [the august’s] remarkable history begins with James Guyon who appeared at the Hippodrome de l’Alma, at the end of the 80s, and who gave life to an august who became the prototype of all the others. The fact is that after James Guyon one finds but a single circus without a more or less comic august, but so little different from the model that each imitator can claim to be the original. (Rémy 1945: 64)

Despite this sudden craze, augusts are regarded by (white-face) clowns as grossly inferior. Edouard de Perrodil, in Monsieur Clown (1889), gave this warning:

Never make the mistake of calling a clown an august in his presence, he will take you for the most contemptible, vulgar and unintelligent ignoramus. On the other hand, I do allow that you give the name of clown to an august, he will be flattered and will offer you his hand as a sign of recognition. (quoted in Rémy 1945: 65)

Despite their disdain, the clowns claimed to have somehow collectively invented this new figure that was taking the limelight. The Fratellinis may be the source of one particular legend, picked up by Pierre Mariel:

One evening, in 1864; an English horseman, employed in a Berlin circus, trips as he exits the ring where he has just placed some equipment. Tom Belling, named August (the name of this horseman), was known, urbi et orbi, for his intemperance. Such that some fools, not doubting that his fall, somewhat comic, was due to a state of endemic drunkenness, heckle him with: “August, August”. He gets up and looks at the audience, laughing… His ridiculous manner and his red nose cause the auditorium to repeat, with a gay abandon: “August, idiot”.

So what kind of clown is this august? He starts as the clown dressed as a citizen, the parody of the Ringmaster.

The ringmaster knew just how to take advantage of the incredible stupidity of the August. He gave him a special costume which has been kept since then and that everyone recognises: ill-fitting black suit, with ridiculous tails (de Perrodil quoted in Remy 1945: 67-8).

This simple figure is not primarily an acrobat, but a professional comedian, irrespective of whether he has other skills or not.

The august’s role can be summed up in one word: reaction. Whilst the clown is continually proposing, the august is continually reacting, mostly in a way that conflicts with the clown’s goals. An essential feature of the august is that he doesn’t appear alone. He needs the clown, and it is this partnership that, from the 1890s onwards, ushers in the golden age of clowning.

It is most likely Pierantoni and Saltamontes who were the first example of a pair of clowns that were not simply brought together occasionally for the performing of an interlude or an entrée, but who were united by a team spirit and capable of playing the whole repertoire according to their own games and their own ideas. (Rémy 1945: 101)

Such a partnership is founded on dramatic principles, relying on a theatrical complicity born of a long-standing pairing. which is the beginning of the revolution in clowning. It was Foottit and Chocolat who were to become the first stars in this new format.

Thanks to [the august]… the classical entrée… extends, expands, takes on the proportions of a comedy sketch and becomes theatrical in form. (Remy 1945: 103)

Their repertoire depends on the personalities of the performers, rather than their techniques or staging. This is the beginning of the golden age of circus clowning, where the dramatic possibilities of the clown/august relationship, together with the Ringmaster, will be explored fully for the next half-century.

So there we have them. Two clown roles, and a straight man.

In this workshop w concentrated on the second part of the text, working on getting the mechanics of the action right. Once we were more or less satisfied with our results, we turned our attention again to the prologue. IT makes sense if you perform the number in a circus, but what if we were to do it somewhere else? Like a pub, for instance, or in the street?

Creating a new context doesn’t mean creating new material, or corrupting what you have. This isn’t an exercise against the flow, like those awful politically correct renderings of little red riding hood, for example. We are not looking for an ironic reading, but a renewal. So in devising a new prologue, we will probably use all the ideas already present, unless they absolutely contradict our new context.

Our pub results were pretty satisfying. Loyal becomes the publican, Clown strides into the bar, weapon in full view, and causes a stir, understandably. Loyal wants to know what on earth he’s up to with that rifle in here. Clown talks him round and Loyal demands a demonstration. At which point Clown calls on August, who has been sat there at the back all this time, planted in the public. The rest is textual…

This gave rise to an interesting discussion on reality. What happens when you walk into a pub with a big gun on your shoulder? You get arrested! Or shot! So we have to make some choices from the options available. In order for the gun to have an effect, it must be believable, to an extent. But it must also be in play, as this is clown. If the audience know the clowns are coming, we can get away with more realism. But if it’s a surprise, we have to signal that it’s only theatre.

I shall report back when we have tried it out a number of times.

Works cited:
Baudelaire, Charles (1855) De l’Essence du rire.
Baugé, Isabelle (1995) Pantomimes, Cahors : Cicéro Éditions.
McKinvern, John A. (1998), The Hanlon Brothers, Illinois: David Meyer Magic Books.
Tristan Rémy (1945), Les Clowns, Paris: Grasset.
Rémy, Tristan (1962) Entrées clownesques, Paris: L’Arche.

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 5, 5/11/09

2009-11-06T21:27:00.000+01:00

We must now finalise Act I, or at least draw some conclusions about how we might conceive of this opening part of a full-length clown show. For this is an investigative workshop, at this stage investigating the devising process, and is not a true devising session in itself.

By full-length show, I mean 90 or 120 minutes. These days when people talk about full-length shows, they often mean barely 60 minutes. Is it because of a lack of audience attention span, o a lack of ideas? When we spent two or more years devising our first show as Companyia d’Idiotes (1993-6), we scraped through to 50 minutes, or an hour on a good night. It’s not easy devising a long piece of work.

It is not only the length that dissatisfies me when I see a full-length clown show. It is also the structure. That’s leaving aside the shows that are plain bad, either because of their content or their performers, of course. Even the decent shows seem to lack a sense of how they are put together. One of the most successful clown shows of the last decade or so, Slava’s Snowshow, is structurally a horrific hodge-podge of numbers of varying type and rhythm, seemingly stitched together without thought. Yet it has received critical acclaim (though not amongst clowns, in my experience). The fact is, there is little to gauge good clown work by. WE have no ‘Clown Shakespeare’, at least not visibly so, though I could argue the case for the Fratellini’s William Tell, or Dario and Bario’s The Bottles, for example.

There is still a feeling that clowns do not produce good full-scale work. The clowns themselves are sceptical:

Working in a theatre doing shows of an hour is very difficult, it takes it out of you, it demands brilliance. Usually a clown burns out in an hour, although there have been people who have done it very well. (Interview with Oriol Boixador in Zirkolika 2008, my translation.)

The question remains of which structure to use. Discounting a series of numbers, as well as a unified fictional setting (or ‘clown-theatre’, as they might call it in Britain), I await clarification via our ongoing investigative work. If we tread carefully, I am sure the right forms will emerge.

Back to Act I, we now know several key elements of how it will work. We know the action will not need motivation, that it will lead to a second Act concerning food and drink, and that a table and one or two chairs must be onstage by the time the first act finishes. We must still decide if the objective of eating is to be stated from the outset, later to be fulfilled or bettered. Or if this objective is to emerge. My feeling is to incline for the statement of intent at the start. It is stronger to set up an audience expectation, then thwart it, then overcome the obstacles, and finally achieve the objective and go one better.

This is true of even the smallest street show, where structure is vital. If I start by getting out my accordion, then I am effectively making a promise that I will play it. After a series of problems and attempted solutions, I must eventually give the audience what they want, or more. Anything less will lead to my audience walking off in disappointment.

Our structure will thus look something like this:

Act I
Scene 1: business of bringing chair on, keeps getting removed, finally in postion.
Scene 2: rhythmical sequence of moves, involving leaping, chasing, falling and other slapstick, building to a climax, possibly with broken furniture.
Scene 3: order is restored, and we end up not just with a chair or two, but a table as well.

Act II: food arrives?

So much for the devising process, then. I will now leave the nuts and bolts work on this piece for other rehearsals and, in these research workshops, move on to working with already-scripted numbers.

Works cited:
Companyia d’Idiotes, Mamiydaddy, Barcelona, 1996.
Dario and Bario, (1930) The Bottles in Rémy, Tristan (1962) Entrées clownesques, Paris: L’Arche.
Fratellini, Francois and Albert, Guillaume Tell in Rémy, Tristan (1962) Entrées clownesques, Paris: L’Arche.
Slava Polunin, Slava’s Snowshow, Barcelona, 1999.
Zirkolika (2008), Revista de las Artes Circenses, no.19 Winter 2008.

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 4, 29/10/09

2009-10-30T11:58:00.001+01:00

I thought we’d be moving onto the third and final scene of Act I, but in order to get a perspective on the whole, I decided to take a step back and look not just at Act I, but also at how it might set up Act II. The premise so far in Act I seemed to be the placing of the chair, but this doesn’t answer the question that must be in the audience’s mind, ‘what is the chair for?’ We therefore had a brainstorming devising session on what chairs are used for, beyond sitting.

Following are the fundamental actions that most answer the question, ‘what did you bring the chair on to do?’ The most obvious perhaps is to eat, and suggests a need for a table. Also strong, but rather over-situated are to have your teeth pulled out, and to have your hair cut, or get a shave. These two are classics in the clown repertoire, of course, scenes with barbers and dentists giving plenty of scope for clowning. Even more common, though, are scenes with food and drink. Rémy’s collection of 60 entrées includes no less than 16 which deal with the subject (Rémy 1962).

What is it about being obvious that attracts clowns? And why am I so interested in primary behaviour at the expense of being original? One explanation is that when you perform such a basic action as eating, or sitting, the audience generally will accept what you are doing without the need for further explanations. In other words, you do not need to justify your actions. We don’t need motivation for these everyday acts that all of us engage in almost without thought.

This is a great advantage to the clown, and indeed to the actor in general. As we do not need to explain our actions to the audience, we do not need to add anything to our performance beyond actually doing those actions. Said in another way, we do not need to interpret our actions or, even, we do not need to ‘act’. The English language is a bit confusing here, as I would like to use the word ‘act’ to denote ‘simply doing the action without adding anything’, rather than to denote the interpretation of one’s own actions which is implied when we speak negatively as in ‘stop acting’. The Spanish word for acting, ‘interpretar’ gives us a better idea of what I mean, though the French ‘jouer’ takes us completely in the opposite direction. All of which might serve as a warning that, when trying to talk about what acting is, it is often simply a case of avoiding semantic pitfalls.

So, looked at in this way, the choice of actions for our clown show might be based on the criteria of ‘needing no motivation/justification’. We can then see the relative weakness of actions such as: to reach something up high; to read; or to put your shoes on. All of which suggest questions of ‘why?’ ‘what?’ and ‘where?’: ‘what are you reaching for?’ ‘what/why are you reading?’ ‘where are you going, and why?’

Even more, we can also now see that the actions sited at the barber’s and the dentist’s do in fact require more justification than eating. They ask us to suspend our disbelief. They are in a sense more fictional than the action of eating and drinking, which can happen almost anywhere and anytime. Now, if we actually situated that eating and drinking in a restaurant, for example, then we would be asking the audience to do the same work as when they watch the barber or dentist scene. Which, in my opinion, is a very good reason not to create that restaurant. For, once you have your restaurant, you will have to keep referring to the damned thing, and will be more restricted in your choices, but without gaining anything from the situation.

Taking a situation and finding as many gags in it as possible is a common enough procedure for generating material. Chaplin did just that in the early part of his cinema career. And - surprise, surprise - the restaurant was one of the best!

Although I hadn’t a story, I ordered the crew to build an ornate café set. When I was lost for a gag or an idea a café would always supply one.(Chaplin 1964: 180)

Of course, the later Chaplin would build longer and more complex forms that could no longer rely on this simple procedure.

As my skill in story construction developed, so it restricted my comedy freedom. (Chaplin 1964: 180)

In Chaplin’s medium, film, the actual café was absolutely necessary and unavoidable. It is virtually impossible to have unsited action on camera, as photography demands that all the space be in a sense real. But live theatre is much freer. We can perform without set, without costume, without lights, without just about everything except the actor and the audience. The performance doesn’t so much represent a reality, copying it like film does, as exist as a primary reality itself. And the less we use fictional time and space, the more real the performance becomes in itself. I personally believe that clowning belongs more in this kind of ‘real performance’, and that this brings it closer to circus, which is also a performance of real rather than fictional actions.

Circus draws this ‘realness’ from two principle sources. The first is the nature of feats of difficulty. The performance of difficulty or danger is, in itself, dramatic. It is ‘enough’. We need no story, no fiction, no theme, though many have thought differently throughout the long history of cross-fertilisation between circus and theatre, contrary to the pretensions of new circus practitioners who claim to have invented circus theatre. Early circus combined a ring and a stage.

From one point of view, early circus can be seen as an awkward hybrid, pending the emergence of its natural form, the unitary ring, in the late 19th century… From another point of view, we can see early circus as the perfect expression of its age… an oscillation between the three-dimensional action in the ring and the pictorial display on stage. (Wiles 2003: 199)

The logic of the early circus was a binary one. The beauty of the material body was displayed by athletic horsemanship and by living sculptures in the ring, while nobility of spirit and the ethereal beauty of exotic landscapes were displayed within the idealist world of the stage. (Wiles 2003: 200)

Early circus at Astley’s loved to put on shows recounting great military theatrics –The Courier of St. Petersburg, The Vicissiudes of a Tar, starring Andrew Ducrow; the Battle of the Alma; or Richard III - and at the Cirque Olympique, which in order to escape Napoleon’s regulation of the theatres of 1807 argued that it was not a theatre, famous performers in dramas included Coco the Stag and Baba the Elephant.

Military circus re-appeared in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, most notoriously in Makhno’s Men, where star clown Vitaly Lazarenko was cast as the villain, the anarchist leader Nestor Makhno.

While Makhno’s Men brought a new historical “realism” into the Soviet circus, the pantomime’s river flood and its military battle reconstructed with circus artists riding horses were hardly avant-garde innovations. Charles Dibdin staged “aqua-dramas” in England as early as 1804. The 1824 London pantomime, The Battle of Waterloo, featured riders dressed as Cossacks in cavalry battles more than a century before the Red Army’s cavalry chased Makhno’s men across the ring in Moscow. Like the Russian pantomime in 1929, the Cossack spectacle at Astley’s Amphitheatre in London included the blowing up of a bridge. (Schechter 1998: 43)

Times had changed: at the beginning of the decade clowns had symbolised the revolutionary spirit; Stalin’s view was that they represented the dangerous forces of individualism and anarchy.

In the ‘Golden Age’ of circus, the drama was provided by extended clown entrées performed by duos and, later, trios. Much later, New Circus later would have an obsession with characters and narrative that revealed a curious sense of inferiority in relation to theatre, and which had the disastrous effect of ousting the clown from a central position in the show.

As Contemporary Circus began to theatricalise circus and develop longer shows bound by a single artistic vision, addressing a narrative or thematic line, the clowns found themselves marginalized. Even circuses like the Pickles Family Circus, which was described by Mankin as ‘clown-sensitive circus… a “clown-love zone”’ (2001: 106) struggled with integrating the longer, narrative clown entrées. (Peacock 2009: 52)

Today, Cirque du Soleil content themselves, and their audience, with a theme, a kind of wave towards meaning which avoids actually having to make any.

The negative impact of Cirque du Soleil’s vision of itself as creating a new kind of theatricality is that the shows become pretentious, imbued with a meaning which Cirque du Soleil claims in its marketing of the show but which is rarely discernible to the audience. In over-theatricalizing, Cirque du Soleil seems to have lost sight of one of the potential purposes of theatrical performance; to communicate meaning. (Peacock 2009: 56)

The second source of realness in circus is of more general appeal, at least to me as a clown and actor. It is the circular performing space. Performing in the round means you cannot hide anything. All is visible, physically, and therefore psychologically and emotionally too.

This makes it practically impossible to convince the audience of the existence of fictional worlds, or to create places which are nor actually present.

The circle is unsympathetic to the spaces which plays most commonly represent: rooms, roads, fields and so forth. (Wiles 2003: 165)

It thus also inhibits narrative, which is essentially fictional.

To recover a Greek spatial relationship [the circle] combining physicality with narrative, concelebration with political statement, is an elusive El Dorado for many modern practitioners. (Wiles 2003: 164)

In other words, what happens in the circus is for real, it is here and now. Raffaele de Ritis points out that in circus, death may happen in the ring, before our eyes, in contrast to Greek theatre, where it happens offstage and out of sight.

When we started to teach clown at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona in the new tent, we realised that the space solves half of the problems involved in training in clown. Reducing the possibility of fiction, students are required to address the reality which is before them, which is an empty space and an audience who have come to enjoy themselves. What better context for the production of clowning?

Once one has accustomed oneself to this relationship, one has to learn how positions within the circle produce meaning in a very different way to working on a rectangular theatre stage. Wiles refers to Stephen Joseph’s experience of theatre in the round at Scarborough:

He argues that the circle is not vectored and has but a single strong point, namely the centre… He makes an analogy with the interior of a lighthouse, saying that lighthouse-keepers are known to go mad because they have no point of orientation. (Wiles 2003: 165)

It is this lack which distinguishes the circle from the square, the latter being defined by a sense of north, south, east and west. In the square, back and front are different, as long as the audience are only on one of these sides. Even left and right take on significance. So, when I move, as an actor, downstage, I create meanings, which are distinct from when I move upstage, for example. In contrast, in the circle, there is no backwards or forwards, or even sideways. It is irrelevant which point on the outer edge of the circle I am at, for example. I will always be in the same relationship to the centre, and indeed to the audience.

I agree that the centre is a strong point. But I also feel that there are other meaningful points in the circle. There is a kind of outer ring, a little way in from the edge of the circle, which is a different space to the very edge. For at the very edge I virtually disappear from the performing space, and become associated more with the audience and its space. A third important point in the circle is the one near the artists’ entrance, which partly breaks up the unity of the circle. Standing just in front of this entrance, I command the space in a particular way. In a related, but less present way, I can command the space from the barrier, the actual gateway into the ring. To generalise, we can place the white-face clown at the centre of the ring, the august on the periphery, and the ringmaster, or director, at the barrier.

So we know how the ring determines the relationship between performer and audience, but how would it affect the relationship between student and teacher, if used consistently? The traditional position of the teacher, sat in the centre of his watching students whilst one or two are onstage working with the exercise, produces a clear power relationship that maybe has helped create the figure of the master/guru which is so common in the world of clown teaching. What would happen to that guru if he were merely one of many, watching from the rim of a circle? This is something I am keen to experiment with in the near future.

Going back to our devising process, we did just have time for one more thing in this session. Looking at objects that easily accompany chairs, as sources of more action, we found attractive those that might produce accidents or danger when placed on the seat, such as drawing pins, plates of food, hats, glasses, candles, etc.

But the main conclusion points towards food and drink in Act II, thus allowing us to ‘just do the actions’ whilst, of course finding them ridiculous and making the audience laugh. A kind of ‘clown Mamet’, if you like.

Works cited:
Chaplin, Charlie (1964) My Autobiography, London: The Bodley Head.
Mamet, David (1999) True or False, New York: Vintage.
Peacock, Louise (2009) Serious Play - Modern Clown Performance, Bristol: Intellect.
de Ritis, Raffaele (2007) El Cercle I la Poetica del Risc, in Generalitat de Catalunya (ed.) (2007)El Circ: la Poetica del Risc, Barcelona: KRTU.
Schechter, Joel (1998) The Congress of Clowns and Other Russian Circus Acts, AK Press.
Wiles, David (2003) A Short History of Western Performance Space, Cambridge: CUP.

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 3, 22/10/09

2009-10-23T17:36:00.001+02:00

Having got the chair onstage, what happens next?

I think it is still very much an open question in clown dramaturgy just how we construct the action. There are plenty of models to choose from, from theatre and cinema: variety (one self-contained piece after another), linear narrative, episodic narrative, or indeed from music: classical sonata form, Wagnerian climaxes, to name a few of the most obvious ones. The most developed clown entrées, from the ‘golden age of clowning’ c.1890-1945, if we follow Rémy’s judgement (Rémy 1945, 1962), last around 20 minutes, being based on a single, strong premise. The same holds true for vaudeville, as here discussed in reference to Harry Langdon:

Though Langdon’s vaudeville act was, as a comedy sketch, based upon a narrative format, Langdon was accustomed to working within the standard twenty minutes allotted to each act on a vaudeville bill. … This twenty minutes or less included at least one song by Langdon’s wife and the specially staged curtain call. This left only enough time for Langdon to establish a single, simple situation as the premise for his performance. (Rheuban 1983: 46)

Another form of premise-driven comedy is the TV sitcom, which, in its most highly developed state in the USA, fills 22 minutes in a 30-minute slot, broken down as follows:

Sitcom format: Credits - Story (Teaser/Cold Open) – Commercial – Story – Commercial - End of Story – Commercial – Tag – Credits (Sedita 2006: 8).

In other words, one idea will last you approximately 20 minutes, as long as you know how to develop it.

Having got our chair on, I now wanted to see a change of rhythm, and maybe a series of problems and attempted solutions. We tried playing with jumping over chairs and tables, or otherwise passing by them. Since I did a workshop with the Russian movement teacher, Natalia Fedorova, I have been intrigued by jumping over furniture. One of her classes consisted in just that, taught with a refreshing simplicity and without any neurosis about safety.

As with the previous week, we ended up with two devised pieces. Both had something but were incomplete, but both demonstrated the importance of rhythm when working in such a basic physical way. I think I would like to see a build up to a climax in this second scene, which could lead to a chair collapsing or some other big surprise.

Next, in theory, it seems to me that we will want a third and final scene, which will bring the action to a satisfying fulfilment. A kind of end of Act I, perhaps.

Works cited:
Rheuban, Joyce (1983) Harry Langdon: the Comedian as Metteur-en-Scene, London: AUP.
Sedita, Scott (2006) The Eight Characters of Comedy, Los Angeles: Atides Publishing.
Rémy, Tristan (1945) Les Clowns, Paris: Grasset.
Rémy, Tristan (1962) Entrées clownesques, Paris: L’Arche.

Clown Training: Transcript of a Talk

2009-10-20T13:25:00.000+02:00

Central’s AHRC Creative Fellows

Recipients of AHRC funding present their ongoing research on clowning and acting, telematic theatre, and the life and death of objects and puppets

Creative Fellows:
Jon Davison (JD), clowning and acting
Julian Maynard Smith (JMS), telematic theatre
Nenagh Watson (NW), the life and death of objects and puppets

Chair:
Prof Andy Lavender (AL), Dean of Research, Central School of Speech & Drama

This event was held at Central School of Speech & Drama on 7 October, 2009

Andy Lavender: Thank you for coming this evening. I’m very pleased to introduce Nenagh Watson. Jon Davison, Julian Maynard Smith. Nenagh, Jon and Julian are all Creative Fellows at the school and they’re all here as a consequence of the Arts and Humanities Research Council grants and creative fellowship scheme. The scheme is for practicing artists to connect in quite a embedded way with an academic institution in order to have time and space to explore and develop their own artistic practice, to be more experimental than might ordinarily be possible or to look at slight re-routings of ones work, and then to feed back into the culture of the institution. So it’s hugely fruitful for us to have Jon, Julian and Nenagh with us. I should say, at the risk of embarrassing any of them, that the scheme is very, very competitive and last year, where we won two of the awards, I think there were 58 applicants and only six awards given.

I’m going to introduce them as it were en masse and then ask them to present for about 15 minutes. We’ll take some initial questions in relation to each presentation and then open up for discussion.

…

Jon Davison is in the third year of his fellowship with us exploring clowning in relation to acting. Nenagh, as you’ll have gathered, is exploring object animation and puppetry, so Jon’s exploring clowning and acting up to a point, and connections between the two. Jon’s training includes workshops and courses with Philippe Gaulier, Complicite, Franki Anderson, John Lee, Moshe Cohen and Fool Time Circus School in Bristol. Not so long ago he completed an MA in Drama Practices and Research at the University of Kent, so he comes to us already with a sort of practice research profile.

In 1993 Jon co-founded Companyia d’Idiotes with Clara Cenoz in Barcelona and Jon has been based in the city pretty consistently since then. Consequently a lot of Jon’s clown practice and teaching has been in Barcelona: he devised and performed Clown Klezmer with Clara Cenoz at the Street Theatre Festival in Madrid as part of the International Clown Festival (later presented in London) and devised and performed work for the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona and the Esparaguerra International Mime Festival and the festival of humorous visual art in Barcelona and other locations.

Jon is a member of the World Parliament of Clowns and has taught for many years, principally at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona and the Col.legi del Teatre. He’s also a musician, playing accordion with two or three groups ranging from sort of folk and world music, through to Jewish and Gypsy music. In a shared past several years ago, Jon and I busked together at one point!

….

So I’m very glad to welcome the three of them; three people with very interesting practices that have international scope and a lot of experimentation to them. They’re here with us to test and explore and extend that practice. I think Jon is starting as I think Jon has been with us a couple of years.

Jon Davison: Thank you Andy. Well, clowning is traditionally thought to be a very informal kind of performance practice. I’m going to endeavour to be rather formal in my presentation but being a clown and prone to accidents and failure, please forgive me if I don’t manage it. Hence two laptops, a whole range of audio visual things to deal with, and a glass of water near the laptop. So here we go!

I dare say clown performance, or rather clown training as a preparation for performance, is the subject of my research, and clown performance is both familiar and rather unfamiliar at the same time: familiar in the sense that it’s played a role in just about every culture and every historical period in some form or another (I don’t think there’s anybody on the planet who has enough knowledge of every culture in every historical moment to say with absolute certainty); unfamiliar in that it’s seldom been the subject of serious research, at least academic research, or even practice-based. There’s something about clowning that says, we don’t need to think about it. Now I have various thoughts on why that should be so, but that would be a very long talk. I just want to point that up.

So the potential impact of clown research is rather wide, taking place in a field of activity that has the power to reach many but remains relatively unexplored. I think the position of clown as performance, at least in the West, if we can still use that term (I think it’s applicable in contemporary clowning), appears consolidated. Analytical reflection is rather thin on the ground so the danger is that the field is left open to assumptions, lazy ideological thinking, fashions, and outdated ways of seeing things, all of which are all over the clown world over the past 50 years. When I talk about ‘contemporary clown’, it’s a neat and tidy way to think of it in terms of the last half century for various reasons, one of which is the figure of Jacques Lecoq, the actor trainer, if I may call him that, who in the early 1960s introduced clowning into the programme of studies at his school in Paris. Since that date, he and those who have followed him have established a particular pattern, or I would say orthodoxy, of clown training and hence performance. So that’s what I’m talking about.

Of course there are other strands that are particularly interesting and less well known in the West (again that term comes up) that were happening at the same time as Lecoq in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, but again that’s a whole big area that I’m not going to deal with now. In short, there have been a whole lot of new practices happening from the 1960s, but the 1960s were 50 years ago. What has been happening that’s really new? Sometimes when I look at contemporary clowning and contemporary clown teaching it seems like we are still in May 1968.

I’ve divided my three years up into self-contained packages, trying to reduce the whole big subject of what clown training is into something manageable. For my first year I looked at ‘presence’, a very simple thing to look at, you can do that just in a year. The question was – How is a clown to be convincing? This is really the age old question of actor training – how is the performer/an actor/a clown to be convincing? – and it’s one that I think is at the root of all serious actor training methods or attempts to train the actor, certainly it’s there explicitly since Stanislavski, and way before probably.

A short aside: I’m afraid I use the words ‘actor’ and ‘clown’ interchangeably. It’s a bit naughty, I shouldn’t really do it, but it helps us blur some of the distinctions that have been drawn up between clowns and actors. Clown particularly has been favoured as a method for training actors, but as one little piece of the training if you like, so clown could be a little sub-set of acting for me. Let’s just say they are the same thing for now.

Back to the question: how is an actor, or clown, to be convincing? I wanted to look at that from three different angles. The first year would be: How is that presence established, how does one as a performer convince an audience that it’s real, that it’s convincing, what exactly is that question? This is the thing that comes up time and again, but I want to look at it in terms of clowning, because that’s my field. Now that led me within the first year of the research to question a whole lot of assumptions. Contemporary clowning has very much focussed on one notion, which I’m keen to preserve, and that’s failure, the notion that by failing, assuming one’s failure, one convinces an audience that… what? That’s the question! Be convincing of what? That it’s real? That it’s authentic? What is it that performers do that we need to convince the audience of? Like I’m trying to convince you now, trying to hold your attention, what is that? Is there something behind it? These are the questions I’m looking at. How does a clown do that? Principally by failing, admitting it, and thus attaining extra points for being more honest. That’s a very rough definition of failure and success, and that’s something that’s quite familiar with those who have engaged in clown training over the past 50 years particularly.

We’ve extended that a little bit perhaps over the first year, but while looking at how a clown can be convincing I wasn’t so happy with some of the other assumptions of this orthodox thinking, if you like the post-Lecoqian orthodox thinking in clowning, concepts such as clown as mask, clown as play, clown as improvisation, or even clown as theatre or clown as physical theatre. I was very happy to jettison all of these concepts, or at least put them to one side as not really being those mechanisms that make clowning happen. That’s a rather strange thing to be saying in a drama school these days: ‘Let’s not use games, let’s not use play, it doesn’t work, it’s nothing to do with theatre.’ I’m stating the case rather extremely but that’s what I’ve done over the first year in order to see what’s left. Can we have clown as clown? What is it? How can we describe what it feels like to be present as a clown? What is it? What is the phenomenology of the clown? And once we have an idea of what it is, how can we get there? How can we train people?

As I say I’m happy with the failure dynamics, but a lot less with some of the others. I think my impression is that they were again going back to May ’68. They were very suitable then, but they’re not so much now in the 21st Century. I know that’s very polemical with a lot of clown practitioners, but that’s why I’m here! My conclusion, in a way, is let’s gets rid of all this ideological baggage and let’s end up with what clown is.

I did salvage a little bit of play, we did find that it was useful to use. Roger Caillois, who wrote about games and play, had four categories of play, one of which was ‘vertiginous’ play, which is that kind of activity that produces vertigo if you like, which in turn produces a de-censoring of the self, a loss of focus – for example, spinning, or jumping for a long time. We used chasing, but we tried to eliminate the rules so we were no longer playing rule-based games. We were using activities that could be termed ‘play’, very primitive play, in order to generate some kind of presence, which was not clowning but which was similar to clowning, a presence that could then get us into a suitable state in order to then clown. Again, it’s trying to use something as a function of something else. It’s quite difficult. It’s very tempting, I think, for practitioners and teachers to go, ‘Oh, ok, if clowning is a mask – for example, the red nose is the smallest mask in the world – then we can work with that and then we are doing clowning.’ But maybe we’re not. Maybe we are then working with the red nose, which historically and trans-culturally is not a necessary condition of clowning. It’s a very culturally limited symbol.

What I’m getting at is – How do we do something for itself? And how do we train performers in that? I think contemporary dance, or even contemporary circus, has been several steps ahead of us in the sense that they’ve tried to look at their own art form on its own terms. And that’s where I basically ended up at the end of the first year.

I would like to show you a little bit of video which gives you an idea of vertiginous play might look like. This is a bit of edited video of some workshops in Barcelona in the first year:

Video plays

Ok, that’s how we might get into a state for clowning, but what would we do with that state, once we’re in that state?

I shall speed through year two. In the second year, basically what we did was look at what it’s like to do clown, what do clowns do – and again that’s challenging the orthodox contemporary clown view that your material comes out of your being, so your authenticity will generate your material – the actor as author. Again I wanted to challenge that assumption and see if we could look at the clown authorship away from the devising physical process, and we found that we could. We came up with a little encyclopaedia of clown, because there’s about 50 ways you can write clown material or analyse it. We’ve used that this year to generate a little demonstration piece to show how that works; the sources have been anything from clown autobiographies to watching other people’s shows. I’ve watched an awful lot of shows this year, good, bad and indifferent, and I’ve tried to fill what I perceive to be a hole in the contemporary clown training method, which prepares students for feeling clownish and then leaves them with nothing to do. So that’s been our reasoning this year.

Year three is going to be an attempt to put all that together in front of real, rather limited audiences. We have a number of projects on the go that will put the material out with higher production values and to a wider range of audiences to see if we’ve got it right, to see if this adjusted (I wouldn’t say completely new) form of clown training is going to do the job, which in the end is to produce performance that will convince.

AL: We’ll pause before we move on to take two or three questions. I have a question to kick off with, which is to ask about failure in relation to acting and if part of this project deliberately blurs a distinction between clown and actor. I can understand that failure might be completely crucial to characterising what clowns are and what they do. Does that apply to acting as well or is that distinctive unto clown?

JD: That’s an interesting question. In the first year, I taught on several of the MA courses here at Central as well as workshops in other institutions. In the actor training and coaching MA, for example, there’s an exercise in clowning where you have to cross the stage. You take one step every time you get a laugh, you can only move when you get a laugh, then you translate what you are doing into a rather more complex kind of scene, with this if you like, but every bit of action needs a laugh before you can move on.

Then we tried to apply that, but without getting the laugh, and we found we could. There was a mysterious way you could have the same process but leave aside looking for the laugh, which seemed to eliminate that reliance on failure that seemed to preserve a sense of complicity with the audience and that the audience were kind of writing this work, at least its timing, or its breathing because the laugh is also very related to patterns of breathing. I think we had some success there, but I think the theory behind it and why it worked, does escape me because we kind of eliminated failure, there’s a version of thinking a clown exercise but about doing it for something with more serious purposes. So yes and no.

AL: Jeopardy in the moment.

JD: Yes, I think if you’re not clowning, there’s a sense as an actor that you’re on the edge of a precipice that brings presence to your performing. So that’s why that happens.

AL: Any other questions to Jon?

Audience Member 1: Jon, do clowns have a different relationship to objects than other performers?

JD: There, you see, the same question – clowns are not performers! I think they have the same relationship as other good performers but not the same relationship as other not-so-good performers. Of course there are other not-so-good clowns, which we won’t talk about… I could talk about the relationship of clowns to objects. I think that is a real relationship. There’s a sense in which clowning is real, it’s here and now: this laptop is not a laptop which represents a laptop from the 18th Century; this is not a glass, it’s a plastic glass and if I’m going to break it, and my hand crush it, it will behave as it will behave since it is very material. Clowning is very material, so we do have that relationship with objects. When we come to using complex props, that creates a problem for prop designers and makers because we’re always saying, ‘I want this!’ then, ‘It doesn’t behave like I thought it would behave so shall I change the prop or shall I change my material?’ So there is a lack of fiction in clowning, which translates into a real relationship with objects and I think that one can permit oneself to a higher level of a fictional world as another performer, which one cannot in clowning, and that applies not just to objects but to character and to time and to light and to space. Clowns are just here in this space, with this light.

AL: Thank you. I’m going to move on so we can leave a little time at the end for anything that might cut across two or three of the fellowships, so I’m going to hand over now to Nenagh Watson.

…..

AL: We have five minutes or so, and I’m inclined to see whether there are any questions that pertain more broadly or perhaps concern the previous presentations as well?

Audience Member 6: This might be a really naive question, but to what extent can you think about the clown as an object manipulator of his or her own body?

JD: Very much so. It comes back to this thing of presence, which it is impossible to attain and you will fail inevitably to be authentic. It’s an impossibility, from a clown point of view. Everything is ridiculous as a failure: my own emotions, my own thoughts, my own movement, my own body… So you kind of separate yourself, you don’t identify with yourself, you know you’re playing away from yourself all the time, so there’s a sense in which all these things – your feelings your thoughts, your body, your life – are in sense an object being manipulated.

…

AL: I’d like to ask just one more question that I’ll put perhaps to Jon and Nenagh that comes out of what you said, Julian. You talked about creating a combined narrative space so one can appreciate the challenges of making the technology work and the challenges of the performers. Dramaturgically I think you’re interested in a sort of story telling, or at least creating a narrative experience, and I wonder whether that’s another theme that runs through all three presentations, the idea of presence and immediacy and some kind of instability and intimacy in the moment. But on the other hand, I wonder if, you’re also attempting to create things that work through sequence, things that work through our understanding of narrative and through story, which is a different paradigm perhaps than the paradigm of presence.

JD: In the case of clown I think that’s something I’m keen to look at in the last year of my research: what narrative, or if it’s not narrative, what structure is appropriate for clown, beyond what has traditionally been the case, where a premise-driven idea is given in about 20 minutes, or 22 in the case of American sitcoms. How do you make a piece that is full length – if you like, an-hour-and-a-quarter – in clowning without being boring? Something which challenges and is up there with the greats of theatre authorship. The Shakespeare of clowning. How can you do that? I’ve never seen it. There are lots of issue shows around, and some of them are excellent, but they’re not Shakespeare.

AL: The Holy Grail.

JMS: But why do you feel that need? Buster Keaton was fine with 20 minutes.

JD: Yes, absolutely, you see, you can’t sit through a whole Buster Keaton. I suppose because it’s been tried and hasn’t quite worked. I suppose it’s commercial as well.

……………..

AL: Well I think it’s time for a glass of wine before you jump on a train. I’d like to thank Jon, Julian and Nenagh. I’m glad that we’ve introduced them to you and we’ll find opportunities later this year and subsequently to share this work as it develops and moves into showings and public manifestations. And of course those of you who are studying here might also see them in class.

ENDS

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 2, 15/10/09

2009-10-16T13:26:00.000+02:00

Prior to getting on with the job of stringing together some of the primary chair and table actions in a form appropriate to clown, I issued a warning: clowning isn’t always fun. Over the last 50 years of clown workshops, the orthodoxy of clown-as-liberation has sold itself as the answer to all those students who don’t like discipline, hard work or sacrifice. Why else would a clown school be founded in Ibiza of all places? Mostly, this clown-as-play ideology traces a false ancestry back to Philippe Gaulier, but Gaulier means something very precise and focused when he talks of play, which has very little to do with what most students regard as ‘having a good time’ (and Gaulier remains in that most studious and serious of places, Paris).

Why did I bring this up now? Among the volunteer participants in the research workshops were some who had been with the project since the start, some who had joined halfway through, and several newcomers. I asked everyone what their interest in clown was, and the answers were as varied as can be: clown has a history; Shakespeare’s clowns; what is it really? ; to get a show together; it’s like a drug; it’s a module on a course; the only thing that’s creatively fulfilling… I like all of these answers, and they are all true. But my own reasons in this last year of the project are very precise: how do we maintain the unbounded clown presence (that we trained in in the first year) when working with the structured forms of clown performance? Clown is a highly patterned activity that nonetheless relies on the simplicity of being ridiculous before you’ve actually done anything. That’s quite a hard thing to achieve, and requires self-sacrifice.

Sacrifice isn’t a word I’m accustomed to using, so what do I mean by it? What should we actually give up in order to do good clown work? I think we should be prepared to give up our own personal ideas, our own feelings, our own desire to be recognised. In a word, our ego. In the context of performer training, in a drama school or clown school, that means dropping all those demands by the student to be ‘treated as a creative, mature adult’, by which I am referring to the ever more bloated trend towards the view that everyone deserves ‘respect’, regardless of whether what they are offering is a load of rubbish. I find it ridiculous that in a clown class so many students rebel against the demands on them to be funny! Their pathetic justification for producing dull and narcissistic nonsense in front of an audience is that ‘clown doesn’t have to be funny’! Since when? If clown ceases to be funny, then clown ceases to be.

So in truth it is this fundamental demand, to be funny, that drives the discipline appropriate to clowning, and not any woolly notions of enjoying yourself, expressing yourself, or being friends with your class-mates or the teacher. As far as I can, I try to work by this maxim, and thus hope to avoid bludgeoning students with my own ideas, feelings, or ego.

[Note on 19/12/09: it is noteworthy that the group of participants is at its smallest now since the project began. Of course, this may be for other reasons, but I am not surprised that clown-as-hard work doesn’t quite have the same mass appeal as clown-as-do-what-you-want. Maybe the whole boom in clowning is based on such a falsity. Maybe soon, when we awake to the reality of what clown is, this fashionable popularity will fall away. Maybe I am biting the hand that feeds me!]

So, we then got to work, in groups, on devising action sequences with chairs. At the end of the workshop we had two examples. One was pretty satisfying, and could form the basis for a decent show. The other was frustratingly incomprehensible and lacking in appeal for an audience. What were these differences, and why did they occur?

The first piece took as its premise a first action which was clown “A” bringing a chair onstage. This makes a simple promise: someone will use this chair to do something chair-like, such as sit down, to play an instrument or to eat or whatever. “A” then remembers something and exits. While “A” is off, “B” enters and removes the chair. “A” comes back, finds the chair missing, and exits to get another one. “A” then exits as before, having forgotten something. Same business with “B”. Then comes the surprise: “A” brings on a chair for a third time, but “B”, instead of waiting and removing it, comes on at the same time, also carrying a chair. Both leave with their chairs. “A” returns, and finding no chair, exits and returns with “B” together with all the chairs accumulated. And so on.

There are numerous routes you can take through this maze, and many which will work. The logic remains, based on attempts at solving the basic problem of getting the chair on. At some point the end must come, the chair is on, and scene 2 can begin.

The second piece had no such clear premise to begin with. Instead of a clear action in space, things here centred around non-actions motivated by embarrassment: people not wanting to sit close, and so on. The comedy of embarrassment must surely be one of the worst aspects of British humour, or at least one of the least exportable elements. Happily, I have cured myself of any temptation to laugh at people saying ‘sorry’, by leaving the country 16 years ago, and am now fully vaccinated against politeness. Along with dryness and irony, politeness is what most turns the majority of worldwide audiences off from British comedy (including clowns). It isn’t a recent phenomenon. Tristan Rémy recounts the history of the battle for dominance between English and European clowns that dragged on for around a century.

Thanks to [Medrano], the formula of the gay circus prevails definitively. He never permitted, for example, an artist to be costumed in black. Everything, for Medrano, from attitudes to colours, had to lead to joy… If the French Pantomime managed to rid the ring of the clown of British spirit, the splenetic buffoon and character with a humour without “éclat”, it is to Medrano that we owe it. (Rémy 1945: 87-8)

The Cirque Medrano becomes known as the ‘Clowns’ Circus’, promoting the new style of ‘latin’ clowns: popular, light and comical. The next half century would see at the Medrano: Grock, the Fratellini, Porto, Pipo, Rhum, Achille Zavatta, etc.

So, with scene 1 in hand, we can now move on to ‘what happens next?’

Works cited:

Tristan Rémy (1945) Les Clowns, Paris: Grasset

Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 1, 8/10/09

2009-10-09T12:11:00.002+02:00

Having just wound up the second year of this project by compiling An Encyclopaedia of Clown, where I had concentrated on how clown works at the level of gags and short pieces of action, I began to think about how larger forms and structures work. How can we make whole numbers and, beyond that, full-length shows, using the principles worked on over these last two years?

I started by asking myself what the primary, normal actions and behaviour with tables and chairs are. I had the idea that these two pieces of furniture would provide more than enough setting for a 90 minute show in the round. They can operate at the centre of a circular performing space, as they are three-dimensional, unlike sets, doors, sofas, and so on. They have a history of involvement in clowning, and are easily portable. And they allow us to do scenes with food and drink, which I suspected would be the theme of our performing work this year.

So we began by applying a simple spatial exercise to these pieces of furniture. Three performers are free to use the table and chairs in any normal way, but must maintain certain fixed distances from each other. Performer “A” is arm’s length from “B”, who in turn is a leg’s length from “C”. “A” and “C” have no specified relationship. I chose to work with groups of three, as I also had in mind that I wanted to explore fully the possibilities of clown trios.

I had used this exercise many times to teach a kind of clown status. There are many status exercises around, but they mostly base themselves on psychological concepts, demanding that the performer use their head in order to create status relationships. And so they generally create relationships based on a psychological understanding of character. In clown, we don’t need or want characters, we just want you. Fixed spatial relationships give you more than enough to play with and you don’t have to think about what and why you are doing whatever you are doing.

So that deals with the relationships. What about the actions themselves? We needed quite a bit of work for everyone to understand just what normal behaviour is! Unfortunately, much theatre and clown training encourages students to think that they must be creative. So using a chair as a machine gun rather than to sit on is regarded as more interesting. Keith Johnstone does a great demolition job on this twisted way of thinking in his seminal work, Impro, so I won’t go into it in detail here.

I tend to think in terms of three categories of actions: primary (normal use of objects, using them for what they were intended); secondary (logical other uses, that work but are not what they were intended for); and tertiary (fanciful uses, that may not be logical or possible even). In reality, the three areas blur into each other, but I wanted to get down on paper the basic examples in all three for chairs and tables, as follows.

Primary uses
Chair: sit on it, stand up from it, pick it up, move it, offer it, accept it, change places, lean on it
Table: sit at it, walk round it

Secondary uses
Chair: stand on it, fall off it, pull it away, jump off it, fight with it, share it, leap over it, put feet up on it, sleep on it
Table: stand on it, leap on it, hide under it, lie on it, dance on it, block the door with it

Tertiary uses
Chair: tame a lion
Table: balance it on feet

Aside from direct actions with these objects, we can combine them with other objects. For example, normal objects to put on a chair might be: cushions, clothes, hats, newspaper. Secondary ones might be: plates, glasses, drawing pins.

One more thing: the objects themselves can be primary or secondary. That is, a chair can be made normally or not. Normal chairs are made of wood, metal, plastic, etc. Abnormal chairs would be made of paper, rubber, or bubble-wrap. Normal chairs support your weight when you sit in them. That’s what they are designed for. But abnormal ones might fall apart, or bend, or give you an electric shock.

As you can see, I’m not really interested in those tertiary uses. What is interesting for me is how you shift slightly from normal to surprising uses. And how it’s these secondary actions that are often funny.

Now we’ve clarified just what kind of actions we can call upon, it should be an easier job to devise something that works, avoiding the pitfalls of creativity or self-expression that plague so much contemporary clowning.

An Encyclopaedia of Clown

2009-09-30T22:00:00.003+02:00

[This is a lengthy piece of work, so I thought I'd publish it bit by bit. Here are the first two entries to be going on with.]

50 ways or elements (a kind of clown periodic table, perhaps?) to understand how clown works and how to generate material.

We used the Encyclopaedia to devise a short demonstration show for the Festival Of… at CSSD in September 2009, designed to test, compare and demonstrate the wide variety of forms and structures in clown performance.

To read more about how we compiled the Encyclopaedia, see my paper ‘The Dramaturgy of Clown or “What do clowns do?”’

1. Breaking the written rules of the game.

By “rules of the game”, we mean any norms of behaviour stated explicitly, and which are designed to generate a particular activity in an orderly way. Evidently the breaking of these norms will threaten or even destroy the activity. Donald McManus defines clown’s role as contradicting the context: “Clown logic does not have an essential meaning other than to contradict the environment in which the clown appears” (McManus 2003: 17).

We commonly use words like “cheating” or “disobeying” to denote these disruptive behaviours, but perhaps the most radical way is to “refuse to play”. The Olympic 100-metre runner who takes drugs (cheats) is abhorred by the sporting community, but is ultimately understood, as their behaviour is motivated by the ethic of winning the game, and thus shares the same values as sporting society. But the runner who strolls down the track instead of trying to win is an affront to the community’s ideals that cannot be assimilated within its value-system. The clown’s role thus situates him/her as an outsider, one who knows that: “There are no rules that require us to obey rules. If there were, there would have to be a rule for these rules, and so on” (Carse 1986: 10).

We all have the impulse to disobey, as well as the impulse to maintain order. Both are key elements in clown.

2. Breaking the unwritten rules of social cohesion.

By “rules of social cohesion” we mean any norms of behaviour not stated explicitly, but which are implicitly applied by mutual agreement of a group. As with the above entry, the breaking of these rules leads to the threatened or actual unravelling of the pretended order. Relationships between people, and between people and objects, start to fail.

In order to know when we are breaking the rules, we need to know and acknowledge what the correct behaviour would be. For example, we know how to use a chair properly: we can sit in it or stand up from it. We can move it or stack it, offer it or accept a seat in it.

Improper uses might be: standing on it, pulling it away when someone sits, or fighting with it. All these uses are common and logical, but remain improper in the sense that we or the chair fails to comply with the primary use it was intended for.

Going still further, we can find fanciful or tertiary uses: taming a lion, balancing it on your forehead, a chair which collapses, a chair made of paper.

Clowning thus engages directly with material and social reality, first and foremost. It sees things “as they are”. In spite of our constant breaking of the unwritten rules that surround us in our activities, those rules never go away. They may change, but new ones are continuously appearing. The goal of eliminating them is an unattainable utopia. Clowns are content to play infinitely with the rules, and thus take up no permanent political or ideological position. They are constantly responding to and contradicting the context, which is constantly changing.

I think this is a salutary lesson at our own historical moment in clown in the West. Clown is far simpler than those who equate it with self-expression, or creativity, would have it. It does not consist in having far-fetched ideas that bear no relation to reality. In brief, clown is not a short-cut to escapism. Only by accepting and coming to terms with reality does the clown truly free him/herself from the weight of materiality. You can’t change reality – it will always remain reality. This acceptance parallels the recognition of the flop in performance, when one accepts one has failed, and the audience duly laugh.

Paul Bouissac argues that not only do clown routines depend on playing with the real, but they actually serve to define what is perceived to be real and unreal. According to Bouissac, clowns thus reveal and demonstrate the tacit principles underlying society, and are thereby the producers of a kind of socio-anthropological theory-in-practice: “circus clown performances demonstrate the basic but unwritten rules on which our construction of a culturally bound meaningful universe rests” (Paul Bouissac 1997:195).

Bouissac goes further: “Profanation is not so much the breaking of a rule made explicit in a legal code as the exposure of the rule of the rules, the principle or principles that are so fundamental for the holding together of the regulative system that they cannot be formulated. For instance to make explicit and to publicize the following rule, “it is forbidden to British subjects to sneak into the Queen’s bedroom unannounced at dawn,” is unthinkable, in terms of the system, because it would imply that this action is indeed a possibility… it seems obvious that the nature of the rule transgressed, not the quantity of the transgressions, distinguishes profanation from simple rule breaking. It is as if a cultural system with all the prescriptive and prohibitive rules which form its body were actually relying on a few crucial but unformulatable rules, some sort of culturally tacit axioms or silent dogmas from which all the other rules are derived and justified but which are themselves undemonstrable, unjustifiable and ultimately impotent…. In a way we could say, metaphorically, that every morning a clown sits on the Queen’s bed, at the risk of losing his passport.... Founding rules cannot be justified by the rules they generate. In this sense, any society hangs from an unsupported hook.... I would like to lay down for discussion the claim that profanation denotes a class of actions which question these tacit principles through the selective transgression of some of the rules that are derived from them or by exhibiting some behavior which implies a system of rules that would be derived from the negation of these cultural axioms; 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” (Bouissac 1997: 197-9).

3. Objects or people are in the wrong place

Paul Bouissac splits what he calls profanation into five categories. His first one goes like this: “a particular object assigned to a certain place or position is moved to and placed in an inappropriate place or position” (Bouissac 1997). To simplify, I would say: “objects are in the wrong place”. And to this I would add the category of people.

To illustrate this principle, here are some examples:

- Someone sits on a chair placed in front of the door
- A lifeguard in the desert
- A little rubber duck in someone’s mouth
- A clown is in the audience

Another sub-category of this is the absence of an object where it should have been:

- A coat hook is missing, so the coat hung falls to the ground
- A teacher is asleep in bed while his students sit in the classroom

A similar analysis to Bouissac’s has been made by Rowan Atkinson, in his TV programme, Laughing Matters, in which he discusses the rules of comedy. According to Atkinson, “an object or person becomes funny by being in an unexpected place”.

4. Objects used by the wrong person

This follows the first part of Bouissac’s second category: “an object that should be manipulated in a certain manner (or simply be seen) by a particular person or class of persons, is manipulated in this manner (or is seen) by an unqualified person…” (Bouissac 1997).

- A baby drives a car
- A business man sucking a dummy
- A bald woman uses a hair-drier
- A granny uses a pneumatic drill

A simple way of coming up with ideas of this kind is to ask the question, “ what’s the worst birthday present you could give someone?”

5. Objects used wrongly

I have separated this category out from Bouissac’s second, which continued thus: “… or is manipulated in an inappropriate manner” (Bouissac 1997).

- A hammer to break an egg
- Wipe your nose on your sleeve (while holding a hankie)
- A dining fork to dig the garden
- Drying your hair with a bike pump
- Eating a shoe

6. Action done by the wrong person

- A tramp unveils a new shopping centre
- The Queen does a car insurance advert

The same kinds of people keep coming up when we think of examples of people out of place. Favourites are: the Queen, tramps, the Pope, babies and animals.

This group covers those actions that are not so strictly attached to a particular object and its inappropriate use.

The word ‘inappropriate’ is quite a good one here, but it does sound too euphemistic to me. That’s why I use the word ‘wrong’. We all know when something is wrong, or right.

7. Action done for the wrong person

Bouissac’s third category is: “a patterned behaviour that should be performed in the presence of an object or person is performed in the presence of an inappropriate object or person”.

- A wheelchair is wheel-clamped
- A conductor conducts the audience
- A comedian tells jokes to dogs

8. Action done when you shouldn’t

The first part of Bouissac’s category number 4: “a patterned behaviour that is prescribed in a specific context is performed in another context…”

- TV news reader falls asleep
- Laughing at bad news

Most bodily functions have such socially restricted correct contexts that they easily lend themselves to being done when you shouldn’t: farting, peeing, shitting, burping, yawning breastfeeding, having sex, and dying are comedy classics!

9. Action not done when it should have been done

And now the end of Bouissac’s number 4: “… or is not performed in the prescribed context”.

- Bride doesn’t say “I do”
- Doctor stands by
- Forget to open the door in order to go out
- Suicide bomb fails to explode
- Sun doesn’t set
- Parachute doesn’t open

10. Misunderstood words

Bouissac’s number 5 is: “a word or text to which a prescribed interpretation is attached, is interpreted in another manner or, still worse, the consequences of this new interpretation are actually implemented”.

The following are some famous examples. A prize for anyone who knows who said them.

- “I’ve got one, too”
- “Who’s on first base”
- “Four candles”

Other routes to verbal chaos are through:

- speech impediments
- foreign languages
- deafness

Works cited

Atkinson, Rowan (1993) Laughing Matters, Tiger Television for the BBC.

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.

Carse, James P. (1986) Finite and Infinite Games, New York: Random House.

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

The Dramaturgy of Clown or “What do clowns do?”

2009-09-30T12:00:00.000+02:00

This is the transcript of a paper I delivered in London at the "Festival Of..." at Central School of Speech and Drama in September 2009. It formed the final reflection on the previous year's research. Contemporary clowning over the last 50 years has largely rejected the notion that we can know what clowns do, claiming clown to be an authentic experience above all. I attempt to demonstrate such a position as false, and to reveal that clowning can be seen as a highly structured and ordered activity that owes little to the concepts of spontaneity, improvisation or play, and is therefore open to analysis of "how clowning works".

John Wright, in his study of comedy “Why Is That So Funny” brusquely rejected the notion that we can know what clowns do:

"Asking ‘How do clowns walk?’ or ‘What do clowns wear?’ are inane questions. But to ask ‘How do clowns make us laugh?’ and, more importantly, ‘What physical impulses inspire that comedy’ will take you to a place where you can find a personal ownership of ‘clown’ as a level of play." (Wright 2006: 180)

It only takes someone to state something categorically, and the clown who loves to contradict surges up inside me and speaks up with a “Why?” delivered with the intonation of a 6-year-old who just loves to contradict. Much of my research method is in fact based on such clown philosophy, which you might simplify as a kind of scientific scepticism, or instinct not to believe, to keep questioning, especially when three or more people agree on something, until there are no more questions left to ask or we are all exhausted from the attempt.

Wright’s policing of this no-go area for contemporary clowns sums up the now old-school, post-68 view that we are all better off since we did away with those nasty texts, authors, and anything that admits to being thought out beforehand, and ushered in a new era of spontaneity, improvisation and authenticity.

“Clowning takes us back to basics….it's not about routines, or structured material of any kind. “(Wright 2006: 184)

Wright does offer significant analysis of how his notions of play relate to clown, and I find much to agree with, particularly on the practical dynamics of the presence of the clown in the performer, but ultimately his position is a merely ideological one, in my opinion.

Most clown-as-play advocates lack the depth of thought that Wright brings to the matter, however. Louise Peacock, in her recently published Serious Play - Modern Clown Performance, talks of “the intensely personal nature of clowning which generates play from within the performer” (Peacock 2009: 13). Unfortunately, though, her main example is Slava Polunin, whose Snowshow is now a kind of clown franchise, the roles passed on to a list of performers operating around the globe. Not very personal, then!

Peacock offers no serious analysis of why we should continue to believe in the mantra of clown=play=authenticity. This simply stating of one’s faith in the authenticity or truth of the self is a key feature of much, though not all, contemporary clowning.

But let us leave aside debates about faith and scepticism, for I wish to turn my attention instead to another old discussion which should really interest us more as performers, as it is that question which has vexed actors, directors and actor trainers since at least Stanislavsky, and in truth since we began thinking about acting: “Is the actor pretending, or is it for real?” Or, to place a moral burden on the issue: “Should the actor pretend or should the actor create reality?”

Peacock and others, in their bland talk of truth - “the concept of performing truthfully is common in clowning” (Peacock 2009: 107) - more often than not end up talking about the “inner clown” (Peacock 2009: 34) and invoke the heritage of Philippe Gaulier along the way. Yet Gaulier has no recourse to concepts of “inner” anything. In The Tormentor, he writes: “The actor enjoys suggesting feelings. The audience enjoys feeling them. Nothing is true. Everything is false, except for our imagination“(Gaulier 2006: 174). Of course, the great clown guru is here talking about the nonsense involved in believing that characters are real. “A huge error is the confusion between the actor and his character” (Gaulier 2006: 175). If we follow Gaulier, rather than waffling about “inner clowns”, we can say that the actor, and especially the clown, is pretending for real. The pretence is authentic. That’s the best we can do to keep the faith, in my view.

Of course, such claims for a new age of acting that is more authentic, more true, more real, have been seen time and again throughout history. Soviet clowns in the 1960s, backed up by the Party, pushed away from the grotesque and towards the natural, the realistic. Oleg Popov, in his autobiography, was quite happy to 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)

A familiar argument? Well, we need only look back to the great shift from Melodrama to Naturalism at the end of the 19th century to find a similar ideological stance, one which dismissed the past as untruthful, deceitful, grotesque, false, in favour of a present which is authentic, true and, most importantly, ART.

Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack state that “drama written by the ‘emancipated dramatist’ stages its own seriousness as art. To see a play as ‘dramatic genius’ is to insist it is something more than a vehicle for the resident acrobat” (Shepherd and Womack 1996: 286).

This pretence to create performance that does not pretend, but instead is somehow “true”, finds 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)

Correspondingly, the Naturalist ideology refuses to accept artifice: “Plot smacks too much of deceitful artifice, of hidden control” (Shepherd and Womack 1996: 283). “The good naturalist author doesn’t interfere by plotting: he just allows people to be people” (Shepherd and Womack: 284).

This is the same rejection of artifice, the grotesque and theatricality, together with a blind faith in truths, humanity, and liberating the self that we find contemporary clowning desperately trying to reinvent, a whole century on. Such a laissez-faire attitude of “don’t think, just be yourself” has become a dangerous disease in contemporary clowning. But let us not be shy of digging up clown authorship. It is lying around like unharvested potatoes. Clowns DO think!

It is worth pointing out a few of the places where these clown authors might be hiding. Isabelle Baugé, prefacing her edition of collected Pantomimes (French silent theatre of the early 19th century with Pierrot as the star), notes how one author of pantomimes, Champfleury, deviated from the norm:

"the style is remarkable and … the author does not respect the norms of writing which habitually ruled the practice of mime authorship… they generally composed in the present indicative …they avoided metaphors, comparisons and other rhetorical forms, which were difficult to translate onto the silent stage. Now, Champfleury… : the use of the past tense, figures of speech, ironical proverbs, visual descriptions of characters… "(Baugé 1995: 17).

It is evident here that the rules about how to write for Pierrot the clown are so clear that it is obvious when one breaks them.

Authors and performers have, of course, a noble history of collaborating, competing, one-upping or even trying to eliminate each other, or otherwise being chained together. Such parings abound in the field of clown: Shakespeare and Kempe (who came out on top of that one?), Irving Thalberg and The Marx Brothers, or Eric Chappell and Leonard Rossiter, whose rate of delivery as Rigsby in Rising Damp was such that “Eric had to pen extra pages of script because he devoured the dialogue at rapid speed” (Webber 2001: xi).

Scott Sedita, in The Eight Characters of Comedy, (2006) has a succinct chapter on how to act in short-form TV comedy:

The complexity and great attention to detail in sitcom writing is something that actors new comedy take for granted. They will add words, drop words, or just paraphrase. Although there might be more leniency in the world of drama to play with he dialogue (I odn’t recommend it), it CANNOT be done in half hour comedy…. DON’T CHANGE A WORD! … writers are an obsessive bunch, especially about their words…
Actors… will add words or “handles” as they’re called in the industry, thinking they’re making the dialogue more conversational, when really they’re messing up the rhythm" (Sedita 2006: 14-5).

Even those comic performers who present themselves to the audience as themselves lean just as much as anyone on their own or others’ writing. Ronnie Corbett, in his autobiography, describes his own performance as “me being me playing me” (Corbett 206: 79), but relied on only two writers in over 80 Episodes of The Two Ronnies for his cameo ramble in the chair. It is a complex question as to just how different this is to Ronnie Barker, who “found it almost impossible to talk directly, as himself, to an audience. He had to be in character” (Corbett 206: 79).

Coming back to contemporary clown training, I believe the great failure of Lecoquian teaching has been to abandon students without the resources to create material or to understand someone else’s creation. Trapped in their own collaborative love-in, companies of performers idle away the audience’s time with democracy on stage. And the clowns are the worst of the lot. Many is the full-length clown show that entertains somewhat, admittedly, but heroes of contemporary clowning such as Slava, Litsedei et al. have created works that do not stretch much further than that. Shapeless, devoid of meaning, lacking significance. Shakespeare they ain’t.

But the door into Clown Writing is wide open, and we can enter freely. If we care to look, observe and reflect, a vast array of knowledge on what clowns do is there to be had. That is what I and my workshop collaborators in London and Barcelona have been doing all this year.

And what is the result of our digging? A treasure of 50 ways to understand how clown works. Not how it feels. Many of those ways also serve to generate material. We also made strides towards a kind of universal unified theorem of clown, that might encompass a range of seemingly disparate definitions in vogue. And I would also hypothesise great steps towards the elimination of game playing from the clown devising process, a huge debt to Avner the Eccentric, one of the principal non-play clown teachers in the world today.

We have also used the 50 elements (a kind of clown periodic table perhaps?) to devise a short demonstration show, The Encyclopaedia of Clown, premiered at the Festival Of… at CSSD in September 2009. It is designed to test, compare and demonstrate the wide variety of forms and structures in clown performance.

What are my sources for the 50 entries in this encyclopaedia? Much teaching, devising and performing, first and foremost. Personally, after finishing my training with Gaulier, I was clear about what clown was, but not about how to make a show. Much of what I am now teaching in clown devising courses is a crystallisation of those early years of fumbling in the dark rehearsing shows together with Clara Cenoz, as Companyia d’Idiotes, for years before they were ready.

Secondly, as sources, there are the performances of others, live and preserved on film or video. I have sacrificed my enjoyment of a large number of clown shows over the past year in order to be able to write a decent review on each one, some of which are published on my website and blog. Inevitably cinema clowns have drawn more attention. You cannot compare the flatness of a DVD of a live show with the art of Chaplin, Langdon or Tati.

Thirdly, as already touched on, are the words of the clowns themselves. The long careers of the last three in particular have provided me with useful data for analysis of clown dramaturgy via their (auto-)biographies (Chaplin 1964, Rheuban 1983, Bellos 1999). But clowns do not usually give away many secrets. Perhaps they assume no one is interested. Coco (Nikolai Poliakoff) spends pages describing the mounting of a circus tent, but only hints at his number performed at a children’s hospital: “I tried to think of all the things I could do to make the children laugh” (Poliakoff 1941: 56). Harpo Marx, the clown of no words, spends tens of thousands of them on high society anecdotes, but only a handful on a routine (the 200 knives), though his advice is invaluable (Marx 1962: 316-7).

Fourthly, there are related fields of comedy which are not so in-bred as clowning and are happy to trade in secrets. Numerous books are on the market on sitcoms and how to write and act in them, as too on cartooning, Even stand-up comedy has stolen a march on us. Olly Double’s books are exemplary, and then there is perhaps the best autobiography from a professional’s point of view, Steve Martin’s. All these fields also boast of university level studies. In clowning I only know of two short course modules accredited by universities, at Lyon (France) and Girona (Spain).

Still, I must say I am proud to be part of a genre that continually lags behind everyone else. Always the last!

Works referred to:

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

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

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

Corbett, Ronnie (2006) And It’s Goodnight From Him…, London: Penguin.

Double, Oliver (1997) Stand-Up: On Being a Comedian, London: Methuen.

Double, Oliver (2005) Getting The Joke, London: Methuen.

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

Martin, Steve (2007) Born Standing Up, London: Simon and Shuster.

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

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

Poliakoff, Nikolai (1941) Coco the Clown, London: J. M. Dent and Sons.

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

Rheuban, Joyce (1983) Harry Langdon: the Comedian as Metteur-en-Scene, London: AUP.

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

Sedita, Scott (2006) The Eight Characters of Comedy, Los Angeles: Atides Publishing.

Webber, Richard (2001) Rising Damp, a Celebration, London: Boxtree.

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

Review: Serious Play

2009-07-27T22:37:00.003+02:00

Serious Play, Modern Clown Performance
by Louise Peacock, (Intellect Books 2009)

As a specialist in the field of clown (as a practitioner and an academic), I was excited when I recently learned of this book's imminent publication. There are so few rigorously written studies of clown that I was ready to welcome any contributions to the serious study of this complex art form.

Having read the book, I am astounded and appalled that such a shoddy piece of work could get past the publisher's checks. The published text is based on the author's PhD thesis, but the writing would hardly bear up to scrutiny on an undergraduate level.

Apart from being very poorly written from a point of view of style and clarity of thought, the text contains several factual errors, such as the lumping of Chaplin into the category of Hobo Clowns, a form which the author rightly states was born in the 1920s. Chaplin's tramp character (NOT the same as a Hobo), as everyone knows, had been appearing in films throughout the previous decade.

The author devotes a large section to discussing the clown activist work of CIRCA, but neglects to mention that the founders of CIRCA have long ago abandoned this project, declaring it to be an untenable position.

The basic assumption of the book, that clown is equivalent to play, is never justified, and ignores the large amount of clown work done in recent years that rejects the usefulness of play theory to clowning.

If this had been published some 20 or more years ago, it might have had some resonance, but today it reads as a poorly researched personal reaction to a handful of shows rather than a rigorous study.

I do not understand how someone with apparently very limited knowledge or experience of clown (the author has done a workshop with Angela da Castro, seen Slava's Snowshow a number of times, and very little else) has managed to get such a misleading work into the marketplace.

Review: El Pallasso i el Führer

2009-06-06T14:42:00.002+02:00

El Pallasso i el Führer (2007)
directed by Eduard Cortés

I confess to only having seen a little less than an hour of this film. Firstly, I chanced upon it on TV last night, so missed the beginning, and secondly, tedium got the better of me and I switched off before it finished dragging itself towards the end. In my view, that doesn’t disqualify me from reviewing the film, however.

As a clown and a clown historian, I should have been delighted to be contemplating a film based on a historical occurence of Charlie Rivel’s performance for the Fuhrer on his birthday but, alas! no.

First there is the astounding fact that it was broadcast in a dubbed-to-Spanish version, the original being in Catalan. I was watching in Catalonia: why wasn’t it broadcast in the original version? Is it really so hard for the poor Spanish public to do a tiny bit of work and read some subtitles? Not even when the original language is one that is official in the country and not really so difficult to get the gist of even if you don’t know it. And so, as with all dubbed films, the atmosphere evaporates, and in this case a heaviness takes over which is exacerbated by the denseness of the dialogue, a text which never for one second escapes from a turgid literariness.

Ferran Rañé‘s protrayal of Rivel bears some likeness to the man himself in his bearing and manner. He’s obviously watched his appearance in Fellini’s “I Clowns” and done a fair imitation, although that’s as far as it goes and it can’t be called a full characterisation. But when it comes to the scenes where he is called upon to actually perform as a clown, he unfortunately joins the rest of the cast in an embarrassing parody of what actors might think clowns do. A very disappointing film indeed.

Clown Quotations

2009-06-05T13:19:00.004+02:00

Today I'm making a (slow) start on compiling a list of clown quotations. Slow, because I'm feeling a bit lazy and can't be bothered to go searching all my notes and books for bits of wisdom. But never mind, I will add to the list as I go along. All suggestions greatly received!

What makes a good clown quotation? Firstly, it's better if a clown said it. And if not a clown then someone professionally close to the clown's world. Secondly, it's better if it surprises us and illuminates us, just as the performance of a clown is intended to do. It's no good keeping on repeating the same old material, it gets tired very quickly. So, no platitudes!

"When you stand there doing nothing and it's funny, that's repose" (Johnny Carson)

"Clowns are pegs, used to hang circuses on." (Phineas T. Barnum)

“I was born a clown. I’ve never felt comfortable as a woman.” (Annie Fratellini)

“To that eternal naïve question reporters are for ever shouting at me: ‘Why did you become a clown?’ I have only one reply. ‘Because I wanted to.’” (Grock)

Circus Architecture

2009-05-20T17:28:00.006+02:00

A recent post on Pat Cashin's Clownalley (amazing blog, visit it here if you haven't already: http://clownalley.blogspot.com/) on circus buidings sent me scrummaging around in my collection of circus architecture images... so here are some of them:

Clown Stamps

2009-05-20T17:07:00.003+02:00

Clowns have always been attractive images to be plundered for anything from toys to clothes to TV adverts to, in this case, stamps and matchbox labels. Having discovered some of these recently, I have begun to collect them. I can't believe it... a stamp collector!

The International Clown Project

2009-05-19T23:46:00.002+02:00

Review: Pierre Pilatte, “Dans ma philosophie”

2009-04-14T18:10:00.000+02:00

Antic Teatre, Barcelona,
31st January 2009

Like all great absurdists, Pierre Pilatte’s starting point is the mundane, that most ordinary kind of reality that we encounter in semi-private every day of our lives, and that seems to be the basis for our inner worlds, and hence our contact with the outer world of objects and the people that surround us.

Pilatte is an expert exponent of what we might call “clown du quotidien”. In this clown world we find the ridiculous in the most inconsequential of actions, deeds that normally go unnoticed by our own consciousness, mini-tragedies that surely should have no significance. Pilatte looks for a lighter... dozens of large boxes are thrown aside in the search, eventually he decides upon a trunk... it’s full of lamps... no matter! there is a pile of plastic cups, which he then removes one by one from the stack, thus revealing a key in very last one... the key to a box... and there it is, the lighter. Ordinary? Absurd? Not as crazy as using the lighter to smoke a chair. But the prime act of clown stupidity is then, only afterwards, to take out a packet of normal cigarettes!

“Dans ma philosophie” is a show that walks the line between madness and normality with exhilarating ease, its actions and language rivalling Ionesco at his best.

Live Clown TV

2009-04-11T00:15:00.001+02:00

Review: La Cleta i la Mandarina

2009-04-10T22:24:00.000+02:00

Teatre Riereta, Barcelona,
2nd March 2009

This is a little gem of a kids’ show that manages to bring together some lovely clowning and some very neat magic. Magicians have a tendency to be clever folk, as the skill of misdirecting the audience’s attention is usually allied to a well-developed intellect. And that doesn’t bode well for clowning, which as we all know relies on a well-developed stupidity.

However, La Cleta achieves a marvellous unification of her two brain hemishperes, remaining utterly silly whilst completely foxing her audience... and herself! Instead of using magic to fool us and impress us with her superior skill, she uses it against herself, the joke almost always being on her.

The clowning is simple yet to the point, such as La Cleta’s exclamation of “I did it wrong!” every time she makes a mistake, or her habit of asking an audience member’s name and then claiming she is called the same: “Same as me! We’re the same!” And a wonderful example of how to be negative as a clown: whilst the two clowns do impressions that are easy to guess, La Cleta repsonds to the audience’s correct suggestions every time with a “no!” that is so innocently addressed to us that, despite it being grammatically negative, comes across as a complete affirmation.

Review: Licedei, The Family

2009-04-09T12:52:00.003+02:00

Licedei, The Family (Semianyki)
Hackney Empire, London,
27th September 2008

Licedei are still notable for being a company that has a relatively large number of clowns onstage, compared with most exponents of clowning. “The Family” is performed by 6 performers. I have two main problems with this, despite enjoying the show immensely.

The first problem is that it is rare that clowns can remain being clowns in the company of so many. The contrasts between them become inevitably less stark, and contrast is an essential element in clowning. They begin to resemble each other too much, and a couple of the daughter characters could easily be merged or dispensed with. The second problem is with the clowning, or lack of it.

Most of what happens in "The Family" is based more on character-driven comedy or street theatre, rather than true clowning. The great exception is the youngest child, whose simple energy and joy in her own foolishness is what gives the show its heart. The brother mostly plays a lively foil, a trickster-ish prankster in constant tension with his younger sister’s innocence. But although his orchestra conductor number is particularly accomplished, it falls into the oft-seen trap of making the audience into the clowns, and the clown into the director. Fine for an average street theatre show, and entertaining enough, but clowning can aim much higher.

The weakest link is the father, whose gestures seem empty, external, with no sense of self-ridicule. And no contact with the audience. As a result he seems to have no insides, no inner world.

The mother is an altogether warmer, stronger presence, but most of what works for her is again from the realm of street comedy rather than true clowning. Her management of the audience member on the phone after the interval is perfect, but lacking innocence. Her use of dance and supposedly sexy moves quickly tires.

Of the other two daughters, I did like the still, almost autistic presence of one of them. But autism is not enough. She lacks objectives (except in the moment when she wants to answer the phone), remaining in a state of flop.

But, as I have said, although you won’t find the best clowning in the world in this show it is nonetheless extremely enjoyable, full of surprises and generally performed with a positive elan that sends you home happy.

The Phenomenology of Clown

2008-09-30T18:37:00.000+02:00

This is the transcript of a paper given at the conference
"SILENT OBJECTS/SPEAKING SUBJECTS - A DAY OF RESEARCH INTO CIRCUS AND CLOWN PERFORMANCE",
as part of In/Scissions, a Festival of Emergent Arts,
at Central School of Speech and Drama, London, 20th September 2008.

Introduction

I am a research fellow at CSSD, funded for three years by the AHRC to research the contemporary clown. I would like to take this opportunity to present some of the principle findings so far, one year into this project.

My research begins by asking an age-old question in a new context. The age-old question concerns how an actor is to be convincing. This has vexed and provoked actor training since at least Stanislavsky, and has of course been around for far longer. The new context is that of clown training and performance.

The overarching question, then, is: “How is a clown (or actor) convincing?”

The distinction I make between clown and actor is purely rhetorical. My underlying assumption is that they are the same. All clowns are actors. All actors are clowns.

By the end of this year I have arrived at a vision (or rather, a feeling) of clown that is highly personal, in the sense that it depends on seeing (or rather, on feeling) things at a personal level. This “what clown feels like” is what, in retrospect, I have spent the last year searching for. We might call this “the phenomenology of clown”.

What does it feel like to clown? What does it depend on? A loss of ego? An acceptance of failure? High self-esteem? Contradictory behaviour? A sense of difference? Feeling like when you fall in love? This is what we could call “being clown”, and is what I have also attempted to demonstrate in my new solo performance, “from jontxu…to be”. In this performance I set myself the task of simply being with the chair, rather than looking to improvise actions that might follow clown rules. My focus was thus on feeling what it’s like to be clown. I found that it is entirely possible to entertain an audience in this manner, at least for ten minutes.

Definitions

The last 50 years have seen a distinct change in the fortunes of clowning. The standard history of this period goes something like this: “clowning had degenerated into a sterile and formulaic state, within the equally decadent form of circus. Then, in the early 1960s, Jacques Lecoq, by introducing clown into his teaching, brought it under the protection of contemporary theatre, where it has since lived happily ever after, as an art form.”

This fairy-tale has never really convinced me. But my scepticism is not so much aimed at claiming a place in history for the clowning of the 1950s and before (although I could do so), but instead at releasing us from the obligation to subscribe to this new orthodoxy. My feeling, over many years of teaching clown, is that this orthodoxy has not arisen from a rigorous assessment of clown, in other words a solid, trans-historical and trans-cultural definition, but is instead a coagulation of concepts, prejudices and ideologies that in their own cultural and historical moment certainly made sense, but that half a century on fail to convince and therefore are acting as obstacles to making clown for our own times.

Simon Murray, in his book on Lecoq, comments on the student interest in clown:

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

Unfortunately, we are no longer in May 68.

Donald McManus calls for a definition despite the problems:

The very diversity of clown, however. makes a comprehensive definition a complicated matter. In fact, it has proven so difficult that most scholars and historians in the field have balked at trying to define clown at all, and confined themselves to describing character traits, or points of similarity from tradition to tradition. But the persistence of clown as a recognizable figure in virtually all traditions, suggests that some essential clown quality must exist and be worth exploring.

So, let us embark on the path: to cross-examine our inherited teaching and performing techniques with rigour, and without fear jettison them if needs be; and to construct a solid definition and therefore practice, of clown and clown teaching that can serve our own context.

Perhaps I am only being contrary here for the sake of it, but then of course that is the nature of clown! Indigenous clowns in North America are often termed contraries, and one of their tasks is to do everything backwards. When there’s a drought, swim, when it’s cold, go naked. Rubbing you up the wrong way is always going to be part of what I do.

Many definitions of clown are possible, and I am usually quite happy to switch between them as needs arise, but recently I have been particularly enamoured of McManus’s clear thinking on the matter:

Clown logic does not have an essential meaning other than to contradict the environment in which the clown appears.

If Freud had been into clowning he might have called this the “contradiction drive”, and it is a very neat concept indeed, as from it we can easily derive many of the manifestations that we commonly identify as clowning.

Contradiction of the context or environment can manifest as either a failure to understand or an unwillingness to obey the social rules of behaviour, and will clash with the behaviour of those who succeed in being good citizens. This contradiction can operate at several different levels. On one level you can contradict normal social behaviour, in the real world. On another level you may contradict normal social behaviour, within the fictional world of a performance. And on a third level you may contradict the rules of a genre of performance, thus stepping out of the fiction itself. All of these levels may be combined or stand alone.

So, McManus’s definition of clown allows us to leave aside the question of whether clowns are political or not. Messing around with the rules in the real world might get you into jail, or at least into politics, in modern Europe, whereas disruptive fictional behaviour may achieve the same result in a totalitarian society.

It seems to me that this definition of clowning as contradiction may be both necessary and sufficient. So, any aspects of contemporary clowning that do not arise from this contradiction drive can safely be assigned to the dust-bin. At least temporarily while we check our facts.

Failure and Authenticity

The research workshops that form the central methodology of this project began by addressing contradiction of the environment as failure. We spent a term workshopping training exercises in failure and acceptance of failure. This is well-worn territory in clown circles. A clown enters, performs an action for the audience. There are two possible outcomes: either they laugh or they don’t laugh. If they laugh, that is a clown success, and I can continue with my next action, or repeat the first one, depending on what I want to do with my material. If on the other hand they don’t laugh, then this is a clown failure. There are two possible responses to a failure. I can accept it as a failure, or not. If I accept it, and the audience sees that I have accepted it, they will most probably laugh. In that case, I am in the same position as if my original action had made them laugh, and I can continue or repeat my action, in the full knowledge that my audience is with me. In other words, I have converted my failure into a success. However, if I had chosen not to accept my failure, but instead to soldier on, bravely resisting the stage death that is looming, forging on despite boring my audience to death, then my failure will remain a failure.

But there is a contradiction here! This manipulation of failure is a learnable technique. But many students, and I include myself here, have had the feeling that when they work with failure they are coming into contact with something deep and authentic in themselves. And they are not the only ones, for audiences often share this perception. Herein lies the origin of contemporary clown’s alliance with the ideology of authenticity. Contemporary clowning has often sought to ally itself with those practices and ideologies that claim to produce authenticity in performance or behaviour, as in this example of a description of workshops:

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.

Trying to succeed, sooner or later we must fail. We can accept this failure in full view of an audience, who will see everything as long as the performer lets them. This creates an 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 fuller, more authentic, or more real than what we normally come across. We might call this ‘presence’. So, when clowning, when we flop, when we fail, is this some kind of revelation of truth, beneath the veneer of our mask of pretence; or is it simply a theatrical truth-effect just like any other from melodrama to naturalism?

If we accept that this is a learnable technique, can we then say that there is something in this technique that remains hidden, or unrevealed, from the audience? Audiences will often believe that stand-up comedians are improvising, ‘making it up’, whereas the performer knows all too well that he is manipulating his technique in order to create this ‘spontaneity effect’.

But in clowning it is not enough simply to fail to be authentic. One must also try to succeed. There is a play between the desire to convince (succeed) and the failure to convince (the flop). It is this play between the two, often incarnated in two different clown types, the white-face and the auguste, that constitutes clowning, more than an identification with either of the two parts.

The sociologist Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, explicitly warns against accepting that the behaviour that discredits our social mask (which we could align with the behaviour that appears in clowning, or the failure to convince the audience) being judged as somehow more authentic than the social mask itself:

While we could retain the common-sense notion that fostered appearances can be discredited by a discrepant reality, there is often no reason for claiming that the facts discrepant with the fostered impression are any more the real reality than is the fostered reality they embarrass…... For many sociological issues it may not even necessary to decide which is the more real, the fostered impression or the one the performer attempts to prevent the audience from receiving. The crucial sociological consideration…….is merely that impressions fostered in everyday performances are subject to disruption. We will want to know what kind of impression of reality can shatter the fostered impression of reality, and what reality really is can be left to other students. We will want to ask, ‘What are the ways in which a given impression can be discredited?’ and this is not quite the same as asking, ‘What are the ways in which the given impression is false?’

Play, Pleasure and Improvisation

As well as the search for authenticity, the 60s and 70s saw clown’s association with other closely related fields: being in the moment, play, and improvisation

Stephen Nachmanovitch recalls that:

Since the 1960s, the psychological issue of being in the moment has become a conscious preoccupation for many people. It came to be seen as one of the keys to self-realization, and variants of it are on the lips of a thousand teachers and gurus.

Slmon Shepherd and Mick Wallls date play from the following decade:

Barker's thoughts on play, by contrast, fit into the (counter-) cultural context of western Europe in the 1970s. So, too Csikszentmihalyi's final chapter (1975), the 'politics of enjoyment', celebrates the value of 'non-instrumental' behaviour for creativity and pleasure. Indeed so much of the work on play seems to date from this decade.

Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow (1990, 2007), in Improvisation in Drama,
State, without any justification, that “Clowning is one of the purest foams of improvisation”.

This faith in the magical potential of clowning to connect us to a pure truth has its origin several decades earlier, however, with Jacques Copeau. 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.

Copeau’s concept of clowns as spontaneous, sincere and unsullied has survived to this day, which is frankly bizarre given he himself was quickly shocked out of his idealisation of clowns when he saw their rehearsal and performance techniques were not based on some kind of innocent playfulness, but on set routines.

But as McManus points out,

The Fratellinis were in any case brought to Paris from Russia specifically to appeal to a high-brow clientele. The management of the Medrano circus realized that the working class audience was abandoning the circus in favor of other newer entertainments, especially films and music hall. The Fratellini specifically geared themselves, therefore to an audience with intellectual and modernist tastes.

The literati of Paris would visit the Medrano Circus, imagining that were discovering a naive kind of theater that captured the spirit of their modernist ideals. The Fratellini themselves, however, targeted their performances to this elite audience.

He 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.

Copeau’s successor, Lecoq, doesn’t even bother to idealize circus clowns. For him they are already “limited”, in Simon Murray’s words. Murray doesn’t elaborate on what those limitations are supposed to be, allowing himself thereby to sweep clown history neatly under the carpet while no one is looking, as in: “Like the circus clown, the pantomime mime has little to offer theatre.”

But things gets worse. In the rush towards clown as liberation, no one wants to be the baddie. You do not come across many courses offering to help you discover your inner cruelty, and how to make everyone else look foolish. (Which is strange, since “serious” actors often relish playing the villain.)

On the other hand, you will find Angela de Castro offering a clown workshop for teenagers entitled “Challenging Authority”.

Instead of the white face, the negative side of clowning has been taken up by the bouffon. The bouffon is indeed a kind of dark or negative clown, but still one that suited the leftist agenda of the 60s, aiming its negativity outwards at those in society who are foolish enough to imagine they are not themselves foolish. This neatly deflects any looking at one’s own negativity, whilst allowing a playground in which one can delight in dark humour.

There is one place that the white face does appear in contemporary European clowning, however, and that is in the role of the clown teacher, especially the one who follows the via negativa, in the tradition of Lecoq and Gaulier. Being limited to the classroom, though, these figures are rarely seen in public.

Early 20th clowning knew much better than we do today about the delicate balance between the white-face and auguste clowns as equal and opposite. In his introduction to Tristan Remy’s Les Clowns (1945), Bernard de Fallois says:

The beautiful dialogue between the white face and the auguste does not set at each others throats the superior and the inferior, the executioner and the victim, the exploiter and the exploited. The two partners are at the same level. They are two equal forces, two principles one as positive as the other. The white face is no more superior to the auguste than thought is to action, or serenity to emotion.

The white clown’s contemporary absence has left the auguste alone and inexplicable without her partner. Perhaps another era would have preferred to adopt the white face, an era that needing to identify itself with the controlling urge, the desire for power and the knowledge that allows one to fool the gullible. Richard Findlater, in his biography of Joe Grimaldi, quoting D. L. Murray, suggests that Regency England might have been such an age:

his whole conception of the Clown reflects that period of genteel blackguardism, pugilism and practical jokes. The ‘grimacing, filching, irresistible Clown’, his white face larded with red like a schoolboy’s that has been dipped in a surreptitious jam-pot, is a plebeian successor of the mohocks, a companion of Jerry Hawthorn and Corinthian Tom, whose recreations are breaking windows, tripping up old women and assaulting the constables.

The point is that it is clear that different cultural moments will want different clowns.

Red Noses

Lecoq’s other major manoeuvre, having extracted the auguste from the grip of the past, was to choose the red nose as the only visual element to remain. He could have chosen big feet, or red hair, or baggy costumes. But this wouldn’t have slotted into his theatre-as-mask agenda. By using the red nose he neatly seemed to prove that clown is mask.

John Wright: 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.’

Although it is true that the red nose has some effect in clown training, it is not a necessary condition of clowning. I see no inherent connection between clown and mask. It is not necessary to use the red nose in order to clown. Using a red nose can be useful at times, though not for everyone. But clown can be reached without it. So the red nose is not identical to clown.

Curiously, other movements towards eliminating clown history were being made around the same time, but for seemingly quite different reasons. In the Soviet Union, the clown Oleg Popov had few good words for his predecessors. For Popov, the new art-clown excluded the old grotesque clown:

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

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.

But who was it who actually wanted to see this real, natural man? The 1959 First National Conference on Clown Craft, known popularly as the Congress of Clowns, suggests the answer:

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.

The result of the congress, coming only three years after the revelation of Stalin’s crimes by Krushchev, is that “clowns mocked low-level bureaucracy, as well as idlers and incompetent doctors, with state approval.” In other words, although clowns were given back some of their historical rights to parody, their targets were strictly limited by the Party. This choice of content fits neatly alongside Popov’s stylistic overthrowing of the grotesque.

Did this raise clowning to the level of art, as Popov pretended? In the preface to Tristan Rémy’s Les Clowns, Bernard de Fallois judges against:

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.

Popov not only shadows Lecoq, but is as damning as Copeau on the Fratellinis:

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.

Games and Rules

Let us turn now to playing and games. This is a more difficult area for me, as my career has not only embraced clown, but play and impro. Not only that, but games and play have acquired huge status in the theatre-training world. Many proclaim total faith in games as theatre.

For John (Wright), games are how we make dramatic action real. To discover the play is to discover the games at work in the play, the games that generated the play in the first place. Not an optional extra, an ice-breaker or a nod to ‘directorial process', games force us to be present in the rehearsal room here and now. In the theatre this is fundamental. The circumstances of the play, the ‘there and then' of the story, are in constant play with the 'here and now' of the actors' shifting relationship with the audience.

Finding the Game... The rules are: 1. Find the game. 2. Entertain each other with it. 3. Recognise when the game is over. 4. Find another game.

Clive Barker, in Theatre Games,

The elements of play… are also the seeds of drama because they are expressive forms of human personal and social behaviour, and because drama is itself a game or a play activity. The use of games is therefore not only a means of technical training and of exploring human behaviour and acting, but a springboard for exploring the nature of drama and theatre.

The problem is, there is no evidence to show that clowning can be understood through these kinds of games with rules. Roger Caillois points out that

Many games do not imply rules. No fixed or rigid rules exist playing with dolls, for playing soldiers, cops and robbers, horses, locomotives, and airplanes - games, in general, which presuppose free improvisation, and the chief attraction of which lies in the pleasure of playing a role, of acting as if one were someone or something else, a machine for example.

And James P. Carse, in Finite and Infinite Games, goes a good deal further:

There are no rules that require us to obey rules. If there were, there would have to be a rule for these rules, and so on.

Chris Johnston (2006), in The Improvisation Game, takes a balanced historical view:

there is arguably some comfortable leaning on the past. One consequence is a too-easy acceptance of those tenets established early but more recently losing their relevance. The Johnstone/Spolin axis was born from a desire to liberate performers via game disciplines into a spontaneity that was imaginatively liberating. Perhaps now it's time to move to a stage in which those now-liberated imaginations can dream a science that moves beyond game-dependency.

There are several problems with games. Firstly they are not theatre, and do not operate in the same way as performance. Secondly they are based on rules, and rules are what clowns do not like. Thirdly, they encourage accruement of more rules, the avoidance of risk, and safety consciousness.

But in spite of this, and in failing to win over most critics, the Copeau-Lecoq-Popov axis claims to have won the day in academia and actor training. John Wright claims:

Theatre as game and acting as play are the two most radical ideas to hit theatre-making over the last twenty years, and they're still rattling the doors and windows of our most august theatre institutions. Games aren't ‘icebreakers' or 'warm-ups' that you abandon when you decide to start work. The games are the work, particularly when you're making physical comedy. Games contain all the raw ingredients we need for creating material and evolving comedy of amazing richness and complexity. Games work because they give us restrictions. Rules, if you like. Not rules to live by, just rules to make things happen.

According to Mark Evans, Copeau’s concepts, including clowning, are already inside the gates, now 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.

The problem with rule-bound games is how they can easily attract more and more rules. These rules have nothing to do with how to play the game, and more to do with creating a network of social behavioural obligations between participants. A society, if you like. These are different rules to the ones that define the game. The latter are the basic rules which are needed to generate the particular action that occurs in each game. They are the rules that kids will state first when asked to describe a game: “If she hads a person when she is he the person she hads becomes he.”

As with our definition of clowning as contradiction, these rules are necessary and sufficient. But what is not necessary is what commonly happens when playing the game “queenie”, for example (the basic game consists of throwing a ball over your shoulder and then guessing who’s caught it),where players will attempt to create a democratic version thus: saying that the thrower has to wait before turning around, in order to give the receivers a chance; or even sometimes the thrower themselves, after having caught someone, says ‘oh, sorry, I turned round too quick, I saw you’! If we were to play it like this, we might as well pack up and go home, because nothing interesting is going to happen.

In the workshops, when we played without these safety nets, the clowning took off. But that is not the end of the story. There is another contradiction here! The urge to govern others, to control outcomes (your own and others’) remains present. Furthermore, I would even say that it is vital for clowning that it does remain. The gap between what we want others to do (‘don’t turn round yet!’) or what we would like to happen (‘I’m going to stand close and catch the ball quicker’), and what actually does happen (the thrower turns quickly and the ball hits me in the face as I’m very near) remains in full view. It is my very control urge that leads me into inevitable failure. And thus the clown appears. Our urge to control ourselves, others and the world, are as essential to the production of clowning as are our urges towards freedom.

So, can we salvage anything from game-playing? Can we play without rules? Roger Caillois identifies a category of playing he calls vertiginous games.

The last kind of game includes those 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 orders 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.

In the third term, we developed four main training regimes based on vertiginous play: dancing, jumping, chasing and laughing. These, together with a handful of fundamental failure exercises, form the basis of the performance we offer entitled “Fusion of clown, clown, clown, and clown”.

Once we have removed unnecessary parasites from the body of the clown, what we should be left with is something that works for us today. If we are to look clearly at contemporary clown, I propose that we look at it on its own terms. We would do well to cease talk of masks, play, improvisation, authenticity or devising. If clown exists, then it must have its own rules, definitions and modes of existence. Today, contemporary dancers are able to talk about dance on its own terms, and not as a kind of theatre, or kind of pantomime, or add-on to music. Equally so in contemporary circus. Can we not do the same for clown?

© Jon Davison 2008

Draft Notes on Contemporary Clown Research, October-December 2007

2008-01-30T19:57:00.000+01:00

I haven't worked out how to put in the endnotes and references in this blog format, but I am persevering!

Part 1: Introduction

In this introduction I shall give an overview of the organisation of the project and its first term, as well as discussing some of the issues that have arisen, particularly in relation to the legacy of Lecoq. I then go on to describe the workshops in detail. Lastly, I give a summary of the work that is imminent.

The project got under way unofficially in September through canvassing for participants. In London, this was done partly by sending a short description of the project to course leaders at Central, and partly via my own contacts. I also gave a brief introduction to the project at a staff meeting before the beginning of term. An early meeting of initial participants was held in September to talk through what the project really could be about. A large part of this discussion centred on how the participants’ own interests might be incorporated within the framework that I had set out.

Our discussions ranged over a number of areas that had not appeared in the original project description:

• Risk: what clown might teach us about the importance and value of risk
• Cultural difference: the differing interpretations and understandings of clown in different cultures (the early participants were English, Spanish, Greek and Colombian)
• Dyslexia and other normally disadvantageous conditions as potentially advantageous in clowning
• The difficulty of making finished work based on clown.

We began the workshops in October with approximately 12 people, but when I began to give classes on regular CSSD courses, giving students a first hand experience of what clown can be about, interest and attendance at the workshops became overwhelming for a time, then settling down towards the end of the sessions. I decided not to put limits on this ebb and flow of participation, for several reasons. I didn’t want to exclude anyone who might have a genuine interest, perhaps a first-time interest born of curiosity after having had a first taste of what clown can be. Participants ranged from first year undergraduates, through M.A. students on a variety of courses, to ex-students and professionals. I was happy to abandon, at least for a time, my habitual preference for a limit of 15 students.

I even considered it a positive experience for the regulars to have that comfort shattered by newcomers invading their safe space. Of course, there is no doubt that regularity and stability can be an aid to learning, but I do have a certain scepticism about an obsession with safety and secure environments, which is particularly prevalent in much clown teaching, probably due to the inherently challenging nature on a personal level of this kind of performance training. I think this is a particularly British phenomenon, as it contrasts sharply with the Spanish experience, where security in clown training is not a concern. I was led to this conclusion two years ago when I was surveying clown teaching around the world, as part of the process of setting up the Escola de Clown de Barcelona. Looking at how teachers described their courses in the UK it was apparent that safe-environmentalism was a common concern, and memories of my own early training in the UK confirm this. Perhaps we should extend that to the English-speaking world: although I have not been trained there, some Canadian and Australian examples do exhibit similar obsessions. “Nose to Nose” offer workshops described thus:

“This is done with care and respect for each individual and within a framework of rules that ensures a secure and protective environment.”

“Even if the work is at times challenging, we are committed to take you through it as gently and conscientiously as we can.”

“We believe that people grow and learn best in a supportive and positive environment. In our feedback, we point out what is good without being complacent or hiding what we think. This positive regard, we believe, affirms the courage to own our feelings and assert ourselves joyfully in the world – which are all essential ingredients of clowning.”

I don’t remember having seen any such statement within the description of an acting workshop, nor would it ever appear in a Philippe Gaulier workshop, nor in Spain. So why such a cottonwool approach? My guess is that it reflects the fear of revealing emotions in British society. This gives us a clue to another issue in contemporary clowning: its claim to universality (I will discuss this below as well in connection with the red nose). However, from my experience as a performer and teacher, over 12 years in Britain and 14 years in Spain, working with international students and performers, there are quite distinct ways in which different countries have received contemporary clown. In Britain, it has become enmeshed with the autochthonous f you look at John Wright’s recent book on humour, which includes much detail on the nature of clowning, there are a number of examples given in order to describe what clown is which, in my opinion, are limited to British culture. This is only normal, obviously! My own examples will also relate to my own experience. However, I think it is interesting to highlight this, so as to open up our minds to the possibilities of cultural clown difference. Wright’s culture-shock-horror seems to be going in the opposite direction to my own. Analysing a particular performance in his discussion of pathos and clown, Wright first gives us this anecdote:

“Perhaps the concept of pathos as a transient glow of feeling is a casualty of our contact with American culture. The first thing that struck me when working in the United States was the enthusiasm that everyone had for talking about their feelings in public. It was perfectly acceptable to tell everybody how sad or how hurt they were by a particular occasion, and they could talk the entire room into tears. Alternatively, they’d explain how great they felt, and how marvellous everybody had been, and we’d all be jumping about in delight with each other. It was also perfectly acceptable, and even encouraged, to celebrate intense emotional moments with each other in a way that invariably Ieft me feeling deeply embarrassed. I’m more accustomed to the idea that you have to just ‘get on with it’, because in the end, ‘life goes on’. It’s a realisation that puts transient feelings of pathos into a much broader context.”

Then, referring to the performer:

“Had he played sadness, had he shed a tear or sung a sad song, the scene would have plummeted into sentimentality. Then feelings would have been indulged purely for their own sake, and the scene would have been more about him than about us. Like my colleagues in the United States, he would have been inviting us to share emotions together. For all its poignancy, pathos teaches us that everything passes.”

I am not in any way disputing the accuracy of Wright’s analysis of this performance. But it allows us one of two possible conclusions: either Americans cannot play clown because they share their emotions, or that clown is understood differently in different countries.

Another example is the following exercise, “The Death by Poisoning Game”, which includes this instruction:

“The game is to die as credibly as you can whilst never losing your optimism. No matter how badly it hurts, and regardless of how close you might be towards death – it’s still going to be all right.”

It’s a good exercise, but almost impossible to make work in Spain.

Coming back to the safety issue, it seems to me that there is a contradiction within the British acceptance of contemporary clowning. In order to work with the self-revelatory nature of clown, safety measures are put into place to protect the participants from the supposed dangers of others seeing what you feel. This may work well, of course. Or it may make the whole exercise pointless, as the only environment where the clown dares to show itself will be these very artificially created safe houses.

But on the other hand, as Gaulier is very fond of saying, ‘Clown was born in England’. The tradition is, supposedly, healthy, with direct ancestors in Grimaldi and Shakespearean clowns. Could it be that the British national clown type is being confused by a French type (Lecoq), which Britons are then struggling to learn, due to their own emotional immaturity? What would happen if clown workshops were to be inspired by the Grimaldi model? What kind of workshops would they be? Is the English clown actually the white face clown? If so, which nationality is the auguste? The authority on clown history, Tristan Rémy has several answers for us. He could be firstly American, English or German, as legend has it that the first clown called auguste was Tom Belling, supposedly an American, but perhaps an Englishman, and performing in Berlin. Or Cuban, given that Chocolat was the first auguste star, in partnership with Footit. Or Spanish, given that according to Rémy, by 1945 most of the top augustes were of that nationality.

If clown types can be identified with national types, then so much for universality, and we are back in the world of early commedia dell’arte, where each character is partly defined by his regional or national origin.

These thoughts may or not prove relevant to this investigation, but then we do not know that yet. But let us note them here, as they may lead forward to some more detailed enquiries. Or they may not. My main intention is to open up the discussion in areas of clowning that have not been discussed of late.

Perhaps I am only being contrary here for the sake of it, but of course that is the nature of clown! Rubbing the establishment up the wrong way is always going to be part of what I do, and more so when the job in hand is supposed to be crossing the frontiers of current knowledge. The actual practice of contrary behaviour by clowns will be looked at in the third term. This contrariness has been popping up regularly during the workshops, as I will discuss later, and has been one of the key tones of my approach this term.

Going back to the points discussed at the initial meeting, the last point is, I think, a very common situation. Many people have trained a lot in clown, but are unequipped for composing performances that work. Yet they feel compelled to make new work, yet lack a firm connection to clowning’s past. Nor do they easily make the link between clowning and other forms of theatre. Mostly responsible for this situation I think is the orthodoxy in contemporary clowning that has come down to us over the last half century or so that states that the actor is the author. Lecoq was a prime instigator of this ideology. As Franc Chamberlain puts it, in his introduction to Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre: “the emphasis which Lecoq places on … the need for each individual to find something to say”. Although he is not, of course, the only one when one considers the broader field of live performance: “the emphasis on the dancer having ‘something to say’ has been an important part of Pina Bausch’s work with the Wuppertal Tanztheater since the 1970s”.

But if we consider the case of clowning, I can see nothing inherent in the nature of clown which would lead us necessarily to the idea of the acteur-auteur. I think it’s time the acteur-auteur became an option rather than a dictate, thus leaving room for those (the majority, I think) who feel they are more actors than authors. Indeed, one could argue it has done more harm than good. Simon Murray quotes extensively from comments by former students of Lecoq:

“I think the Lecoq set-up breeds the fallacy that everyone has the potential to be a ‘writer’.”

“We worked for about 10 months on a show which brought to light all the problems of working in a Lecoq style. As a group we had a strong resistance to having a director. It was very democratic which I now think is extremely hard – impossible, if everyone has an equal say if nobody has a final veto, and no-one has enough vision to see globally where the whole thing is going.”

“If you put together three actors from Lecoq it does not mean that a good piece of writing is going to come out of it.”

My own hypothesis is that clown is in no way defined by the acteur-auteur ideology. It is not a necessary ingredient of working with clown to have ‘quelque chose à dire’.

The second point here is that Lecoq’s work on clown positioned itself antagonistically in relation to clowning of the recent past (which in the 1960s was the clown of the decadent or nearly dead circus).

Simon Murray, in his introductory guide to Lecoq, has this view on Lecoq’s work with clown:

“Lecoq introduced the subject in the 1960s when he was considering the relationship between commedia dell'arte and circus clowns. Realising very rapidly the limitations of the genre of circus clowning for theatre, he began - unexpectedly almost - to investigate what lay at the core of this form of humour.”

Murray doesn’t elaborate on what those limitations are supposed to be, allowing himself thereby to sweep clown history neatly under the carpet while no one is looking, as in: “Like the circus clown, the pantomime mime has little to offer theatre.”

Incidentally, Lecoq’s was not the only response to the decay of clowning in the 60s: “To preserve the rapidly dwindling profession, Irvin Feld founded Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in 1968, providing the first formal training ground for clowns.”

Subsequent developments in New Circus in the 70s and 80s pushed clown further to the margins, to the extent where today, the dominant model is Cirque du Soleil, who do not refer to “clowns”, but to “characters” instead, especially in the context of auditions for professionals. The American clown, Avner Eisenberg uses the word eccentric instead. Has clown become a dirty word?

Despite all this, Lecoq can be credited with attempting a rapprochement between the clown and the theatre. But that attempt is undermined by at the same time leaving students woefully unprepared to work in the very broad world of theatre. The lack that most commentators usually pick up on is that of ignoring, as Lecoq himself admitted, voice and text. John Wright sees the Lecoq school as:

“a unique grounding for a theatre maker but as a pathway for an actor it is incomplete. A highly creative individual with an articulate and responsive body is only part of what is required in an actor. To produce a performer without an equally responsive voice and an imaginative response to language is like training a pianist to only use one hand… Many students still leave his school with poor vocal skills... All great voice teachers like Kristin Linklater and Frankie Armstrong, Cicely Berry or Patsy Rodenburg maintain that the body and the voice are inextricably linked; the observation has become a truism. I can understand the role of silence in renewing the importance of the gesture, but does speech always overshadow the gesture?... In using the mask to teach the making of theatre and in training the body at the expense of the voice Lecoq has deliberately created a dangerous imbalance in our theatre.”

Clown students therefore find themselves somewhat homeless: ignorant in theatre, estranged from clown history and marginalised in circus. I hope to be attending to some of these gaping holes over the course of this project.

After our initial meeting I came up with a general outline of what I thought we could achieve in the first term. The document follows:

Summary of work to be covered, Year 1, Term 1 (October-December 2007)

Failure:
- Accepting failure, the Flop. How to train in flop-acceptance. Old ideas/Exercises - Lecoq (there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bath water!) and Gaulier. New Ideas/Exercises (Jon Davison, Escola de Clown de Barcelona, plus those yet to be discovered in our own investigations).
- Use for orthodox actors/actor training. Differences, conflicts, problems.
- Physical failure, and its acceptance, as a route to clown presence. Using dance, martial arts, circus and other physical activities to seek out and play with our frontiers of physical incapacity. (Draws on the new work begun in Barcelona by Sara Pons with Jon Davison).
- Intellectual/Verbal Failure. New methods in Clown Speech developed in Barcelona. Enjoying brain failure. Dyslexia.
- Some over-arching questions, conclusions, hypotheses, etc. Can we fail 100% of the time, or is some success necessary in order to be able to fail? When we flop, is this some kind of revelation of truth, beneath the veneer of our mask of pretence; or is it simply a theatrical technique or trick, just like in any other genre from melodrama to screen realism? If it is a performer’s trick, can we expose it as such while using it on stage? In other words can our flopping flop, and still be good theatre? Can clowning offer a fast-track to attaining presence, as it is defined by failure-as-success, and escapes the trap that the serious actor has historically sometimes fallen into of having to pretend that what he is acting is “really real”? Clown may therefore offer the actor the opportunity to achieve presence via acceptance of the failure to be present.

Background Issues:
These are questions that will probably be present throughout the project.
- Can clown training be a complete actor training method?
- What is the relationship between clown training and actor training?
- Is clowning naturalistic or supernatural, or both?
- What are the limits and lacks of recent clown training? (The last 50 years, via Lecog and Gaulier, etc.)
- How is clown understood in different contexts? Culturally, nationally, etc.

As well as the workshop series, I organised, through my mentor, Amanda Brennan, a number of sessions on regular CSSD courses. These were:
B.A. Drama, Applied Theatre and Education (B.A. DATE)
M.A. Advanced Theatre Practice (M.A. ATP)
M.A. Actor Training and Coaching
M.A. Theatre Studies

On each course (except Theatre Studies) I offered a general practical introduction to clown, but clearly this needed to be couched in different terms for different learning contexts. In one session with DATE students the question remained open as to how clown can be applied. I hope to have the opportunity to look at this further at some point over the three years.

In two sessions with ATP students we were able to go beyond an introduction to clown actor training and look at some structural and formal issues. We centred these on Paul Bouissac’s anthropological view that what clowns do is to profane, which he defines thus:

“a tentative and elementary morphology of profanation could include the following:
1. a particular object assigned to a certain place or position is moved to and placed in an inappropriate place or position.
2. an object that should be manipulated in a certain manner (or simply be seen) by a particular person or class of persons, is manipulated in this manner (or is seen) by an unqualified person, or is manipulated in an inappropriate manner.
3. a patterned behaviour that should be performed in the presence of an object or person is performed in the presence of an inappropriate object or person.
4. a patterned behaviour that is prescribed in a specific context is performed in another context or is not performed in the prescribed context.
5. a word or text to which a prescribed interpretation is attached, is interpreted in another manner or, still worse, the consequences of this new interpretation are actually implemented.”

I would simplify this to:
1. things are in the wrong place.
2. things are used by the wrong people or are used wrongly.
3. doing something for the wrong person.
4. doing something when you shouldn’t, or not doing it when you should.
5. misunderstanding words, and maybe acting on the misunderstanding.

Students were able to very quickly produce interesting work based on these principles. In my own workshops I plan to look in detail at this in the third term of the first year. To some extent, this for me fills some of the holes in contemporary clown training. Although it does not question the concept of the actor-author, it does provide tools for devising that are more reliable than “finding one’s clown”, as it draws on a definition of clown that is external and practical rather than experiential and about presence. It was also clear that these clown tools can be modified beyond the reach of clown, to produce other genres of work. I gained some valuable insights into the potential for using this method and how it might bridge the gap between clown and other theatre genres, which we will be following up on later in the project.

For my input into Theatre Studies I was invited to talk about the history of clown in London, but I don’t consider myself a specialist in this area. I have, however, been investigating for the last year or so the history of clown between Paris and London. At ECB I have led two seminars on the subject and this was a chance to give it a more expanded treatment. The result was a lecture plus slide show on a history of the clown-aesthetic rivalry between Paris and London during the 19th century, whose consequences were vital for the development of early circus clowning. Much of what we think we know about pre-contemporary clown is rooted in this relatively short history. I shall soon be writing a draft paper on the subject, with a view to submission to conferences in the coming year.

From before the start of the project it had been clear to me that the MA in Actor Training and Coaching would be my home base. After all, my investigation is primarily into actor training. I gave three 3-hour sessions on this course, the third of which was an attempt to approach how clown can combine with other training methods. I will continue to follow the progress of this course, in order to monitor how the knowledge of clown training may influence the reception and study of other training methods. It was clear, for example, that a kind of Clown-Meisner hybrid would be eminently possible. This fed back into my own workshops, in a way that I expect to continue in the future. We also achieved very interesting results with the “step-laugh” exercise with texts (see the discussion below on this exercise).

Our discussions on the relationship between clown and other methods touched on many key points. Contemporary clowning has often sought to ally itself with those practices and ideologies that claim to produce authenticity in performance or behaviour.

“Clowning bridges the mundane and the magical with a sense of wonder and innocence. It teaches you to be authentic.”

“It is our belief that by focusing on the individual we are, in fact, going straight to the heart of clowning which is the search for authenticity both in the social or personal dimensions of our lives.”

“By focusing on the individual's experience, 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.”

“Clowning is about the freedom that comes from a state of total, unconditional acceptance of our most authentic selves, warts and all.”

Although I myself have experienced this sensation of wholeness as a performer that clown can give, particularly in my early training, I feel that clown is ultimately just another method, another set of tricks, or truth-effects, that we can learn, just like any other actor training method. The sensation that in clowning we see something authentic, or the real person, comes when we work with the acceptance of failure, I think. The effect of seeing someone accept their own mistakes is that we feel we have witnessed the truth behind the façade, the façade being the front that the person is displaying yet is unable to convince us of. The feeling is mutual, in that the performer himself also has this sensation that he is revealing something truthful about himself. But I suggest it would be more accurate to say that these two states, which we could call the attempt to convince and the failure to convince, are simply two sides of a binary game that we can play.

Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, takes a similar view. I shall be writing a fuller account of the implications of Goffman’s work for clowning at a later stage. In his description of human behaviour as defined by the playing of roles, which includes the possibility of the discrediting of those roles, he explicitly warns against accepting that the behaviour that discredits our social mask (which we could align with the behaviour that appears in clowning, or the failure to convince the audience) being judged as somehow more authentic:

“While we could retain the common-sense notion that fostered appearances can be discredited by a discrepant reality, there is often no reason for claiming that the facts discrepant with the fostered impression are any more the real reality than is the fostered reality they embarrass. A cynical view of everyday performances can be as one-sided as the one that is sponsored by the performer. For many sociological issues it may not even necessary to decide which is the more real, the fostered impression or the one the performer attempts to prevent the audience from receiving. The crucial sociological consideration, for this report at least, is merely that impressions fostered in everyday performances are subject to disruption. We ~will want to know what kind of impression of reality can shatter the fostered impression of reality, and what reality really is can be left to other students. We will want to ask, ‘What are the ways in which a given impression can be discredited?’ and this is not quite the same as asking, ‘What are the ways in which the given impression is false?’”

However, society does attach a moral tag to one these impressions:

“Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way. Connected with this principle is a second, namely that an individual who implicitly or explicitly signifies he has certain social characteristics ought in fact to be what be claims he is.”

This is what leads us to the situation where, in order to oppose what they perceive as an authoritarian imposition of normality by society, contemporary clowns take sides and claim that the truth is to be found in the mistake. What they have done however, is simply to reverse the two poles. Good becomes bad and bad becomes good. This kind of May ’68 ideology doesn’t take us anywhere nearer the truth. David MacMurray Smith, in Alan Clay’s Angels Can Fly, talks of:

“the ability of the Clown to take delight in playing with the dynamics of the psychological argument between the image we held of ourselves and the present, real, self in the moment. I like to call this Clown Consciousness… I think that the skilled Clown can walk the tightrope between Image and Reality with impunity. They consciously play with the confusion between the two for the value to be gained by becoming aware of the trap that our own images of ourselves can become, if we mistake them for our real self.”

I think he identifies accurately what clowns do with these two modes of behaviour, but his moral judgement on which is more real leads us back into that old trap of seeking a performance method that will transcend all the others, by getting to the truth more accurately. This kind of belief often presupposes that the methods of the previous generation were somehow all along more false, as if either they didn’t really care about truth, or they were not clever enough to see that what they were doing was false, but that we do see that now because we’re having greater insights.

Take this assessment of Copeau for example:

“By 'purifying' French theatre of its tricks and by shedding it of cabotinage - the phoney gimmicks of nineteenth-century performance - Copeau believed he was preparing theatre for a return to its imagined past.”

As Murray correctly points out, “Copeau remained one of Lecoq's main 'reference points'.

Ironically, what has struck many uninitiated observers of Lecoq-inspired work has been its technical nature. Michael Billington, on Theatre de Complicité, worried “whether the moral content of theatre is being subordinated to a display of technique … it was sometimes a feeling that technique was actually overlaying content.”

My own view is that I cannot see any such scientific evolutionary progression in actor training, though new methods certainly do represent major shifts in aesthetic ideology. The discrediting of circus clowns by the Lecoq generation represents no advance in technique, just as naturalism’s discrediting of melodrama did not either. Or New Circus’s discrediting of traditional circus, or even of clowning. I have heard many New Circus performers say that clown has no place in the circus any more, since “most clowns are not funny”. As if there weren’t hundreds of dull trapeze acts around these days!

John Wright, and he is by no means alone, is concerned over the rise of a new orthodoxy, that the Lecoq school might be

“in danger of creating a culture of correctness … This is most evident in working with students straight from the school who suddenly find themselves confronted with different processes and new applications of similar ideas; 1 have been told: ‘you can’t a mask like that’ or ‘that’s not clowning’. This is not a criticism of Lecoq so much as a fear that like Stanislavski, Lecoq is in danger of falling victim to his own disciples.”

When Lecoq said he was taking the clowns from the circus, he only took one. He could have taken two, or indeed three (ringmaster, white-face and auguste). Wright traces this back to Copeau again:

“The final and most important mask in Lecoq’s training is the red nose of the clown. Copeau was instinctively drawn to the Fratellini Brothers (a troupe of circus clowns) and invited them to his school, only in the end to feel dissatisfied with the set nature of their routines.”

It is undoubtedly true that by means of the sabotaging of the social roles, clowning can have a truth-effect, like the shock of falling to the ground. But I think it’s more useful to maintain the relationship between the two sides as equal and opposite. 19th century clowning knew this much better than we do today. That “image” and “reality” were incarnated two separate and different clowns: the white-face and the auguste. So where has the white-face disappeared to? It seems we only deal with the auguste today. Is late 20th century humanity really so innocent?

Here is Murray on the student interest in clown: “(Lecoq) ascribes this interest as being deeply rooted in a quest for liberation from the 'social masks' we all wear... ... for Lecoq and Gaulier it has at its heart a subversive and radical dimension which chimed with the spirit of 1968

The auguste was the anarchist, the white clown was the state. Today, for example, Angela de Castro offers this workshop:

“Challenging Authority
1-day workshop for teenagers (14+)
Shakespeare’s fools challenge authority – kings and queens, lords and ladies, people in charge – fools are subversive. They turn the accepted order on its head. They speak the truth. Led by the company, this workshop will enable teenagers (GCSE and A Level) to explore how and why fools challenge authority figures. Making links with both the darkness and the humour in only fools, no horses, this workshop will help participants learn more about clowns and fools and how, throughout history and still today, they have such an essential role to play in theatre and the world. The workshop is about what truth-telling, play, courage and simplicity have to say to young people today.”

The clearest exponent of authority-challenging clowning is the Rebel Clown Army. They have taken the clown into the political arena, with great attention to rigorous detail philosophically and practically. I refer to the founders here, not to the many groups which have sprung up either without a good foundation in clowning or without a full understanding of the non-confrontational nature of this work. At ECB we have hosted courses by Hilary Ramsden, one of those founders. On the last course, the practical street work ended up with the participants under arrest, “fined 1,000€ per red nose ‘for behaviour contrary to public dignity’” . Jordi Jané, the well-known journalist and historian of circus and clown, though disproportionately comparing the situation to Franco’s regime, does legitimately point out the hypocrisy of the authorities:

“Exactly a year ago I was present at the Mayor’s speech when he praised circus as an artistic expression with roots in secular and noble human values. Such paradox disconcerts me.”

Anyone who knows the cultural climate in Barcelona would not be surprised at this. The city that practically prohibits street performance often tries to sell itself as liberal, cosmopolitan and international, but of course is as ever, provincial, nationalistic and philistine. After all, it is the capital of Catalonia! The offending behaviour, by the way, consisted in “guarding” a police vehicle.

There are grades of opinion here for all tastes. The participants created a blog on the events and reactions. Most of those opinions are of disbelief at the police reaction. Strong support was offered by the Catalan Circus Association, as well as by all political parties who are not presently in power either locally, regionally or nationally, not surprisingly, given the imminence of elections. On the other hand, some street performers feel that this work makes their own job more difficult by creating an expectation in the police that street clowns are going to provoke them, therefore they move them on, politically motivated or not.

The ECB view is that in street clowning, one must learn to play with the public. That means gauging how much someone is willing to play, and if they are not, well, you don’t play either. These are simple rules that often take experience to get right, however, and each performer will also decide if they want to err on the side of provocation, or on the side of safety. My own view is that although it is true that clown allows for a liberation from the codes of conduct, this does not imply some kind of absolute freedom in the sense that ‘I can do whatever I like, whatever the reaction or consequences’. For me, the freedom of clowning consists more in knowing that I can choose freely any line of action, and not be subject to expected modes of behaviour. But that I cannot control the reaction of others. In other words, I can decide to perform naked in the street if I want to, but I cannot decide what shall be the public’s reaction, hostile or in good humour. Clowns can have cake, but they don’t usually eat it.

More than that, I think that the police, in their role as white face to the auguste, form an essential part of the clown’s world. Without rules, clowns would have not much reason for existing.

“The beautiful dialogue between the white face and the auguste does not set at each others throats the superior and the inferior, the executioner and the victim, the exploiter and the exploited. The two partners are at the same level. They are two equal forces, two principles one as positive as the other. The white face is no more superior to the auguste than thought is to action, or serenity to emotion.”

I am looking forward to having in my hands the exact wording of what the police formally accuse the clowns of, as I believe that would be a very accurate definition of clowning. Who better to ask, apart from a clown, what clowns are, than the forces of law and order? The nature of authority defines the auguste clown. Curiously, the ECB is situated in a building that was last used as a police archive!

The white clown’s contemporary absence has left the auguste alone and inexplicable without his partner. Perhaps another era would have preferred to adopt the white face, an era that needing to identify itself with the controlling urge, the desire for power and the knowledge that allows one to fool the gullible. Richard Findlater, in his biography of Joe Grimaldi, quoting D. L. Murray, suggests that Regency England might have been such an age:

“his whole conception of the Clown reflects that period of genteel blackguardism, pugilism and practical jokes. The ‘grimacing, filching, irresistible Clown’, his white face larded with red like a schoolboy’s that has been dipped in a surreptitious jam-pot, is a plebeian successor of the mohocks, a companion of Jerry Hawthorn and Corinthian Tom, whose recreations are breaking windows, tripping up old women and assaulting the constables.”

Although Grimaldi’s clown is not identical to the late-19th century white-face clown, it is one of its key ancestors. In any case, it is clear that different cultural moments want different clowns.

Authoritarian, cruel, hierarchical, cerebral. Not qualities that the flower power generation wanted to promote. The auguste represented freedom, authenticity, the underdog, emotion. Of course that’s all well and good. But let us not mistake what was a politically and socio-culturally specific choice in a particular place and time for a universal definition of clown. I think clowning is now suffering from this choice, although the panorama is not altogether homogeneous. In Canada and the USA, there is work being done on the white face, inspired by the pioneering work of Richard Pochinko. At The Institute of Canadian Clowning, in the “Joey and Auguste Workshop”, one may

“explore the sides of your clown - the manipulator, the victim and the intermediary. This workshop is done working in partnership with another performer. Writing, relationship and performing are explored. It completes with a student workshop performance.”

But in Europe the auguste rules. No one wants to be the baddie. I have not come across any course advertising itself as helping you to discover your inner cruelty, that side of you that wants to make everyone else look foolish and you clever. Maybe its time will come.

Instead of the white face, the negative side of clowning has been taken up by the bouffon. The bouffon is indeed a kind of dark or negative clown, but still one that suited the leftist agenda of May 68, aiming its negativity outwards at those in society who are foolish enough to imagine they are not themselves foolish. This neatly deflects any looking at one’s own negativity, whilst allowing a playground in which one can delight in dark humour. And since bouffons and clowns don’t easily mix, I think we are missing out on the cruel side of clown.

There is one place that the white face does appear in contemporary European clowning, however, and that is in the role of the clown teacher, especially the one who follows the via negativa, in the tradition of Lecoq and Gaulier. I include myself in this lineage and enjoy very much the role, which the harder you play it, the easier it becomes for the student to take on the auguste role.

John Wright, although he excludes himself from those teachers who use the via negativa, nevertheless says:

“When I teach clown, I become a provocateur. In other words, I assume a role, a sort of ’boss-clown’, and my job is to help you keep the games alive and funny … Being the boss-clown enables me to be completely unreasonable. I can be as rude, cantankerous, illogical, tyrannical and as stupid as I like.”

Wright does, in fact, teach the boss-clown to his students, though my impression is that it is still very much subservient to the auguste-as-clown ethos.

I think this fact, that the white face only shows himself in the role of teacher, may indicate just how much clowning has defined itself in terms of the classroom, rather than in terms of rehearsal or of performance. Were it otherwise, then the white face would appear in the rehearsal room, the most obvious incarnation being the director. But, as we have seen, the Lecoq way has led to the director queuing up to cash his dole cheque. And, as already discussed, the whiteface rarely dares to tread the stage.

Lecoq’s other major manoeuvre, having extracted the auguste from the grip of the past, was to choose the red nose as the only visual element to remain. He could have chosen big feet, or red hair, or baggy costumes. But this wouldn’t have slotted into his theatre-as-mask agenda. By using the red nose he neatly seemed to prove that clown is mask.

“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.’”

However, I see no inherent connection between clown and mask. It is not necessary to use the red nose in order to clown. Using a red nose can be useful at times, though not for everyone. But clown can be reached without it. So the red nose is not identical to clown.

The other abhorrent spin off with this clown-as-mask obsession is that we see many performers taking the stage with a plastic nose on an elastic, as a kind of add-on to the rest of the design of their costume, if they use any. Personally, I love red noses for performing in, I like the way they animalise and focus the expressive parts of the face (eyes and mouth), but I also like that same effect produced by make up. (I like low key intimate clowning as well, but my taste is for the medium sized spaces, e.g. the old circus 13 yard diameter ring.)

This belief in clown-as-red-nose has also led many to the belief in the universality of the red nose, whereas it is culturally specific to Europe and white America. In Spain, the organisation Payasos sin Fronteras (Clowns without Borders) has in recent years had a great influence on people’s perceptions of what clowns are, what they look like, what they do, and for what reason. At the ECB, we even have people wanting to learn clown, ‘so they can go on a PSF expedition’. The clown as jet-setting charity worker is a sad place to end up. Using clown in situations of conflict, or post disaster is perfectly legitimate. But exporting European/American clowns to poor countries to cheer them up is frankly bizarre. I asked Moshe Cohen, an important figure in the organization, why they don’t get the local clowns to do the job. He replied that the local clowns would only do it for money. Well, obviously! So the rich clowns go and do the job for free! Why not raise the money they would use on flying out there and send it to the local clowns to go to the hospital and perform for the dying child? Because the rich clown wouldn’t feel so good. Exporting red noses to Mozambique is not a task I think anyone should be wasting their time on. At ECB we have started the work of looking for clowns from the third world, in order to bring them to Europe to share their knowledge with us, in a relationship based on mutual professional respect.

My point here is not that Lecoq was wrong – to use the red nose, to encourage devising, to focus on the auguste, as all these moves were appropriate and good for the time and place – but that they may not be so useful for us now, in another moment in history. Decisions are made and directions undertaken due to specific cultural and political conditions of the time. By seeing this, we can avoid simply copying the whole picture. We are not obliged to follow all the ideas, and we can see that they are not unavoidably essential to clown work. This will free us to undertake clown work that is relevant to our own times. The equation clown=auguste=red-nose=mask may have served the 60s well but it does not necessarily have any use to us now in the 21st century.

I have located the birth of these ideas in the 60s, but we could in fact locate them some 50 years earlier. Mark Evans’ study of Copeau states that the “central features of his teaching practice” are “improvisation, mime, animal/nature studies, the development and use of mask work”. These roughly coincide with those areas I am proposing we question as no longer necessarily relevant: devising, body as more important than text, the truth is to be found in our non-social selves, and red-nose as mask.

But how can we be talking about either the 1960s or the 1910s, as if they were interchangeable? An answer may be the following. When the curtain came down on the old regime of acting styles, which had remained continuous despite evolving since Shakespeare’s time, around the 1860s and 70s, and the fourth wall was being built, clown was still about to enter its golden age in European circus. (For a full discussion of the history of acting styles, see: Nicholas Dromgoole (2007) Performance Style and Gesture in Western Theatre, London: Oberon. For an account of the rise of Naturalism, see Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack (1996), English Drama, a Social History, Oxford: Blackwell.) Clowns were migrating from theatre to circus for a number of complex reasons, which I shall discuss at a later date. That migration kept them free of the naturalising epidemic, as were all those forms of popular theatre that remained at those venues that were not remodelled along the tastes of the new middle class theatre-goers. But the circus remained the circus, whereas the variety, vaudeville and music hall gave themselves over to the cinema, which, after a brief Indian summer of preserving the popular acting styles inherited from melodrama and comedy, succumbed to the dulling down of Naturalism, which turned down of the volume, contrast and, if it hadn’t been in black and white, the colour as well I am sure.

Clown could therefore be seen arguably as the only form of theatre that did not naturalise itself to remain. A lucky escape! Now, generally speaking, the actor-training movements of the 20th century were part of that naturalising process or else a response to it. So we can trace much of Lecoq’s work back to Copeau, for example. But clown, remaining outside the theatre, remained free of that process at Copeau’s time. But by the time we get to Lecoq, clown has all but died in the circus which is on its last legs. Only at that point does it re-enter the family of theatre. And it is at that point that the naturalisation clown begins.

I think we could say that Lecoq’s treatment of clowning is to clown what The Method was to drama.

“The Method, designed initially to solve what we might call a rhetorical problem – how to produce repeated truth-effects on a stage – comes, in a culture also inhabited by psychoanalysis, to be a method for liberating the truths of the person.”

That sounds suspiciously like that liberating force which is clown in May 68.

This new naturalism in clown wasn’t isolated to Lecoq and those that collaborated with him or learned with him, however. Another movement in the same direction was being made around the same time, but for seemingly quite different reasons. In the Soviet Union, the clown Oleg Popov had few good words for the clowns of the past, as here in the chapter ‘What is a clown?’ of his autobiography, Russian Clown:

“it must be said that in those days comedy in the circus was not an art as we understand that word today.”

For Popov, the new art-clown excluded the old grotesque clown:

“At first sight the buffooneries of the clown do not seem to contribute anything at all to the presentation of human qualities, qualities which, if anything, they are more inclined to mock.”

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 maintains that this evolution towards the new clown has been constant since the revolution:

“So that the reader who does not know Soviet circus history can appreciate the importance and logic towards realism (after the revolution) I would like to say a few words about the best clowns of the last thirty years”

“In 1945 Vyatkin went back to work in the circus. But he was no longer the traditional red-haired zany. We saw a man without a wig, wearing a green hat and a quite ordinary suit.”

“(on the clown, Shliskevich)The spectator does not laugh, he smiles warmly, the smile of one acquiring an insight into someone”

“When Sereda appears in the ring, the children generally ask: ’But where is the clown?’ They can’t believe that this artiste, dressed without make-up, dressed in an ordinary suit, is actually the clown who is trying to make the public laugh … They are, of course, not seeing a conventional clown, but a man like other men, undistinguishable from themselves.”

“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’s rewriting of Soviet clown history in order to prove the inevitability of socialist realism is not altogether convincing. For whilst it is true that Stalin in the 1930s had previously already hijacked the circus to the socialist realism cause, the clowns, such as Lazarenko, generally portrayed the baddies, as in Makhno’s Men, a 1929 circus pantomime vilifying the Ukrainian anarchists. Joel Schechter, historian of popular theatre, analyses thus:

“The fact that Lazarenko ceased to leap over three elephants, and began to leap over three automobiles placed side by side … suggests he was quite capable of acknowledging Soviet industry and its infatuation with machines after the revolution. But his leaps over automobiles hardly embodied the brawny, Stakhanite ideal; that would have required construction of cars at record speed, not a jump over them. In any case, he was hired to portray a villain in Makhno’s Men, not a pleasing or socially productive character.”

Clowns only seem to join the goodies a little later on, along with the move towards realism. But who was it who wanted to see this real, natural man? The 1959 First National Conference on Clown Craft, known popularly as the Congress of Clowns, suggests the answer:

“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.”

“At the 1959 conference, convened by Krushchev to consider the low level of comedy at the circus, clown acts were discussed and performed by a small, private audience which included Nikulin, Oleg Popov … and circus historian Yuri Dimitriev.”

Dimitriev accused contemporary clowns of comparing poorly to earlier clowns, such as Durov:

“’what you do now,’ Dimitriev told Nikulin and company, ‘is trivial by comparison.’

Nikulin asked: ‘Why do you offer us the example of Durov? We cannot perform now as was done in Czarist times.’

The speaker asked him why not, and Nikulin replied: ‘Who will be the subject of our parody? The government is marvellous.’”

The result of the congress, coming only three years after the revelation of Stalin’s crimes by Krushchev, is that “clowns mocked low-level bureaucracy, as well as idlers and incompetent doctors, with state approval.” In other words, although clowns were given back some of their historical rights to parody, their targets were strictly limited by the Party. This choice of content fits neatly alongside Popov’s stylistic overthrowing of the grotesque.

But was the result a raising of clowning to the level of art, as Popov pretended? In the preface to Tristan Rémy’s Les Clowns, Bernard de Fallois judges against:

“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.”

Popov not only reflects Lecoq, but is as damning as Copeau on the Fratellinis:

“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, like, for example, the French artiste, Achille Zavatta.

This artiste, whose work I love, has created a human character who is ceaselessly wrestling against the ups and downs of life, continually falling but each time getting up to continue the struggle.”

I have hypothesised that clowning, due to being somewhat isolated in the circus, only began to catch up with mainstream 20th century theatre practices some half century later. Perhaps we must leap another 50 years forward in order to find another element of the integration of clowning into the establishment, into that of performing training. According to Mark Evans, Copeau’s concepts, including clowning, are now 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 heir 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.”

And for confirmation of the contemporaneity of clown naturalism, see this blurb for a course by Jos Houben in 2006, reminiscent of Popov’s praise of Achille Zavatta:

“Every day we get up, we eat, we get dressed, work, go to bed, sleep…so many banal and obvious activities that we repeat day after day and that makes our lives. This daily routine is so private, so close to us that we no longer see it… In this workshop we take some distance, we observe it as if for the first time. By replaying our daily life we will perhaps be able to discover a hidden side, a poetic depth that might nourish our clown universe… To extract, from daily gestures and situations, rituals, music, grand themes such as Solitude, Love, Death… Going from the table to the door: a Melodrama; slicing an apple: a Tragedy; taking off your shoes: Spiritual Ecstasy! To render that which is simple and banal into something surprising and sublime, what a beautiful mission for a Clown!”

So, think about it for a moment: could we ditch a whole century of actor training? Are we prepared to forget all we have learned from Copeau or Lecoq or Stanislavsky or Grotowski? Could we stop worrying about searching for the meaning, the truth, the message? I could, if it were beneficial. Of course, we cannot go back. But maybe we can clean out some of the layers of 20th century art theatre and see if it’s of any use to us now. I think clown is in a good position to try this.

Indeed, to put my money where my mouth is, at the ECB we are attempting just that. No animal studies, no masks, no ensemble work. No emotional memory, no super-objectives, no as-in-real-life. These are things we have found to be of no use in training students today.

Only then can we ask: what is clown in the 21st century? That is a very big question indeed, and I hope to shed some light on it over the coming three years. And the cleaner the slate we begin with, the better.

Part 2: The Workshops

I have grouped information under six headings. The last five are the forms or principal exercises that emerged as allowing for more development and might prove to generate more complex performances that can be performed to audiences. The first part brings together the rest of the work done in this first term, in the workshops in London and Barcelona, as well as in sessions given as part of regular courses at Central. The account is therefore not chronological but thematic.

Briefly, a word on the relationship between the workshops in London and Barcelona: by the time the London sessions were completed, it was becoming clear to me that I would be modifying my original plan somewhat with regard to the Barcelona sessions. Indeed, I had already shifted my aims a little in London. I felt the need to move on from issues of pure presence, as planned, and into areas of form and structure, which I had thought to begin in the second year. This separation proved too much to maintain 100%. It became useful to consider how to structure some of the exercises, in order to develop their potential further, and also to be able to present them to an uninitiated audience.

And then it seemed more useful for us to pick up the baton in Barcelona at the point where we left it in London. Although in London we were exploring new terrain, our starting point (the acceptance of failure) is one that is quite familiar to those with clown training. This allowed us to work in more detail in Barcelona, and to move on to finding possible structures to enable performance and presentation.

For Barcelona I had already chosen four exercises from the London workshops, and would add a new one based on the work of Sara Pons, who works with clown and dance. We spent one workshop on each of the forms, approximately, plus two more where we revised and practised our discoveries.

And although it was not planned to present work until next September, I wanted to leave open the possibility of beginning this process in February/March and have begun to look at organising venues to show short pieces of work. (Possibly Chat’s Palace in Homerton, and at the ECB in Barcelona.)

i. Playing and Failing

Playing Games

First of all, some kids’ playground games. When I can’t remember a game from my own childhood, my favourite source is Iona and Peter Opie’s Children’s Games in Street and Playground . It is a vast survey of children’s games as described by children, without any moralising filter or judgements on the usefulness of games. It is therefore more valuable than most books on games as applied to theatre, which often contain additional rules which seem to be there for reasons other than enabling play (I will discuss this below).

Ball Tag

So, where do we start? When no one knows each other, or they do but don’t know what the hell they’re going to be asked to do – the simplest of games: there’s one ball and whoever has it throws it at someone else and if that person gets hit by the ball on or below the knees, they’re out. Of course, the ball, after hitting or missing someone, gets picked up by another player who gets the chance to chuck it at someone else. The last person left wins the game.

After playing it a few times, you can up the difficulty by banning running, then a bit more by making everyone walk in slow motion, then that you can only move a step at a time, and that step you can only take when the director of the game claps, which could be in a steady and predictable rhythm, slow or fast, or unpredictable and confusing.

Coming back to our game, at the end we can play it at a standstill. Meaning you can only move from the spot in order to go and fetch the ball if it’s gone out of reach, then you stay where you are when you’ve picked up the ball. And everyone else stops moving when someone’s got hold of it. On top of all these variations, let’s then add the voice. Two possibilities: either continuous voice, or voice only when you receive or evade the ball. When I say ‘voice’ I mean just that: open the mouth and make vocal sound. Not words, just sound. Use vowels, not consonants (see below).

This game demands, and gets, total engagement. That’s because there’s no other way to play it. You have to be quick in reacting. Your decisions and actions become one, not deciding first then acting. That’s the meaning of engagement. Thought and action happen at the same time. It’s living in the present, because there’s no time to think about the future. If you did, you’d lose the game. This game is so simple. Its only element is ‘react!’ It’s a fight or flight situation. The whole body, mind, heart and spirit are on alert. Of course, it’s also lots of fun!

Four Chairs

Four chairs are placed to mark the four corners of a square. One person sits on each chair. A fifth person stands in the middle. If you are sitting, you have to change chairs with someone, and if you are standing, you have to find a chair that is momentarily unoccupied and sit down. After a few rounds, we again add voice, and again we use only vowels.

Why vowels? All human speech, in any language, consists of two basic groups of sounds: vowels and consonants. Vowels are made by putting the tongue in a particular shape in a particular position in the mouth, but without touching any other part of the mouth. The air flows through the vocal chords whose vibrations produce sound, which is in turn modified by the tongue-mouth shape to produce a particular vowel sound: ‘aaa’ or ‘eee’ or ‘iii’ or combined sound: ‘aaaiii’. So, when we produce vowels, our mouths are open. On the other had, when we produce consonants, our mouths are closed, if only for a moment or partially. A closure followed by a release of the two lips produces ‘p’. The same contact between the back of the tongue and the roof of the mouth gives us ‘k’. A near closing between the tip of the tongue and just above the upper teeth, ‘s’, and so on. So when we use vowel sounds in movement, in the instinctive play of this game, or any other, it actually opens us, our bodies are less blocked, more willing to respond in the movement, not so self-conscious, not so ‘knowing’. If you think of a bunch of 4-year-olds running around playing and screaming, what they’re screaming are vowels – “aaaaiiiiiiooooeeeiiiuuuaaii!!!!!!!” – not consonants – “ppppcccttbbbbrrrzzmmmpp!!!!!!”. Of course, to use our voices to their fullest ability, it’s the combination or play of vowels and consonants that we need. But to begin with, better to encourage the open at the expense of the closed. Vowels are more fun.

Barley Break

This is a game for six players, in three couples, each couple holding hands. Two of the pairs stand at each end of the space, and must exchange partners between themselves. The third couple stands in the middle and tries to prevent this happening. The couple in the middle must stay linked, otherwise their interception is not valid. And the exchanging couples are safe once they have linked with a new partner. (For a fuller explanation and contextualisation of this game in the wider context of catching games, and its Tudor origins and appearance in Shakespeare, see Opie.)

Two tactics suggest themselves immediately. You can hang on to your old partner for as long as possible and at the last minute let go and link up with your new partner. This keeps you safe until the moment of change, but restricts your movements as you are physically linked to someone else. Or you can abandon your old partner and risk being caught, but having more mobility have more of a chance of outwitting the interceptors. The safe strategy tends to be boring to watch, and the risky one is exciting to see. Not surprising really.

Name tag

This is a game that could be termed “intelligent”. Philippe Gaulier makes good use of this one in order to create confusion and failure. You have to think and decide and sometimes speak, strictly within the rules, but like in Ball Tag there’s no time to plan ahead. Everything is in the moment, or else you lose. One person is on it, they tag someone by touching them, that person has to say the name of another person, not the person they’ve been tagged by, who then touches another person, who says a name, who tags someone, etc. The catch is that you aren’t allowed to wait till after you’re tagged before saying a name. You’ve got to speak the moment you’re tagged, or just before. Any mistakes or delays and you’re out. When two people are left the game’s over.

My favourite tactic is to hang around really close behind someone, waiting till you hear your name and immediately tag the person you’ve been following, not giving them time to think.

Wanting success and accepting failure

This spontaneous intelligence game leads to all sorts of foolish mistakes, such as tagging when you should speak, saying the name of someone who’s already out, or even of someone who isn’t even playing, like your sister or somebody, or the most foolish of all, saying your own name. When you can actually accept and enjoy your own inept foolishness you really start to have fun with this game. Enjoying your own failure in public whilst still trying to succeed is an important fundamental element of clown.

We all like to succeed. At a simple level it defines what drives us forward. It’s our desire to arrive at our perceived objective. When we do not reach the point we are aiming at, we fail. The experience of that failure is variable, and generally the more public the failure, the more we feel it. Depending on the individual and the context we may feel embarrassed, ashamed, angry, sad, afraid or ridiculous. We then have a choice: we can welcome those feelings or we can try to hide them. The following exercise is designed to practice this acceptance of failure:

Ball Helpers

The game is normal throw and catch, with everyone standing in a circle. As well as the catcher, there’s a helper. The helper is one of either of the two players beside the catcher. The helper must make contact with player and/or ball at the same time as the catcher catches it. As there can only be one helper, and the decision to help must be made in the moment, there is great scope for error. Both may react at the same time, in which case one must then retreat. Or perhaps both decide to retreat, then one (who?) must return. Or neither reacts. Mistakes in this exercise are very frequent, which is the point of it, of course.

Having had some practice at failing frequently in public, we then tried to play the game while trying to hide the mistakes. Initially it proved impossible. We then tried to eliminate the mistakes by delaying the response, waiting until you have read the situation fully before moving. We then tried eliminating the mistakes by getting eye contact with the receiver before throwing, In both cases this involves controlling the impulse.

Compare to the original version, with plenty of mistakes, these cleaned-up versions appeared tedious, like watching automatons perform tasks that have little value. This is not surprising, when the aim is not to slip up, not to reveal anything. Who wants to go to the theatre to see actors revealing nothing? Well, not me anyway.

So, what does welcoming and accepting one’s failure consist of? This is our main question during the first block of workshops. It is not a question of denying our negative reaction, but of adding a positive reaction as well, on another level. The most common positive reaction to one’s own failure is to laugh. Not only that, but we find that if we laugh at our own failure, generally others will laugh too.

So, in all these games so far, you try to win, but if you fail, accept it. The other side of this coin is that you must first have the desire to succeed, to win. Otherwise, not getting to your objective would be no failure. The clown always sets out to do things well. This may be the clowning equivalent of having an objective in other systems of theatre training. The clown applies all his intelligence to the task, physically and intellectually. Don’t try to be stupid, or to fail deliberately. That would be crazy. Clowns aren’t crazy. They’re normal. Try and be clever. Then, when you fail, and you inevitably will, you’ll feel and be stupid.

Observations of the failing body

We then attempted to describe, from the outside, what happens to the body in failure. Observing our own and others’ bodies for a time, we compared notes, then tried to reproduce the body postures and actions described, but without trying to recreate any kind of situation that might have produced failure. The important thing to do when observing in this way is to limit yourself to empirical observations without interpreting them. Thus we can say, for example, that “she moved his head from side to side”, but not “she seemed negative” or she felt embarrassed. This is an area to investigate further, the possibility of an outside-in method of clowning.

Most work done on the categorisation of expressive states in performing considers a pretty similar range of emotions. Richard Schechner, comparing the work on the expression of the human face by Paul Ekman and the codification in traditional Indian theatre that is the Natyasastra, considers that

“Humankind has countless gods, but I would be very surprised if there were not some agreement concerning the “basic emotions”. Love, energy, and peace are not on Ekman’s list, possibly because he considers them to be “mixed” or composite emotions.”

Nor is there much sign of failure in those descriptions of body postures common to studies that identify certain postures with certain psychological states or personalities, usually ones that are deemed to be abnormal, e.g. depressive, arrogant, etc.:

Nor can we find images of failure in the rather more primitive descriptions found in discussions of good and bad posture:

Our observations of failure in the body were the following:
- The head tilts back, sometimes in a wave through the spine.
- The knees come up, vertically, one at a time, sometimes repeatedly.
- The stomach draws in.
- The chest collapses.
- The eyes open wider than normal.
- The mouth opens.
Other observed behaviour was:
- Air is expelled.
- We laugh.

The following frame, taken from the video of the Barcelona workshops, shows all these characteristics except the knee-raising:

We then practised these gestures/postures. Generally adopting the body posture provokes your own laughter, we found. The continued knee movements prolonged the laughter, whereas simply freezing the position produced tension and no laughter. The obvious observation to make here is that what we had taken for the posture of failure seemed identical to that of laughter itself. Does this mean that we were mistaken in our observation, and instead of looking at he moment of failure we were looking at the laughter in reaction to that failure? Or does it mean that failure is laughter? The latter equation, if true, would be a remarkable thing, indeed.

So, is it possible to learn clowning by learning the posture of failure? John Wright claims that

“Asking ‘How do clowns walk?’ or ‘What do clowns wear?’ are inane questions. But to ask ‘How do clowns make us laugh?’ and, more importantly, ‘What physical impulses inspire that comedy?’ will take you to a place where you can find a personal ownership of ‘clown’ as a level of play.”

I don’t disagree with the usefulness of this approach at all. But neither do I think it excludes an external approach. There is some interesting evidence of the effectiveness of the outside-in approach. Susana Bloch, Pedro Orthous and Guy Santibañez-H have done a number of studies comparing the outside-in and inside-out methods of expressing emotions in acting. They show no such queasiness when faced with the possibility of using learnt behavior:

“What in our opinion is lacking in the curricula of most drama schools are instrumental techniques for learning how to express an emotion. While the gnostic-verbal (literary) and the body-expressive (physical) aspects of acting behavior are quite well covered pedagogically, the emotional-expressive (psychophysiological) aspects are almost entirely left to the intuition, life experience or "emotional memory" of the student actor, with little or no technical support. To become an actor, one must become an (‘athlète affectif' as Artaud (1964) puts it - an athlete of emotions (see also Esslin 1976). The question is how.

… a psychophysiological approach to acting behaviour has, to our knowledge, not yet been attempted.”

They attempt to show the feasibility of

“a method designed to teach acting behaviour (which) should teach the actor to "simulate" an emotion. This means to learn to reproduce at will the respiratory, postural and facial configurations which correspond to "real-life" emotional behaviors.”

Emotions are described and learnt in terms of three observable physiological variables: breathing, facial expression and muscle tensions:

“The effector pattern of an emotion is a particular configuration of neurovegetative, hormonal and neuromuscular reactions. From this complex physiological ensemble, we chose for the purpose of our training only the respiratory-postural-facial components because these can be started and modulated at will and carry with them most of the other features that are not directly under voluntary control. Accordingly, we are not considering within our training method physiological/ parameters such as heart rate, blood pressure, skin resistance, skin temperature and gland secretions which are part of the effector pattern but whose control is not needed for the recognition of an emotion by the observer.”

Furthermore, they make the claim that emotions learnt and expressed in this way are just as good as, or indistinguishable from, so-called real emotions:

“Over the years, we have systematized a method for training actors to express Emotions (BOS method), based on our findings on the effector patterns of emotions (BIoch et al. 1972; Bloch and Santibañez-H 1972; Santibañez-H 1976). Practice with the method has shown that it is sufficient to produce such patterns correctly in order to evoke a particular emotion either in the actor and in the observer or only in the latter.”

“When a naive observer, or even one who is acquainted with the techniques, watches the correct execution of an emotional effector pattern, he/she considers the observed emotion as “true" as a spontaneous one.”

Not only is it as good, it is in fact better:

“This is quite good evidence that in order to appear "natural" or "true" on the stage, actors do not need to "feel" the emotion they are playing but must produce the correct effector-expressive output of the emotional behavior. If anything, in our opinion, subjective involvement and identification with the emotions may hinder the theatrical performance. In fact, it is possible that actors often confuse the unspecific excitation they feel during acting with the belief that they are truly “feeling" the emotion that they portray.”

Rules for risk

Keith Johnstone, in Impro for Storytellers, devotes a whole chapter to explaining “the methods commonly used to kill stories (i.e. to stop anything untoward from happening)”. He usefully recommends: “Learning to use these techniques for fun gives us insight into our defensive procedures (paradoxical teaching).” Johnstone’s work is mostly in the field of verbal performance, but his principles can easily be transposed to a more physical performance style, or in this case, playing style. One of his strategies he terms “cancelling”, for example: “Little Red sees the wolf and runs home – nothing is achieved.” In our playground games described above, one common way of cancelling is to retreat from a position you have just taken, in order to avoid losing. Of course, this is a natural way to play the game. But if we want things to happen we must get used to losing. To make compelling theatre, we must play to win but also enjoy losing. So if we prohibit moving backwards or sideways, this has a similar effect on the consequences of our actions in these games as does learning Johnstone’s avoidance strategies. I think we could do a lot more work on how Johnstone’s work could be translated into clown improvisation.

If we feel that “something might happen”, we are probably taking a risk (of losing the game). So we can create rules that will make this more frequent and teach us how to play with risk. These are different rules to the ones that define the game. The latter are the basic rules which are needed to generate the particular action that occurs in each game. They are the rules that kids will state first when asked to describe a game: “If she hads a person when she is he the person she hads becomes he.”

So in our games, if you can’t go backwards or sideways, then to escape you must turn and move. Moving backwards is one of our most basic actions inspired by fear. Training ourselves to move forwards will train ourselves to say “yes”, to commit ourselves and to suffer the consequences of our actions. When we have trained ourselves to go forwards by default, we can of course then choose backwards or sideways when we feel it’s appropriate.

Now let’s look at another game, with what we have discovered about play in mind. The following was the game where it became most apparent which rules are fundamental to the game action, which rules encourage risk, and which create security or ‘save-environmentalism’.

Queenie

First let’s look at how the game works. One person, holding a ball, stands out front with their back to the rest of the group, who stand quite close together, a few yards behind the ball holder. Then the holder throws the ball back over their own head/shoulders towards the group. One person catches or retrieves the ball. The thrower has to turn round and guess who has the ball. If they guess right, the two change places. If not, they throw again, until they guess right. The receiver tries to prevent the thrower from guessing he has the ball. These are the rules that generate the actions of the game. I don’t think any other rules are necessary.

We can then introduce the following variation, in order to work more directly with the acceptance of failure. Now we have only two people receiving from the thrower, and the rest are audience. The two receivers must look at the audience about half the time. Try looking at critical moments, like when the ball is in the air. Whether you catch it or not, share with us your situation. Let us see your desire, thought and emotion. This variation of the game increases the likelihood of failure, as there are only two players, so it is easier for the thrower to catch them out. Not only that, but the need to maintain contact with the audience makes it even riskier. But the key here is to learn to play with each other (as in any game of this kind) and at the same time for us, the audience. This for us in reality simply means looking at the audience. In this way we gain access to your thoughts, feelings, intentions and impulses. It is enough to let us see, there is no need to add anything or to try and communicate anything, as it’s all out in the open anyway. (If you get good at this game, you can even try it one vs. one. Then the attempt to convince us that you do not have the ball becomes virtually impossible, but you must persevere.)

So, given these game rules, what kind of behaviour occurs? The aim of the game boils down to having to fool the thrower. This is always the case, as when you don’t have the ball, if you fool the thrower into thinking that you do have it, they will guess wrong. And if you do have it, you want to fool the thrower into thinking you don’t have it. This trying to fool others that something is not as it is is a consequence of the gap that exists between ideal and reality (see Alan Clay, above). The clown attempts to convince us of something that is patently not true. And the greater the gap, the more ridiculous the attempt is. This definition of clown seems to be sufficiently broad to encompass, for example, the old chestnut of comedy occuring when someone pompous takes a fall. High status being lowered is thought to be funny. We can see that high status is that part of us that tries to convince the audience that we are who we maintain we are. In Goffman’s terms this is the role we play.

Now let’s look at the other kinds of rules that might attach themselves to this game. Instead of first considering some ways of playing the game that might help us take risks and let things happen, let us approach it from the other direction and look at those rules of behaviour that often want to creep in and attach themselves to the game in order to create safety and stagnation. Sometimes these desires remain unspoken, sometimes they are voiced.

With this game, the most common attempt to create a democratic version where no one loses is to say that the thrower has to wait before turning around, in order to give the receivers a chance. Or even sometimes the thrower themselves, after having caught someone, says ‘oh, sorry, I turned round too quick, I saw you’! If we were to play it like this, we might as well pack up and go home, because nothing interesting is going to happen.

You must use your intelligence here: if you take too long, the catcher will have lots of time to hide the ball, and you will be reduced to telepathically guessing who has it. (Telepathy is a concept many theatre practitioners try to promote, although they would usually call it ‘peripheral vision’ or something like that. In clown, we have no problems or shame in looking directly at other performers or the audience, so there is no need for us to pretend that acting techniques also include mind-reading.) If you turn too soon, the potential catcher will not take the ball. If they’re using their intelligence, that is. You aren’t obliged to catch the ball. If you catch it in full view of the catcher looking at you, then that’s your failure. This is a very good example of the kind of reality with which clowning works. When I use the word reality, this is what I am talking about.

What audience would want to watch people not getting caught out? Perhaps here there is a clue that may help us to avoid boring any more audiences to death. The emergence of game playing in theatre over the last decades has led us sometimes to consider that what is important is for the performer to be in a state of play, of pleasure as Gaulier has it, in order to create that presence that fascinates an audience. So far, so good. But the trap here is to then assume that if I, as a performer, am having a good time, then it must mean it’s because I’m playing, which must mean that the audience will like what I’m doing. However, we must be clear about what we mean by play. There are many ways that I can sense that I am enjoying myself. It may be that I enjoy myself when there is a complete absence of risk, when I will not be called on to expose anything of value. In this case, the audience will certainly be snoring away. The mistake, then, in theatre-training through games, can be to focus on the security of the performer at the expense of the enjoyment of the audience. This is a major problem with a lot of devised performance. Some might claim that these kinds of rules serve to maintain the cohesion of the group. They are what Goffman would call team work. But I would say that this is the opposite of what is required in good clowning/acting. Goffman has a very illuminating thing to say on mistakes made within a team:

“I would like to add a further general fact about maintaining the line during a performance. When a member of the team makes a mistake in the presence of the audience, the other team-members often must suppress their immediate desire to punish and instruct the offender until, that is, the audience is no longer present. After all, immediate corrective sanctioning would often only disturb the interaction further and, as previously suggested, make the audience privy to a view that ought to be reserved for team-mates.”

Let us turn this upside down and re-phrase thus: ‘When a member of the team makes a mistake in the presence of the audience, the other team-members often must suppress reveal their immediate desire to punish and instruct the offender untilas long as, that is, the audience is no longer present. After all, immediate corrective sanctioning would often only disturb the interaction further and, as previously suggested, make the audience privy to a view that ought not to be reserved for team-mates.’

As an audience, what I am looking for are revelations. So if companies think their principle responsibility is to their own well-being and the creation of a polite agreement between colleagues, then they are on a sinking ship. In clown, we depend on this revealing. It is really all we have. The lesson is much clearer here, therefore, than in other genres of performance. But I would say that the same should or could usefully apply across the board of theatre. As Meisner says: ‘fuck polite’.

There is a very interesting conclusion that could be drawn here. That we have a problem in that equality/democracy does not produce good theatre. Could it be that we are stuck with the same problem as the Soviet clowns in the 1960s? That our supposedly balanced and safe society does not allow for those imbalances and risks that make exciting theatre? If this is true, then perhaps that is the missing link between the Soviet 1960s and the Paris version.

In the workshops, when we played without these safety nets, the clowning took off. But that is not the end of the story. The urge to govern others, to control outcomes (your own and others’) remains present. Furthermore, I would even say that it is vital for clowning that it remains. It is another instance of the reality-ideal gap. The gap between what we want others to do (‘don’t turn round yet!’) or what we would like to happen (‘I’m going to stand close and catch the ball quicker’), and what actually does happen (the thrower turns quickly and the ball hits me in the face as I’m very near) remains in full view. It is my very control urge that leads me into inevitable failure.

So let us not think that these controlling urges are all bad. They are perhaps essential for clowning to exist, just as the police or the white face clown are (see above). It is this very gap that is ridiculous. The gap can be at a personal level or at a relationship level. On a personal level, it is when you go to sit in a chair but misjudge the movement and fall. On a relationship level, it is when you expect your partner to pour the water in your cup, but instead they leave, or take the cup, or throw the water in your face.

There are some other common modes of behaviour in this game that are designed to thwart failure. They can usefully be discouraged by prohibiting them. So, you cannot pass the ball to someone else once you’ve caught it. Otherwise, as with the demand that the thrower take their time to turn round, it would be more a guessing game than a timing game. I’m interested in the moment the holder turns round, that coincides with the moment the catcher catches. It can also help to demand a metre’s space between receivers, or simply no physical contact.

Zip Zap Boing

In the session after this stripping away of rules, this kind of lord of the flies approach to clown, I felt the urge to overload a game with rules. Using Zip Zap Boing, a game many actors are familiar or over familiar with, we played several near impossible versions. Some of these I have done in the past, but I went further: the rules became so complex, so difficult to respond to in the moment, that failure was inevitable. I believe that failure is inevitable anyway, it’s just that it is usually cloaked in what we have just been discussing, that veneer of unspoken agreements that keep the team together, and convince us that everything is working just fine.

Using words like ‘veneer’ and ‘cloak’ seems to suggest that there is something on top or in front, hiding something beneath or behind. But I wouldn’t pay too much attention to which preposition we use, as I don’t want to claim that these two worlds have to be in any particular set relationship. It doesn’t matter to me whether we think of them as inside and outside, or above and below or whatever. Prepositions are of course the source for much extracting of ideologies from actor training methods, as well as psychology, religion and any system of thought. We have Naturalism’s inner world and outer world, for example; or heaven and hell, and so on. At this stage I don’t particularly want to align clown with any of these systems. Let’s see where we end up, and maybe in the future we can choose our favourite appropriate preposition.

I guess that about 93% of our actions end in failure, but that we endlessly correct them, so as to reach our goals. But if we act on our first impulse, and manifest that in action, and carry that action forward in its original direction, and accept the consequences of that action, mostly we end up with egg on our face, or our fingers caught in the door, or blurting out some nonsense. I say 93%, not because I have measured this in a laboratory. But as I once read a theory that said that 93% of communication is non-verbal, and I am lost to know how this was measured, I just guessed that it would be the same for failure.

So when we stop masking those failures, we can see them. That is clown. And one way to encourage that unmasking is by creating a great strain on the system of masking. By creating rules or demands that are too difficult to maintain, either because they are beyond our capabilities or because there are too many of them, or because they demand a quick reaction but a lot of thought, and so on. Under such strain, the whole structure (of society) falls apart. It becomes nearly impossible to go on. But we went on!

I won’t describe the whole game here, but a word or two on the variations I have habitually used: no voice; no gesture; no lips, only looking; then every time you change from function to function, you change sound/gesture, e.g. if you do a ‘zip’ (pass to the next person around the circle) after someone who has also done a ‘zip’, you make the same sound/gesture. If you do a ‘zap’ (pass to someone not next to you) or a ‘boing’ (pass back to the person who has just passed to you, after a ‘zip’, then that’s a change and you must change the sound/gesture. This combination of two levels of play makes it pretty difficult to get right, which is what we’re looking for, of course.

A new one here was that you change rules (i.e. change the whole system) every time you change function (e.g. after a silent ‘zip’, you might do a look-only ‘boing’). This one had me beaten! The point here is that we never get to acquire expertise. This goes completely against the grain of much physical theatre training, of course. In clown, if I manage to do something well, my instinct is to make it more difficult. So you are always going beyond your limits, just.

A group of five then plays for the audience, standing in a line facing them, so the people at the ends are theoretically next to each other. I hover around waiting to punish any mistakes.

It is possible to observe in detail various things which can happen:

- A delay between the first impulse (which one suspects to be wrong) and the final decision to act.
- The final action, born of the gap between impulse and action, takes on a different quality. It is an action moved by the energy of ‘I don’t know’. We will look at something similar using laughter as the energy next term.
- Remaining static, freezing, then moving again. This coincides with the impulse-action gap, as before.
- After having failed then paused, making a definite gesture provokes laughter. The amount of commitment and decisiveness is important.
- Sometimes you don’t know why it was wrong. That’s even funnier.
- The possibility of enjoying being in control. When one person plays being in control, this creates a good contrast with others who are simply failing. We tried with a group of three people being in control, to see if this would be satisfying. The result was unclear, but we could observe two different ways of controlling. One way is to take your time, relax, wait to act, thus avoiding failure. This way, the audience gets to see the person processing the information. You still are present and letting us see it. This works. (But if you don’t let us see this process, but are still taking your time in order to control it, then it’s boring.) In other words, the gap still remains. This gap between impulse and action seems to be fundamental in our perception of what failure is. It could even form part of an essential definition of failure.

Now we transfer the game to a new situation. Now we are free to move in the space. A chair is placed in the centre, as a fixed point. Now it’s not about being in a line. If you do the same gesture as someone, that includes whether you are sitting or standing. How can you play this game in 3D space? The gesture is a gesture in space, or a movement. So your gesture is your movement in space. They are not separate things.
The game becomes simpler. Either your moves are the same as someone else’s or they are different.

Failure

I think we have begun fill in some details of what failure is, how we know what it is, and how accepted failure differs from hidden failure. Trying to succeed, sooner or later we must fail. We can accept this failure in full view of an audience, who will see everything as long as the performer lets them. This creates an effect, for the audience and for the performer, that something usually hidden is being revealed. This revelation convinces us that what we are witnessing is in a sense fuller, more authentic, or more real than what we normally come across. We could call this ‘presence’.

In fact, we could see the attempt to succeed and to convince our audience as the attempt by the actor to be present. But although this usually fails (according to my 93% theory), our subsequent acceptance of that failure to be present will in turn convince the audience that we are indeed present. Clowning, in this sense, overcomes one of the most fundamental paradoxes in acting.

If we accept that this is a learnable technique, can we then say that there is something in this technique that remains hidden from the audience? For example, audiences will often believe that stand-up comedians are improvising, ‘making it up’, whereas the performer knows all too well that he is manipulating his technique in order to create this ‘spontaneity effect’. So, would it be possible to also reveal this trick? In clowning that would mean that we would not just ‘fail at what we are trying to achieve’, but also ‘fail at failing’. Is this possible?

ii. Ball-Clap

This is our first “form”, a game which we have developed to the point where it can be performed. It remains a game in the sense that every time you do it you have to play it for real. But there are structures in place that do not change, and that hopefully do the job of allowing the playing to engage an audience which has no previous knowledge of the game.

We now have three types of rules:

1. Rules for Playing the Game: rules that generate action
2. Rules for risk:
a. guidelines, in order to encourage risk
b. prohibitions, in order to avoid safety
3. Structures for performance

These categories are woven throughout the following account of this game.

The basic game is throw and catch. Standing in a circle, you can throw to anyone. The rule is the ball can’t touch the floor. All mistakes are punished by getting hit with a rolled up newspaper. Without this, the playing loses commitment. And it’s a lot more fun to be under threat while playing ball. After a while, we increase the difficulty by having to clap hands before catching the ball. We then keep adding complications in order to keep the pleasure level high: a clap and a jump before catching; two claps and a jump; two claps and two jumps; clap and jump plus turn round 360º after catching; plus sit on a chair placed behind you; and you can easily invent more of these. Lastly, there is a free-form version, where you just do anything you want before catching the ball. It doesn’t matter if nothing original occurs to you, you’ve always got the clap and/or jump to fall back on.

In clown there is no need to be original. Keith Johnstone so forcibly makes the point that what works best in improvisation is not originality, but the obvious, that it has led me to think about running an anti-originality workshop, or better still an anti-creativity workshop. But then I thought, that’s what I do anyway. Clown is in a sense fundamentally anti-creative, as well as being creative at another level, of course.

What purpose does the upping of the stakes serve? The fundamental one is to avoid boredom. Many theories of play have been proposed (see Csikszentmihalyi, Huizinga, Schechner, etc.), which I will discuss another time in more detail. To me the answer to “what is play for?” is obviously answered with “to not get bored”. You may say that this is an answer which merely restates the question, but it will do for me. So the increase in difficulty maintains the risk of failure, maintains our interest, and therefore maintains our pleasure (I define pleasure as the opposite to boredom). The risk of failure is a basic element in avoiding boredom.

Another way to keep staving off boredom is to use variations. Whilst upping the stakes increases the difficulty, variations merely change the activity without making it more risky. They therefore don’t have so much effect on boredom, though they work for a while.

It’s a bit like having ice cream every day for pudding (eventually becomes boring), having different flavours of ice cream every day (variations, limits the boredom), or trying a new kind of pudding every day, or making your own, or having pudding before the main course, or eating the ice cream through a straw, etc. The line between variation and increasing the difficulty is not always clear, as these examples show. Both increasing the difficulty and creating variations are inherent motors not just of play, but of clowning. Not only that, they are recognisable forms in clown compositions.

Much variety and circus performance (as opposed to narrative performance) uses variation and stake-increasing, e.g. juggle 3 balls, then 4 balls, then 6 balls. I think that this is part of what Agnès Pierron is referring to here in reference to circus: “Rather than an art, it is an act.” Upping the stakes, or varying the action does not create a fiction, but instead plays with a reality. However, new circus, embarrassed by its primitive appeal, has tried to jettison this in favour of what it perceives as structures that are more appropriate to its bid for the artistic high ground. “As with ‘street arts’, ‘circus arts’ are a ministerial invention, dating from the time when circus changed from being the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture to that of the Ministry of Culture, in 1981.”

When we play Ball-Clap, this way of avoiding boredom, introduced by me in the role of teacher, is one of the two principal ways that the game can develop. The other way tends to occur without my prompting, often before we get to the above, but sometimes later on. It consists in making others fail, or making it very difficult for them. As we have seen with our stake-upping method, it’s the maintenance of a high level of risk that keeps the game interesting. But in the second case, we are creating risk for the receiver rather than for ourselves. I mean, for example, throwing someone the ball without looking at them, or very low, or to the side, or fast, or when they’re not looking. The most extreme might be to just drop the ball, giving them virtually no chance of catching it.

Here I should clarify something. As stated before, if you let the ball touch the ground, you get punished. There is no exception to this. On first encountering this game, many people will demand that the punishment go to the person who has thrown the ball, not the one who didn’t catch it. They claim that the thrower threw badly, or unfairly. This kind of system of laws of the game looks a bit like a regular legal system. Punishment, or responsibility, is attached to whoever is judged to be the cause of the failure. If the ball were to be thrown “well”, in this system, then the non-catcher would in that case “be responsible”. But clown law has it otherwise. It is always the one who receives who is responsible.

This is not some kind of arbitrary cruelty. It seems to me to be (a) easy to understand, (b) closer to how clown works and (c) more fun. Most importantly, it generates good clowning, whereas the liberal-democratic system generates only security. The clown system generates great pleasure as well. Laughter, self-laughter, comes easily under this system. Let’s be clear here, then: the punishment is received by the person who is left with the failure. Probably if you find yourself picking the ball up off the floor, then it’s your failure. That is a far clearer definition and one that is not disputable or open to interpretation, unlike the one we are perhaps more accustomed to, the one based on “who was responsible”, where “responsible” is a very slippery category. We have devised mountains of laws and precedents in order to judge who is responsible. This is a concept we feel is necessary in order to create a society that works. But in clowning we need not concern ourselves over justice. Nor in theatre. Who wants to watch people behaving justly and making sure everyone gets a turn? No one. Unfortunately, as discussed earlier, due to the infiltration of game playing into theatre practice, there has been a tendency to then think that good theatre can be made by following the rules, but not the rules that make action happen, instead the ones that make it fair. This is a gross error and a misunderstanding of play.

Trying to make others lose seems to me to be an essential part of clown. This takes us back to the discussion of the white face and auguste clowns. In this game, the auguste clown could be identified with the person when they don’t catch the ball and get punished. It is he who cannot, and he who gets hit. When we play to make others lose, we are playing the white face clown, the rascally trickster. In this game we can clearly see how they are made for each other. True, the auguste can function alone, making it ever harder for himself, until he fails. Evidently it is possible to fail alone, but not to make others fail alone.

Once we have explored the possibilities of trying to make others lose, and keeping ourselves in pleasure by varying or making things difficult, let us introduce this new rule: if we laugh when you make a mistake, you are pardoned. When I say “we”, I mean at least three or four people laughing in a group of 15. One or two is not enough. The laughs must be involuntary, otherwise they will not be true indications to the one who has failed. Trying to suppress your laugh or to force it will not be of any use.

So we have three possibilities: 1. I succeed. 2. I fail and they laugh= I succeed. 3. I fail and they don’t laugh = failure. Only the last one will be of no use in clowning. But quickly we see that most of the failures do indeed provoke laughter, and the question is how to control or manipulate it? I ask someone who has just dropped the ball, ‘do you want a laugh or a punishment?’ This puts the power clearly into their own hands. ‘But how?’ they might complain. And then we laugh. Then we can try conscious strategies for provoking the laughter that will save us. The most extreme strategy might be to fail deliberately, which is the highest risk of all. Then you are relying on us laughing for you to be saved. Perhaps this is the professional version: a deliberate failure converted into success by the laugh. In fact, even more extreme is going directly to be punished, even when no mistake has been made. This might be called “stocking up on laughs in case you need them later”. Another technique is to re-use what worked once. In clown, if it works, do it again. When you fail, remember and repeat something you did when you failed before that made us laugh. It may work again. This kind of logic is common in clown. The repetition will either make us laugh or not. If not, then your belief that the repetition will work will in itself make us laugh.

Harpo Marx reveals his theory of clowning while recounting his experiences in the Soviet Union in 1933 where directors were asking to see his motivation for making 200 knives appear out of his coat pocket:

“The English-speaking writer … lumbered onto the stage. “Your movements are extraordinary,” he said. “But please forgive us. We don’t know the story. If I may say so, the point eludes us.”
“Point?” I said. “There isn’t any point. It’s nothing but slapstick. You know – pure hokum.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, like he understood, which he didn’t at all. “But may I ask why you were compelled to destroy the letters? Why did you drink the ink, knowing it was ink? What was your motive for stealing the knives that belonged to the hotel?”
I was flabbergasted. I’d done these pieces of business hundreds of times, and this was the first time anybody had ever asked me why I did them. “All I know,” I said, “is that if something gets a laugh you do it again. That’s all the reason you need. Right?”
Now the Russian was puzzled. He said, “No.”
I said, “No?”
He said, “Forgive me. Perhaps it is different in your American theatre. Here you must tell a story that answers the audience’s questions, or your performance will fail.””

Let us move on and introduce something new: more newspapers. I hand out two or three more. All newspaper carriers must punish when required, otherwise they must be punished themselves. Failure to punish someone is thus a punishable offence under clown law. A refinement of the pardon rule then follows: if you punish a failure after we have laughed, then you have erred and will be punished. This last element keeps the whole dynamic virtually self-perpetuating.

We now have a system of relationships that is sufficiently complex for it to be presented to an audience. In groups of three, with two newspapers and one ball we play with each other, and for the audience.

But that is not all. There are some further steps to this exercise. We dispense with the ball, playing with an imaginary ball. It is easy, and failure is now a choice. We then play with no ball, and finally with no newspapers. What is left then of the original game? It seems like nothing, because the rules are based on the ball, and the punishment depends on the newspaper. How can we play without either of these elements? This step has for a long time been of interest to me. To preserve the state that the game puts you in, but to make the leap out of a rule-bound activity. This is not quite the same as using an invisible game to motor a scene, where there are rules but we do not see them. I am proposing that there are no rules, but we continue to play.

Here are some ways to develop the quality of play in this game:

• You cannot hit yourself. That’s crazy. It is not founded in reality and necessity. It might happen occasionally, but it’s not a basic action that should occur regularly.
• Don’t do things for the sake of geometric aesthetic reasons, don’t create balanced stage configurations. Instead, be happy with an unbalanced stage.
• The laughter is free floating. It doesn’t have to be caused by you in order for you to be pardoned. If it’s happening when you are failing, then that’s enough. That means that you can get laughs on someone’s behalf, or save a friend by making us laugh.
• When you err, don’t resist or avoid punishment. Even better, come to the punisher. You will have the time it takes to get there to get a laugh.
• Try and increase the frequency of the laughter. Now it’s not just about winning the ball game. Try and live on the brink of failure.
• Don’t explain what you are doing, just do it.
• Eliminate all actions that are not those of throwing and catching and hitting. The game is enough in itself. Avoid adding fictional actions, such as looking in your pocket for the ball, or having supposed difficulties with the ball. Clown works when we play with reality. We can do without fiction.
• When you fail, look at the audience.
• Don’t make any movements that are unnecessary for the playing of the game.
• Don’t point. Pointing is an explicative action and treats the audience as if they were stupid, as if they couldn’t understand what you are doing, thinking or feeling. The audience is more than capable of seeing everything. You just have to let them.
• Similarly, drop that awful habit of doing sound effects to mime. Truly abominable and I don’t know how it crept into clown.
• Occasionally you can take the newspaper off someone, but sparingly.
• Don’t go backwards or sideways, turn round to go in another direction.
• Don’t avoid being hit, if you have no time to escape.
• When playing with an imaginary ball, receive the ball however you like, it doesn’t matter if someone has thrown it to you in a particular way, there’s no need to respect that.
• Don’t threaten to do something. Just do it
• Look with your whole body at the person you are going to hit, i.e. don’t hit without looking, or looking to the side.
• It’s not so much a game of surprising the other, but of revealing your impulses through the medium of newspapers and hitting.
• Don’t go back to the place you were after going to hit someone. Instead, stay there and risk the consequences.

Our discussions and work centred on the clearing up and out of bad habits. Play is not doing a bunch of movements, or doing what you like because you have fun. Sure, having fun is essential, and without it you can’t expect to interest an audience. But be careful, it is not enough. Playing is about seeing the reality of the situation, the reality of your emotions and the reality of your partner, and the audience. And responding from there.

This is more about letting happen and letting the audience see that, rather than making things happen or communicating them to an audience. It is about being a witness to the moment: yourself, the space, the audience, your partner. And through witnessing, allowing the audience to witness clearly too.

When we play with an imaginary ball, a common mistake is to make everything look difficult. We introduce pretended resistances and difficulties to catch the ball, in order to show that we are playing with a ball. Let’s forget all that and leave that to the mimes. Playing with an imaginary ball is actually far easier than with a real ball, as you can decide what you want. It is completely under your control, unlike a real ball. So you can throw it and catch it in the most absurd of ways, but without sweating or stretching or running around too much. Even if someone throws you the ball hard and fast, you can take your time and catch it when and where you like. This ease is a great thing in clowning. And when you know you can’t fail, you become an expert. When it’s so easy, you can afford to fail by choice.

When we played the no-newspaper version, conscious of not introducing unnecessary rules into the game, we observed that, nevertheless, what happened seemed very organized. What was happening was the familiar “first find the game, then play with it”. It became clear what that consists of. It means creating expectations of behaviour, repeating them, then varying them, then surprising. Surprises are in this sense a kind of failure, as they are doing something that another person didn’t expect. This fits our definition of social failure. For example, Alex has his hands on the back of a chair, Danny sits in the chair and Alex has his hands stuck between Danny and chair. Later, when Catalina sits in the chair, Alex expects the same, but she instead sits on the edge of the chair. There is a gap between the expected (idea) and the surprise (reality). Alex has failed.

A simple overall structure for this game, n order to present it to an audience, would be a straightforward advance through all the phases:
1. Scene 1: 3 clowns play with a real ball and 2 newspapers
2. Scene 2: the same, or different clowns play with an imaginary ball.
3. Scene 3: they play with no ball.
4. Scene 4: they play with no newspaper.

I also like the idea of foregrounding the auguste and white face relationship. We might have two players, one who can only increase their own difficulty, and one who can only make it difficult for the other.

iii. Semi-Circle

This is a very simple exercise, rather than a game, but one that allows us to explore the complexities of how the clown-audience relationship determines the clown’s actions. The nature of this relationship can explain how one relates to one’s own actions on stage (the question of “what” one’s actions are is less of a concern here at the moment). In other words, we are investigating here the attitude of the performer to her own performing. Does what I just did work? Shall I do it again? What shall I do next?

All the following stages in this exercise can be usefully performed whilst wearing the red clown nose, and just as usefully without.

1. We all line up with our backs against a wall. Beginning at the end of the line, one person walks out into the space, in a semi-circle, maintaining eye contact with all of us all of the time, while we, the audience, shout out their name continually while pointing at them. The performer keeps their mouth lightly open, and avoids touching their own body or clothes. Touching your own body is another security mechanism. It creates a kind of expressive short-circuit in the body, as if there were an expressive current that when the body is touching itself can only flow around the body, never leaving it. But when we open the body, that expressive current escapes, into the space, reaching a performing partner or the audience. Most commonly, touching oneself involves the hands – a hand on the head, or clasped hands, or hands on hips – but I include here any part of the body touching any other – an elbow against your side, knees together, a foot rubbing against the other shin, the chin against the chest, fingers of the same hand in contact with each, the lips closed, the tongue pressed against the roof of the mouth. When you release these closed points, there is a feeling that something must happen. It is no longer possible to remain still and safe.

Having the mouth open is the easiest way to let go of controlling what comes out of you. The first exit of the body is the mouth, though there are of course others, and therefore reveals most. I find this is far more effective and efficient (i.e. quicker) in finding the clown than wearing a red nose.

When walking the semi-circle, don’t go too fast. Take it at a strolling pace, one that allows you to register what’s happening, what you are feeling. Go too fast and you will arrive without having been aware of what happened along the way. And whatever you feel along the way, don’t hide it from us, let us see it. It isn’t necessary to tell us anything, or to try and communicate anything. Don’t invent things to do. Just let us see you. If you manage this, you won’t feel any need to respond defensively to what’s happening.

There is a balance here between loving and accusing. Being the centre of attention is wonderful, people calling your name, you are the star. And it is also being the outsider, the individual separated from the group. Both are valid definitions for the relationship the clown has with the group/audience. And in both cases the right response for the clown is a non-defensive one.

2. We now do the same, but without the shouting and pointing from the audience. If it helps, you can imagine hearing it. The relationship should be the same.

3. Again, but this time pause when you arrive at centre-stage, and breathe out. Breathing is or was a key element in Avner Eisenberg’s clown teaching. I came into contact with this work via Danny Schlesinger, who is a pupil of Avner and has taught at the ECB, and is participating in the present workshops. Over the last year I have begun to incorporate and adapt some of the fundamentals of this work into my own exercises. The most astonishing thing for me is that when you enter the stage breathing out, we invariably laugh! One could almost say that breathing out makes us laugh. This is a lot simpler and effective than theories of clown-as-mask! I’m sure we could work out a whole system of theatre based on breathing techniques. I now only use that instruction, breathe out.

For Avner, the out breath happens unconsciously when we have the agreement of the other (or of the audience) to enter their personal space. In the audience’s case, that space is the stage. We look out at the audience, see they are there, immediately breathe out and enter. They laugh. It’s basically a quick way of making friends. Breathing out leaves you disarmed. In other words, you are not perceived to be playing your role, but to be dropping it for a moment.

On the other hand, when we breathe in, we create security. According to Feldenkrais, when we breathe in we strengthen the thorax and abdomen in the expectation of attack, or in order to be able to use force to move the body or an external object, instead of directing the force along the line of the spine. This locking of the body is about force. It is therefore much more difficult to make the audience laugh when breathing in, although there are clearly numerous exceptions to this.

I see no reason why we couldn’t define clown by these means. Clown-as-breath is just as valid as clown-as-mask. I also think that through working with the breath in this way, we can learn about what we have traditionally referred to as the ‘flop’ or the ‘void’. My feeling is that the flop and its acceptance is related to the out breath. We shall be investigating this further in the second term.

4. This time, after arriving centre stage, pausing, and breathing out, you do a simple action, lasting only a couple of seconds. It’s easier if this is done without too much tension or force, as I discussed before when talking about playing with an imaginary ball. After completing the action, you pause/breathe out again, then leave.

The action should be defined without being premeditated. By defining the action, I do not mean knowing what it means, or situating it (who, what, where). The alternative to this kind of clear manipulating of gesture is not only a kind of vague uncommittedness. Being too vague and uncommitted in your gesture will leave us suspended and without a sense that you have an objective. Instead, the gesture must displace you, unbalance you, pull you out of your stable stance. This could be a definition of commitment, whilst avoiding the trap of the school of thought that sees performers as people who ‘know what they are going to say and then say it’. So, commitment is simply that which displaces/unbalances you. And when there is displacement, there is movement. Something has changed, and something else must happen.

5. Next, if you laugh at any time, you repeat your action. Try and repeat it as soon as the laugh starts coming, rather than when it has subsided, that way the action is powered by the laugh, which is a very strong energy and produces gestures of a completely different quality .

6. If you repeat the action several times before leaving, try variations. If you did something with one hand now do it with the other. Or backwards, or then in a modified way. This is the beginning of one very important type of clown structure, based on repetition, variation, recapitulation and surprise.
When there are no more laughs (we are still only concerned about your own laughs) then you go.

7. A new element in these workshops was the instruction to laugh sometimes. The instructed laugh (when I say to a student, ‘Laugh now!’) is something I have experimented with in other exercises, and often has the effect of opening up a real laugh. This was to be the first time I had used it in this particular exercise. I had always valued the effect of ‘if you laugh at yourself do it again’, but have had to admit that it doesn’t always work for everybody. However, I have always been convinced that laughing at yourself is fundamental to clowning and that it should be present in some way in the clown performer. By introducing the instructed laugh here, I feel we have solved the problem.

A deliberate laugh can end up in one of three ways. 1. the laugh is real and involuntary. 2. it is false and provokes real laughter, either your own or others. 3. it is false and remains false, provoking no laughter. Only the third option is uninteresting to me. It is that kind of laugh that an actor is able to force out, imitating more or less accurately the rhythms and tones of real laughter. However it is difficult to sustain for any time. It seems it is based on force, I’m not sure where it comes from. I also think this is maybe very characteristic of British acting, where emotions are produced by willpower, but cannot sustain themselves for any time, as they lack the wave of involuntary muscle spasm that is part of the flow of emotion. We shall be keeping an eye on this hypothesis over the coming years.

8. I may give other instructions now, or ask questions.

‘Where are you going?’ As it is forbidden to point, how can you let us know this? By looking at your objective, which in this case is the end of the semi-circular route.

‘Stop smiling.’ ‘Close your mouth tight.’ Sometimes giving a negative instruction works to put someone on the edge of ridiculous.

9. Now two people enter the space together. They arrive at the centre point more or less at the same time, pause, breathe out, and each does their action. And they maintain complicity by looking at each other occasionally en route. Now if you laugh at your own action you repeat that action, as before. And if you laugh at your partner’s, you repeat their action. If you don’t laugh, but your partner is laughing and repeating actions, you wait for them, as you must both leave together.

10. The same applies for a trio or a larger group. I have more and more avoided groups larger than three in clowning, though sometimes I do use groups of five. The larger group leaves you less room to be different from your partners. This is something I want to seriously address in this project. It seems to me that the problem will be the same as that encountered in any theatre. With a cast of three you have different demands on the writer than with a cast of 15. I have seen a lot of clown teaching and performing using so called choruses. I’m not sure where this came from. Gaulier uses choruses in bouffon work, but that is a whole different world. There is something in the nature of the bouffon that demands that he comes out of and returns to a group. But the clown is an individual, an outcast alone. Traditionally, the clown appears solo, in duo or the trio plus the ringmaster. Groups of clowns, all doing the same thing, seems to me a perverse idea.

There is interesting work to be done with imitation and copying. I do this myself. But there is always a relationship there, perhaps that of big brother-little brother. There the copying becomes ‘I am doing like you because I want to be like you, but I am not you, and therefore fail’. There is again the distance between the ideal and the reality. But if this relationship dissolves, I think we are in one of Keith Johnstone’s strategies for avoiding making things happen: in this case it would be what he calls ‘agreed activities’. “Little Red and the wolf play hide-and-seek and spin-the-turtle; and then they practise ballroom dancing. The characters seem to be working well together, but no one is in trouble, and no one is being altered (except for the turtle).”

Jango Edwards talks about ‘black and white’ when teaching clown. If you are tall, then I am short, if you are clever I am stupid, if you move all the time, I am very still, etc. This gives us a clue as to how can we work with larger casts of clowns. The Russian clown company Litsedei do it with 6 or 7. The now defunct company, Embarquez-les with 5. Theatre Manjana also worked with a large clown cast in their versions of Lorca and Strindberg.

We can see how role definition works in clown easily through the prism of status. I use an exercise which consists very simply in differentiating yourself as much as possible from your partner. Then we add a third person, who must differentiate himself from both of the other two. This can be achieved by relating to one of them at a time, e.g. playing low to A’s high, then high to B’s low. Or you can try and do one thing different to A and one the same, and similarly with B. But when there are more people, there is less and less room to do this. I think that once we have more than three performers, then some become protagonists and others secondary. This is a different kind of differentiating, one of levels of importance. This simply following what theatre has always done, whether clown, comedy or whatever. I shall be coming back to these issue of differenciation, and of ensemble and chorus work, which I feel is of little value in clowning, at a later point in the project.

11. We can then play the whole exercise all over again, but this time it’s when you or the audience laugh that you repeat your action.

I find this exercise to be eminently performable. The question is whether to include the role of the teacher or not in the performance. We shall certainly be trying both.

iv. Step-Laugh

This is a very simple exercise that I have started to develop over the last year. We now have an opportunity to take it much further and to see whether it can form the foundation for clown performance.

1. One person crosses the room, one step at a time. You can only take a step when we laugh.

Crossing the stage is the basic clown objective. In answer to the question, ‘why does the clown enter?’ We can answer, ‘in order to exit’. Anything that happens in between is a bonus. This is similar to the old exercise of entering sweeping the stage, then finding the audience is there, then playing for them, and exiting. But it is simpler and more literal, I think. You don’t need to imagine anything, which for me is great. You just work with the real space and situation here. I am using the term ‘real’ more and more in the context of clown. What I am referring to is that reality which is the performance event, the part that includes the response of the audience to the actions of the clown, and the response of the clown to that in turn. Perhaps this is a new form of realism, in fact, or something we could call ‘real theatre’.

2. Now, if there is no laugh from the audience for 6 seconds, you must take a step back. Of course, this often provokes a laugh, and you step forward once more.

If we have done our homework and learned in other games to take a step forward as a default reaction to most situations of risk, then here we see the step backwards for what it really is: a failure. Or a recognition of failure. That’s why it gets a laugh.

3. Two people cross the stage together, with the same rules as before.

4. Two cross the stage, and if you think the laugh is for you, take the next step, but if not, then don’t move.

This creates a lot of ambiguity and dispute, which is half the fun. In a sense, it becomes clear that the laughs are not personal but universal, though there remains some ego attachment on the part of the performers.

5. One person crosses the stage, sits in a chair placed half way, stands, and continues. Here there are two ‘steps’ which are ‘sit’ and ‘stand’, but the rules remain the same: each step of the action requires a laugh from the audience.

6. Back to two people, plus one chair. Here only one person sits. Obviously, as there is only one chair! Be careful! This is not a conflict. It is in a sense a ‘problem’, but there is a simple solution: one sits and one stands. Clowns do not have problems with their problems. They just look for solutions. It is not a race for the chair, though of course you may feel things if you are left behind or if you win the race.

7. Now start from offstage or outside the room. Now your first step, the one that brings you on stage, needs a laugh. You can look onstage, but not place your feet on the performing area.

8. We now change a little what it is we mean by one “step”. We have seen that “sitting in the chair” is counted as one step, as is “standing up from the chair”. We will also say now that “entering” is one step, as is “exiting”, as is “approaching the chair”. In other words, a step consists of an action that has a clear objective in space. Each step fulfils its own objective by being completed.

This is akin to saying that the motivation for the action is the doing of the action. For example: I enter the stage in order to be on the stage; or I sit down in order to be sat on the chair. In this way, we eliminate all projections into the future, such as would be: “I enter the stage in order to sit in the chair”; or “I stand up in order to exit”. It is relatively simple in clowning to undo these connections. Clowns have no problem with doing each action in the present, for its own end. The motivation dies with the completion of the action. This dying after each action is connected to the “flop”, the failure that comes after the attempt to impress or convince us of something. I think it is also connected to the out breath.

I would say that this kind of “one-step-at-a-time” acting is very much applicable to all actors, not just clowns, and that it is a major contribution to acting technique. I think it could also provide a key to just what we perceive “psychological realism” to be, and why: the very opposite of one step at a time. If we choose to go the other way, linking up one action after another, then the effect is of someone who is projecting their aims into the future, via a sequence of actions in time. If we look at it this way, we can see these two techniques as simply two possible choices. And each choice produces its own “truth-effect”. For me, there is no need to make any claims to authenticity on either side.

So, back to the exercise. Now the performers do complete actions every time the audience laughs. And as there are only a few of those actions now (enter, approach, sit, stand, exit), and they could be performed in almost any order (the only impossible sequences are things like: enter then stand, sit then exit, etc.), let’s leave the sequence open to improvisation. So it doesn’t matter what you do next, as long as it’s done with the permission of the audience (their laughter=permission). All this we can do solo, in pairs, and then in trios.

9. Next, in trios, we prepare the sequences of actions beforehand. This means only that we make a script which consists of “who does what when”, using the available actions, as above. As in the impros, two or more people may initiate an action at the same time.

First we check to see that the scripts are possible. Then we play them according to the laugh per step rule. Each step in the script needs an audience laugh.

Now we can see that the relationship with the audience (laughter leads to action) is independent of the sequence of actions. It is irrelevant whether the sequence is improvised or scripted. In clowning this is relatively easy to see, since the relationship with the audience is probably the first thing you learn. Again, I would suggest that this lesson can be equally applied to non-clown acting.

10. We then try two pairs, doing two separate scripts, simultaneously. Here you will have to adapt. It creates two levels, two worlds, two societies, potentially at odds with each other but in the same space. This proved to give rise to very rich improvisations. I think you could do two people with two different scripts. Again it’s that gap between what you expect and what you get that is a basic component of drama.

11. To the scripts are added two lines of dialogue per person. At least one must be in their native language. The lines are other actions, prepared in content as well as when they occur in the sequence. So they may happen at the same time as an action, or not. Phrases are actions like any other and need the audience laugh before being said.

12. Now we use an existing text. Any one will do. We have tried Shakespeare, Jarry, Chekhov, Mamet, it doesn’t change how the exercise works. As far as the sequence of actions goes, when we start to use a longer text, we keep the action script the same as before. It is not necessary to devise something that “fits” the text.

13. A note on taking a step backwards. This continues to apply when we work with action scripts and texts. If the penultimate action has been a line of text, and 6 seconds pass without a laugh, then taking a step back means saying that line again.

Going backwards and forwards in the script is more of a potential than something you should be doing a lot of in reality. Otherwise the whole thing becomes too chaotic for my liking. With practice, you can get a laugh whenever you need it. When the laughter is on a roll, you can just keep doing things.

14. In the workshops in Barcelona, we devised a more complex scheme, combining all these possible scripts. This could form the basis for a public presentation. Here is the scheme:
• A enters SL, crosses stage, exits SR
• B enters SL, crosses stage, exits SR
• A + B enter SR, cross stage, exit SL
• C enters SR, crosses stage, places chair CS, exits SL
• A+B+C enter SL, cross stage, one sits, stands, exit SR
• D+E enter SR, perform their script, exit SR
• F+G enter SL, perform their script which includes lines of text, exit SL
• D+E, F+G perform their scripts simultaneously, each pair enter and exit on own sides
• A+B+C perform script with text from Titus Andronicus, plus later D+E, F+G perform their scripts again, simultaneously. All exit SR
• C enters SL, crosses stage, removes chair, exits SR

15. With the MA Actor Training and Coaching students, we also experimented with the exercise in another way. We did it without looking for the audience laugh. It seems impossible but is actually just a way of allowing your actions to be transparent. There remains a sense of continuing with audience permission, as if the audience were driving the action forward, as if the spoken text came from a necessity on the part of the audience (and not on the part of the actor, which is how we often think about this).

This is something I would like to explore much more, perhaps in conjunction with other training methods. One opportunity to do this I hope to be in conjunction with Lenard Petit at the Michael Chekhov Actors Studio in April 2008.

There are other signs of audience response, of course, apart from laughter. But gasps are not quite as explicit, for example. Perhaps we use applause as a stand-in, a conventional response, necessary where the bodily response is not audible or visible enough for the actor to register it.

v. Anticipation

I originally had had no intention of developing this next area so far. Anticipation is something I have used in different exercises for some years now, and in my own mind belongs to a group of concepts, practices and experiments that in general serve to encourage improvements in improvisation, consciousness and play. The practice of anticipating is easily approached through playing ball. Instead of catching the ball as you do normally, catch it a little beforehand. That is, before you were going to catch it. This is what I mean by anticipating.. What results is that the time between the decision to act and the action itself is shortened or suppressed. It’s just a way of fooling ourselves into performing thought and action near-simultaneously.

Maybe it’s my habit of being contrary, but whenever I find something I like and that I think works, I instinctively look for its opposite as well. It often occurs that this also works. In the case of anticipation, the opposite I use is delaying, or waiting. Playing ball this way means you catch the ball a little after you were going to. You can wait as long as you like as long as the ball doesn’t touch the ground. This sometimes leads to what is known as the ‘juggler’s bow’, the catching of the (last) ball at a point just above the ground, with one knee on the ground.

Having practised anticipating and delaying, you can then choose freely, in the moment, which of these modes to use. Having just two choices has always interested me. I think that in order to improvise, or play, or indeed perform, we need to know that we have choices. But having more than two options does not change the nature of choosing, improvising, playing or performing. The restrictedness of the choice in fact makes the play easier to generate. I don’t want to go into detail on this right now, but it is worth noting. For a full and interesting discussion of the role of restrictions in improvisation, see Chris Johnston’s The Improvisation Game. Other binaries I habitually use are: closed/open body; up/down; yes/no; etc.

However, here we went on to work exclusively with anticipation. We added the requirement to take a step forward at the same time as catching the ball. This heightens the concurrence of decision (‘I’m going to catch the ball’), the action (the movement of the hands, arms, etc. towards the ball) and the consequence of action (the outcome, the way the ball sits in the hands, or runs away, plus the final posture of the body, etc.)

Next, having taken that step when catching the ball, repeat the step, and again and again, enough times to cross the circle. Then throw again. The way the first step turns out is what we call unthinking, or spontaneous, whereas we would normally say that the rest are repetitions, or conscious, or rehearsed. When working on improvisation, this binary of spontaneous/rehearsed interests me a great deal, and I would say that the two poles are equally good at seeming to be predictable or surprising. In other words, they are the same thing. But let us leave such a large subject for another time. Again!

Next in the game, we try and provoke more than one person to respond, either by pretending to throw the ball in one direction, then changing the decision, or by being ambiguous about its destination, etc. Now all those who have (spontaneously) reacted to the ball must give that first step forward, then repeat it and cross the circle. There may be one, two, three or many in action at the same time. The training in anticipation has now led us to respond immediately, manifesting our… now, how shall we phrase this?...’impulse’ (I am convinced we can find a better term to substitute this old chestnut, which is surely on its last legs) as a full action of crossing the space. I call this a full action, meaning that it has an objective which is understood in its very accomplishment.

And now the same, but the ball is invisible. Eventually, we forget about the ball as an external object, and continue to play with sending and receiving impulses and intentions. This then means that whenever you receive eye contact you will move. But of course eye contact works both ways, so both people will move. The “ball” is now two-way, and there are probably already several of them.

Now we transfer these rules to a stage area. We have a screen, behind which is an offstage area, and a chair in the middle of the onstage area. A group of 5 or 3 play the game. You can be on or off stage. Now instead of crossing the circle, you either enter or exit, whenever you get eye contact. Another option if you are on stage is to sit down when you get eye contact. And when you are sitting, your next move must be to stand up. And all those decisions are made with anticipation, i.e. moving before you would normally do so.

Is the object of the game to stay in the chair? No, the object is to play the rules. The desire here is not to stay in the chair, but to do the next action, as and when it presents itself as possible. Also, getting eye contact obliges you to take the next decision. There is no option of staying where you are.

Now we add some more objects and objectives. I like to use these concepts interchangeably. Because having an objective means using an object, for the use it was designed for. And, conversely, an object suggests or is even defined by the potential objective we can have with it.

We place onstage a table, and on it a bottle of water and an empty glass. You must use all objects normally, that is, the bottle is for pouring water into the glass, you can only drink out of the glass, not out of the bottle, and so on. These are what I call primary uses. We all know what they are, though they are problematised, of course, when we cross cultures. Clowning takes place on the one hand in this literal, material world, where things are what they are (a spade is a spade and is used for digging). This is where clowning expresses what we perceive as the reality behind the front, and can debunk, deconstruct and demolish our pretensions to civilised and polite correctness.

On the other hand, clowning may reach flights of the most absurd fancy, where anything is whatever you want it to be (a spade is not a spade and it is used for sleeping on, for example). This is where clowning invokes its right to step over any boundaries. So, what is the connection between reality and pretence? And how do we travel from one to the other? Again, I must leave these questions for later, specifically for the third term of the project, when we shall be examining profaning.

But for the moment, let us just note that in clowning we can think of object use in at least four different categories:
1. Primary use: using an object for what it was designed for, e.g. using a bucket to carry water.
2. Secondary use: using an object for what it was not designed for, but for which purpose it may easily serve, e.g. standing on an upturned bucket in order to reach a high shelf.
3. Tertiary use: using an object for what it was not designed for, nor for what it might usefully serve, therefore necessitating an imaginative leap, e.g. using a bucket as an astronaut’s helmet.
4. Contrary use: using an object in an inappropriate way or at the inappropriate time or in an inappropriate context; contrary use includes both secondary and tertiary uses, but is broader in scope as it includes the whole context, e.g. using a bucket to fill a bath tub when using the taps would be easier.

After a little practice, new elements of play present themselves, such as that of delaying or surprising the eye contact. We also see the possibility of cheating (see below).

Next we add the possibility of receiving our eye-contact-motivation from the audience. First we try it with a solo performer, then with pairs and trios. We can try this in to versions: 1. You can only receive eye-contact-motivation from the audience when you are alone on stage. And 2. Anytime.

As you must have eye contact in order to move, it appears that eye contact motivates the action. Particularly with a solo performer, it seems as though the audience becomes the performer’s brain.

A couple of basic consequences show up clearly. If you look at the audience but then don’t act, we are frustrated and hate you. But if you don’t look for a long time, when you do and then act we are rewarded for our waiting. And of course, once the rule is understood, we can cheat: act without eye contact, or not act with eye contact.

A side effect of these rules is that if you look at the audience or partner all the time, it is difficult to end and start actions. Better to get your eye contact motivation first, then while performing your action, look at your objective: if you are sitting, look at the chair, etc. In fact, this may be the best (or only?) way that we can know what your objective is. This would mean that we can define an objective as that which you are looking at. This gives the effect that when you are looking at your objective, you are engaged in your own world. Could we thus define the ‘Inner world’, the world of the fiction? And when you look at the audience or partner, you are in the outer world, the social world of reality, the reality of the theatre event.

Whilst watching these experiments and discussing their consequences, it occurred to me that these rules might go some way to analysing and explaining some of the experiences I have had as an audience of clown performance, both good and bad. Could these rules then form part of a critical vocabulary for talking about clown performance? We shall see.

For example: there is eye contact with the audience, but no action comes… and again. This seems very familiar, something I have seen in shows I haven’t enjoyed. Conversely, I’m quite happy for you to look at the wall, if you then look at us and do something new.

Lastly, we can cheat: move without eye contact or not move with eye contact. Cheating is a different thing from doing things badly. Cheating is a conscious act, perhaps, a choice. You need to choose the moment to cheat, when it will make it more fun for the audience. We discovered that the scene often develops along nicely for a while, following the rules, then often two performers find themselves looking at each other, unable to act, then there comes an escape, maybe via cheating which leads quickly into the end of the scene.

Let’s go back to that question: ‘is the object of the exercise to stay in the chair?’ Now with the more complex action sequence involving the bottle, glass and water, the question became: ‘is the aim to drink the water?’ Well, yes and no. In the Barcelona workshops, when practising this exercise, one discussion centred on whether the exercise is about conflicts of desires. My reply was that if you are seeing the work as about who can drink the water first, then you are either looking at it wrong, or playing the scene wrong. As we have seen before, the desire is born with the onset of the action, and dies with its fulfilment. There is no super-objective.

Or is there? In a sense, the existence of these particular objects suggests its own particular objective, fruit of a particular sequence: open the bottle, pour the water into the glass, drink the water. As an audience, we can see that. We are not stupid. So there is no need for the actor to re-state this. Neither is it necessary, nor desirable, to desire the water so much that any other outcome becomes completely undesirable. If we both go to sit in the chair, and one sits and the other doesn’t, then fine. There’s only one chair, so one can sit and one can stand. Where is the conflict? Surely the objective has been achieved, that of having the chair occupied? Of course, one has just failed in the fulfilment of their aim, and perhaps we have laughed at that failure. But now we move on.

So, two people can achieve an objective without dragging conflict into it or having a problem with the problem. Although we need to have desire in order to achieve an objective, those desires are discrete units of action, not sequences of cause and effect. So, when you are sitting, your only desire can be to stand. Or: you cannot desire to sit when you are off stage, as this is not an available action. Nor can you desire to enter in order to sit. Clown has useful lessons here. The clown decides each objective in the moment, and is fully engaged in each action for itself. If the actor only concerns herself with the task in hand, the rest will look after itself. But if she tries to carry the weight of a whole series of actions, she will be top heavy. Trust the audience to understand the sequences of actions and to interpret them if they wish to. But do not do their work for them by analysing your own actions. I find this removal of a kind of generalised desire on the part of the actor extremely…desirable. Maybe this is a kind of Buddhist clown, a clown without desire.

The bottle and glass seem to give us endless variations, it may even be that two clowns and two objects are a self perpetuating system, just as three objects and one clown are (something we will look at elsewhere). The two clowns are like the two hands of the solo performer. We must investigate this further. What would happen with two clowns and three objects?

vi. Dance

This last piece of work is slightly different, in more than one way. Firstly, it is something we didn’t do in the London workshops. This was partly due to time, and partly also due to the fact that it was led by Sara Pons, dance and clown teacher at the ECB. I had hoped to get Sara over to London before, but it wasn’t possible. I hope to do so in the near future. We have been collaborating over the last year on how dance and clown meet, within the context of dance/clown classes at ECB. I asked Sara to offer selected parts of that work to the workshop, over the course of one three-hour session. This fell into three parts:

1. Preparation
2. Building a vocabulary
3. Improvisations

Preparation

Two or three at a time, move across the space in a straight line, and at each step turn 90º. You travel in the same direction, from one end of the room to the other, but keep changing the direction you are facing in. Next time, the turns are 180º. Then 270º, and finally 360º. Then we use combinations, e.g. first turn 90º, second turn 180º, third turn 270º, last turn 360º.

Each person will encounter their own limits at a particular point. I feel that this work is similar to working on acrobatics, but without the physical danger. Its similarity is in the way the body gets confused in the process of trying to direct itself in new patterns. Of course, you may be already quite expert at this, in which case you will need to complicate the movement even more in order to fail. The limit is defined by failure. Those used to dance may be more practised in using the mind to control the body, the same as a musician has integrated conscious decisions with finger movements, or as we all do when speaking our native language. We need to find out where we are incapable of speaking, playing or moving.

Creating a Vocabulary

The possible ways of moving were:

• Create gaps and go through them. Gaps can be of many kinds: the space between arm and torso, or between legs, or through finger and thumb, etc. Any part of the body can travel through those spaces, large or small. This is done solo, in pairs, and as a group.
• Help other to go to the floor. This is a simple process of aiding another person to travel to the floor, helping and guiding and supporting their body en route, especially the head. First in pairs, then as a group. And then the reverse, you help someone up off the floor, in a similar way.
• One touches the ground, one doesn’t. In pairs, one person is touching the floor while the other is not. This position changes constantly. Use this to travel across the space.

Improvisations

In the improvisations, done in pairs, the only options are the three modes outlined above. You cannot use any other way of moving. The idea is to be as much as possible in that frontier zone where your movement may escape your control, as in the preparation exercise. The improvisations are done for the audience, i.e. making eye contact, and sometimes using the red nose.

The first few attempts tended to use a lot of the vocabulary, constantly, and thus appeared mechanical, unmotivated, and dull to watch. They began to work well, however, when it was realised that there is no obligation to be in constant movement, only that when you move, it must be a movement from the vocabulary. But that impulse to move cannot come from the knowledge of having a vocabulary, it must come from somewhere else. This is what differentiates this work from simply being contact improvisation, and takes it into the realm of clowning.

From where does the impulse come, then? For the moment, the best answer to that question is that the movement impulse comes from a sense of failure, of the void. This is an answer within the context of the work we are doing at the moment. It doesn’t exclude other answers, but is the most useful hypothesis right now. In this dance work, it became clear that what was just as important as moving was witnessing. Witnessing is about being present, but without the need to do anything. Clowning can very easily reach this state, as it involves a very clear and open contact between performers and the audience.

Let me try to explain with an example from these improvisations. Performer X begins to move, forming a circle with her arm, expecting performer Y to move through it. Y doesn’t move, but looks at X, at the audience, and is happy to be where she is. X shows signs of failure, but tries another form, expecting a response from Y. Y remains happy to be still. X sinks further. In this example, X is trying to make things happen, to use the vocabulary, and Y is happy to wait, and has no need to show anything. This becomes X’s failure, and it is Y’s looks, between X and the audience, that allow us, the audience, to see what is happening to X. In other words, Y is the witness that allows the audience to know what is happening to X.

In other exercises we have defined quite clearly sometimes how that decision to move may come about. It may be when eye contact is made, or when the ball comes to you, or when someone is going to hit you, or because you are sitting and next you must stand, or because there is a glass of water in your hand, and so on. I think we can put these motivations into two broad categories: the existential and the material. The existential covers those states where one feels failure, the void, the flop, the exposure of what was hidden, etc. The material covers those decisions that are made based on the reality of the space, objects and bodies, understood as having their primary use, at least at first.

In this first stage of the investigation, we have been focusing on the existential side of things, that is rooted in failure as a means to presence. It is a strange kind of presence, because failure is really a kind of absence, the absence of success. But, far from absence being a hindrance to presence, it becomes that which produces that presence. In clowning we see that presence-through-success is impossible, or nearly so, occurring only every now and again. In other words, it is usually impossible to be fully present. But rather than despairing at the impossibility of wholeness and complete presence, in clowning we accept that failure, and then that failure-acceptance leads us to success, or to presence. This is a great conjuring trick that goes right to the heart of the actor’s paradox. Clowning may offer a fast-track to finding this presence-in-absence, as it is defined by failure-as-success, and escapes the trap that the serious actor has historically sometimes fallen into of having to pretend that what he is acting is “really real”.

This dance-clown work gives us a form in which to produce very simple, but very rich, performance. This performance consists in making decisions in space, whilst conscious of the audience and the reality of what is being revealed in the process. This is a rather tortuous definition, but it is an attempt to sum up just what it is we are looking for. I think that this can be defined as dance, and it can be defined as clown, and, of course, as theatre. I think there is a possibility of understanding and defining theatre (or performance, if you prefer) from the perspective of clowning. That, by understanding how clowning works, we can understand better how theatre in general works. And that this is possible because clowning is, simply, theatre. Or dance.

Part 3: What Next?

All sessions have been recorded on video by Mark Morreau or myself. Mark is a former circus performer and a well-established video maker and website creator, and has worked for numerous circus and other performers. I am now in the process of re-viewing the footage. I have also created a new section on my own website to cover the project. This includes documentation in text, image and video, and a blog where all can discuss the issues.

Other activity underway includes:

Editing of Video and Photos. The process of writing these notes has included looking at the video recordings of the workshops, and along the way I have begun to select sequences that interest me. I will now start producing an edited version, viewable by participants and all interested parties. I have also begun extracting still images from the videos. Photos taken during the Barcelona workshop are being prepared as part of the design of a short publicity booklet intended to present the project as whole.

Establishing other working groups. I hope to give a workshop in April 2008 in New York (at the Michael Chekhov Actors Studio, in collaboration with Lenard Petit) and in May or June in St. Petersburg (in collaboration with Pezo Theatre Company).

Proposals to conferences. Sent or underway to CETT and to the International Festival-Fair “Theatre Methods 08: Between Tradition and Contemporaneity” (July, Latvia).

Contact with professionals. I have started discussions with various professionals, on different means of collaboration with the project. These include: Barry Grantham (eccentric dance),Diana Campbell Jewitt (folk theatre), Bill Beeman (specialist in Iranian popular theatre), and several London-based clown teachers. I am compiling a mailing list of interested academics and practitioners, in order to disseminate updates of the project.

Alumni. I have begun discussions with Caroline Clark at CSSD about how to involve alumni. So far we have talked about how to target alumni that may be interested, and also about finding “big name” alumni to pledge their support, if only in name. This could be a useful avenue to explore, with the aim of bringing the investigation into the public arena.

Arts Council. I have begun discussions with Chenine Bhathena at the Arts Council about the feasibility of funding a parallel performance project. This would enable paid rehearsals at a later stage, to enable professional work to be shown, with the possibility of a permanent company being born out of the whole process.

Teaching at CSSD. I shall be teaching the Classical Acting, Puppetry and Screen Acting students this term, as well as hopefully a session with the MA Writing students.

Participants and Project Partners. A relationship has already begun to emerge between the workshops at CSSD and ECB, as is evidenced in the way work has spilled over from one place to the next. One London participant attended the Barcelona workshops, and it is hoped that two Barcelona participants will travel to St. Petersburg to take part in the planned workshop in spring 2008. Two other participants from Barcelona also intend attending some of the next London sessions. In both groups the cultural mix is fairly varied. By country of origin, they are:

In London: UK 8, Canada 1, USA 1, Colombia 1, Spain 3, Greece 1.
In Barcelona: Spain 6, Spain/Germany 1, Germany/Russia 1, Greece 1, Brazil 2.

A note on the Barcelona participants: the original project description envisaged that they would all have completed a year’s clown training. This was approximately the case, though some have done less and some more. Other criteria that guided my choice (for they were all invited to participate by me) was that I was looking for performers who already had some artistic integrity and personality of their own. A kind of artistic maturity, you could call it. I think this comes partly with experience, but more importantly it is something that some create whilst others do not. Members of this workshop therefore had strong personalities as performers, with wide differences between them. I intuitively felt this would be stimulating and productive for what I want to investigate. After the workshop, I now feel this more clearly, and that it is a pointer towards a way of working with a group of performers that might interest me. That way would be moving away from ensemble work as it has been thought of, or the moulding of a style. At any rate, this is something to keep an eye on as we progress.

We should also consider in this equation the roles of the workshops given on regular courses at CSSD. These are not some kind of separate one-way process. Whilst maintaining their nature as part of clearly programmed courses of study, they are also already proving to be vital laboratories in the context of my own investigation. Different things can be explored in the context of Actor Training students than can be with Classical students. Varying hypotheses are born and tested in these varying contexts. In fact, it would be wise to keep under continual review the whole network of relationships between workshop groups.

International Clown Research Project

2007-11-27T01:35:00.000+01:00

In October 2007 the International Clown Research Project got under way at Central School of Speech and Drama, London. We have just completed the first series of workshops, and it's now time to reflect on the experience, view the videos, and look ahead to the next sessions, which will be taking place in Barcelona in December.

The project is funded as a Creative Fellowship at Central, with project partners such as the Escola de Clown de Barcelona, Madrid International Workshop Festival and the London International Workshop Fetival. As well as the workshops in London and Barcelona over the three-year period, I am planning groups in New York (hopefully in conjunction with the Michael Chekhov Actors Studio) and in St. Petersburg (in collaboration with Pejo Theatre Company).

And so I leave this thread open to anyone, participant or not, to discuss the issues being raised as we begin to get a feel for what this project can be over the coming years.

2007-01-21T13:45:00.001+01:00

Welcome to ClownBlog. I started this blog as a way of stimulating discussion worldwide on the subject of clown. It’s a serious subject but it’s hard to find serious discussion about it on the web. I’m not against forums that allow you to swap information on clown shoes, but I’d like to address other concerns, like:

What is clown in our contemporary world? More and more people seem to be turning to clowning as a kind of answer to difficult questions, in health, politics and spiritually. 50 years ago this would have been unthinkable. So, what’s going on?

(A note on language: I will endeavour to publish as much as possible in English and in Spanish. Comments and discussions in French and Catalan are also very welcome, but I am unable to moderate in other languages.)

Jon Davison

Bienvenidos a ClownBlog. He empezado este blog para poder estimular la discusión mundial del tema del clown. Es un tema serio pero es difícil encontrar algo serio sobre el clown en la web. No estoy en contra de los foros que te permiten intercambiar información sobre los zapatos de payaso, pero me gustaría hablar de otras cosas, como:

¿Qué es el clown contemporáneo? Cada vez más parece que la gente mira al clown para responder a unas preguntas complicadas, en la salud, la política y la espiritualidad. Hace 50 años esto habría sido impensable. Entonces, ¿qué pasa?

(Una nota sobre los idiomas: intentaré publicar lo más posible en inglés y español. También los comentarios y discusiones en francés y catalán están bienvenidos, pero no puedo moderar en otros idiomas.)

Jon Davison