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
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Saturday, 9 October 2010
Clown Training Today: an historical survey
(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.
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 FratelliniOn 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 PopovBut 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 DavisonThe 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.
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
SCLOWNS present "The Spaghetti Horse"
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
Thursday, 20 May 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Summer Intensive Clown Course
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
Thursday, 29 April 2010
First Thoughts about the End
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…
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…
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Clown Prosthetics and Amputations
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)
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)
Monday, 29 March 2010
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.
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.
Monday, 18 January 2010
Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, Week 11, 12-15/01/10
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.
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.
Friday, 18 December 2009
Clown Workshop at Shakespeare’s Globe, 16/12/09
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.
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.
Thursday, 17 December 2009
Clown Workshops: how do they work?
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.
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.
Friday, 11 December 2009
Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 10, 10/12/09
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.
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.
Friday, 4 December 2009
Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 9, 3/12/09
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.
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.
Sunday, 29 November 2009
Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 8, 26/11/09
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.
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.
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.
Friday, 20 November 2009
Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 7, 19/11/09
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.
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.
Friday, 13 November 2009
Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 6, 12/11/09
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.
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:
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.
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 biographer, John A. McKivern, gives specific details:
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?
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:
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.
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.
Despite this sudden craze, augusts are regarded by (white-face) clowns as grossly inferior. Edouard de Perrodil, in Monsieur Clown (1889), gave this warning:
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:
So what kind of clown is this august? He starts as the clown dressed as a citizen, the parody of the Ringmaster.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Friday, 6 November 2009
Clown Research Workshop, Year 3, No. 5, 5/11/09
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:
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.
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.
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