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.

Clown Devising Workshop

Every Thursday 6.30-8.30pm
at Apiary Studios

Coming soon! - please let me know if you are interested in coming to this. We will start soon: once we have enough people.

Jon Davison

London Clown School

info@jondavison.net

Following on from the popular success of the weekly clown workshop on Mondays (we've only missed one Monday since starting in April last year) I am happy to announce a new opportunity for all to develop their clowning.

The Monday class has been covering everything from discovering the joy of being stupid in front of others to the work of coming up with workable ideas for performing in public.
There's so much to do in such a short time that I've decided to open up a new class to focus on the devising aspects of clowning, leaving Mondays freer to work on the dynamics of clowning and enjoying your own stupidity and thereby making others laugh. That doesn't mean there will be no devising at all on Mondays, nor that Thursdays will ignore the essential need to actually perform your material as stupidly and funnily as possible. But it will allow for some more in depth work to take place in both areas.

The need for training in devising clown material

It’s all very well experiencing clowning in a workshop situation, where the teacher sets up the frame and conditions, but quite another matter when you come to perform in front of audiences out there in public. Learning the dynamics of clowning won’t be enough. Something else is required. Other kinds of comic performers habitually spend a lot of time and effort on ‘material’. Stand-up comedians worry over joke structure, sketch comedians search for strong premises for their ideas. Why should clowns be different? Popular misconceptions suppose that clowns just get up there and are funny just by being true to their inner selves. But looking inside yourself won’t really save you.

There are countless practical ways of devising material appropriate for your clowning. Awareness of and understanding of these is far preferable to just hoping the clown you ‘found’ will survive the real stage situation. These forms and structures of clown material also derive from simple notions of what clowns actually do. At the moment, my favourite terms for what clowns do are ‘wrongness’, the ‘unthinkable’, the ‘unexpected’ and the ‘obvious’.

This workshop is ongoing, drop in, continuous, unending - basically every week - so you can come regularly or occasionally or just once. It works for different kinds of people: you might have just started clowning and want to try performing in public; you might want to get back to it after a time away, or revisit your material and improve it or change it.

So now you will be able to dedicate even more time to clowning. Come to both days or just one. It's up to you.

Time: Thursdays 6.30 – 8.30pm
Venue: Apiary Studios, 458 Hackney Road, London E2 9EG http://www.apiarystudios.org/
Cost: Single class £15; or £50 for four classes paid in advance; or £60 for five classes paid in advance; or £110 for ten classes paid in advance

Coming soon! Clown Studies

This will be the first of its kind. I started running these classes way back in 2006 when we opened the Barcelona clown school. It felt like an innovation then. No one was really teaching clown history or theory or analysis. To me it seemed self-evident that thinking and knowing about clowning could benefit your performing. Or that it could be a worthwhile study in itself.

Ten years later, and still no one is offering clown studies in this way, anywhere, as far as I am aware: neither in private clown schools nor in universities, despite all their talk of embracing ‘popular performance’.

I flirted with the academy for a number of years (aside from my experience setting up clown workshops myself), teaching and researching at high-level drama schools which had become part of the university system: the Institut del Teatre in Spain and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in Britain. I learned much from my students in Barcelona and had great opportunities to research in London. But I realise that the academy is destined to remain a dead end as far clowning goes, insofar as no one is likely to take the subject seriously enough at an institutional level.

So after years of trying to forge a niche for clowning, either through systematising its teaching or by trying to set up an MA in clowning, I now prefer to put my energies into my independent teaching. Over the last year, the London Clown School Monday workshop has become well-established. We haven't missed a week, not even for Xmas. People come regularly or occasionally, and there is always a mix of old and new faces. Each participant gets to explore as they wish, whether it's discovering the joy of being stupid in front of others, or preparing performance material to try out in public. One of the many advantages of this format is that it avoids the crushingly standardised control of education today with its targets, aims and objectives. So there’s not a hint of "by the end of this course you will have learned x". As a teacher, it’s not my business to bet on what you may learn, nor when you may learn it.

So, now it’s time to offer, in a similar sustained way, an opportunity to explore the other side: the history, theory and analysis of clowning. Every week I receive requests from students needing advice, guidance and tuition for their projects, dissertations and theses investigating clowning. It's hardly surprising, given universities' long-term failure to invest in clowning.

This new initiative will offer a programme of studies in 2 formats:  

- a weekly drop-in class held in London 

- an online class, also following a weekly pattern

I’ll also continue to offer one-to-one tutoring, guidance or supervision either in person or online.

Clown Studies Syllabus

This falls into four broad areas: theory, history, analysis and personal research project.

Theory

General questions - What is clown? What is funny? How can we talk about clown? What is clown’s relationship to comedy? to humour? How do we know what clowns are? What are they for?

History

What is clown’s history? How are clowns specific to their time and place? Why do different meanings become attached to clowns according to their time and place? What is a Shakespearean clown? A circus clown? An auguste clown? A personal clown?

Analysis

Using practical observation of the work of clown performers, live or on video/film, contemporary or historical, how can we talk about them? What is the vocabulary of the clown critic? How can we answer the question ‘why is this (not) funny?’

Projects

Compiling a short project on a theme of your choice, in any presentation format (except clown performance itself) that can be stored or recorded for future clown students to consult.

Provisional expressions of interest:

Please get in touch if you are interested in any of these options and I will keep you posted on developments.

Best wishes,

Jon Davison

London Clown School

www.jondavison.net

info@jondavison.net

Clown Training

I don’t subscribe to theories of clown as mask, as play, as physical theatre, as religion, as anything except what it is: clown. Clown is very simple. At most, it is an attitude. An attitude to life, to oneself, to the world. We don’t need techniques, or methods, or psychology, or safe environments, or anything except a desire to invert our habitual fear of ridicule into pleasure in self-ridicule, and to use it to make others laugh.

I don’t like to use too many games, exercises, techniques. These are only ways of fooling us into thinking we are working hard. I prefer just to start. To relate. To look. To listen. To lead students along a path that lets them enjoy their own stupidity and exposing it to their friends.

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 is to turn failure into success, fear into laughter, suffering into joy. We don’t need to change ourselves, just look at it all with 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.

Clown Training often finds itself going in a completely different direction to orthodox concepts of what education is, such as the contemporary obsessions with aims and objectives, learning strategies and pathways, levels and units, achieving potential or acquiring skills. It’s more a kind of anti-education, blurring truth and pretence, intelligence and stupidity, knowledge and ignorance.

Clown Devising at "Cal Clown"

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.