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.

The Deconstruction of Clowning

Clowns frequently claim to access authenticity by unmasking social conventions or exposing the workings of performance genres, thus presuming power within society as taboo-breakers and truth-tellers.

Contemporary clown’s version of this tale stresses the dynamics of the ‘flop’ as the gateway to such truth. The performer, admitting failure to convince the audience of his/her competence, seems thereby to reveal a reality behind the mask of convention. By owning one’s flops, one is identified with ‘truth’, since to make a mistake must, by definition, be unintentional (i.e. they escape manipulation).

However, the professionalisation of clowning indicates that this unintentionality is in fact willed, practised and skilled. The ‘flop’ is an ‘authenticity-effect’ which stages ‘reality’. Given that clowns habitually admit to conventions, how might one declare this particular ‘truth-trick’?

Would such a ‘deconstructed clowning’ still seem like clowning and give the same pleasure as that staging of the authentic which clowns presume to do?

‘The Deconstruction of Clowning’ is a performance and discussion which takes place on Thursday 3rd October at 7pm and Friday 4th October at 2pm and 6pm, at Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

http://www.collisionscentral.com/jon-davison/

www.jondavison.net

Jon Davison has been a clown performer, teacher, director and writer for the last 30 years. He is co-Director of Studies at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona and a former AHRC-funded Creative Fellow at CSSD. He has performed at festivals, theatres, tents, streets and bars throughout Europe. His first book, ‘Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice’ was published in 2013 by Palgrave Macmillan, for whom he is now preparing a ‘Clown Theory and Practice’ on clown training.

Please visit our Contact and Bookings page for further information on how to book your free ticket.

If this works, the live video will be available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo4i4yt25ts

Review: "The Art of Clowning", by Eli Simon

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.