How did this come about? Part 2

I’ve been meaning to get around to updating my story for a while now. Seems like 14 years have passed since I last attempted to make sense of the path I have travelled! Ah well, maybe it’s a good time to assess those years? Because, right now, things don’t make a lot of sense.

Shortly after writing up that last account, in Barcelona in 2005, I embarked on a new phase, prompted by a desire for a more stable pattern of work, which I hoped I would discover by returning to Britain, where I imagined teaching contracts would last more than the stipulated one-year maximum available in the Spanish system. The problem being, that in Catalonia, pretty much all the staff teaching performance or acting were (and probably still are) from the same generation. That generation sharpened their craft in the late years of the dictatorship, and belong to a heritage of cultural resistance that chimed with Catalanist national identity. As the law stated that a public institution must employ half its staff on permanent contracts, with the other half on one-year contracts, almost all the for-life posts were held by those who would all retire around the same time, being of similar age. I didn’t want to wait around another 20 years for my chance. However, forewarned by friends back in Britain that times had changed and in order to get a teaching job I’d now need a postgraduate qualification, I got myself a place on the MA in Drama by Practice-as-Research at Kent university. The one-year course proved ideal. I managed to maintain my residency in Barcelona while popping over for the required lectures: just one a week for 6 weeks or so, funding my trip with busking on Brick Lane each Sunday during the market, which back then was a joyous and chaotic affair, just before the grip of gentrification bleached the life out of the area. I was housed as a guest at an also slightly chaotic community of 17 people on the corner of Bethnal Green Road, a haven of relative peace which had survived since its initial founding back in the 80s as a Quaker initiative, now sadly dissolved under the pressure of grotesquely raised rents across much of East London, which has seen the disappearance not only of affordable housing, but of affordable spaces for artists to work in. The rets of my MA course was like a mini-PhD, under the marvellous supervision of Olly Double, stand-up comedian and expert on comedy past and present. It was an absolute joy to dedicate that year to researching how clowns have historically used prosthetics and amputations to make their work, and it culminated in a one-man show with a dozen or so recreated examples. I still make good use of my three-legged act and the extending arms, and would love to revisit the floating head illusion one day, too.

By chance, whilst in London during that period, I noticed my old lecturer in theatre from Nottingham, Simon Shepherd, was giving an open talk at Queen Mary University. To be honest, the topic didn’t draw me, but I was curious enough to go along and have a chat with someone I hadn’t seen for a couple of decades. That brief post-talk conversation laid the ground for the next step: I would be applying for one of the new ‘Creative Fellowships’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, designed to support the re-entry of artists into the academy. And it would be hosted at Simon’s current place of work Central School of Speech and Drama. Having been accepted as the school’s very first Creative Fellow, I embarked on a three-year salaried period of investigation, exploring the current state of clown training in the wider context of actor training. It felt like the plan might be working out: I had a job, a full-time one. I immediately spent my first month’s salary on all the books I hadn’t been able to buy over the last several years. (Still haven’t read them all.) I became a permanent member of the Bethnal Green community, whilst continuing to share my time between London and Barcelona. My split life seemed to fuse. Central seemed to resemble the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona, my previous pace of work. Both were dedicated to training actors. Yet a culture shock awaited me…

Clown wordlists / keywords

There are many clown teachers. There are many methods. They do not agree.  Here is a quick way to get an idea of my approach:

Words I use: funny, laughter, do, action, task, object, clown, clowns, clown-like, clown-ish, gag, number, act, exercise, pretend, simple, fake, real, why, feel, emotion, think, human, surprise, impact, intrude, disrupt, contradict, shame, love, audience, script, wrong, stupid, look, friend, plan, experiment, science, attention, drama, dynamics, mechanics, conversation, skill, repertoire, fear, ridiculous, conditioning, cultivate, aware, speak, humble, shit, …

Words I don’t use: spontaneous, authentic, sacred, self, inner, mask, truth, the clown, improvisation, play, game, high stakes, universal, difficult, wisdom, transform, art, collaborate, physical, spiritual, problem, status, ensemble, dark, tragic, contemporary, traditional, rule, creative, imagination, fiction, message, personal, mime, my clown, your clown, vulnerability, …

Clown Universals?

Having just returned from teaching a five-day workshop in Canada, where there are many clown teachers and methods but one rather dominant one, I wonder whether we should stop talking about 'The Clown'?

As the process of writing thie Clowning Workbook advances, sometimes apace, sometimes snail-like, the thoughts refine and the questions expand and a larger picture starts to come into view: what is the practical output of training and how deeply does it reflect our assumptions about what those outputs should mean?

Clown Universals?

I’ve spent a lot of time looking for them, well, looking to see if there are any, testing the ones I’ve found a lot of people subscribe to, but it always happens that as soon as you think there might be something we can agree on, up crops a clown example that contradicts what looks like a universal principle. I still think it’s worth searching for principles, though, underlying structures that we can use to understand how clown/clowns/clowning happens. But those underlying structures are always going to be determined by each person’s own starting point, your own assumptions about the world and what is important, your own search for meaning generally, I suppose. So there will be many different versions depending on your own cultural background (clowns differ greatly across cultures in how they manifest), your own philosophical standpoint (whether that’s explicit or not) and what you believe in. Personally, I try and keep my principles simple, and they are always up for revision. At the moment, what I find most useful is to work with an assumption that clowns are figures which offer themselves as laughter-objects. So a clown is someone we are invited to laugh at, simply. Of course, those who believe clowns don’t have to be funny ill disagree with me, so I won’t be claiming to have defined all clowns/clowning/clown. The idea of the clown as object-of-laughter means that it is irrelevant whether this happens through means of reproduction of repertory or standard material/acts/gags, or by means of response in-the-moment to an audience, or by both means simultaneously (my preferred way). That’s why, for me, the article in this thread doesn’t help me at all, as it is looking for principles in the wrong place in my view. It is looking to define the clown through those aspects which seem to be immediate and in the present, but for me that leads down to a dead-end, one that I have got stuck in myself in the past. The way to get out of those dead-ends, I think, is to be brave and question whether the results are really good or not, or reliable, and not to rely on a belief that one has discovered the ‘truth’. Thinking that one has discovered the truth is, of course, very tempting, and seems to be prevalent in some clowning practice, perhaps due to the large impact that studying/experiencing clowning can have on a person at a subjective level, especially in the early encounters with it. This subjective experience might lead to placing quite a lot of stock in the feeling that the clown can be personally transformative, and therefore a path to knowledge and wisdom. Which it can be, but then again so can pretty much any human endeavour. So I would be suspicious of claims to sacredness or wisdom that set clowns/clown/clowning apart or above other human activities, and the idea of universality often accompanies the mindset of ‘wisdom’.