How to survive as a clown

 How to survive as a clown. This is what I've been doing all my adult life and I'm still doing it.

 

I have spent my whole adult life (40+ years) exploring what clowning is, how it works, how to do it, how to learn it, what it means and what it is for. 

I started performing by accident, and felt it had to be my vocation, without knowing why. 

Then I started studying it, in order to understand how and the why what I was doing was clowning. 

I started teaching it when I was a student, in order to try and work out how to do it better. 

I started researching its history, in order to understand why many of the things I had been told about clowning were wrong, and didn’t work. 

Today, I am still dedicated to exploring this paradoxical and ubiquitous artform which is so often denigrated as low yet so often has pretensions to wisdom. As one of my students recently suggested, clowns are anthropologists, we study humans.

 

My projects include:

-          Collaborate practical research with other clown performers and teachers worldwide

-          Large-scale performances aimed at the widest range of audiences

-          Solo clown acts

-          Directing, mentoring and tutoring clown artists

-          Teaching worldwide, in universities, drama schools, and all kinds of communities

-          Writing books about clowns and clowning, their history and variety across cultures

 

As I grew up and continue to live in a society and culture where everything is monetised, all this exploratory behaviour has come at a cost. 

Sometimes I get paid to do it (teaching, mostly, and sometimes performing). Sometimes I don’t (research, most writing, some performing). On rare occasions, I’ve been paid to think about clowns and clowning (a three-year research fellowship at Central School of Speech and Drama). 

At other times, the research happens under cover of teaching, which for me is always exploratory and asking the question ‘how do we do this thing called clowning?’ and never ‘ok, this is how you do it’. Many times, the cover is blown and the institution prefers to employ someone who will do the latter. But sometimes, I get lucky. 

There have been times when money is tight, but then there is always the street. And again the same question: ‘how to do this thing called clowning … in the street?’ 

Sometimes, people and places are so kind as to offer their resources at little cost. The first instinct when someone gives you something cheap is to offer them more in return. And then the collaborations and the explorations blossom even more. But sometimes, people think that artists are a good source of hire income, whilst simultaneously expecting them to offer their experience cheaply, in the name of accessibility.   

Maybe we can’t instantly transform our monetised societies into kinder places where everyone can get on with doing what they are good at in peace and with the security of having their basic needs met. Maybe we can’t suddenly make clowning sacred instead of precarious. But we can keep looking for better ways.

Mickey Mouse and Julius Caesar, Two Clowns Busking on the South Bank, London

Looking for a busking pitch on the South Bank, where officially permission must be sought from the owners of this privately owned piece of land. But not getting any reply from the owners, it's a question of trial and error.  Next to a couple of fancy human statues who have put a lot of work into their costumes we find the ubiquitous Mickey Mouse. Everyone wearing a Mickey Mouse costume that I've seen seems to have the same gestural language. I don't just mean that they all wave, but that they also all have the same kind of shuffling movement, combined with a lack of fixed points probably brought on by the way the weight of the costume is distributed. In contrast, the posh statues have a mime-trained look, displaying their technique with pride. Not being a fan anymore of such clean-lined gestuality (I had a good year doing mime in the Theatre Jeune de Narbonne, partly as my French wasn't good enough to speak on stage) I find I am not prejudiced aesthetically in favour of either Mickey or Julius Caesar. They appear to me as equal contestants, and my impression is that they both work on the same fundamental principles. Leaving aside quesitons of aesthetic superiority, people are attracted to Mickey and Julius becaue of .... what is it exactly? The strangeness of these other-worldly beings, arrived from another world, the world of the dead, or the never having been born? Mythical incarnations, sent to bless, or to scare us. Isn't it that essentially what makes them tick? My own field, clowning, surely then comes into the same category. Appear as a clown, and you are a clown. Let us place two clowns side by side. One, who has trained with several world-reknowned teachers, spending large sums on workshops to gurus who sometimes deliver and sometimes do not, travelling internationally to improve his/her understanding and practice of clowning, seeking out the truth of their own vulnerability in the moment, exposing their inner clown to the audience, and costumed thoughfully, drawing on ocntemporary and historical fahions of clowning, but always looking for what makes them as an individual work best and appear mot ridiculous. The other, costumed in an off-the-peg multi-coloured, synthetic-fabric outfit, no training, no thought. Both clowns.

Today, I don't fancy competing with the statues, I've come to play music, so I choose the other side of Hungerford Bridge, placed strategically to allow viewing and litening from those descending the bridge, those in the terraces outside the Royal Festival Hall, and anyone else strolling along the river on this sunny-ish lunchtime. It's the ideal spot, there's enough space not to annoy anyone who doesn't want to listen, but excellent sightlines. The only drawback is it isn't permitted here, so I last half an hour at most. Still, it's worth it for the positive reactions from those who frequent these spaces dedicated to high art. They are generally an appreciative and discerning audience. I wonder if they prefer Mickey or Caesar?