Clown Training: A Practical Guide 9781350363526, 9781137387578

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Acknowledgements

As is clear from the text of this book, my own learning about how to teach clowning owes much to those who have both taught me and been taught by me, as well as all those clown teachers I have met as a collaborator, a translator, an observer or a coach along the way. To all of you who have contributed in such ways, I owe great thanks, and especially to the following: staff and students at Fool Time Circus School 1989–92, especially Franki Anderson and Guy Dartnell; Philippe Gaulier and my class companions at the École Philippe Gaulier in London 1992–3; staff and students in Barcelona at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona, Col.legi del Teatre de Barcelona and El Timbal, and especially those who gave up their time and energy outside classes to help research and document further (Alba Pujol, Mercè Solé, Marga Socies, Roger Casamajor, Laura Burgaya, Eugeni Roig, Silvia Vich, Paula Ibáñez, Sandra Aurora, Maria Stoyanova, Sara Pons, Marta Serena, Helena Otaegui and many others); students at La Cuina Teatre in Sant Feliu; Sonrisa Médica in Palma, Mallorca; Simon Shepherd, Andy Lavender, Caitlin Adams and Franc Chamberlain for their support for my research at RCSSD in London which began in 2007; Farah KarimCooper for the opportunity to teach clowning on the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe; and Clara Cenoz, of Companyia d’Idiotes and the Barcelona Clown School, together with the many teachers and students over the years since the latter’s foundation in 2006. And finally, to my companions in life and clowning, for all their patience and support, Bi Pérez and Jenny the dog. J.D. June 2015

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Introduction

This book is conceived in a simple format: I have merely aimed to revisit what happens when I teach clowning, and instead of actually teaching real people in a real space, write it down in more or less the same order as it would have happened in that teaching. So the written word stands in for actions, thoughts, speech and feelings which occur during the teaching of clowning. I have not just wanted to write down the instructions and ­explanations I  give to students, so that others may use those exercises, although that is a prime aim of the book, of course. Nor have I limited myself to reflecting upon the aims, objectives and reasoning behind the exercises and activities. I include also my thoughts and reflections which occur as I am teaching, some of which I share with students and some of which I keep to myself, as well as my own feelings and responses to the teaching and learning process as it unfolds. These might include anything from self-questioning about the effectiveness of an exercise to the philosophical assumptions or values behind doing a particular exercise. In writing all this down, inevitably the language I use matches fairly closely the language of class. A description of an exercise, intended to get students doing it correctly as swiftly as possible, will normally be in simple language: direct, imperative, instructional. The questioning and reflecting upon clown exercises which happens just after trying them or seeing others try them is mostly expressed in similarly urgent language. Even my own inner thoughts and notes to myself take such a form. Perhaps this is due to the nature of clowning itself: active, impulsive, often shocking or surprising. In any case, this is the language of this book. In keeping with this style, I have kept references and endnotes to an absolute minimum. Since I am not one who benefits from planning things architecturally, by which I mean deciding beforehand upon a structure into which I will then place the elements which build into something the reader can digest – I have elected to allow those varying strands (instructions, thoughts, ­descriptions of action, reflections) to emerge as and when they seem appropriate, which again reflects my teaching method. Sometimes an exercise will play out almost identically to the way it happened the last time I taught it, beginning with an explanation of how to do it, followed by all the students ­trying it, and ending with some conclusions and discussions. It’s a classical ­educational format: explain what you’re going to do, do it, reflect on it. But many times this linear approach is interrupted, by unexpected actions, thoughts or desires. An exercise might suddenly suggest a new way of doing it, or a further variation. A group of students might find an 1

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e­ xercise difficult, useless or plain boring, leading to abandoning the work and setting off onto something contrasting and refreshing. Thoughts and ideas might take over, leading to discussions right in the middle of the doing of an exercise. Or the general mood might be so overwhelmingly not right for the lesson plan of that day that the focus becomes how we are feeling rather than those supposedly neutral and objective teaching methods we call ‘exercises’, as if they were merely like physical limbering up which can be done mechanically and regardless of our state of mind and soul. This is a book, then, which aims to be both highly practical and also theoretical, in the way that I experience practice and theory – together. By ‘theory’ I simply mean the common activity which we all engage in whenever we are doing something: thinking about what we are doing, about why we are doing it, about how other people are doing it, or have done it in the past, or about how we might do it, or should do it, in the future. What is ordered, though, is the sequence of exercises, and the way they are grouped. This matches the way I employ them in actual teaching. Not all the exercises in any one section or chapter here will be used in any given course, perhaps, but the concepts and learning processes each ­section addresses will mostly happen in the order in which they appear in this book. Of course, another teacher might do them in entirely another order, or would do entirely different things altogether. This book has no presumption to speak for all clown teachers. Much as in the world of acting in general, clown teachers tend to have very individual ways of doing things. We are frequently moved to make claims for our own approach as being more ­effective than others; to defend or attack particular ways of conceiving of and teaching, and indeed performing, the clown. Sometimes, particularly influential figures in the world of clown teaching find themselves at the centre of heated disputes about the relative merits of specific approaches. Just why this should occur is an interesting question, but it is not one to which I shall be trying to find an answer in this current book. And still less would I presume to offer a clown teaching manual which presented itself as some kind of objective textbook of a generally accepted method. Such a thing just does not exist, and it is advisable that the reader, and the student or teacher of clowning, accept this state of affairs from the outset. This book, then, offers my own particular thoughts, experiences and teaching practice of the last couple of decades, which includes when my own passionate excitement about some aspect of clowning leads me to make large claims for it. The reader will judge whether it is a book more useful as a practical tool for others or more as an insight into the mind of a teacher. From where I’m standing, those two things are inseparable. As the philosopher Montaigne would have said, we are all perhaps our own subject of study. The exercises and games I describe are all ones I currently use frequently. In that sense they are up to date, but they come, together with my ­reflections, from a whole range of sources and periods in my clown training career, not only as a teacher and a student, but also in my roles as translator/­interpreter,

Introduction

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observer/assessor, course leader/employer or researcher/historian of clown teachers and their teaching. The chapters of the book are divided in concordance with the broad concepts and categories used to guide myself through a course of clowning, particularly when that course involves a large number of hours, which is my most common experience in recent years, teaching on one-month full-time residential courses developed together with Clara Cenoz at the Barcelona Clown School, comprising a total of 200 contact hours. If I had written the book some years ago, before the founding of the school in 2006, those categories would have been a little different, something which was clearly apparent to me when I revisited a first draft for such a book which had lain on the shelf for 15 years or so. The chapters are themselves grouped into two sections. The first part of the book deals with what I am calling ‘training’, the second with ‘devising’. This division is not cut and dried by any means. It partly arises for historical reasons. The ‘training’ section consists primarily of games and exercises designed to train the student in certain aspects of clown performing. The emphasis is on how the individual can explore and discover how they can do the job of performing clown on stage. The focus is on the unique, in-the-moment experience of the individual in the act of performing. This kind of performer training is fairly dominant today across a wide range of performer training, including acting and even dance. The second section focuses on a rather neglected area in clown training, which is how one can compose, devise or otherwise create material for clown performance. This is a less personalised kind of education, but one which must ultimately re-encounter the more individualised performer-based experience of the first section in order to be of use to a clown performer. It is in some ways more akin to the ‘old-school’ systems of apprenticeship, or learning from how others before you have done it. The chapters of Part I, as I have mentioned, go in order of some fundamental concepts I use to guide myself through a course of study. This starts with a kind of induction into ‘play and pleasure’, experienced for its own sake without worrying about audiences or performing as such. Rediscovering the ‘play instinct’ is often the first key to training in clown. The next chapter brings that playfulness into contact with the audience, which is what marks playing games off from performing. It also brings into focus the particular ways the clown has of relating to an audience. That relationship is explored in depth in Chapter 3, where games are left behind and formal exercises take their place, designed to lead the student to an embodied understanding of actually clowning in front of spectators. A shorter chapter, the Epilogue to Part I, considers how this awareness of yourself as clown may be enhanced through the use of the clown nose or hat. Part II begins with Chapter 5, an extensive survey of ways in which bits of clown action and material can be created, encouraging ways of thinking which will be most productive when you come to put these bits together,

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as in Chapter 6, to structure longer pieces of performance. Chapter 7 is an attempt to explore ways of making whole clown shows, via case studies of some of my own devising workshops. The final section, an epilogue to Part II, looks at some of the consequences of taking this clown out into the world beyond the classroom, applying it, as it were, to a variety of settings: from streets to hospitals. This way of organising the exercises and other material in the book reflects, as I have mentioned, my own practical teaching experience, and much of that material was developed or evolved as a part of that teaching. But much of it has a previous history. The origins of particular training exercises and exactly why a clown teacher uses one rather than another is complex. Even if you remember your first encounter with an exercise, you may remain entirely unaware of its history before that moment. Wherever possible, I have acknowledged sources other than my own classes for some exercises. Some I remember being taught by a particular teacher, although some I do not remember or maybe even remember incorrectly. Even when my memory serves me well, the teacher I learned it from may have claimed it but forgotten that they got it from someone else. Ownership is thus hard to ascribe, and is ultimately not the point. Such is an oral tradition, which clowning still is, and that includes its teaching. Most clown knowledge is passed on orally. Teachers generally today focus exclusively on the workshop as the means to impart knowledge. The kind of memory which is important here is a memory in the body, the feelings, the imagination and the impulses of the individual. Some of the exercises come from the years in the early 1990s when I was running workshops in Barcelona and when I was influenced by improvisation concerns, fresh from my recent training with Guy Dartnell, Frank Anderson and Jonathan Kay. Others come from when I was searching for a simplified approach to clown teaching, once I had established myself as a teacher of clowning at the Institut del Teatre and other drama schools in Barcelona in the late 1990s. Others come from my formal research period at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (RCSSD) in the late 2000s, and which became embedded in the one- and two-month residential courses at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona (Barcelona Clown School). These included practices which were modified in response to what I saw as the failings of clown training (and actor training more generally) based on games, which I encountered on returning to Britain. Also from this period comes much of the work on devising when I was wrestling with the limits of devising which relied too heavily on, often vague, notions of improvisation. I started taking notes from around 1989, as a student of clown at Fool Time Circus School. At the same time, I started teaching, as part of an experimental clown group, then to others in Barcelona from 1994 onwards. I also spent a lot of time devising new ways to train myself in clown improvisation for the impro show I performed between 1991 and 1992. It never seemed odd to me to be learning and teaching at the same time, because both were

Introduction

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about finding out the best way to clown. This aspect of teaching, then, is about learning, not about knowing; learning as inquisitiveness, not as trying to get it right, or acquiring a style or technique. Having said that, there is more than one way of teaching/learning clown. Workshops driven by a spirit of open enquiry are marvellous things, but they probably won’t be enough. The workshop, or conservatoire, model has its drawbacks. The power the student surrenders to the clown teacher (indeed to many acting teachers), the dominance of the classroom ­experience and group dynamics all tend to produce particular kinds of clowning habits. I touch on some of the most obvious dangers in the course of the book. In contrast to this model, which has risen to prominence in clown t­ raining since the early 1960s, there is what we could call the ‘apprentice model’ of training. As one might expect, this too has its advantages and its drawbacks. The apprentice model emphasises respect for a craft, for knowledge already acquired by those who have gone before, valuing practices held in ­common by clowns throughout history. If previously this way of learning was restricted to closed groups or families, I think that there is much which can be recouped today, and this view informs much of the second part of this book. In this model I would include not just the passing down of set routines or gags, but also the tradition of learning on the job by one’s own mistakes. A classroom always remains just that: a classroom. But practice and experimentation carried out in many contexts out there in the ‘real world’ will teach different lessons. The disadvantages of apprentice-style learning are apparent: what works in one instance might not work the next time. But then, that is what  ­experience is for! And in any case, all training is in some way an attempt to predict what might happen in the ‘real’ performance situation and to prepare the student to deal with that situation better. So in that sense the exercises in a workshop must in some way be guessing at the ­performance to come. Otherwise they would be of no use at all. It’s no use producing great ­clowning in the classroom if no one else outside gets to see it. My own intention is to bring together the best of both approaches in my teaching, and I have endeavoured to do so in this book as well. A book is, of course, another way of learning. Given that clowning is considered mostly to be an inherently practical, physical and non-literary form, you probably won’t come across many people telling you that the best way to become a clown is to read a book about it. But that’s exactly what you are doing right now. Books can of course have all kinds of influences and stimulate all kinds of insights, and the current one is obviously intended to perform such a function. I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed of in learning something about clowning from a book. I certainly have done on many occasions. One particular book on improvisation inspired me for a number of years, in a manner far in excess of the impact on me of actually studying with its author some time after that.

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When my role as teacher started to overtake my role as student, I found that teaching continued to be a question of learning. This was despite a growing sense within me that ‘I knew more than I did before’. I found that new exercises and variations on old ones would crop up in virtually every class. Some of these novelties were reused, recycled with great profit. But some of them never seemed appropriate again, or didn’t give the spark or result of the first time on the day they came to light as a response to that moment. This is a completely normal process. What works one day might not work another day. The learning process is an irregular road and does not follow a logical progression from knowing nothing to knowing everything. You never know what you are going to learn next, so it is absurd to project learning aims into the future and expect to attain them. Every day s­omething is different: the students, the mood, the weather, the news. No exercise or process can be set in stone. This is even more evident perhaps in clowning, particularly in those areas relating to improvisation and the ­freeing up of conventional modes of behaviour which this implies. Repeating exercises out of awe and respect is foolish. So I would encourage all users of this book to keep the process alive. Use what seems exciting and useful to you, ignore what doesn’t. Change, develop, vary and invent! Many of the descriptions of exercises here include some variations of mine, but don’t stop there.

Chapter

1

Play and Pleasure

Do clowns warm up? When I began being a student of clowning, I never felt comfortable with warm-up exercises. Whereas I never questioned doing some stretches and a bit of sprinting before starting a game of rugby, I generally felt awkward doing such seemingly aimless pursuits as ‘walking around the space’ or ‘passing on a gesture’. The activities appeared to me to be either something to do with coordination and control or else demanded that I somehow be in a kind of ‘performing mode’ but without knowing what actions I should be doing. With time, I found that I preferred to avoid setting my own students these kinds of tasks, as when we came to do the clown exercises I was actually requiring something quite different from them. What ‘thing’ was that? Well, it wasn’t a nebulous ‘performing state’ or coordination or remembering everyone else’s name or feeling part of a group (all supposed aims of warmups). It was clowning. I realised that I wanted to start clowning ... at the start. So I began to eliminate from my teaching repertoire all those exercises and games which I was unable to clownify, unable to squeeze some clowning out of early on. It meant getting rid of a lot of the baggage many clown and theatre students and teachers have carried over recent decades, as this has been a time when play and games have waxed into a near-dominant position in many quarters. I have always suspected that throwing a ball around may have felt revolutionary in Howard Barker’s early days in the 1950s, but the almost obligatory nature of theatre games today does not necessarily reflect a continuation of that revolution. Add to that the fact that many have held clowning to be the play-based performance mode par ­excellence. Despite the weight of such orthodoxy, I felt forced to observe that playing lots of theatre and other games won’t automatically make you into a clown. This doesn’t mean I reject the use of games and play. Far from it. Many a student of mine has been sick of the sight of balls of various sizes. And having read my initial exercises in this section, you might find that they resemble what for you is a warm-up. But I always want to know how the game is getting us nearer to ­clowning. My first experience as a student of Philippe Gaulier gave me that sense of immediacy, a children’s game played in such a way that clowning might 9

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well appear at any moment. Gaulier is perhaps the clown teacher who has most influenced others over the last several decades, including those who object to the directness of his methods. It permeates my own teaching and understanding of clowning. Apart from being the standard-bearer of the ‘flop’ (originally Jacques Lecoq’s notion of what is at the centre of clowning, which I shall deal with in detail in Chapter 3), Gaulier values above all what he calls ‘pleasure’. This pleasure comes about as a result of ‘play’, but for Gaulier it isn’t just any kind of undefined playing, but a particularly performance-related idea of what play means. After all, the French word for ‘to act’, jouer, is also the word for ‘to play’. Performers must play and have pleasure, otherwise, for Gaulier, they cannot be actors at all, and much less clowns: You have people, they have a funny face, and they have many jokes in their head so they have funny eyes and we are better with these people than with other people. For sure the funny person has a special face, special eyes, happier than the boring person. So if you want to make theatre you have to be lustig, full of fun everywhere, for sure it is something given, the fun, the pleasure to be an idiot, the pleasure to be Hamlet, the pleasure to pretend I am someone else, the pleasure to say nobody could recognise me in this costume. For sure it is a special quality in life. If you are boring and you don’t have this pleasure you can’t be an actor, you can’t be a clown, you can’t be a bouffon, you need this special beautiful pleasure for sure.1

Other clown teachers, admittedly a minority, don’t really refer to playing at all. Over the years, my own experience of practising clowning has led me to question anything which seems too accepted, too mainstream, too ­normalised. In the case of theatre games, this ‘clown scepticism’ not only led me to question the functioning of warm-ups, but also to investigate and be open to incorporating such non-play methods into my teaching. Most of those methods date back to earlier times when clowning was learned by apprenticeship, but some contemporary teachers, such as Avner the Eccentric, have veered away from the dominant thinking on games. Avner’s focus has come to rest on the way clown action develops and is structured, and the staging of clown thinking or clown logic, as well as techniques of breathing intended to centre the clown performer’s presence in the there and now of relating to the audience. This leads to a concern for the detail of what we could call ‘clown stage technique’, resulting in accomplished performing: As usual his manipulative skills are subtle, gentle and extraordinarily effective. Avner gets the volunteers to come onstage and participate in his act by creating situations in which the most comfortable choices they can make are precisely the choices he wants them to make. As he does in his physical balancing acts, Avner creates the comic illusion that he is losing control, when in fact everything is occurring precisely according to plan.2



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But we are not there yet. My own curiosity about ‘clown thinking’ was instrumental in what makes up the later section in this book on devising clowning, so I will leave a more in-depth discussion until then. So, for now, with warm-ups out of the way, let’s get on with the first activity. Walking On residential courses in the countryside (at the Escola de Clown), I took up an idea a colleague who had studied with Avner at the Conservation Barn in Massachusetts told me about: going for a walk. The idea quickly became an integral part of our work at the school. From what I second-handedly understood of the use of walking as practised by others, it could be a chance to get to know your classmates and ease yourself into things ... classic warmup aims. At the start of each day, everyone would walk in one direction for a certain time, then turn round and come back. You could go at any pace, but everyone turned back at the same time. As with other warm-up activities, opportunities to learn clowning whilst going for a stroll soon begin to present themselves. Personally, I like to take a different route every time. And if I take a particular direction, suddenly turn off in another. Keeping a vague sense of where I am, I enjoy getting a little lost, then finding out I was somewhere other than where I thought I was. In other words, enjoy your walking, whatever it takes. Turning to the aspect of socialising, chatting to and getting to know people seems, if anything, to be rather a non-clown thing to be doing. Conversations involving the exchange of superficial information about each other in order to create social bonds feel like they take us away from the here-and-now immediacy of clowning. But getting this kind of interaction done and out of the way might indeed serve our purpose. For example, whilst strolling, in pairs, quiz each other about your lives; get as much data as possible about the other person: nationality, age, job, beliefs, family members, hobbies, studies. After a time switch partners and do the same again. Then, at the end of the walk, gather everyone together and ask each person to offer to the rest of the group any pieces of information they feel will surprise or otherwise interest or intrigue the group. One way of guessing what might surprise others is to give them something which might contradict their assumptions and expectations. In the context of this kind of data, the stuff which supposedly defines us within our societies as such-and-such a person, that means making a judgement about what sort of person you think the other is, only to be contradicted by the knowledge that they are in some way not that. It’s actually quite astounding how good we are at this. Judging, or pre-judging, is easy. Person X looks very young, but turns out to have three kids; person Y seems shy or slow to communicate, but in fact works as a teacher; person Z dresses unconventionally but works as an accountant. And so on. The lesson

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here is not just to realise how quick we are to judge (though that is step one), but to tap into the pleasure of truths which will surprise and contradict our peers’ expectations. I will look at the dynamics of surprise and contradiction later on in more detail, especially when it comes to devising material for performance, but it is in fact an impulse which we can begin to cultivate very early on in the clown learning process. The fun of ‘things are not what you thought they were’ soon becomes more desirable than our boring old habits which seek to confirm our prejudices in a world where things are ‘as they should be’. By tackling head-on such habitual forms of social relating, they are assimilated into a clown dynamic. Rather than avoiding or dismissing something as ‘bad’, we can playfully subvert it on new terms. What often counts for ‘normality’ or ‘reality’ is constantly presenting itself to us, and clowning offers a way of dealing with it without becoming completely entrapped within it. It becomes the stuff we can clown with, our material. There are further ways to play with this material. I offer some here, but of course there are many more that one could invent. Limited-word conversations This works well while walking, but can also be used without moving. In pairs, talk to each other using sentences of just three words. No more, no less. Change partners whenever you want, or intervene in others’ conversations. Stick strictly to the limits. This isn’t an exercise is obeying rules, though. The obedience is a way of overpowering your habitual tendencies, the patterns of speech you tend to resort to again and again. In ­improvisation work, it is easy to assume that freedom is obtained by ‘doing what you want’. That may be the case, but that can quickly become ‘doing what you always do’. Unaware of our habits of behaviour, we simply reproduce them, believing we are acting with free will. One way of becoming more aware of those habits and maybe breaking them is to put in place obligations which force you to behave otherwise. In this case, we are dealing with speech and the articulation of a thought in a simple sentence. Left to our own devices we may just say ‘what we always say’. But forced to squeeze our emerging thought into a three-word format, both our thinking and its articulation start to change and become strange, though not so strange that the sentences don’t make sense, for that would not serve our purpose here. One of the surprising effects of this exercise, which seems so directed by the mind, is that one sometimes feels more connected to the speech act, though one’s striving to make sense and communicate. At the same time, one is brought into the awareness of the speech act. The exercise combines more or less inevitable failure (it’s difficult to do) with a strong urge to communicate. The resulting combination of connectivity and estrangement is a valuable element in clowning, one we shall see often.



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The next day (or later on, if you don’t have so much time) do the same, but with sentences now composed of just two words. The same forces are at work here, but a two-word sentence is a little different from a threeword one. With three words you have space for a classic simple phrase, comprising a subject and predicate, the latter typically comprising a verb and either an object or adjective. The predicate tells us about the subject or what it is doing, feeling and so on. For example: Jon (subject) looks tired (predicate). With two words, this pattern is harder to achieve. You can omit the verb whilst observing and maybe pointing at something: ‘nice tree’. Or simply exclaim: ‘how nice!’ The work then becomes how to build conversations. Abstract ideas are almost impossible and the relating between people might instead base itself on mutual observation or exchange of sensations. Next day, or later on, take it down to one-word sentences. A sentence with only one word might not seem like a sentence. Grammatically speaking, perhaps it rarely is. But remember the need to communicate, to make sense, and try to use your one word to get across an idea, a thought, an impression. Next time, converse in sentences of zero words. ‘Nonsense!’ you might object. Well, stick to that desire to communicate and find out what’s still ­possible. In any case, doing exercises to learn clowning is rarely about ‘managing to do the exercise’. The exercise will be there to impel you to respond, hopefully in a way which takes you closer to clowning. Attempting a seemingly impossible task may well give excellent results. Actually it might be easier than an ‘easy’ exercise, since the failure is built into the exercise so you don’t have to worry about it. (Failure being essential to clowning.) If you hear yourself voicing the commonly heard objection of ‘that’s very difficult!’ then try saying the same thing, but as a way of saying thank you for the opportunity to fail. Finally in this little sequence of variations, have conversations where each sentence is as long as possible but contained within the space of only one out-breath. Again, be strict with yourself about the limits and don’t take extra in-breaths in an attempt to finish your sentence in the way you thought you wanted to. The effect has similarities with the reduced-word sentences, in that your thoughts and articulation become estranged. But it also demands you say more, usually, than you would habitually, forcing you out of comfortably reproducing your normal speech. I’d like to add one more suggestion: as you come near the end of your out-breath, push the air out more forcibly, such that the final words come out louder and more emphatically, rather than dwindling weakly away. Again, this will put you off both more off-balance (more failure) and push you to connect more with the speech act. It may be that you discover new patterns of speech which give you some good results as a clown while doing this exercise. Remember that for later use. We will come back to this when devising material.

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OK, so we’ve been for a walk, half an hour, maybe an hour, and we’re back in the workshop space. We’ve kind of started but kind of haven’t. The  simplest of instructions for the simplest of activities will get things active swiftly: Ball tag Rules of the game The rules of ball tag can be stated very simply: there’s one ball, and if you get hit by the ball on or below the knees, you’re out. Mostly, someone will grab the ball and throw it at someone to try and get them out. Then the ball, after hitting or missing someone, gets picked up by another player who gets the chance to chuck it at someone else. The last person left wins the game. Then we play it again. I suggest everyone ‘uses their intelligence more – be clever’. Someone might cotton on to this and try and restrain another so they can aim the ball better at them, drawing the response: ‘Hey, you’re not allowed to hold onto me and stop me running away!’ But who says that this isn’t allowed? I add: ‘If I haven’t said you can’t do something, then that means you can do it.’ Usually, planting this idea of freedom gives rise to a whole load of strategies to try and win, yet still we hear cries of ‘That’s not allowed!’ The actual rules of a game, at least these kinds of children’s games, are most often very simple. By ‘actual rules’ I mean those instructions necessary and sufficient to generate the action of the game. What often happens when we play games, though, is that we bring in a whole load of other rules which in themselves don’t generate the game’s action, but which describe the ways in which we believe that game should be played. These ‘unspoken’ rules of behaviour frequently crop up in the form of ‘that’s not allowed’ or ‘you can’t do that’. But if they don’t generate action, then what purpose do they serve in clowning? I feel that they are the very things we should be looking to wean ourselves off from as clowns. Habituated or unconsciously normalised behaviour is what clowns don’t do. As time has gone by, my instructions before beginning an exercise have got shorter and shorter, letting everyone work out how to play the game themselves. It’s not about learning how to play a particular set of rules, as in itself this is of no use, but instead about learning to free ourselves from unthinkingly reproducing our normal conditioned behaviour. Prohibitions Once you’ve played the game in this free spirit a few times, you can go in the other direction and introduce prohibitions. Prohibitions are great catalysts for improvisation. We already saw some examples with the reduced sentences for conversation. Part of the pleasure of prohibitions is the way



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they break up our habitual behaviour. In the present game, we could ban running, then go a bit further by making everyone walk in slow motion, then say you can only move a step at a time, and that you can only take that step hen the director of the game claps, which could be in a steady and predictable rhythm, slow or fast, or unpredictable and confusing. Confusing is good. Why? Our enlightened modernity has taught us that understanding comes by shining a light on things and seeing what they are, seeing the order in the chaos, understanding what’s ‘really’ going on. That’s democracy, right? Only dictators keep their people in the dark, keep them confused. So what’s good about confusing people? Well, when we’re confused, we don’t know what we’re doing, we don’t know what we’ve done, and we don’t know what we’re going to do. We do stupid things, we make fools of ourselves. It’s clearly one path that may lead us towards the clown. This ‘not knowing’ can then be a path towards knowledge. ‘Not knowing’ may in a sense be ‘truer’ than ‘knowing’. ‘Knowing’ in the sense of ‘being in control’ is after all only going to be an illusion of being in control. Whether you want to agree with that in general terms or not, ‘not knowing’ is at least in terms of clown philosophy something which, when accepted, bears fruit. Variations As with most games and exercises, variations are endless. One useful track is to add voice while playing. This can be done at the level of sound only, or using words and speech. You could use voice continuously throughout the game, or only at critical moments (when you are going to get someone out, or when you run or jump away, or get hit). I find that if the voicing is non-verbal, then it’s best to stick to vowels rather than consonantal sounds. Vowels are easy: just open your mouth and let your out-breaths make sound. Your movement and responses in the game will generate plenty of sound without you having to think about it. Why not consonants? All human speech, in any language, consists of two basic groups of sounds: vowels and consonants. Vowels are made by putting the tongue in a particular shape in a particular position in the mouth, but without touching any other part of the mouth. The air flows through the vocal cords, whose vibrations produce sound, which is in turn modified by the tongue–mouth shape to produce a particular vowel sound: ‘aaa’, ‘eee’, ‘iii’ or the combined sound ‘aaaiii’. So, when we produce vowels, our mouths are open. On the other hand, when we produce consonants, our mouths are closed, if only for a moment or partially. A closure followed by a release of the two lips produces ‘p’. The same contact between the back of the tongue and the roof of the mouth gives us ‘k’. A near-closing between the tip of the tongue and just above the upper teeth, ‘s’, and so on. So when we use vowel sounds in movement, in the engaged playing of this game, or any other, it actually opens us, our bodies are less blocked, more willing

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to respond in the movement, not so self-conscious, not so ‘knowing’. If you think of a bunch of 4-year-olds running around playing and screaming, what they’re screaming are vowels – ‘aaaaiiiiiiooooeeeiiiuuuaaii!!!!!!!’ – not consonants – ‘ppppcccttbbbrrrzzmmpp!!!!!!’ Of course, to use our voices to their fullest ability, it’s the combination or play of vowels and consonants that we need. But to begin with, better to encourage the open at the expense of the closed. Vowels are more fun! Using words is also productive in this game. I recommend focusing your speech on those critical moments, when emotion and readiness are at their height. Use few words (remember the reduced sentences). But which words? Any will do, but a very common result here is that people will start to shout insults. Almost as if by cursing your opponent you will somehow force the game, as a form of physical action that can influence events and the movement of the ball and human bodies. It seems to fit the game and is immense fun. Voice and action work well in tandem. We are built that way as human beings. Clowning incorporates all human activity, vocal, physical, verbal, gestural. If it is theatre then it surely does not belong only to ‘physical theatre’ or ‘textual theatre’. Historically clowns have existed across the ­ whole spectrum. Engagement in children’s games This game demands, and gets, total engagement. That’s because there’s no other way to play it. You have to be quick in reacting. Your decisions and actions become one, not deciding first, then acting. That’s the meaning of engagement. Thought and action happen at the same time. It’s a kind of living in the present, because there’s no time to think about the future. If you did, you’d lose the game. The kind of ‘knowing’ that means being in control would be of no use in this context. So it’s actually quite useful to let yourself be confused – you might win the game! This game is so simple. Its only element is ‘react!’ It’s a fight or flight situation. The whole body, mind, heart and spirit are on alert. The same concepts and aims can be cultivated and worked through using a whole range of games, most of them played in some form or another by children. When I began teaching in earnest, one of my main sources for games to use was the wonderful collection made by folklorists Iona and Peter Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground. One of this book’s many merits is that the descriptions are those given by the children themselves, one of my favourites being: ‘If she hads a person when she is he the person she hads becomes he.’3 There follow some of my favoured games, described in their basic form, together with suggestions for variations and ways to draw out the clowning from them.



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Grandmother’s footsteps Learning without explanations Grandmother’s footsteps is by now a classic of clown workshops, in no small measure thanks to Gaulier’s continuous use of this game over many years. There are many versions of this game around the world, with slight variations. I prefer a stripped-down version which resembles the one I played as a child, with as few rules as possible about how to play the game (as explained above), as opposed to, for example, the Spanish version, which entails the person who has their back to the others counting to three before turning, thus reducing the scope for catching people out by surprise, as well as having a chase and tag section which comes after someone has managed to touch the ‘grandmother’. My version is so simple that I think I can teach it to people without explaining the rules before playing. We just start. I stand on one side of the space with my back to the others, who I tell to stand together on the other side of the space. Then I turn round unexpectedly and point at anyone who I see moving, saying their name, and gesture to them to go back to where they started from. When someone manages to get across and touch me without me seeing them move, they win and take my place. And so on. Teaching without prior explanation sets up a different relationship to learning to that which most modern education aspires to. The dominant orthodox approach today often begins with explanations of not only what the students will be asked to do, but also what they should expect to learn as an outcome of that process. This sets up a dynamic where the students can intellectually assess the learning process before actually immersing themselves in the activity. They also judge their results with reference to those pre-set expectations, rather than drawing their lessons from the activity itself. This almost seems to make the activity superfluous, which is absurd. On the other hand, a ‘blind’ immersion in a game, where the rules, purpose and outcome are uncertain, awakens other ways of responding to the activity. One is obliged to accept that one does not know exactly what to do, but one must respond, must keep going. In any case, if we are honest with ourselves, how many of us could really say we know what’s going on around us in our lives and in our world? Yet we continue living. Understanding, in this sense of control, is clearly not a prerequisite for life. In clowning, and indeed already in this simple game, we can experiment with that state of unknowing in a playful and joyful way. We might even find that the unknowingness augments our pleasure. Some students might react initially with anxiety to this. But by playing it can normally easily be overcome. And anyway, what of the anxiety that many feel when faced with a task whose steps and outcome have already been mapped out by another?

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Variations Variations of grandmother’s footsteps are easy to come up with. I don’t mean in the way that the Spanish version mentioned just now adds on rules of behaviour or an extra bit of game. Good variations normally don’t alter the central dynamic of the game, the thing which drives it forward. So try pairing up with someone by holding hands, and if one of you is spotted moving the pair have to start again. Then do this in threes, fours, big groups, the whole group split into just two teams, and eventually the whole group all linked together. Or place a chair somewhere between the grandmother and the group, and each time you begin your trip across the space you must sit once in the chair, then continue. Or, similarly, you must put on and take off a sweater that is placed in that spot, en route to Grandma. Interestingly, all these variations tend to make the game harder to win. And yet they seem to increase the amount of fun had. The more difficult the game is, the more fun it is. There may be a number of reasons for this: the challenge and thus the pay-off increase; the failure increases and thus the fun too (if we are already tapping into how failure becomes pleasurable, as it does in clowning); and instead of becoming bored by too much repetition, we keep finding new things to play with. Cheating Aside from variations, the level of pleasure can also be increased by pondering the following question: ‘is this game a cooperative one or a competitive one?’ On occasions some people will answer ‘cooperative’ and others ‘competitive’, but mostly there is a large majority or unanimity which see grandmother’s footsteps as essentially individualistic competition. Taking my cue from this observation, I then suggest: ‘so if the others lose (get sent back for being seen moving), then you have a better chance of winning ... so ....’ Usually with just this hint the next round of the basic game will see a few participants start to impede the progress of their opponents, tickle them, trip them, pull their hair, push them over. If that doesn’t happen, then I instigate the ‘cheating’. I was once in a movement class run by a well-respected Russian teacher who, upon learning I was a clown, proceeded to accuse me, in good humour, of cheating every time I did one the exercises (which weren’t about winning, but merely about coordination of movement). At first I was taken aback, but I soon took this as a complement. In her opinion, cheating was what defined clowns. Cheating may not help you win the game, indeed it might expose you to more risk of being caught. But then it’s better to err on the side of risk than caution when learning clowning. Unless your cautiousness is so extreme that it becomes ridiculously funny.



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Queenie Not knowing and intelligence The basic concept of Queenie is so neat that it is an easy one to teach without previously explaining the rules. I tell the group I will say ‘yes’ whenever they play the game right, and ‘no’ whenever they do things which don’t belong in this game. I stand, holding a ball, away from the group with my back to them and throw the ball back over my own head/shoulders towards the group. Since they don’t know what the game consists of, anything can happen at this stage. Someone might catch the ball, or return it to me, or ignore it, or whatever. What is common is a mixture of bemusement and intense use of the intelligence in trying to understand. Both are important qualities of a clown, who is at once bemused by everything and constantly engaged in trying to understand. It is often stated that clowning does not make use of the rational part of ourselves, but whilst it may be true that abstract or conceptual thought do not sit well in most clowns, it is absolutely necessary to set in motion one’s practical intelligence at all times, without which one would not be fully human. This is an intelligence ignited in the moment in the midst of what the clown is doing right here and now. Without this one would be a vegetable. It doesn’t matter how long it takes for the group to work out the rules of this game, as although this is the stated aim of the exercise, the experience of ‘intelligent bemusement’ is an education in itself. In fact, the longer it goes on, the more practice one has of living in that state of not being in command of the situation. Accepting this non-control is essential to feeling comfortable with, rather than afraid of, letting go of the desire to control. The reality is that we cannot control most things, and clowning lets us admit that and get along with it fine. Anyway, now for the ‘answer’: once the thrower has thrown the ball of their shoulder, one person catches or retrieves the ball. The thrower turns round and says the name of who they think has the ball. If they are right, the two change places. If not, they throw again, until they guess right. The receiver tries to prevent the thrower from knowing he has the ball. These are the rules that generate the actions of the game. I don’t think any other rules are necessary. Lying and fooling So, given these game rules, what kind of behaviour occurs? The aim of the game boils down to having to fool the thrower. This is always the case, as when you don’t have the ball, if you fool the thrower into thinking that you do have it, they will guess wrong. And if you do have it, you want to fool the thrower into thinking you don’t have it. In part, clowning attempts to convince us of something that is patently not true. And the greater the

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gap between the truth and the pretence, the more ridiculous the attempt to convince us is. The simple word for this is ‘lying’, which relates back to what we were saying about ‘cheating’. We could even say that ‘trying to convince’ others of something is what human beings habitually engage in a lot of the time. In clowning this attempt is revealed for what it is, a sham. Therein lies the pleasure. In clown philosophy we could say that any and all attempts to pretend that we know what we are doing, or that we are what we say we are, will be doomed to fail sooner or later. Under this definition comes everything from someone claiming high status falling on their arse, to a fool claiming to be able to explain the theory of relativity. Unspoken rules Let’s look now at the other kinds of rules that might attach themselves to this game. Instead of first considering some ways of playing the game that might help us take risks and let things happen, let us approach it from the other direction and look at those rules of behaviour that often want to creep in and attach themselves to the game in order to create safety and ­stagnation. Sometimes these desires remain unspoken, sometimes they are voiced. With this game, the most common attempt to create a democratic version where no one loses is to say that the thrower has to wait before turning around, in order to give the receivers a chance. Or even sometimes the thrower themselves, after having caught someone, says ‘oh, sorry, I turned round too quick, I saw you’! If we were to play it like this, we might as well pack up and go home, because nothing interesting is going to happen. Let’s go back to that practical intelligence: if you take too long, the catcher will have lots of time to hide the ball, and you will be reduced to telepathically guessing who has it. (Telepathy is a concept many theatre practitioners like to wave around, although they would usually call it ‘peripheral vision’ or something like that. In clown, we have no problems or shame in looking directly at other performers or the audience, so there is no need for us to pretend that acting techniques also include mind-reading.) If you turn too soon, the potential catcher will not take the ball. If they’re using their intelligence, that is. You aren’t obliged to catch the ball. If you catch it in full view of the catcher looking at you, then that’s your failure. This is a very good example of the kind of reality with which clowning works. When I use the word reality, this is what I am talking about. Risk and the fun of losing What audience would want to watch people not getting caught out? Perhaps here there is a clue that may help us to avoid boring any more audiences to death. The emergence of game playing in theatre over the last decades has led us sometimes to consider that what is important is for the performer to be in a state of play, of pleasure as Gaulier has it, in order to create that ­presence



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that fascinates an audience. So far, so good. But the trap here is to then assume that if I, as a performer, am having a good time, then it must mean it’s because I’m playing, which must mean that the audience will like what I’m doing. However, we must be clear about what we mean by play. There are many ways that I can sense that I am enjoying myself. It may be that I enjoy myself when there is a complete absence of risk, when I will not be called on to expose anything of value. In this case, the audience will certainly be snoring away. The mistake, then, in theatre-training through games, can be to focus on the security of the performer at the expense of the enjoyment of the audience. Performances which are created or devised with this focus on the performers’ own experience, rather than on that of the audience, are often doomed. Games with rules might serve to build and maintain the cohesion of a group or team of workers, but they won’t produce good clowning. Playing without the safety net of endless rules and protocols designed to create fairness will let the clowning take off. That doesn’t mean that the urge to control outcomes, to govern oneself and others, will magically disappear. It will stubbornly refuse to give up. Furthermore, I would even say that it is vital for clowning that it remains. This gap, between what we want others to do (‘don’t turn round yet!’) or what we would like to happen (‘I’m going to stand close and catch the ball quicker’), and what actually does happen (the thrower turns quickly and the ball hits me in the face as I’m very near) is fascinating. It is my very control urge that leads me into inevitable failure. Put another way, it seems we cannot fully escape being ‘human’ in this sense, but must not fully surrender to our fears, urges and concepts which would have everything happen just as we would like it. Failure Gaps between one’s ideal and the reality can occur on many levels. On a personal/physical level, it is when you go to sit in a chair but misjudge the movement and fall. On a relationship/physical level, it is when you expect your partner to pour the water in your cup, but instead they leave, or take the cup, or throw the water in your face. Or on a relationship/emotional level, when my crying is intended to make the other feel sorry for me but makes them run away instead. Becoming aware of the creative possibilities of reality/ideal gaps will be extremely useful later on when we come to devise material for clowning. There are some modes of behaviour which commonly occur in playing this game and whose unstated purpose is to avoid the critical moment when the thrower and catcher encounter each other, and winning and losing are in the balance. They can usefully be discouraged by prohibiting them. So, you cannot pass the ball to someone else once you’ve caught it. Otherwise, as with the demand that the thrower take their time to turn round, it would be more a guessing game than a timing game. I’m interested in the moment the holder turns round, that coincides with the moment the catcher catches.

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Dead tag That critical moment which elicits the excitement and pleasure in participants, is prominent in another children’s game, Dead Tag, which, like Queenie, I have stripped of some of its extra details in order to focus on that quality. I did this with quite a lot of these games during a period of my teaching when I was particularly interested in cultivating a close relationship with these moments of excitement, which seem involuntary but which can be elicited, too. In the simple version, one person lies on the ground, eyes closed, as if dead. The other players pass by and the dead person has to grab a living person, simultaneously opening their eyes, screaming and lunging out to try and catch a passing piece of body. If successful, the dead person and the tagged living one change places. It’s most fun if you take risks, get as close as you dare to the corpse (touching can be prohibited if it makes the game more fun), stepping over it, lying beside it and so on. Four chairs I don’t recall where I got the Four Chairs game from, or how I might have adapted it, but one of its main interests is its focus on the critical moment of potential loss/gain. Set up four chairs to form a square, with the chairs forming the corners and facing into the square, as far apart as space allows. Four people sit on the chairs, with a fifth person standing in the centre. If you are sitting, the aim is to keep changing places, and if you are standing the aim is to sit down on a chair. The pleasure comes from playing with the risk of losing your place. Add voice when in movement (vowels are best) and you end up with a bunch of people screaming, running and laughing crazily. Once again, the use of prohibitions might help the fun. In this case, it’s likely to be banning moving the chairs. The duality of prohibition/cheating is indeed a fascinating one. Prohibitions help to abolish habitual, conventional behaviour, whilst cheating releases you into a world of more freedom. It’s a question of judging whether the extra rules/prohibitions will increase or decrease the risk/pleasure/fun/freedom. Use them when they are useful! Any number of variations can be played out with this game. Instead of voicing vowel sounds when in movement, you can speak text. Or laugh. Then, if sounds or laughter come involuntarily when you are still, you have to move. The two go together. Musical chairs Trying to get a chair to sit on is the basis of a number of games, the most common of them perhaps being musical chairs. Gaulier’s use of it is almost legendary and many have imitated him. Pleasure can be augmented in this familiar game by keeping the surprises coming. The person running the



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game can remove more than one chair at a time, or none at all. Or switch the music on and off quickly, to confuse people, or turn the volume down progressively until no-one is quite sure if it’s still playing, so the usual sudden lunge for a change becomes a hesitant but completely engaged state of not knowing what to do. Controlling the chairs and music gives you a chance to understand from the other side the fun of creating moments of ‘being in the shit’, to use a Gaulierism. Especially when performing with a clown partner, the setting up of potential flops is just as important as the experiencing of them. Name tag If someone tags you, you are out. But if you say someone else’s name before getting tagged, you’re saved. When you hear your name you have to tag someone. Very few people are any good at name tag, which makes it ideal for clown training. When the situation almost certainly obliges you to fail, accepting failure is the best approach. There’s something about the combination of the impulses to move, to touch and to speak which most of us find hard to coordinate. Frequently people say the name of someone who’s no longer in the game, or their own name or even of someone who was never there! Other common confusions are speaking when you are supposed to move, or vice versa. Or simply not knowing what to do at all. Inevitable failure Despite being near impossible to play, it’s still fun to come up with strategies designed to improve your chances. Hang around behind someone, for example, waiting to hear your name so you can tag them immediately so they don’t get a chance to prepare themselves. Of course, your chosen strategy might lead you to lose, but who cares when the aim is pleasure, not success? All in all, this is a great game for coming to terms with near inevitable failure, which I would say is the natural condition of human endeavour. Normally we try and convince ourselves that we have some chance of making things turn out how we planned, but this mastery is mostly illusory. Clowning is a relief from that pressure, as it admits things as they are, which is one reason why we often experience it as liberating. These, then, are just some examples of games which are useful for working on our playfulness, awakening it, cultivating it, practising it, and at the same time training us in approaches that will be conducive to clowning, replacing some of our habituated and rule-bound behaviour with an acceptance of the pleasures of failure and unknowingness. In one way, it’s a method, with principles and values which stand behind the way one uses the games. But in another sense, it is open to infinite variation, using different games if they are more favoured by participants or teacher, or both.

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I’ve already discussed a little the differences between rules which generate action in games and rules which produce safety, fairness or even inaction. The games I’ve chosen have mostly had some of their exterior stripped away in order to get at what I’m interested in clowning. But we can go further. ‘Playing’ and ‘playing a game’ aren’t quite the same thing. A game normally implies rules, but does playing itself always obey rules? Discussions of the nature of play and games have proliferated in recent decades, and much of that discussion has become caught up in the lack of clarity in those words and what they mean. ‘Play’, in particular, can mean many distinct things, depending on context. Just because we use a single word for many concepts doesn’t mean all those concepts must fit into a single definition or theory. I‘ve already mentioned Gaulier’s rather theatrical notion of playing and there is a wealth of literature and philosophy on the subject. In this book I don’t want to get into that discussion in detail, but one bit of play theory worth mentioning here, as I have found it productive in teaching, is Roger Caillois’s concept of ‘vertiginous play’. Vertiginous and non-rule play Caillois talks about activities such as the tightrope, falling or being projected into space, rapid rotation, sliding, speeding, and acceleration of vertilinear movement, separately or in combination with gyrating movement. ... This vertigo is readily linked to the desire for disorder and destruction, a drive which is normally repressed.4

This category of play is not about succeeding in an exploit, but about pursuing the destabilisation of perception. When researching clown/actor training at RCSSD as a research fellow, I became interested in the potential for this kind of play to help put us in a state which, although not identical to the clown state, would at least be close enough in some aspects for it to be a useful part of clown training. Over a whole term, we developed four main training regimes based on vertiginous play: dancing, jumping, chasing and laughing. (For a longer discussion of these explorations, please see my research notes published at the time.)5 I have since used these activities, in part to replace the kinds of warm-ups I’ve already mentioned don’t really prepare clown students for what they are going to be doing, and in part to take the place of games and exercises which seem to me to be so heavily over-laden with rules and the obligation to obey them that any clowning which takes place as a result usually ends up looking like it’s more a product of fear and convention than of freedom and joy. The experiences, practices, thoughts and theories of others impinge, not infrequently, upon the way I experience, practice, think about and theorise clowning. These influences may come from within the field of clowning, from related areas or from seemingly unrelated places. And



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their influence may be direct or oblique. In the case of vertiginous play, it has never been the case, in my own practice, of trying to reproduce or demonstrate reliably and faithfully whatever it is I think Caillois had in mind when he wrote what he did. Instead it becomes recycled into something which is of use to me at this moment. The concept of being offbalance is certainly useful for clowning, and the notion of play without undue rules provides a way of imagining and practising such playfulness. The very theorising of such a thing makes it easier to pursue in earnest. In this way the thinking about clowning meshes with doing clowning in a way which feels inextricable. So the following activities may well not be what Caillois would have had in mind, but they do serve some of the purposes I find useful in cultivating a kind of playfulness which approximates to the state of clowning. Dancing Of all the human activities with the express purpose of producing pleasure in the participants there is perhaps none more widespread as dancing. It is so familiar to us in so many variations that it would be absurd to explain here ‘how to do it’. And yet there are a number of pointers which help draw experience from dancing which can bring us nearer to clown. If my memory serves me correctly, it was Gaulier who would tell his students, when dancing in pairs to music, to make this moment ‘the best moment of your lives’. (The number of times I have used such a phrase has meant that finally I am honestly not sure where it has come from.) This was not meant to judge any past experiences as less than the ‘best’, but to impress upon those dancing that only the present exists and that pleasure in the moment only happens right now. In order to augment that pleasure, the dancing pair should look into each other’s eyes constantly, never looking away, however tempted they are to avoid any feelings or embarrassment that surfaces. Making value-judgements After changing partners a number of times, if possible having a dance with each member of the group, everyone is then asked who was their best partner and who was their worst. Many clown students baulk at these questions. ‘Why judge?’ they ask. ‘I can’t tell the difference’, they protest. ‘What does it matter?’ ‘it depends on the music’ ‘it wasn’t good but it wasn’t our fault’ or simply ‘it’s not fair’. All these resistances to answering the question are, in my view, missing the point. The point is not to judge a person as a ‘good/ bad’ dancer. The point is not to ascertain one’s favourite music or whether one piece is more danceable than another. The point is not even to ascertain if a particular partnership is a ‘good match’. The point is merely to recognise (at the time and after the event) when pleasure was present and when it

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was not. I think there is not one person in the world who does not know when s/he likes or does not like something. We may play all sorts of games in order to cover this up and not let others, or even ourselves, know. But the feeling of good/bad or pleasurable/unpleasurable in some form or another will surely occur despite this. When we watch a performance, of clowns perhaps, we may have strong reactions, loving or hating the performers. For whatever reason, as an audience member we often seem to have this awareness fine-tuned. If we ‘know what we like when we see it’, then can we not apply the same perspicacity to ourselves when we feel it? This is all that this question is asking: can you spot when you have pleasure or not (the extremes are easier to see)? If you can’t or are confused, this kind of exercise gives you the opportunity to practise this. Later on, this will be of great importance, when we come to respond directly and in the moment to an audience’s reactions to us as performers of clown. The audience will most likely be making quick realisations about how they feel about us. If we as performers cannot have that same clarity of perception about what we are doing then we will be unable to respond honestly to our audience’s reaction. And since this dynamic is central to clowning, our performance will fail, and not in a good way! Jumping, skipping and chasing Not all of Caillois’s examples of vertiginous play are readily available to all, such as the tightrope or being projected into space, but rapid activity such as rotating, rolling or jumping can easily be done without need for equipment or expertise. With a bit of instruction, falling can also be added. If such structureless activity is hard for some to practice in a regular way, then formalised versions can help. Although there is no reason why anyone would need a reason to spend ten minutes every day just jumping, skipping with a rope can encourage you to be more methodical in your practice. In workshops I  usually begin with the simplest forms of passing under and over ropes, with two people turning a long rope for the others to merely walk under one by one, in pairs or groups, then adding a single jump, building to more jumps and even throwing a ball to each other as a few people skip together. Then work with shorter ropes solo, in pairs or threes, seeing how many moves you can manage. Once everyone is more acquainted with the effects of skipping, which apart from physical tiredness include an exuberance or joy, take the ropes away and continue with imaginary ropes. This isn’t an exercise in illusionistic mime, however, but a way of hopefully finding the pleasure in just jumping by ridding yourself of the need to have the rope as an excuse to do it. A similar effect can be had by removing the structure or rules of chasing or tagging games. First play a tag game as normally, such as ball tag from before or an even simpler one. Then continue to do the same actions but without the rules of the game. This seems at first to many to be an impossibly



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absurd task. But think about it: what are the actions habitually performed in tag? Aside from touching or tagging, it basically consists of people running away and towards each other. We can continue these actions with a similar pleasure, but throw away the focus on who is winning or losing. Walking ... again The non-rule-ness of these activities is also to be found in walking, which we looked at earlier. Walking is perhaps one of the simplest of all human actions. It doesn’t need much if any thought, and cannot be ‘improved’ by practising it or ‘trying harder’. All one needs to do is to do it. In this way it is akin to clowning itself, and I find myself suggesting, on many a walk, that clowning is just like walking. It doesn’t require a special kind of movement or motivation, just to put one foot in front of the other. Even vertigo might be sought by deliberately taking risks on a walk and getting lost. Not quite knowing where you are is a kind of uncentredness which, if welcomed, can drive clowning. Playing ball Near, but not quite in the vertiginous category, I would place ball playing. Throwing and catching a ball is such a simple and self-contained activity. Its simplicity means it needs no justification or complex understanding. And yet it is more than sufficient to absorb you for long periods of time. There is something about it which supplies its own pleasures, without the need to search further. Having said that, there are many ways to vary the playing, without going so far as to create overly ordered rules and structures. So I like to approach playing ball in a global way, rather than looking at distinct games with their own distinct laws. Beginning with simple throwing and catching in a group, extra modifications can be introduced as and when they seem appropriate, useful, or fun to do. Here are some ways of playing ball. Don’t mess around before threatening to throw the ball This first one is actually a negative, a prohibition. When playing ball, concentrate on doing the actions implied, namely, ‘throw’ and ‘catch’! A silly instruction? Not really, as sometimes players seem to be searching elsewhere for the fun, and not in the acts of catching and throwing. Typically, this will consist of moving the ball around a lot when the player has it in his hands, before throwing it. I can’t say for sure whether the player is enjoying this as he does it (though I suspect not in most cases), but I can say that it’s no fun for the rest of us, who wait for the player to finish his little bit, before being allowed back into the game. What I think is behind this activity is that the player does not realise that throwing and catching are fun in themselves.

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Instead, he thinks there is no pleasure to be had there, so he feels he must seek it elsewhere, in inventive ‘creativity’. But this ‘creativity’ goes nowhere. Neither would I call it ‘play’, at least not in the same sense as the play which occurs in throwing and catching. This ‘false play’ lacks the unpredictability of playing ball, it is self-sufficient and without risk, and it does not engage other players, not even at the level of spectators. This might seem like a harsh judgement on an innocuous bit of behaviour, but if you cultivate bad habits from early on, they will creep into your later work as a clown. Better to train yourself to react, act, be awake, not know what will happen next and take joy in that than to weigh yourself down with obligations to be interesting, creative or original. Throw to the side Commonly, when we are all standing in a circle and throwing the ball to each other, we will throw the ball directly towards the person (as far as our physical coordination allows!). But there is no reason we should stick to this pattern. Try throwing it instead slightly to the side of someone, or in between two people. This small element of unpredictability is enough to shake things up and can suddenly wake some players up, who had already got into automatic mode. It creates uncertainty. For whom was that ball thrown? For me or for the person next to me? We don’t know, and we might both react. Throw high/low The same as before, but now the ball goes a bit too high to catch easily, or bit too near the ground for you to get it without having to move, bend or make some kind of effort. Catch to the side Now go back to throwing the ball in the direction of the receiver’s body. But the receiver now must modify their position so that they catch the ball to the side of them, with their arms extended. This imitates the effect of the previous game, but now it is the receiver who is modifying and making things less predictable, not the thrower. We are accustomed to assume that it is only the person with the ostensible power (the one with the ball) who can initiate play, but this is not the case. There is no reason why the one without power, the so-called passive player, cannot take the initiative. Catch low/high Now do the same, but this time the catcher moves their body so as to be able to catch the ball above their head or near the ground.



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Reversed catching to side and high/low If this appeals so far, try a contradictory version of all this. This time, if the ball arrives low, catch it in the ‘high’ position (your arms above your head and your body lowered towards the ground). Alternately, if the ball arrives high, try and catch it with your body being higher than the ball as much as possible. If it arrives to one side, move your body behind it to catch it. If it arrives towards your body, move aside to catch it. Then try and do all those things at the same time! Helpers If the ball is caught by someone standing next to you, ‘help’ them catch it, by which I mean get your hands on the ball as well. Part of the fun here is that there being two people on either side of the catcher, we don’t know which one will be the helper. If both move to help, one should drop back. The uncertainty allied with the need to react fast creates much of the pleasure of this version. After a while, increase the number of helpers to three (the two by the catcher’s side plus one other. Then five helpers, and so on as far as you want to take it. As you might realise by now, these ‘rules’ are all rather silly. They are not designed to train you in your powers of coordination, concentration and focus, as much theatre training purports to do. Their objectives are confusion, bewilderment and foolishness, all happening within the framework of a pleasurable game which incites engagement. Repeat All the games so far in this section can be done together with the instruction to ‘repeat’. By this I mean that the catcher, having made their spontaneous move in the game, must then repeat as exactly as possible that move, this time without the stimulus of the ball being thrown and caught. Trying to reproduce something which has just occurred spontaneously creates a curious effect. On the one hand, it is relatively easy to repeat this, as it has only just happened and the impetus or its trace seems to remain in the body for a moment, and can thus be retrieved. On the other hand, the ‘real’ stimulus is not there, so the action feels unmotivated, undriven. This probably means that it will appear to have an ‘unreal’ or  unconvincing quality. Better than one repetition are several. I like to do three repeats, so that’s doing the action a total of four times. Each time seems to have a different quality. If the first one seems authentic and surprising, the second one will seem fake, the third might come out rather earnest, as if trying to make things more convincing, whilst the fourth often comes across as utterly ridiculous. Clowns work equally with the

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authentic and the fake, the convincing and the unconvincing. Cultivate both and get used to one following swiftly on from the other. Anticipate/delay This modification involves timing when you catch the ball. First try anticipating that moment, so that you grab or snatch the ball just a bit earlier than you normally would. This encourages a kind of hyper urgency, and potentially lots of mistaken snatches and drops. Then switch to its opposite, the delayed catch. Catch the ball slightly later than you normally would, but make sure you do catch it and don’t let it hit the ground. Then mix the two, deciding in the moment which one you will use. Try and avoid anything in the middle, anything ‘normal’ in your timing. If it appeals, you can use these timing modes to do other actions, aside from playing ball. Go around picking up objects, for instance, anticipating the moment. Then delay your picking up moment. Try it in interpersonal relations, anticipating the moment two people shake hands. Or delaying it. Try it with speech: say hello to each other, but anticipate the moment to speak. Or delay it. Practising playing outside the classroom This can be taken out of the classroom as well, practising anticipation and delay in our everyday actions. When the phone rings, pick it up and answer in an anticipatory fashion. Or pay for something in a shop with a delayed gesture. Whatever takes your fancy. Although I think the ideal is to be comfortable in both these modes, I would say that to begin with it’s probably better to concentrate on ­anticipation. Cutting the time you have to think, plan or have ideas about what you are going to do will help you cultivate a more impulsive relationship with the world. Having said that, perhaps that’s just my bias and maybe it really depends on your habitual mode of timing. So whichever it is, do the opposite. Because encouraging opposite habits is most likely to mess up your habitual, automatic responses. Look at someone else The normal thing to do when throwing and catching a ball is to look at the person you are throwing to or catching from. Indeed, many theatre games make a point of this in order to train coordination and complicity. So now let’s do the opposite. When you throw the ball to someone, look at a different person. When you catch the ball, don’t look at the ball, but at a person. It doesn’t matter if you drop the ball or throw it awfully. It’s not a basketball class!



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Bounce off your body Launching the ball towards someone by throwing it against your own body so it bounces off you is a way of throwing that reduces drastically how much you can control the ball’s flight. Try bouncing it off the top of your head, your chest, your knee, your foot. Bouncing the ball off your foot isn’t the same as kicking the ball. In kicking, your foot is active, moving towards the ball to contact it. In bouncing off your foot, the foot is passive, at rest, and your hands throw the ball against the motionless foot. Then try bouncing it off other players’ bodies. And offer your body to be bounced off. Try all parts of the body, including ones which seem to be useless or too difficult to reach for the task. The reduced control seems to be a prime reason for the pleasure to be had from playing like this. Perhaps also it is the passivity of your body, when combined with a successful and satisfying launching of the ball, which provides you with unexpected pleasure. Use other parts of your body Having experimented a little with parts of the body unused to propelling balls in the previous game, now use those odd body parts actively, to hit the ball to someone else. Try it first prohibiting the use of feet, hands, or indeed the head, which find it too easy to pat or kick. Use your elbows, knees, shoulders, bottom. Once you’ve got used to varying the body parts, allow the hands, head and feet to play too, but don’t let them dominate. Catch with other body parts Next try actually catching the ball but without using your hands. Elbows are easiest, knees are possible, but other ways might work. If you sit on the ground, you can catch the ball with your two feet. And then throw it to someone using your feet too. This is worth spending some  time on with everyone catching and throwing (not kicking) the ball with their feet. In fact, one of the earlier ways of playing, anticipating the ball, will help you here. Most people, when trying to catch a ball with their feet, instinctively wait for the ball to arrive at their feet before doing anything actively to trap the ball. This almost always fails. The ball won’t land magically between your feet. If you think about doing the same with your hands, the ball probably would never just land in your hands unless your hands did something to go and grab the ball. So do the same with your feet. They should actively reach out to grab the ball. If you do this anticipating the ball’s arrival, your grab will be even more decisive and you will have more chance of catching the ball. What’s even more interesting, from a clown point of view, is that if you attempt it like this but fail to catch the ball, the resulting drop usually looks impressively daring or ridiculously funny.

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Without that commitment to the catching these results couldn’t happen. So the lesson is: throw yourself into it and the result will either be a success or a spectacular flop. Take risks Going back now to standing in a circle, catch or hit the ball in a way that most likely you won’t be able to achieve. The simplest way to try this is to try and contact the ball when it is somewhere behind you and out of sight. So you can try and kick it when it’s behind you, for example. But there are any manner of ways to try the near impossible. Like throwing yourself to the ground under the falling ball and trying to get it to bounce off your stomach. Or whatever you come up with. The point is to commit to something you feel you probably can’t achieve. The pleasure here is partly due to the lack of fear. Once you stop caring about the result, you can have fun trying things you wouldn’t normally attempt. Plus once in a while something will come out well, giving you an unexpected burst of pleasure. More playing Hopefully the principles behind the games so far described will allow you to use other games in a similar way. It is easy to source new games: from your childhood memories to books on actor training or anthropological and sociological studies of children’s and adults’ pastimes. As time has gone by, I have tended to use a smaller number of games and exercises in teaching, but there are always occasions when you want some variety. If you think of it as being simply a question of mood, then the way forward is not hard to see. One mood might push you to play the same game over and over again, whereas a different mood will make you hungry for a new game every time. It’s good to follow one’s mood, the mood of the group. It will most likely lead you where you want to go, especially if you are unclear as to how to proceed or feel stuck. No amount of slavish following of a lesson plan or curriculum will get you out of those kinds of moments. During my early experiences as a student of clowning, I spent ten days on a residential course with the improviser Jonathan Kay in the middle of nowhere in Hertfordshire in February. Snow was on the ground. I had been bored for five days. He asked us to go outside for a couple of hours, preferably barefoot and alone, and play. For an hour and a half I sat shivering and got a very wet bum, huddled up on a tombstone in the nearby cemetery, cursing the money I had wasted on this bloody course, when, out of sheer freezing necessity, I stood up and started stomping my feet and clapping my hands in order to warm up. That then turned into jogging, jumping, and very soon I was running around, rolling around, and….playing! The running and rolling quickly became a game of ‘escape from a prisoner-of-war



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camp’, and in half an hour, I’d made my way, inch by inch, to the road, playfully but genuinely wary of each occasional passing car. If only I could get across that road, I’d be free and away! Time whizzed by. It all seemed totally real, yet of course I knew it was only a game. My fantasy seemed more vivid than life as I knew it. For it was lived, every moment of it, in the here and now, in the moment. The second five days of that course were fun, but it was the cold moment which opened the door for me and which stayed with me. I returned from that course and embarked on a journey to work out how to perform (and teach) free improvisation and play, which would sustain and entertain me for many years afterwards.

Chapter

2

Clown and Audience

Playing a game with others may help us get nearer to a state of playfulness that aids clowning, but it differs from clowning in one important aspect, that there is no audience as such. When we play a game, we are playing with each other. If that game involves participants being eliminated, then those who are still in the game continue to play with each other but cease playing with the people who are out of the game. In many if not most games, eye contact between players is a constant and essential part of being engaged in the game. That means that players will stop looking at those who are eliminated, although the latter may watch the ones who are still in the game. They become a kind of audience. If, ­however, the players who continue in the game also were to continue to look at the ones who are out, then a new dynamic is established between the two groups of people. In a sense, the players are then still playing with the others, even though these will not take an active part. This seems to me to sum up the relationship between clowns and audience. It acts as a useful working definition of clown performer and clown audience. The former is active, the latter is passive, but all are in relationship via visual contact. Now we can go back and play all the games we did before again, this time with visual contact with the non-players. Let’s have a look at some of these and how they work. Ball tag An audience for this game can be either accumulated, as people are got out, or set up from the beginning, with some playing, some watching. In this case, you can also prolong the experience by giving all players three lives, so everyone gets longer to practise this way of playing it. It really is as simple a concept as sharing who you look at: between the players and the ­watchers. Once there are more watchers than players, this becomes easier to do and it is useful to think of a 50/50 split: half the time be looking at your game c­ompetitors and half the time at the audience. The common tendency at first is to forget about the audience, for the big reason that if you don’t keep your eye on the game, you are more likely to lose it. 34



Clown and Audience

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So ­admonishments and reminders to ‘look at the audience!’ are necessary in great frequency. It’s important to experience this from both sides, as when you are being an audience you will see what happens when players look at you and the effect it can have. This is an exercise that it is well worth asking for feedback on after each round of playing it. Now, feedback means many things to many people. So I will now define more clearly what I think is productive as feedback and what is not. Feedback and observation Generally, in fact, I do not use the word ‘feedback’ but ask the question ‘what did you see/observe?’ Answers at first might be of the sort: ‘she was ­competitive’ or ‘he didn’t care about winning’. However, I would call these not observations but interpretations. They are judgements, ­suppositions about what someone else appeared to be thinking, wanting, feeling or intending. It is the kind of reflection we commonly make when asked for ‘feedback’. But let’s go back a step and actually observe what happened in the game or, simpler still, what the participants actually did. Sometimes, such a question will not seem easy to answer at first, but once you get the idea they are really very simple to respond to. So we might have, in this case: ‘he ran constantly’, ‘she threw the ball very hard, except on one ­occasion’, ‘only one person looked at the audience’, ‘when she looked at the audience, she smiled’ and so on. This habit of observation is going to prove very useful throughout clown training and this game is an easy place to start. We can also, as an audience, observe ourselves, thus: ‘when he looked at the ­audience, we laughed’, ‘when they didn’t look at us for a while, I got bored’. The last observation is in fact an interpretation, of one’s own feeling response, but it starts from an observation of what the player did and when. This is important, even at this early stage, in order not to get embroiled in suppositions about what we think is going on. I think it is enough to observe that, generally, when a clown performer looks at the audience when engaged in an action, the audience will respond differently to when the ­performer does not look at them. One clear effect is that of the audience ­feeling that they can observe what the performer is feeling, or indeed thinking or intending. I say ‘effect’ with due caution. But, as I have just mentioned, it isn’t really an observation at all, but an interpretation. The audience interprets the actions of the clown. That is their job, if you like, whilst the clown’s job is to ‘act’. The debate over whether we can actually ‘know’ what someone else is feeling or thinking now becomes irrelevant and we can free ourselves of such anxieties once and for all. I believe that is extremely useful to gain some distance in this way. It leaves the performer free simply ‘to do’, whilst engaging in simple eye contact with an audience, leaving them free to observe and enjoy. At no time, then, will the clown force her own

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Clown Training

‘interpretation’ of her own actions upon the audience. This would be like not only doing an action but also telling the audience what that action means, feels like, or even what the audience should be feeling or thinking in response. Faced with such dictates, an audience will only have two options: accept the performer’s interpretation or reject it. This is rather risky, as you will lose some spectators, whilst those who accept you will be merely consuming something which you have pre-digested for them in some way. Far more interesting, and in fact less risky, to let them come up with their own interpretations of your actions, which may be multiple or similar. I share these rather developed thoughts about clown acting at this early stage, not in order to insist on them being learned or digested at this point in a hypothetical clown training course which would follow the scheme of this book. They crop up here because this is where I have learned to take care to fashion the exercise at hand according to the values of acting which I have just discussed. Of course another teacher, if they have different values, will not do this exercise in the same way. How could it be otherwise? Playing for spectators Now back to the game. If space allows, it is good to play this one in the round. Maybe set up some chairs in a circle around the playing area, which eliminated players must sit upon when they are out. Gradually an audience accumulates around the remaining players. The obligation to look at the audience now becomes more intricate, as you have to keep changing your angle of vision. It is a first lesson in playing in the round which shall prove vital at later stages of clown training, when material must be adapted to performing situations with audience on all or some sides, not just end-on. Playing in the round also helps us towards another aim of this game, which is ‘playing to play’. Playing to win and playing to play Performing in the round often has the effect of slowing down the action and speech of performers, in comparison to performing end-on. There is something not just about the time it takes to contact spectators on all sides, but also about how spectators read a circular space, which demands a more leisurely pace. This doesn’t mean that things ‘feel slow’, but that greatest pleasure for audience and performers comes, in a circular arena, from taking things a bit easier. With our ball tag game, this has some desirable effects. As we move from playing the game with only our fellow players, to playing not only with them but also for the audience, the importance of winning the game starts to be challenged by the draw of eye contact with



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spectators who are interested in what you do to the extent that they even smile or maybe laugh or clap. Put another way, the more interested the clown is in the audience, the less attention he will pay to what he is trying to achieve (in this case, hitting someone with the ball and avoiding getting hit). So an a­ udience on all sides, demanding more time and contact, puts more pressure on the aim of winning. And this is as it should be. A similar effect is realised ­playing end-on, but demands of ‘look at us!’ may be more necessary then. Some clown students will automatically get this, others will have to have it pointed out to them. But in the end, the evidence of the audience’s observation should prove conclusive: ‘when you look at us we like you more’. In the end, an audience doesn’t care whether you win or lose a silly children’s game of tag. As a play script, this isn’t exactly top-notch material after all! Nor is it a sport. If it were a sporting context, then yes, the spectators would be engaged precisely by the urge by all players to win the game. The ­theatricality of sport is in its competition. Here we can see how sport and theatre differ. If I pay £100 to go to see a boxing match and it’s over by a knockout before the first round is over, I may be disappointed I didn’t see too much boxing, but the essence of the contract between boxers and ­spectators will not have been broken. So fundamentally I will be satisfied. But if I go to see Hamlet and, instead of everyone dying after two or more hours, all the characters end up dead within five minutes, then I will probably feel cheated. Sport is driven by the outcome, whether that’s a quick knockout or a dull 0-0 draw, whereas the pleasures of theatre are in drawing things out, as it were. Of course, I am simplifying horribly here, but I think there is a fundamental distinction. In clowning, if we remain too wedded to games and results, we will forget that the audience’s pleasure may be in seeing the silliest of outcomes played out over time. Instead of throwing the ball to get your opponent out as soon as you can, then, perhaps you will want to let them suffer a little. Let the audience enjoy the moment, don’t end it too soon. ‘Playing to play’ savours the tensions between players, looks for endless variations, repetitions, risks where none were necessary. There is one factor in clowning which makes this even more important and, happily, easier to achieve: laughter. Being laughed at We all have different responses to when people laugh at us. Some people get angry, some laugh as well, some get sad, some are bemused, the list is endless. It doesn’t actually matter how you react, but as a clown it does matter that you let us see that reaction. At one level, clowning is defined by its response to laughter. Audience laughter is the sign to the clown that they have noticed and taken pleasure in the clown’s actions. If the clown is

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Clown Training

interested in that audience (and she should be), then this laughter becomes the basis upon which the clown-audience relationship can be built. Being equally, or more, interested in the audience than in what one is doing is what ‘clowns do’. In this exercise you end up having one foot in the game and one in the audience, so to speak. Which clearly slows down the game and its outcome. In fact, once the game is over, the performers must leave, so the incentive for the clown is the opposite of the sportsman. The clown will try to prolong things and stave off the outcome, in order to spend more time in front of the audience. All these things may not happen immediately during training, and it is of course normal sometimes not to want to stay in front of the audience for as long as possible! But they are pointers, instincts to be cultivated, habits to be formed over time. Grandmother’s footsteps The same ways of playing this game which I described earlier, including cheating and variations, may be employed in the version working with an audience, although to begin with I prefer to use just two players competing against each other to reach the third person, the grandma, with a chair in their path. Look at the audience! As with ball tag, the players must split their looking between the game and the audience in roughly equal measures. This doesn’t mean, as some will attempt to do, looking at both grandma and the audience at the same time. This leads to a strange posture where the playing is attempting to include two points which are perpendicular to each other in the same field of vision. The effect, for onlookers is weird. Clowns might be crazy, but weird, in this sense, they are not. Clowns are as normal, if not more so, than non-clowns. Think of it this way: if I want to walk over to where someone is standing (here it is grandma), then the normal thing is for me to look at that person as I perform this action. If I didn’t look where I was going, I might end up in a place I hadn’t intended to reach. Likewise, if in the normal course of events, I want to sit down in a chair, the normal thing for me to do is to look at the chair, before and during the action of sitting down. Otherwise, I might miss and fall. This behaviour is what I mean when I say ‘normal’. It is nothing to shy away from if one is clowning, in some misguided attempt to act weird or ‘be different’. It is the basic mode underlying intention and action. We don’t want to throw this away because, without it, it will be almost impossible to get things wrong, which is another thing which defines clowns. Now, in this version of the game, the obligation or, hopefully at some stage, the instinct, to look at the audience will complicate the basic human mode of



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doing things. Yet they remain two partly separate worlds, the world of my desired and intended actions and the world of my being drawn to connect with onlookers. The former is a kind of script for the clown, and the latter is the relationship established in this precise moment with whoever is watching. The two inter-relate but do not merge, it being more ­productive to maintain them in tension (Marx might have called it a dialectic). So don’t try to resolve them into one all-encompassing gaze. Another way of understanding this is  to imagine you are going about your daily business, walking along towards your ­destination, when a friend calls out your name from somewhere over to your side. You instinctively look to where the call came from and find yourself in eye contact with the other. You may hold a swift few lines of conversation or gestures with your friend, but you may also continue to look where you are going, switching your attention from one to the other. The human neck is quite well designed for this purpose, of turning the head so that the eyes, placed on the front of the face, may look in different directions. Use your neck! The other bit of looking which goes on in this version is between the two competitors. Avoid looking anywhere other than the designated ‘normal’ points: grandma, competitor, chair or audience. In the audience version of the game, the grandma will only be there in order to facilitate the game of the other two, so is not required to look at the audience, and indeed should not draw their attention. The audience’s perspective Once again, post-game observations can reveal much of the dynamics of what happens. Commonly, as before, the spectator may have the impression that the players’ feelings, thoughts and intentions have become an open book, by means of the eye contact. For whatever reason, this in itself seems to fascinate audiences, to the extent that we can be happy just with this. There is no need at this stage to have any kind of actions purporting to be more interesting. A silly game is enough. There is a warning here as well. Don’t try and introduce extraneous actions, intentions or ideas (likewise those dreaded ‘interpretations’). The game is sufficient to generate all the clowning you want at this stage. Players who want to show off, be clever or appear funny just look like idiots whom the audience will reject. If this happens it really is worth feeding back on it immediately, and catch the habit early, as it may take a number of warnings for the culprit to become aware enough of their behaviour in order to be able to change it. Variations If you particularly like this game played like this, there is scope for yet more variations. Experiment with hiding the grandma behind a screen so that the spectators can’t see her, and then give the grandma the option of just

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Clown Training

ceasing to play. If the grandma does this (which the audience won’t know), the two players trying to reach her must then carry on as if nothing had changed. It’s interesting for the spectators to try and guess at what point this had happened. There are often giveaways which tell us the player has stopped ‘playing for real’ and is now ‘just pretending’. Don’t worry too much about whether one way is better than the other. Clowning involves both being completely committed (doing things for ‘real’) and also maintaining distance from what you are doing (knowing you are ‘pretending’ to do something for real). Impossible playing A stage further on would be to remove the grandma completely. Now the players must try and convince us that they are engaged in a fight to the death, even though we can plainly see that this is not the case. The ­impossibility of convincing us of something puts the clown in the worst (best) possible position: inevitable failure. It’s worth recalling here the fact that difficulty is the clown’s friend. So whenever clown training seems to feel to you like it is ‘difficult’, remember that. Difficult is good! As a final step, try the same but with only one player. Now the illusion of competition has been doubly broken. What is left for the clown to do? Now you have no choice but to admit that it is all pretence, leading to an attitude to the game which is half-believing, half not. If you were to stop believing in it completely, then you would just stroll directly across the stage. But the remnants of the game remain, and then we see a clown who is sort of doing a game we recognise but sort of ignoring it at the same time. Queenie A similar adaptation can be made of queenie. Two receivers and one thrower begin. The receivers have the obligation to split their looking 50/50 between the audience and the game. The points the player of this game looks at will be: the thrower, the ball and each other. The thrower doesn’t need to look at the audience, being, like grandma, the facilitator of the playing. The tendency here, as in many games played for spectators, is for receivers only to look at the audience when it’s safe to do so and they don’t risk losing. But we must insist on cultivating the curiosity of the performer for eye contact with spectators. ( Illusion of ) transparency There are three distinct moments in the course of an action when you can look at the audience: before, during and after the action. In Queenie, ‘before’ is when the thrower still hasn’t released the ball, ‘during’ is when the ball is



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in flight, and ‘after’ is when someone has caught the ball. Obviously ‘during’ is the riskiest of the three and therefore needs to be practised more. As with grandmother’s footsteps, the audience here will most probably observe that they have the impression that they can see the players’ thoughts and feelings. Or, to put it another way, the performers appear somehow ‘transparent’. Whether this transparency is ‘real’ or an ‘­illusion’ created by the way clowning is staged and the way the relationship with the audience is constructed ... well, take your pick. Personally, I see it as a theatrical illusion, but one which relies for its effect on it seeming to be ‘real’. Actually, I would even say that ‘you can’t get much more real than that’. And again, it is important not to add anything. The game is more than sufficient and extra ideas, pretend emotions, justifications or whatever else will show up like sore thumbs and cause the audience to reject the player. Laughter pardons failure When there are just two receivers, the thrower knows of course that if she guesses wrong then it must be the other one who has the ball. So what if we were to remove one of the receivers from the game? Then logically there would be nothing to guess and the game would cease to function, surely? All that would happen would be that the thrower would say the receiver’s name and he would lose and they swap places, continually. Doesn’t sound like fun. However, we can maintain the game if we bring in a new stipulation: if, after the receiver is named by the thrower, the audience laughs, then the receiver wins, remains in place and the thrower throws again. Only if there is no laughter does the receiver lose. The concept of laughter as a kind of ‘pardon’ is most useful in c­ lowning and we shall use it extensively in other exercises. When the task is ­impossible, as here, then laughter is a means to success. Laughter is the clown’s measure of success with an audience and so it seems natural for it to indicate winning. It doesn’t matter how that laughter arises. It can be, ­seemingly, a direct result of the way the receiver catches the ball; or the emotion expressed when caught out; or the blank refusal to admit the plain obvious; or clumsily fumbling the ball in the most crucial moment; or playing badly; or even something the thrower does or which happens outside of the control of the receiver. In fact, laughter in clowning is not exactly a personal affair. One doesn’t have to ‘earn’ it. As long as it is happening, then everything is ‘okay’! Four chairs The four chairs game naturally turns inwards, as the chairs look into the square, and so it is usually only the player in the centre who has much ­freedom to look at the audience. But if we reduce the numbers of ­players,

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the temptation to be enclosed within the game will be diminished and the ­players’ curiosity will more easily be drawn outwards towards the onlookers. Playing at playing First try removing one person from the game, but with the instruction to carry on playing as if they were still there. It’s as if the fifth person hasn’t shown up to play, but it is always better to play than not to play, so the game goes on, but with a gap. It is sillier to play like this, and therefore more ­useful for clowning, than to remove a chair and maintain the balance of chairs to people. After a while, take another person out, with the same idea. With less people in the game, turn your attention more to the audience. When we reduce the numbers to just two, then split your looking 50/50 between the audience and the focus points of the game (opponent and chairs). Clearly there is now no serious point in trying to win, as there are ample chairs, but it is still pleasurable to be ‘caught out’ and have to stand in the centre, or to ‘race’ your opponent for an empty chair. This is now no longer a game with serious rules, but a kind of imitation of a game. It’s like playing at playing a game, if you like. Rather than playing in the ordinary sense, clowns play at everything, including play itself. If the instruction to use your voice and make vowel sounds is maintained in this version, some extremely crazy and ridiculous behaviour will ensue. Craziness ‘Craziness’ is another one of those difficult words, like ‘play’. Referring to so many more or less related concepts, it is easy to misconstrue. Here, used positively in a clown context, I am referring to a kind of energy which keeps you breaking the rules, disregarding normal behaviour whilst enjoying yourself immensely. That’s hardly a precise definition, I know, but suffice to say that it has little to do with the suffering or unawareness entailed in other kinds of craziness. Craziness is an important element in most clowns. Without it, we may still have a person who is ridiculous, silly, disobedient and so on, but their energy will tend towards inertia. A few clowns will be like this and all the better for it. But the majority will be wise to cultivate their craziness and avoid the trap of playing ‘deadpan’. Musical chairs Like the previous one and many others, this game works more easily with an audience when the number of players is reduced. In general it is quite difficult to be a group of performers if you outnumber the audience. So,  once  several people have been eliminated, or starting from a small number of participants, the duty again is to share your visual contact ­ between spectators and competitors and chairs.



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If you play this game from the beginning with the instruction to ­actually dance while the music is on, then now you will have the opportunity to  dance for the audience. And as we don’t really question why people are dancing, you have a kind of instant show, potentially at least. The audience will then be observing two worlds: the first is the world of your performance, your dance. The second is your on-stage world which is happening unpredictably in the moment, the world of each person’s thoughts, feelings and strategies to win the game. Avoiding reproducing clichés As before, don’t introduce new material, ideas or plans other than ones which will get you a chair. There is a big temptation and a danger here, which is that if the music is recognisable to you, you might be led to try and dance in the style you think is correct, and then, since this is clown, to try to do that dance style in a funny way. Don’t! This is a trap! It’s not that such clowning isn’t possible – it is, and very common in the form of parodic numbers, and we can come to such things when devising material - but reproducing a whole set of social conventions such as a dance style can lock you into a dry cliché which pushes aside all your engagement in the real situation of the game. Better to dance with the simplest of pleasure in the music and at the same time lend your focus to the game and the audience. Extended failure A further development here is possible. When you are the unlucky person left without a chair, use your moment of failure in front of everyone to launch into a short (or long) dance of failure, elaborating your performance with the energy that has come in the moment of realisation that you have lost. Bodies in the moment of failure are quite distinct things, and as a clown you will be learning to begin from this point. Usually we think of such failures as the end points of something, when an attempted activity is abandoned. But for the clown, this is the starting point. The clown enters the stage in a state of  failure. Audience eye-contact games There are also other games which can be specifically used to practise eye contact with the audience. Sparring games are particularly good for this: Slap hands Two players stand facing each other and hold their hands out in front of them, one person with palms upward, the other with palms facing down, above the first person’s palms. The one with the hands below must try and slap the other’s hands and if she manages to, wins, and they swap positions.

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Clown Training

This game usually asks for eye contact all the time between players, but here you must look at the audience all the time. Take risks by looking in crucial moments. Arm wrestling Set up two players facing each other to arm wrestle, elbows on a table, hands clasped, in profile to the audience. While playing to win using your utmost strength, look at the audience, not at your opponent. This time it is 100% of the time that you must look at the audience. Resist the t­ emptation to look down or away, especially when under great pressure. Keep your eyes wide open, whatever you feel. Often strong emotion or exertion leads us to avert our gaze, but these states are incredibly interesting for a ­spectator to witness. Free looking Obviously you don’t actually need the excuse of playing a game in order to be able to look at people. You could just as easily do the same kind of thing as the above exercises, but without actually having a game as your task. Simply  stand there and look at each spectator. This isn’t an exercise I use myself, but it is one I have observed, and admired, in the teaching of Sue Morrison. Her teaching evolved from working closely with Richard Pochinko, who in turn sought to combine what he had learned from European teachers such as Jacques Lecoq with indigenous traditions of his native Canada. An exercise ‘without rules’ clearly depends heavily on the management of the situation by the teacher. This is not always an obvious point, as was evidenced once in a workshop I was translating for Sue once in the early days of the Barcelona Clown School. One of the students, when it was her turn to get up and do the exercise, mentioned that she had done the exercise in the past. The teacher, surprised, asked, ‘Oh really, when was that? I don’t remember teaching you’. The student replied, ‘Oh no, it was with another teacher.’ To which Sue responded, ‘Well, if it wasn’t with me, then you haven’t done this exercise!’ Outside the classroom Looking at spectators while going about your activity can be practised at any time, then. Try looking out at people nearby when doing normal tasks during the day. They may not be spectators in the sense that they are there already watching to see what you will do, but they may very ­easily become such once you have engaged them in eye contact. Absolutely any action will do for this exercise: walking down the street,



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talking on the phone, fixing a car, picking up food from a shelf, talking to a friend, anything. Particularly fun are actions which have turned out badly, like just missing a train you have run for. When the train pulls away, look round to see if anyone has seen your failed attempt. This is good practice for the stage, but is even better for street performance. We shall see that it is a prime means to gather an audience where just before there was none. Playing and performing On occasions, an exercise such as many of the ones we’ve looked at over these first two chapters may develop so well in a class that you have the impression you’ve just witnessed a great performance. In a way, that’s what we are constantly looking for in the training: at least to see moments of clowning, instances when we can say without doubt that ‘clowning has happened’. Although the classroom or workshop is a place where we can fail as many times as we want in pursuit of success (even if in clown terms that success means becoming adept at exploiting your failure), the success of training is ultimately measured in terms of how much good clowning it can produce. That good clowning might well happen during the class. But it might also happen some time after the course has finished. Weeks, months or even years later, you might find that what you were trying to learn back then in that workshop has just born fruit. And of course it doesn’t matter in the slightest when this happens. A class isn’t the place for showing off how good we are at clowning. Such a competitive environment would never, in my opinion, be able to generate truly good clowning, anyway. But even bearing this all in mind, it can happen that an exercise takes off, as it were, becoming almost a whole performance. When this happens, it is easy to think, ‘what if we were to do this again in public? If it worked well now, surely it could be a great clown number for us to perform somewhere else?’ These thoughts occur both to students and to teachers of clown. At least I can vouch for the fact that they have occurred to me when I’ve been both student and teacher. And on several occasions I have taken that step and translated the workshop exercise to the stage. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s easy to see how certain games, exercises or scenes arising from them could become very performable pieces for audiences other than your classmates. I think it’s always worth trying this, as long you are aware of the potential for failure. Not that such a risk should ever stop anyone from trying! The differences between workshops and public performing are many. Some of those differences can be compensated for but some cannot, I think. Here are some of the major ­differences as I see them:

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Clown Training

Workshop

Show

Audience is known to the performer (spending hours together in class)

Audience probably not known to the performer

Audience will also do, or have done the exercise

Audience will not have to do the exercise

The participants all understand how the exercise works, what is expected of them and of the spectators, by having it described by the teacher before doing it

The audience only understand what is presented to them in the moment of performance, not usually having anything explained to them previously about how they should react

Participants are implicitly looking very closely for moments of clowning. They are inspecting things very closely, and the slightest evidence will awaken their response

Audience are awaiting clear moments when they can laugh

Everyone may be bored with watching each other perform (having been in class together for a while)

The performance and performers will be seen by the audience for the first, and probably last, time

Everyone may be habituated to laughing The audience will not be used to the at each other, with little provocation performers

It’s not that either of these two situations is better or worse for clowning, but that they are different. The workshop may become a kind of hothouse situation where amazing clowning can be generated, or it may also become sterile and over-familiar. The public performance may flop due to a lack of connection being established between clowns and spectators, or it may ­surprise everyone by the unexpected laughs and delight with which the clowns are received. Uncle Vanya An elaborate example of using games and exercises was when I decided to stage Chekhov’s play, Uncle Vanya, with a group of students.1 This apparently ambitious plan was actually driven by cautious realism. I had three weeks with a group of acting students to both teach them clowning and to put on a workshop performance open to the public, for which they would be assessed as part of their degree studies. Workshop performances at this school were generally a kind of showcase, especially in students’ final year, and often a chance to work with a well-known director who might give you some work when you graduated if all went well. That meant that usually the hours available were taken up with putting on a production, not with learning a new skill such as clowning.



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But why Chekhov? Wouldn’t it have been easier to have devised some short clown numbers for the performance? Well, that seemed logical, but as I hope this book demonstrates, the first stages of learning clowning do not automatically prepare you to perform. Well, to perform, yes ... but to ­perform what? Where does the material come from? I felt that devising in such a short time a few quick numbers would only give poor results. Devising is a whole new thing to attempt. As I have hinted at already by defining some of the more obvious differences between workshops and public shows, ‘just playing’ or ‘just improvising’ won’t necessarily get you very far with an audience. Indeed, this has been a stumbling block for many decades, the absence of training or guideline in devising for clown meaning that many students have the feeling that they might have discovered their clown but they didn’t know what to do next. I will come to the matter of devising proper in the second part of this book. So I opted to take the exercises we had been doing (like the ones in the first part of this book) and develop them into a performance. I was relatively pleased with the result, which, despite there being a large number of exercises used, I put down to the fact that the exercises were all placed in a larger frame, which was the performance, ostensibly, of a well-known Chekhov play. Although it was obvious from the start that this staging of a classic of western theatre was not going to be recognisably theatre as we know it, but a seemingly chaotic attempt by a dozen or so clowns to make sense of something they couldn’t grasp, the framing as a piece of serious theatre stood up, and thereby allowed for all sorts of messing about within it. Rather than try to describe how those games became watchable in a show, I direct the reader to the video of the performance.2

Chapter

3

Clown Dynamics

The clown curriculum If the chapters in this book are conceived in line with the main areas of learning into which I divide clown training, then clown dynamics is a section which I generally see as being at the centre of the whole training. The play and audience work has led us to a point where we are hopefully ready to embrace the essential elements of the way clowning functions at the level of the relationship between the performer and the audience. Later, once that dynamic has become established, we will be able to start creating material for the clown to perform. That’s the plan, anyway. However, things don’t always work out so linearly. I often return to the dynamics after the devising to get out of the thinking mode which work on devising often leads you to – and because a well-devised number isn’t going to work without the clown being present. This is a normal and natural process of going back to the beginnings once you’ve got to the end, a constant cycle of revision. More surprising, though, is when sometimes a person will just take to the clown dynamics with no preparation. (I describe a particularly striking example of this at the end of Chapter 8 in the section on ‘teaching clowning’.) Indeed, it was with a view to leading students directly and swiftly into the dynamics of clowning, when the time available was short, that I developed many of the exercises in this chapter. Systems are all very well as long as they do the job they were intended for. Once they become ends in themselves or obsessively structured, they lose their way. I once came up with the idea of the ‘seven pillars of clown’. The ­ pillars (or ‘pillows’ as we preferred to call them) corresponded roughly to some of the chapters here. The idea lasted for one summer and then seemed too clunky. Too much system suffocates clowning. There is no need to come up with something as spectacularly organised as a system like chakras, meridians or Euclidean geometry. Patterns will occur, as, for example, in this book many exercises start from a basic children’s game, before moving on to variations, and using prohibitions to keep students on the right track. But not all are like that, nor should they be

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49

forced into such a scheme merely for the sake of apparent symmetry in order to justify being claimed as a teaching ‘method’. The flop Talking of systems, this chapter takes its cue in large part from a concept and practice which owes its place in contemporary clown training i­ nitially to precisely one of those apparently consistent systems of training. Jacques Lecoq’s experiments with clowning in the early 1960s gave us: the flop. So let’s take a quick look back to that decade, in order to have an idea of what we are dealing with. Lecoq tells in his own words how in the early 1960s he experimented with clowns at the school in Paris which he had founded in 1956. (It seems like an account straight from the horse’s mouth, although it was only published in 1987, but since, to my knowledge, there are no corroborating witnesses on record then we must take it as accurate.) In 1962 the school discovered clowns, a phenomenon that was to take on an importance that I never anticipated. … The first courses only lasted two days but the core theme had already been identified: clowns make you laugh. So I set up the stage and everyone came on with the sole obligation to make us laugh. It was terrible, ridiculous. Nobody laughed. In an atmosphere of general anguish the student-clowns flopped; and as each one passed across the stage the same phenomenon was repeated. The crestfallen clown sat down, sheepishly … and it was at that moment when we started to laugh at him. The teaching method had been found – that of the flop.1

The mechanics of this clowning are: you aim to make the others laugh, from the stage, but this is practically impossible, so you give up, whereupon they laugh; the failure to make others laugh becomes the key to making them laugh. Apart from telling a student ‘make us laugh’ (which is an excellent exercise), how else can we train in flopping? Prisoners The game For the first stage of this game you need a circle of chairs with one person standing behind each chair. The others sit on the chairs, but the number of chairs must be calculated such that a few chairs are vacant. So, for example, with twelve people playing, you might have seven chairs and five people sitting, leaving two empty chairs. To play, anyone standing behind an empty chair has to wink at someone sitting, who then stands up and

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Clown Training

comes to the winker’s chair. But if the person behind that moving person touches them, then they stay in that chair. After a while, everyone changes places. Playing for the audience Once you’ve had enough of the basic game, place just two chairs facing each other, with one person standing behind each and one person sitting on each chair, totalling four people in the game. Everyone else is the audience. The rules of winking, escaping and touching are still the same, but now the standing person (or guard) only has the same one person to wink at, the one sitting in the chair opposite. If winked at, the sitting person (the prisoner) doesn’t move to a vacant chair, since there are none, but instead goes to the empty space between the players and the audience. As they escape they shout, ‘one point!’ as they look the audience in the eye, before returning to their chair for more. The first person to get three points wins, and you swap round. What is useful at this stage, apart from the game itself being fun, is to try and do several things at once in the crucial moment: see the wink, lift your bottom from the chair, look at the audience and open your mouth to shout, ‘one point!’, ‘two points!’ or ‘three points!’ Ideally, these should not occur as a sequence of actions with space in between, but as stimulus (wink) and instant reactions (stand, look and speak). Having mastered that (or not!), move on to the next stage. Now, as the two players sit in their chairs, in addition to being attentive to the dynamics of the game, they hold a conversation between them. Any subject will do, although it is always a good idea in such cases to avoid talking about the game itself, its rules, participants, and so on. This time, when you escape and come downstage to the audience, don’t shout, ‘one point!’ but instead continue with what you were saying in that conversation. Bring what was offstage onto the stage. Pleasure If all this seems like a lot of instructions, then you can practise this bit a few times before getting to the key point of this whole endeavour. Once you arrive ‘onstage’, impelled by the delight of escaping from your guard, looking at your audience and saying all kinds of nonsense from your inane conversation (let’s assume it wasn’t an interesting chat, as creativity isn’t called for right now), stay there. Keep going. But with what? You have no show, nothing interesting to say, you just find yourself there. Stay there with your pleasure, the joy of winning the stupid game and looking at these people who are looking back at you. For as long as that pleasure lasts, stay there. As soon as it leaves you, go back to your chair and carry on playing. How do you know when you have pleasure or not? It’s not obvious to everyone playing this game to begin with, though it is often easier to spot



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from the spectators’ perspective. Some help from the teacher is useful, so I will say ‘leave!’ when someone is outstaying their welcome or ‘don’t go yet!’ when someone has given up too early. Gradually, by playing the game, watching it and being attentive to the guidance as to when there is pleasure or not, you begin to recognise it in the moment. It is actually rather similar to recognising the pleasure or lack of it when you danced with a partner. A performer who stays on stage without pleasure wearies the audience, whereas one who leaves early leaves the audience feeling cheated. The trick is to identify the moment of pleasure loss, and act on it immediately. The flop Once you start to get the hang of this, something else quite extraordinary starts to happen. When your pleasure disappears, you recognise it and start to leave. At that moment the audience laughs. When this is happening we can introduce a new instruction into the game: when the audience laughs, come back onstage. This means that, if you handle the ups and downs of your pleasure well, you will never leave the stage! Every time you flop and admit it, they laugh and you are successful. Sometimes this exercise benefits from having a screen or curtain separate the area with the chairs where the game takes place from the performing area: backstage and onstage, as it were. Finding your own pleasure When you are practised at this, you can dispense with the guards. Two people sit on their chairs and, whenever they feel the urge, stand up and enter, with pleasure. Ah, but how can I feel the urge to enter? What if it doesn’t come? Two possible solutions present themselves. First, invent it. Pretend. If it leads you to real pleasure, wonderful. If not, you will have a flop and, hopefully, a laugh. Having ‘true’ emotions, impulses or motivations is never a problem for a clown, since she can always pretend, and the possible outcomes (success or failure) will be the same as when she feels something ‘for real’. In fact, the same applies to actors in general, but that needn’t concern us now. The second solution might take a little longer to get. Observe yourself as you sit there in the chair, not knowing how to get up, wanting to feel something exciting that will impel in front of the audience. What are you feeling? Defeat? Sadness? Confusion? Something will be there, probably a so-called ‘negative’ emotion. Now enter the stage with this emotion, which should be easy, as it’s the emotion you have right now. Play this feeling for the audience and see if your pleasure takes hold. But what if you have no emotion? You’re depressed? You’re bored? Then play this, with pleasure! Boredom has just as much right to be onstage as happiness. Why discriminate against certain feelings? It may well be that your boredom, played with pleasure,

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Clown Training

makes us all roll around laughing. Once you realise that, you find pleasure and enter the stage with any feeling, then there is no stopping you. Every moment will be an excuse to begin. Self-awareness and audience awareness Identifying pleasure might not seem like an exact science to begin with, but it is definitely something one can get better at. In a way, that’s one way of answering the question, ‘Can you teach people to be funny?’ Because, yes, you can teach people to be aware of their pleasure and to manipulate its ebb and flow in front of an audience, which produces a certain kind of clowning. As I have already suggested, audiences already recognise the presence or absence of pleasure. When they believe it to be present they will be happy to be engaged by the performer or, if you prefer, will be ‘convinced’ by the performer. They will accept you, love you. But when the pleasure disappears, they will reject you and want you to go away right now, and if you do not then they may hate you. No amount of technique will be able to convince an audience when the pleasure has gone. They might quite like you, they might be quite interested, they may even tolerate you. But love you they will not! Pleasure is a functioning drive, not just in clown but in all other genres, potentially. In this it resembles any number of other concepts which have been used in order to explain how the relationship between performers and audiences works. These have included, at one or other time in history or today: presence, chemistry, spark, magic, radium, alchemy, power, energy, electricity, magnetism, illumination, fire, lightning, mesmerism and many more. Curiously, many of these terms allude to either science or the supernatural. They are usually used in a final attempt to explain what seems inexplicable, and the terms themselves are rarely explained in themselves. They act as metaphors. ‘Pleasure’ may be more or less of a metaphor, it doesn’t really matter in the end, but it is my preferred term in part because of my own training history (Gaulier founds his whole system of acting on it), and in part because in clown there is so obviously a lot of fun going on, and ‘fire’ or even ‘presence’ just feel too earnest. Failure to convince is convincing Just something to note here: pleasure may be common to all acting, but in clown it takes on a distinct form. As we saw in the last game, the clowning is being produced at the points where the pleasure is coming and going. In the very moment when you stop convincing an audience, as long as you admit the fact and leave, you instantly have them with you once more. In the flopping and the returning of the clown’s pleasure lies not only the audience’s engagement, but also the clown’s very performance dynamic, the motor which will drive the clown’s actions and how those actions are to be created onstage.



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Lineage and ownership of clown exercises I have described this game and its variations fairly much along the same lines as how I learned it as a student with Gaulier, as far as my memory allows. In  any case, it’s pointless trying to remember an exercise exactly as it was when you first did it. It will develop and change, sometimes out of recognition, as you use it over time. Some exercises might be closely identified with a particular teacher (though that teacher may of course have got it from someone else), but they rarely can be said to ‘belong’ to any one individual. Oral forms of culture, which are passed on by word of mouth or my doing them in practice, cannot truly be said to have owners. Ownership is a rather falsified concept based on whether one can possess something in order to sell it to someone else. A printed play text can be owned and sold as a book, but a live performance cannot. I think it’s good to acknowledge influences, but in the end we must all remake things as we see fit. The same approach will broadly apply when we come to invent or recycle material for performance, later on. The next exercise has a curious history within my teaching practice. I found the basic version in a self-help book designed to teach laughter skills, aimed at businesspeople wishing to be more productive. The authors acknowledge in turn that they got it from a Buddhist monk.2 I made some alterations to make it more useful to clowns and it ended up later being a key training method in flopping. Mirror-laughing I have written about this exercise on a number of occasions, including at some length in my first book, Clown Readings.3 There I was concerned not just in how the exercise worked in training but also the way it evidenced the role of laughter in clowning. At the risk of repeating myself here, I will cover similar ground, but presented in the way I conceive of it as I am actually teaching the exercise. Set up a large mirror, full-length if possible, on one side of the space, and a chair facing it, placed in the centre of the space. One person sits in the chair facing the mirror, in profile to the audience. You have just two options as to where you look: in the mirror at your own image, or at the audience. No looking at the floor, ceiling or anywhere else. Eyes must always remain open, despite an instinct to close them at times. So far, easy, right? When explaining this exercise I take pains to over-emphasise how near-impossible it is to get the exercise wrong. This is partly to make a joke about students’ fears when presented with certain exercises, and thereby maybe dispel some of that fear. Some clown exercises do indeed instil fear in some people, as they seem to demand an opening-up in front of everyone which we are not accustomed to. This exercise, together with one or two others also included in this present chapter, are especially daunting in that way. And yet the actual mechanics of the exercise are so very simple.

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Clown Training

As well as making choices about where you look, you must also be continuously laughing. I mean continuously, with no elongated pausing. There is absolutely no requirement to produce a ‘genuine laugh’. Nor is this the aim of the exercise. The aim of the exercise is ... to do the exercise correctly. If you follow the simple instructions well, then you will have done the exercise well. Whatever you learn will come from that experience. ‘Achieving’ a fixed aim (like a real laugh) is not learning. It is achievement. The two are, at least to a clown, not the same thing by any means. The three kinds of laughter: real, fake and acting I observe, normally, three types of laughter in this work. First, there is what we generally believe is a genuine laugh, one that seems to come involuntarily. Secondly, there is what seems obvious to us to be a fake laugh, one where the laugher is clearly detached from any supposed mirth. It comes across as distanced, mechanical or without pleasure. A lie. Both of these laughs are good in the context of this exercise, as well as generally in the work on ­clowning. However, there is a third kind of laughter of which we should be wary, what I call the ‘actor’s laugh’. This laugh bears an uncanny resemblance to the genuine laugh, but we suspect something of the fake. We cannot be sure. It looks and sounds like the real thing but it isn’t entirely convincing. To a certain kind of actor it is the pinnacle of his achievement, his technique. It is useless to the clown. The clown oscillates constantly between the real and the fake, between coming and going, between presence and absence. The actor’s laugh sits right in the middle of this and thus only serves to stagnate the performer in front of an audience who admires him but little else. So if you find yourself in this middle ground in this exercise, and if the realness of your laughter doesn’t take over, push the laugh back towards the fake end of the spectrum, let it be known beyond doubt that this is pretence. Then he audience will know where they stand: in front of a clown who hasn’t a clue how to laugh. Many things can happen in the course of this exercise, from unstoppable delirious laughter by all, through deadly silences to sobbing. All are good. You don’t know, before you begin, what it is that will provoke laughter, or silence, or indeed tears. It might be simply seeing yourself in the mirror which makes you burst out laughing, which in turn sets off the spectators. Or it might be when you finally stop doing your continuous fake laugh and breathe and look at how fed up you look that stimulates the laughter. Adding in moments of pause often aids the student to take a moment to become aware of how foolish she is appearing, and thence laugh. If rigid patterns of fake laughter get established, it can be good to break things up by varying the rhythm or pitch of the voice. Depending on your level of commitment to this training, you can choose to persevere with the exercise as long as you can. There is no real time limit,



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nor is there any optimum time for achieving anything. If you find yourself crying or otherwise suffering, therefore, you can elect to stop, or you can keep going. I have many times found that gently leading someone in a negative state back in front of the mirror to look at themselves leads to the resurgence of genuine laughter at the sight of such a silly tearful face. Suddenly realising how foolish it is to be having a bad time, for no reason, is pretty ridiculous! Laughter and the flop To summarise, what seems to stimulate laughter here, whether it comes from the person doing the exercise or the onlookers, is frequently a realisation of how unconvincing one has just been, how foolish that fake laugh was. It seems to us relatively easy to spot when a laugh is fake or genuine, so as audience (and performer, if he is attuned to his own flops) we ‘know’ when the performer is convincing or not. In addition, as laughter is supposedly so difficult to fake, laughter is generally believed to be, by definition, something genuine. Then the mere attempt at trying to fool us with a fake laugh is the pinnacle of foolishness. As such, it is doomed to failure. The real laugh is thus a kind of successful performance, whilst the fake one is a flop, which, if admitted, provokes an instant real laugh in response. Laughter plus action After everyone has done the exercise at least once in this way, it’s time for a second round. This time, you begin in the same way, but at the teacher’s clap as a signal, stand up from the chair. You are now free to move. If you feel relatively at home with the comings and goings of your laughter, you can leave the mirror behind a little, only coming back to it in moments when your energy is slipping. Now add in some movement. It can be any old movement, but do it precisely when and only when you feel your laugh is a genuine one. Observing this, from outside and inside, is educational in the least. A movement, even a ‘meaningless’ one, when performed at the same time as the person is laughing, takes on a very special kind of quality. It is almost as if the laughter is the raw energy which enables actions to be carried out, a kind of life force. It is quite different to that same movement made without the performer’s laugh. What is the difference? The simplest answer would be: when it is accompanied by the performer’s own laughter, the movement is performed with pleasure. Laughing at yourself (for that is what you are literally doing when laughing at your reflection in the mirror) is a particularly clown kind of pleasure, and so your action here will, in a sense, be a clown action.

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Action, not psychology Note here that I am not entering into any kind of discussion of ­psychology. Beyond acknowledging that for many students these exercises might understandably evoke certain fears and anxieties, I don’t see much to say about psychology here. Nor indeed anywhere during the process of clown training. The exercises, or at least the good ones in my view, do the job for the student of putting him in the right context where clowning can happen with relative ease. The dynamics of the exercise should thus do the job of getting the student as near as possible to the learning aims, which are to clown. Put like that it all sounds rather mechanical, but the experience of it, for both clown and audience, is anything but. The rollercoaster on which the performer rides, and the vast amount of detail which the audience perceives, are rich in feelings, thoughts and actions. But for the clown performer to get there, to achieve this, it is not necessary to follow a tortuous path, but instead follow some simple guidelines. These guidelines have principally to do with actions, that is to say, with things which you may do. And if it is something you can actually do (like look at A or B; or laugh either genuinely or in fake manner), then it is something which the teacher, or director perhaps, can actually demand of the performer. It is no use giving a confused or metaphorical instruction to a performer like ‘get in touch with your energy’ or even ‘use your ­pleasure’, if the performer doesn’t know (and cannot know) what ‘energy’ or ‘pleasure’ is. Laughing duos Further variations of the exercise can involve more than one performer at a time. Try with two. They both laugh simultaneously, both using the mirror and looking at the audience, and additionally look at each other. Try this next with the action performed when your own laugh feels g­enuine. Finally, you can eliminate the fake laugh altogether. In this case the instructions are to look at each other and/or the audience, in silence; when you laugh (genuinely) you also move; when the laugh disappears you stop moving. If in the previous exercise, prisoners, the clown left the stage when her pleasure went, returning when it returned, then in the mirror exercise the clown either falls silent and/or stops doing things when the laughter ceases. Silence, inaction or leaving are all symbols of the flop, of failing to convince the audience. They are a way of staging the clown’s failure. That failure can also be seen in the way the body itself behaves when under the effects of this kind of laughter. Which kind of laughter, one might ask? Well, without getting too deep into conflicting theories of laughter, I  would briefly say that it is a self-ridiculing laughter, a finding-oneselfutterly-ridiculous kind of laughter.



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Observations on the laughing, failing and falling body When I ask those spectating the mirror-laugh exercise to observe what they saw, they can fairly easily perceive those differences between action accompanied by self-laughter and that which is not. What is actually going on in this case? It isn’t easy to describe laughter-driven action, and I suspect it would need a whole scientific study in controlled laboratory conditions to establish just what the muscles, nerves and other elements of the physical body are doing. But we can observe, from the outside, some very familiar patterns and postures in the body when it laughs. A simple exercise is useful in building up awareness of this. When laughing, as for example in the mirror-laugh exercise, whenever you laugh genuinely and involuntarily, immediately repeat that laugh, whether you still have the urge to laugh or not. Make the repetition as accurate a copy of the involuntary laugh as possible, trying to reproduce not just the sounds, but also the face, the mouth and eye positions, the posture and movement, including head position, arm and leg positions, inclination of the spine, and so on. This conscious repetition of a previously non-conscious action will often, in itself, provoke others’ laughter, probably, I would say, due to your inability (failure) to convince us of something that just now was indeed convincingly genuine. In other words, you will have just produced a little moment of clowning. We saw the real thing, and then how you tried to sell us the fake version, and we saw through it! But as well as this outcome, immensely desirable, will be a growing awareness, if you keep repeating the laughter moment, of what your body habitually does when you laugh in this way. And the results are generally not unexpected. Allowing, of course, for a great amount of variation between individuals and moments, a common pattern emerges where your head tilts back, your mouth opens, your chest collapses and your spine bends forwards, one knee comes up, often repeatedly, and you nearly, or actually, fall backwards to the floor. Physiologically, the ‘anti-gravitational muscles’ (upper legs/thighs and abdomen) are relaxing, thus failing to do their job of keeping you upright. Laughter and failure Intriguingly, by the way, this same posture/action can be just as frequently observed in moments of failure. Try it: when playing any game which involves a moment when players lose and are eliminated, such as ball tag, practise observing yourself at the moment when you lose, and try repeating your action/posture of that instance. Many attempts have been made to categorise emotional states in so-called empirical terms. Some have focused on trying to map the facial expressions of emotions; others have looked at the postural manifestations of states of being or personality types, often those deemed ‘negative’ or ‘abnormal’

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in a medical or psychological sense. But as far as I am aware, the link between self-ridiculing laughter and failure as manifested in the body has not received any attention. For a clown this link is of immense importance. Does this mean that we experience and feel the same things when we ‘lose’ as when we laugh at ourselves? Is feeling failure actually the same thing as self-ridicule? And are failure and self-ridicule destined to dump us on our backsides? Incidentally, this is clearly not just a static posture but more of a position the body enters into, a movement. I have found that, if students repeat the position, without the urge to laugh beforehand, it is the adopting of the body posture which provokes your own laughter. The continued knee movements prolong the laughter, whereas simply freezing the position produces tension and no laughter. This seems to open up a potentially new route to learning clowning. Just practise the laughing position! Which of course would go against all those mantras of the orthodox view these days on clowning, which says that you can’t learn it ‘from the outside in’. But as I have written extensively on that debate elsewhere, let’s move on. Daily laughing practice A final note on the mirror-laugh exercise. It is an excellent one for practising at home in private. In fact, this is what the ‘original’ Buddhist/self-help versions proposed, to laugh at yourself for ten minutes every day, first thing in the morning. It can be in a small mirror, or a full-length one, dressed or naked. The rest of your day, having begun by finding yourself utterly ridiculous, will be a breeze. If done every day, the teachers say, it has the power to change your life attitude. So, if you want to change in this way, now you know what to do! Some classroom traps As the training, and this book, progress, the activities I am proposing are becoming less and less like games, of the familiar children’s kind, and more like exercises, which try to re-create, in the workshop, some of the conditions of public performance, but under controlled, or benign, circumstances in order to practise or train in preparation for the ‘real thing’. This is what a large part of actor training methods aspire to, of course. Whether they do actually manage to do this successfully or not is open to question. One of the issues in clown training is the audience. As we have already seen, the audience is relatively active in a partnership with the clown, though still essentially passive and therefore still an audience. The advantage here is that the class participants not doing the exercise do act as the audience, without which it would be next to impossible to practise ­clowning. The  drawback here in the clown workshop, though, is that it will be the same audience class after class. Your same companions will be there



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l­ooking at you every time you attempt to clown. Two things can happen here. Either they can become fed up of seeing the same faces and cease to be amused. Even when you are clowning well it has little effect. They have become a ‘difficult audience’. Or they can become so much everyone’s friend that everything their classmates do seems to be hilarious even when it isn’t. This is a slippery slope which does no one any favours, since you will gain a falsely high opinion of your clowning. I have seen this happen many times, especially in longer residential courses where group bonding can be fiercely strong. Students sometimes even come to view the positive experience of the group as not just part of their experience of clown training, but more important than clowning. Which is fine, in itself, but it won’t help your clowning. I have even seen this on short courses, where in-jokes quickly become evident. This is not apparent to the participants, but to an outsider it is glaringly obvious. Just try the experience of sitting in on someone else’s clown class and you will see what I mean, when everyone except you is laughing. Who can blame students for falling into such a trap? But unfortunately teachers are prone to it as well. I have cringed at the amount of laughing I have witnessed some teachers regaling their clown students with. They have either lost all sense of proportion or are subconsciously trying to prove what successful clown teachers they are, since all their students are funny all of the time. With that in mind, let’s pass on to another exercise which attempts to allow for practice of particular dynamics connected to laughter. Semicircle The names of most of the games and exercise in this book are the ones I have used to refer to them in my own notes. So apart from well-known games that already exist, I have made up names which are pretty basic, their purpose being to remind me of their content. The names mean nothing in the course of a workshop or course. It would serve no evident educational purpose to introduce them to students by name. Here is an exercise whose name does not reveal much unless you know how it works. To begin with everybody stands in a straight line, all facing what will be the performing space. Stand close together, but comfortably. An audience whose members are physically close to each other generally responds more than one which is separated by distance or the barriers of large armchair-like theatre seats. This is not to be forgotten whenever it is in the clown performer’s power to arrange or influence the layout of an audience, whether seated or standing. More laughs may result from a group of spectators whose sense of each other’s physical presence is greater, than from a collection of isolated individuals. Now, assuming you are the person on the end of this line, you walk into the performing space, in a semicircular path which will take you roughly

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furthest away from the line of onlookers at about the mid-point in the line, from where you will start to bend back towards them, rejoining the line at the opposite end to where you began. The walk should be a not too fast stroll, allowing for time to look at the onlookers, which you should do for one hundred per cent of the time. A strolling pace, one that allows you to register what’s happening, what you are feeling. Go too fast and you will arrive without having been aware of what happened along the way. And whatever you feel along the way, don’t hide it from us, let us see it. It isn’t necessary to tell us anything, or to try and communicate anything. Don’t invent things to do. Just let us see you. If you manage this, you won’t feel any need to respond defensively to what’s happening. The audience, as well as looking back at you, will do two additional things: they will point at you and they will call out your name. They should do both of these constantly, during the whole walk. Once more, this is an exercise whose elements are simple to do, and any temptation to do otherwise should be resisted. The walker does not have to do anything, just walk, look ... and keep their mouth open. Having your mouth open is the easiest way to let go of controlling what comes out of you. The first exit of the body is the mouth, even though there are others, of course, and therefore it reveals most. I find this is often a far more effective and efficient (i.e. quicker) route to finding the clown than wearing a red nose. I have seen countless times how people will laugh instantly when a clown student opens their mouth, not just in this exercise. Once everyone has done this, have a check to find out people’s feelings and experiences. These habitually range from feeling joy to fear, from feeling loved to derided. Both ends of the spectrum are valid, and opposite though they may seem, are related to each other, at least in the world of clown. One way of defining a clown (amongst the many) is as an individual who is different from the group, given their foolish or unconventional manner of behaving or looking. But this description also applies to the exile, the outcast or the scapegoat. The relationship between these individuals and their groups, or communities, follows a similar dynamic. Where they might differ is in the degree of love between them. Think of shouting ‘you stupid idiot!’ at someone in two different ways, one in order to insult and hurt them, and another to an old friend who, despite their foolishness, is still dear to you. Just as the onlookers’ attitude may differ in this way, so may the individual’s stance: do you receive the pointing and name-calling as love or as rejection? Being the centre of attention is wonderful, people calling your name; you are the star. But being the outsider, the individual separated from the group, can be painful. And in both cases the right response for the clown is a nondefensive one. Next, do the same again, but this time without the pointing and namecalling from the audience, though the walker can try and recall, inwardly, the feelings she had when the audience were active the first time around.



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Plus out-breath ... In a third round, pause when you arrive centre stage, and breathe out. Then continue your semicircular journey. Breathing, especially breathing out, is another key element in clowning. Avner Eisenberg has a series of exercises designed to train one in breathing out at the key moment when you enter the stage, establishing trust with an audience. Breathing out also often provokes laughter. Simple, eh? Breathing generally accompanies muscle tensions which strengthen or harden the body in preparation for physical effort or to protect yourself. Breathing out goes with the opposite: being defenceless, vulnerable. The latter is more conducive to clowning. ‘Clowning as breath’ would be a more than acceptable way of theorising how clowning works, in my view, though it is not something I have developed further. It certainly makes more sense to me than ‘clowning as mask’. Plus action ... On the fourth round, as before when you arrive centre stage, pause and breathe out. This time, after the out-breath, do a simple action, lasting only a couple of seconds. Do this action without tension or force (in the spirit of breathing out!). After completing the action, pause again, breathe out again, then leave. Ideally, the action should be unpremeditated and you should avoid situating it (defining who does it, what it is or where it’s done) or telling us what it ‘means’. We aren’t looking for ‘good ideas’. Focus on the breathing, the pausing, the looking ... and the being aware of what you just did in front of the audience. Plus repeat action on self-laugh ... Next we will introduce a new instruction into the exercise. Now, if you laugh at any time, you have to repeat your action. Try and repeat it as soon as the laugh starts coming, rather than when it has subsided; that way the action is powered by the laugh, which is a very strong energy and produces gestures of a completely different quality, as we have seen already. If, due to your repeated laughter, you repeat the action several times before leaving, try variations. If you did something with one hand now do it with the other. Or backwards, or then in a modified way. This is the beginning of one very important type of clown structure, based on repetition, variation, recapitulation and surprise. When there are no more laughs (remember that we are still only concerned about your own laughs, not the audience’s), then you leave. Occasionally, when the clown student is not coming across any of their own real laughs, I will throw them the sudden instruction, ‘Laugh now!’ This can work in a similar way to the previous exercise, mirror-laugh, ­provoking

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a real laugh and thence a repetition of the action. Contrary to that previous exercise where it didn’t matter if the laughs were real or fake, in a semicircle the only way to remain on the stage is if you laugh for real. Not that there’s anything wrong with leaving immediately! It’s also important to remember that not every exercise works for every student. If you find you laugh with difficulty in this one then probably some other kind of set-up will be more beneficial to you as a clown performer. On the other hand, the non-laughing person will be of great service in a duo to the one who cannot stop. Once again, in clowning it is rarely if ever a ­matter of ‘achieving’ a particular thing. I believe there is always a way for each person to clown by using what they already have, without the need for learning skills or developing other parts of their personality. Further useful instructions There are other instructions the teacher may use during this exercise which can help some students, but it will always be a matter of judgement in the moment as to what might work. Here are some of my more usual ones. I ask, ‘Where are you going?’ and forbid the student to point. This means they will look at their objective. For some curious reason this very often raises a laugh, as does the inverse question and response, ‘Where have you come from?’ (student then usually looks round over their shoulder). I say, ‘Stop smiling.’ ‘Close your mouth tight.’ Sometimes giving a negative instruction works to put someone on the edge of ridiculous. Duos Next, two people enter the space together. They arrive at the centre point more or less at the same time, pause, breathe out, and each does their action. And they maintain complicity by looking at each other occasionally en route. Now if you laugh at your own action you repeat that action, as before. And if you laugh at your partner’s, you repeat their action. If you don’t laugh, but your partner is laughing and repeating actions, you wait for them, as you must both leave together. Repetition, not copying The same set-up applies for a trio or a larger group. I have more and more avoided groups larger than three in clowning, though sometimes I do use groups of five. The larger group leaves you less room to be different from your partners, and thereby less room to clown, in my view. I have seen a lot of clown teaching and performing using so-called choruses. I’m not sure where this came from. Gaulier uses choruses in bouffon work, but that is a whole different world. There is something in the nature of the bouffon that demands that he comes out of and returns to a group. But the clown is an



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individual, an outcast alone. Traditionally, the clown appears solo, in duo or the trio, plus the ringmaster. Groups of clowns, all doing the same thing, seem to me an odd idea. When the dynamic of a duo in this exercise starts to be one of each person doing each other’s actions, it can start to look like they are copying each other. Be careful, for this can be a trap. The drive here is not to wish to copy another as such, but instead to do whatever it is that is provoking laughter. This is a very profitable instinct to cultivate in clown training and a world away from simply doing the same. The latter is one of what the great improvisation teacher, Keith Johnstone, might refer to as ‘agreed activities’, and is one of our strategies for avoiding making things happen, as in his example: ‘Little Red and the wolf play hide-and-seek and spin-the-turtle; and then they practise ballroom dancing. The characters seem to be working well together, but no one is in trouble, and no one is being altered (except for the turtle).’4 Clowns without stories Despite sharing this characteristic with some kinds of impro, clowning does not, as far as I see it, share the narrative drive which Johnstone is interested in, for example. When you begin to enter the dynamics of clowning where a laugh signals ‘repeat’ or ‘do a variation’ or ‘do what she just did’, what emerges is not a story but some other kind of structure. The clown is unconcerned about telling a story, for he never had one in mind to begin with, and even if one starts to appear then he will lose interest if something more exciting occurs. The ‘content’ of clowning, in that sense, is nil or, at best, rubbish. And the laughter–action link is not just for the clown. It is also a signal to the audience, as if to say, ‘If you laugh I will do it again, since I am trying to re-elicit your laughter.’ Later on we shall see how these forms will produce or construct not just clown improvisations but whole, rehearsed numbers. Once you are used to doing this exercise by using whatever gestures happen to come to you in the semicircle, try using some pre-set actions when you arrive at the centre. Walk to the centre, breathe out and then begin the pre-set action. Respond as before to your laughter. When you’ve had enough, breathe out and leave. The most interesting actions for this, I find, are ones which will most probably lead you to fail. Here are a couple of them. Triangle and square Using the index finger of one hand, draw an imaginary square in the air in front of you. Using the index finger of the other hand, draw an imaginary triangle in the air in front of you. Both hands are moving at the same time, one side of the square or triangle coinciding. This means that the two hands go out of synch, which makes it difficult.

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Name body parts Touch with your hand different parts of your body. At the same time as you touch yourself, say out loud the name of the body part. Do this without pause, as quickly as possible. To make it harder, disallow repeating the same body part. Keep your eyes on the audience. If you get lost, keep moving, touching and saying body parts, however messed up you get. Keep voicing sounds, even if they are nonsensical noises. Finally, you can do this whole semi-circle exercise all over again, this time responding to the laughs of the audience rather than those of the clown, as the cues to repeat your action. This is a very simple exercise, rather than a game, but one that allows us to explore the complexities of how the clown–audience relationship determines the clown’s actions. The nature of this relationship can explain how you relate to your own actions on stage (the question of ‘what’ your actions are is less of a concern here at the moment). In other words, we are investigating here the attitude of the performer to your own performing. Does what I just did work? Shall I do it again? What shall I do next? Ball, clap, hit Much of this chapter comes from when I first began devising new exercises in a search for a means to get swiftly and easily to the heart of the dynamics of the clown. Some of those exercises lasted a short time in my teaching, others come and go, and a few remain central to clown training as I practise it today. This next one is still a key one for me. General guidelines for playing ball The basic game is throwing and catching a ball. Everyone stands in a circle and a single ball is thrown and caught between participants, in any order. There is only one extra rule here to make the game happen, which is that the ball mustn’t fall to the ground. It must be caught. Although on most occasions these few instructions are enough to get things going in the direction this game is intended to go in, it can happen that other ways of playing it develop. If we go by the guidelines I described earlier on in this book, then this freedom to play as you wish is an important part of learning clowning and is to be encouraged. However, experience shows that, depending on which way you play a game like this, the result will be quite different. This game gives us an opportunity to explore something extremely interesting for clowning, but only if we take it in a particular direction. So, what would be the ‘wrong’ direction? Faced with the instruction to not let the ball touch the floor, some players take that as a cue to pat the ball with their palms, rather like playing volleyball (it depends on the size of the ball how this actually happens). They forget that the other instruction was



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to ‘throw and catch’. This then results in the assumed aim of the game being to ‘keep the ball in the air’. I have yet to find this amusing, though perhaps I will one day find the clown potential in such an activity. ‘Keeping the ball in the air’ is actually quite a different kind of thing from ‘not letting the ball drop when I try to catch it’. So let’s play ‘catch’ for a while. Failure and punishment Pretty soon there will be a couple of drops and players are reminded that the ball shouldn’t fall. I usually wait until the third drop or so before playing the role of impatient teacher and informing students that there are consequences if they fail to catch the ball. Getting some newspaper and rolling it into a stick, I hit the person who has dropped the ball on the bottom. General hilarity usually ensues at this point. Immediately the game becomes exciting, tense, hugely pleasurable, full of laughs, bright eyes and the desire to play. The stakes have risen and the game has become more playful. Players now exhibit a whole range of responses and behaviour. Some try to run away when they drop the ball, others gladly offer their backsides, some throw strongly and confidently, others cautiously, some reach out to grab the ball, others avoid it, some dominate the ball, others seem to drop it every time it comes near them. All these reactions are good and valid and potentially clown reactions. As long as the pleasure of the game is there then all behaviour can become clowning. Each person will have their own sets of responses to this situation and those responses will serve them perfectly well in order to clown. No one will have to learn a different set of behaviour. If you are the one who drops continually, then that is the clown you are, at least in that moment. If you are the one who runs away, then likewise. Or the one who wins all the time. And so on. This is one of the great freedoms, and thus joys, of clown: you don’t have to try and be someone you are not. If you are rubbish at playing ball, then this game probably won’t teach you how to catch and throw a ball better, as this is never its aim. There is nothing to achieve, in that sense. What is to be learnt, then? Well, once players start to perceive the fun to be had in this high-stakes game, curious new things often begin to occur. There are two general directions the game can go, and both usually happen with any given group of players, though not necessarily in the same order. One way it can go is that, faced with the heightened risk of punishment by newspaper, everyone starts to be really cooperative by throwing the ball carefully and directly to the catcher, looking into their eyes before releasing it. In order to stave off failure, participants strive to become experts, as a group. This resembles a type of theatre game whose aim would be to teach coordination, cooperation and other such supportive things deemed necessary for actors. But the most studied expertise will always meet failure at some point. Someone will drop the ball. Now if that was to happen in the hypothetical theatre game I have alluded to, then the ball would simply be retrieved and the group would carry on practising their efforts to be better

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throw-and-catch players, erasing the error from their consciousness. But in our clown game, the punishment doesn’t let this happen. Instead it makes a whole theatrical, ridiculous point of the drop. It becomes the key moment, the moment we are waiting for, in fact. A game played out by experts with hardly an error is merely time wasted, in clown terms. The sooner we get to the ‘good bit’, the better (‘good bit’ = ‘failed bit’, obviously!). The other way the game can go is for players to realise the fun to be had in trying to outwit the others. They throw the ball to someone who wasn’t looking, or throw it surreptitiously over their shoulder, or throw it ferociously hard and fast so that it’s nearly impossible to catch. Or, even, they just drop it on the ground right in front of someone else. Just to get the other person get punished. This is enormous fun. Now we have a long series of drops and newspaper whacks. And, suddenly, incredibly, someone actually catches the ball! Unfairness and clown justice Often, when someone starts this kind of tactic, deliberately making someone else fail, there will be a voice or two of ‘That’s not fair’ or ‘It wasn’t my fault’. The general rule here should be: if you are the person picking that ball up off the floor having failed to catch it, then you are the person who is going to get the newspaper punishment. It is as if, in clowning, ‘natural justice’ says that the person who fails is the person who is punishable. And this is the whole point of using the newspaper in this game, aside from augmenting players’ pleasure and engagement. The newspaper marks out the moment of failure, and aids the failing person to recognise and, if you like, to ‘own’ that failure. One can make excuses for not having caught the ball (‘He threw it too hard’, ‘I wasn’t ready’), but one cannot deny that one has been whacked on the bum with a bit of paper in front of one’s peers. The failure thus becomes materialised, undeniable, owned. This recognition and owning of one’s failure is what a clown must eventually learn to do. Who ‘caused’ the failure becomes irrelevant. Clowning cannot be created by being ‘fair’ but by accepting your own failure, in the moment it happens. This is not some kind of arbitrary cruelty inferior to democratic liberal values of responsibility and equal rights. We have devised mountains of laws and precedents in order to judge who is responsible in courts of law. This is a concept we feel is necessary in order to create a society that works. But in clowning we need not concern ourselves over this kind of justice. Nor indeed in theatre. Who wants to watch people behaving justly and making sure everyone gets a turn? No one. Unfortunately, a negative effect of over-use of game playing in theatre training could be a tendency to assume that good theatre can be made by following the rules. Not the rules that make action happen, but instead the ones that make it fair. This is a gross error and a misunderstanding of play. This also touches on the thinking behind the, admittedly miniscule, number of objections to playing games using rolled-up newspapers to hit each other with. Gaulier, once again, is to be credited with bringing to the fore



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such teaching practices in our own time, though of course he isn’t the first clown to have whacked someone in order to help them be funnier. I have even heard the occasional professional clown come up with such nonsense as ‘That exercise isn’t valid since you wouldn’t be able to do it with a class of children in a school’. Well, I have and I would. It’s all about how you present the violence, as a game. I would say it does more, in fact: it can transform the fear of failure, punishment and rejection by the group into the pleasurable game of joy in experiencing the flop and the laughter and love which you provoke in your peers. This is one thing which clowning at its best is capable of, by declaring our fears, getting them out in the open, or least staging them in an open, physical, visible manner, we can gain a more conscious relationship with those fears, with ourselves and others. In our own era, which is one of intense fear of risk and a sickly misunderstanding of what security and ­ ecessary. fairness mean, such clowning stands out and is perhaps even more n In this clowning, playful violence is celebratory and joyful, producing a positive zest for life, not a demeaning subservience to fear and death. Raising the difficulty level Although this game isn’t about developing your ball-throwing skills, it does usually happen that the group can get better at not dropping, if only through increased concentration. If people get too good at it, you can raise the difficulty fairly easily. Now, before you catch the ball, clap your hands once. This heightens the probability of dropping the ball. Punishment by newspaper will now happen whenever the receiver either fails to catch it, or if they fail to clap beforehand. A further level of difficulty can be introduced by adding the requirement of having to jump, as well as clap, before you catch the ball. Absence of jumping, or clapping, or catching, will get you punished. If you want to make things more difficult, then add a second clap, or having to turn 360  degrees before catching, or whatever. You can have a ‘free’ version, where the receiver can do any action they want to before catching the ball. I would say, though, that a lot of instructions will eventually take focus away from the failing moments. If they are needed in order to maintain players’ interest in the game, then fine. A game is always to be played for fun, so if boredom threatens one should find a way to keep it at bay. That is the purpose and meaning of play, in my view. But really it will be the pleasure in the failing, the newspaper and the attempts to avoid or provoke drops which should be the fun of this game. Laughter as a pardon Once this has been played for some time, a new instruction can be added in. Now, if you fail in any way, there will be two options. If people laugh at this point, you will not be punished. But if there are no laughs, then the

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newspaper will do its job as before. What counts as enough laughter to be pardoned? Well, that’s open to interpretation and usually depends on the size and nature of the group. We now have a slightly more complex system of clown justice. Failure is punishable, but failure which provokes laughter is not, because laughter is success. This then leads to some subtle modifications in behaviour at times. Remember here to re-use whatever works. In clown, if it works, do it again. When you fail, remember and repeat something you did when you failed before that made us laugh. It may work again. This kind of logic is common in clown. The repetition will either make us laugh or not. If not, then your belief that the repetition will work will in itself make us laugh. In extreme cases, once you realise that you might be spared punishment even if you don’t catch the ball, by making people laugh, then you could opt not even to try and catch it. Someone throws it to you and you don’t even raise your hand. The hope is that we will laugh. This risk is to be encouraged and gives us a new range of possibilities in clowning, although it won’t work for everyone. Laughter or punishment A final, more demanding, phase of the game can be tried after players have attempted this riskier strategy. Now, punishment will happen whether you catch the ball or not. Unless we laugh. So each throw-and-catch moment will demand either a laugh or a punishment. I like here to ask the failing player, ‘Which do you want? Laughter or punishment?’ It seems like an absurd thing to ask. And, being absurd, it often can provoke laughter itself, which is saving the player, of course. But how could you ‘choose’ to be punished? Even more, how could you ‘choose’ for others to laugh? Isn’t that not in your power? The very consideration of this as a possibility, though, hopefully begins to instil in the clown student the idea that an audience’s reaction might actually depend on what they, the clown, does. Well, not so much ‘does’, but how the clown responds. To failure. There are yet more ways to develop this exercise. Here are a few. Give the newspaper to one of the participants. The role of punisher/teacher is a useful one to learn and some clown students will take to it. Remember, the punishment’s functions are to: increase players’ pleasure; make explicit the failure of a player; and aid in the provocation of laughter. Hand out more rolled up newspapers. Three whackers descending upon you when you’ve dropped the ball could well make you funnier! Play the game for spectators. Three play the game whilst the rest of the group watch. There could be one newspaper, two or one each. Each version creates a distinct dynamic. One newspaper means we still have the set-up as before, of one figure who has authority over the rest. You could play by the rule that if the person with the newspaper makes a mistake, they lose the newspaper. This ups the stakes again, giving everyone the motivation to get hold of the



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newspaper and not lose it. With two newspapers in a group of three people, we have a situation of gross unfairness, with one at a disadvantage. This can be great fun. Setting things up to be unfair is a productive route in clowning, as unfairness makes things happen, as already discussed. By the way, remember that if we laugh there should be no punishments, so anyone who punishes someone when the audience has laughed is committing an error ... and should be punished! Unless we’re laughing, of course. Imaginary ball Finally, if the group of three have three newspapers, we have a state of supposed equality which leads to a kind of war. It can happen that the actions of throwing and catching the ball now become problematic in themselves, as holding a newspaper at the same time isn’t easy. This might make the game more fun, with more failure. Or it might just make it too difficult to maintain. There is a good way out of this: remove the ball. But how can we play ball without a ball? I have two ways of doing this, the first of which is just a step towards the second way. Play the game with an imaginary ball. This frees your hands up to use your newspaper. But it also frees up the physical possibilities. The problem of mime Frequently players will start to ‘do mime’. That won’t take us anywhere, except into mime. In clowning we really are not going to be interested in whether you can convince us of the presence of an imaginary object or not. It is irrelevant. So although one could have a kind of ‘mime comedy’ here, it wouldn’t be clown. in the worst cases, players start pointing and mouthing at each other and imaginary objects in vain attempts to force others to accept the ‘fact’ that they threw the ball ‘over there’ or that they still have it. This creates a tedious and tense atmosphere alien to the lightness and freedom of clowning. A common ‘bad mime’ habit here is to make everything look difficult. We introduce pretended resistances and difficulties to catch or ­ throw the ball, intended to show somehow that we are playing with a ball, to create the illusion of an object with weight. Let’s forget all that and leave that to the mimes. Playing with an imaginary ball is actually far easier than with a real ball, as you can decide what you want. It is completely under your control, unlike a real ball. So you can throw it and catch it in the most absurd of ways, but without sweating or stretching or running around too much. If, for instance, you see someone ‘throw’ the ball at what they would have you believe to be great speed, but then wait calmly a few seconds before  sticking your hand out while keeping the rest of you at ease, and ‘catch the ball’, then maybe we might laugh at a stupid clown. Or maybe if another player has decided to ‘transform’ the ball into a huge one, but then you catch a tiny little one, you will be realising that you are free to respond as

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you wish. Since there is no real ball! Everything is pretence! This is an important clown lesson to learn. If everything wasn’t pretence then you wouldn’t be free to respond as you choose. You would indeed be enslaved. This ease is a great thing in clowning. And when you know you can’t fail, you become an expert. When it’s so easy, you can afford to fail by choice. And of course in this game we have the punishments for dropping. With an imaginary ball, who is going to know or decide when the ball has been dropped? The person with a newspaper will then have the freedom to decide when to hit or not to hit. This will become more obvious in the next phase. No ball Once the trio of players has managed to play with an imaginary ball in this way, take the imaginary ball away. But how can we play ball with no ball? Of course, it’s impossible. But remember it’s always better to keep playing than to give up. At first this will probably mean being rather bemused whilst going through the motions: swinging your arms around, moving around, looking at each other in search of something which isn’t there. And hitting each other when you feel like someone has failed. Or maybe even just ... when you feel like it. Though not when we laugh. Eventually this evolves into a simple set-up: when the audience don’t laugh, someone gets hit, but when they do laugh then no one gets hit. Guidelines for hitting A word on hitting: do it openly. Look at the person you are going to whack, turn towards them. Don’t do it in a cowardly fashion to the side without ­looking. It will rarely be pleasurable to an audience like this. And if someone is going to hit you, you can turn and run away, if you have the time. Otherwise, just take it. Accept the failure. Especially if it provokes a laugh, which in the end is your only criterion. As a group of three you will also start to realise that the ‘if it works, do it again’ applies to you as a team, not just to individuals. If, for example, person A hits person B and the audience laughs, then person A should hit person B again. Person B should be glad to offer themselves to be the victim once again, happy that this will please the audience. There are some other useful guidelines worth bearing in mind to take full advantage of this game, which has become an exercise. • Don’t hit yourself. That’s crazy. It is not founded in reality and necessity. It might happen occasionally, but it’s not a basic action that should occur regularly. • The laughter is free-floating. It doesn’t have to be caused by you in order for you to be pardoned. If it’s happening when you are failing, then that’s enough. That means that you can get laughs on someone’s behalf, or save a friend by making us laugh.



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• When you err, don’t resist or avoid punishment. Even better, come to the punisher. You will have the time it takes to get there to get a laugh. • Try and increase the frequency of the laughter. Now it’s not just about winning the ball game. Try and live on the brink of failure. • Don’t explain what you are doing, just do it. • Eliminate all actions that are not those of throwing and catching and ­hitting. The game is enough in itself. Avoid adding fictional actions, such as looking in your pocket for the ball, or having supposed difficulties with the ball. Clown works when we play with reality. We can do without fiction. • When you fail, look at the audience. • Don’t point. Pointing is an explicative action and treats the audience as if they were stupid, as if they couldn’t understand what you are doing, thinking or feeling. The audience is more than capable of seeing everything. You just have to let them. • Don’t move backwards or sideways; turn round to go in another direction. • Don’t avoid being hit, if you have no time to escape. • Don’t threaten to do something. Just do it. • Don’t go back to the place you were after going to hit someone. Instead, stay there and risk the consequences. Hitting each other has now become a way of producing a scene. The ball has been dropped, as it were. Ideally, all impulses, responses and reactions have now become translated into the actions of hitting and avoiding being  hit. Played well in this manner, it can become a beautiful piece of clown theatre where the audience is witness to a complex set of relationships which we can read with ease via the staging of violence with newspapers, each part of the drama being manifested purely through this medium. Hitting scenes in the round I particularly like the way this works when there is the opportunity to play it in the round. Hitting scenes can be used to practise an important part of stagecraft for circular spaces (which might apply in circus or street ­ performance). Circular spaces with the audience on all sides have rather different coordinates to rectangular or square stages with the audience endon. The rectangular stage is traditionally mapped out by key points defined by whether they are downstage (near the audience), upstage (far from the ­audience), stage left (from the actor’s point of view) or stage right. Centre stage is also a marked point. Thus if you are ‘upstage left’ the effect of your positioning will be very different to if you are ‘downstage centre’. The performer’s location transmits meaning, and what that meaning is depends heavily on how far or near you are to the spectators and whether you are in

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the middle or towards the sides of the stage. Even if the audience is placed all around a rectangle or square, there will be difference interpretations placed on whether the actor is positioned in the middle of one of the sides or if he is in a corner, quite apart from the difference made by being in the centre. Circles don’t have corners, and if spectators surround the space then there is no front or back either. That leaves the meaningful points as just the centre of the circle and the rim of the circle, the latter including the whole circumference of the space. In most cases, though, there will be some sense of a fixed ‘back’ point (the entrance to the circus ring, for instance, or the place where the street performer has left their props). This point on the circumference of the circle will have its own particular ‘meaning’. Zones of a circle Let’s now use a hitting scene with three people and tie it in to these coordinates, or zones. Each person must make sure she is in one zone or another, and not vaguely wandering between them. So if you find yourself on the periphery, then use the periphery, maybe move around the edge of the circle, change direction, whatever. If you want to go to the centre, then go there! And be there, until you change and again go back to the rim of the space. Being conscious of these decisions changes the way the action can be ‘read’ by the spectators considerably. It also enhances your hitting choices. For example, let’s say you are jogging round the circle edge in a clockwise direction and find that someone else is coming round the other way. If you meet, one may hit the other. But it could happen that one turns around and runs the other way, pursued. Or both might turn round and run away from each other. Or one might go to the centre, encountering the third person. And so on. When on the perimeter one tends to want to move, whereas in the centre the tendency is to be still, but this depends on a number of things. The other interesting thing that becomes apparent when you play the game in the zones of a circle is that certain clown characteristics may come to light, depending on which zone you occupy. Being in the centre generally happens when you want to try and control the space, and the others in it. Being on the edge generally means you aren’t interested in control, or are more interested in the audience, which is nearer. And being at the entrance to the circle means you actually do have a commanding position. Without wanting to push the analogy, I find it productive to see a correspondence between these three points and three main clown roles. Thus the whiteface clown is at the centre, the auguste on the periphery and the ringmaster at the entrance. Step-laugh At least at the time of writing this book, this exercise has to be my number one favourite. It sits right at the centre of what clowning is: its dynamics, the relationship between clown and the audience or between the clown and



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her performance, the kind of laughter that clown provokes and the possible meaning of that laughter. It is an exercise which can seem both incredibly difficult and yet comprises the simplest of elements. It seems to work nicely after a group of students has been working a while already on the fundamentals of playing, playing for an audience and the flop. On the other hand, it is eminently possible and practical to begin a one-off workshop on clowning with this exercise. No preamble, just straight in. Or to end a session. It can be used to revise a devised clown number in order to ready it for a real audience. And it might even be a means itself to perform clown in front of a non-workshop audience. In common with other exercises in this chapter – mirror-laugh, semicircle, ball clap hit – ‘step-laugh’ builds a relationship based on laughter response, without which there can be no clown. The poetry which some claim for clowns can only come from here, otherwise it’s just wishful thinking at best and pure ego at worst. Clowns have nothing to say, to misquote Lecoq, which is where their profundity, if you can call it that, lies. Because there is nothing to say. These at least are the values I perceive behind my own teaching practice. If yours are different, then the clown for you will be different too. This is an interpretation of what is going on when a clown flops which is distinct to that which Lecoq himself offered when commenting on that early discovery of the teaching method for clown. Interpretations of the flop Back at the beginning of this chapter I introduced this whole section on clown dynamics by referring back to Lecoq’s early ‘discovery’ of the teaching method of the flop. As is clear from the subsequent exercises I’ve been presenting, the flop plays a huge role in my concept of clown and the means I use to teach it. But my interpretation of what that clown flop and clown laughter ‘mean’ is very different. The quote earlier only told us about the ‘mechanics’ of flopping, of trying to make us laugh, failing to do so and sitting down. It is a kind of roughly objective observation of what those students did. Another description of those same classroom events appears ten years later, in 1997 in Le Corps Poétique, but it goes further than just describing an exercise: It was at that point, when they saw their weaknesses, that everyone burst out laughing, not at the characters that they had been trying to show us, but at the person underneath, stripped bare for all to see. We had the solution. The clown doesn’t exist aside from the actor performing him. We are all clowns, we all think we are beautiful, clever and strong, whereas we all have our weaknesses, our ridiculous side, which can make people laugh when we allow it to express itself.5

This idea, of being able to see a ‘person underneath, stripped bare’, is quite a different thing to seeing someone who tried to be funny, sitting down, after

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which we laughed. Lecoq develops this idea a little further, equating what a clown student experiences as ridiculous about themselves (and which makes others laugh) as ‘personal weakness’: This discovery of how personal weakness can be transformed into dramatic strength was the key to my elaboration of a personal approach to clowning, involving a search for ‘one’s own clown’, which became a fundamental principle of the training.6

For clown this means the clown is then a part of one’s ‘self’. Of course, depending on your world-view, this interpretation might fit. You might see people as having ‘underneaths’ and ‘outsides’, with the bit inside being ‘truer’ than the outer layer. Personally I don’t. But aside from these differences, does focusing on the supposed effects and meanings of clowning in this way help us to clown? Put bluntly, if I am told as a student that I am looking for my ‘inner clown’, will that make it easier for me to clown? I think the answer is a definitive ‘no’, regardless of one’s world-view. I will leave a lengthier discussion of this for my next book, but I do want to come clean and declare my position here, as it informs much of the way the exercises are conceived and described in this book. In addition, the ‘inner clown’ has become the orthodox ideology, as it were, in the world of contemporary clowning. This book takes a different tack. Step-laugh basic exercise Let’s go back to the step-laugh exercise. It is even harder to get this exercise wrong than the mirror-laugh. The only elements in it are: walking, stopping, turning round and looking. There are two levels of instruction involved. The first is that one person must cross the room or performing space. This will vary depending on where you are working. It might mean entering the room or space through a door, crossing the floor, then leaving through a door opposite. Or appearing from behind a screen and disappearing behind another. Or using curtains. Or any combination of these. (It might also involve entering from one end of the room and reaching the centre of the performing space, but this is a special case.) While the person walks across the space they have three optional points to look at: where they are going; where they have come from; and the audience. The second level of instruction interferes with this seemingly simple task. You can only take one step on your walk when the audience laughs. If the audience don’t laugh for, let’s say, about six seconds, then you must take a step back towards the place you have come from. In order to enter the space, you need a first laugh. To get it you are allowed to stick your head or body into view of the audience, but you can’t step on the performance space. If this strikes panic into you before trying it, think of it like this: you will be a kind of barometer of the audience’s laughter. If they laugh, you will



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move one way, commonly called ‘forwards’. If they don’t laugh, you  will move in the opposite direction, commonly known as ‘backwards’. You will be like one of those little figures in a barometer, one of which comes out when the air pressure predicts rain and the other which shows itself when sunny weather is promised. It’s not your fault or responsibility whether the audience send you one way or the other. After all, we would never blame the little barometer figures for the weather, would we? Although we might have strong feelings about them. Or think of yourself as a little paper boat on a pond in a park, blown by the wind one way or another. Of course, you aren’t a paper boat, nor are you a wooden figure in a mechanical barometer. You are a person, with the power to make decisions, with desires and free will. But as a clown you are, in part, going beyond these desires. Here, the desire would be ‘to cross to the other side of the space’. As long as you have this desire, ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’ will mean something to you. They will mean ‘success’ and ‘failure’. But if you stop to think about it, do you really care whether you end up on one side or the other side of the stage? After all, it wasn’t even you who decided that was what you were going to do, it was I, the teacher, who gave you the instruction. It may be next to impossible to rid yourself of desires ‘to get to the other side’, so to speak, but a loosening of the attachment to achieving your aims is certainly possible. In clowning, this loosening comes in the form of encountering the pleasure of responding to the audience’s laughter in the dynamics created by the flop. It will be just as pleasurable for you to retreat as it will be for you to advance. For me, this is about the best we human beings can do in terms of detaching ourselves from the drives to achieve which bring about our disappointments and ultimately our suffering. As a clown, I can laugh at such things in myself, even as I recognise that I am always enmeshed in this ridiculous and constant finding of things I want. A clown, then, can gain a certain liberation through self-ridicule from this enslavement, a distance which is what perhaps allows him to experience fully and without fear his feelings, thoughts and actions. Why suffer? This exercise can go in two directions, according to how you take it. You could give in to the panic caused by the fear of not getting to the other side or being stranded there for a long time. That might lead you to try desperate measures to make us laugh. If you were to admit your dismal failure in these moments then you would have welcomed the flop and got a good laugh from the audience enabling you to advance. But if you remain attached to your desperation to succeed, then you will suffer, and we will interpret your ever-increasingly tense actions as suffering. The last thing an audience wants to see is the suffering of the performer. The suffering of a fictional role can be a great pleasure, but not that of the actor.

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The other direction the exercise can take is thus that of lightness. You simply wait for the laugh and if it does not come, you admit defeat, turn and are about to go. And then we laugh, and you return. Remember, you are possibly funnier when you leave! If you can become friends with your state when you happily give up and leave, and turn it around and use it when you arrive instead, then you will have the makings of a great clown. And don’t forget the simple thing of breathing out. Especially as you begin, as you look first at the audience, as you are about to take your first step. The problem of fiction There exists a category of exercises which seems to have similar aims to this one, which consists generally of asking the student to enter the space while sweeping the floor, without looking at the audience. After a time, maybe indicated by the teacher, she must ‘notice’ the audience. From that point on, all actions must be ‘done for us’. No longer in her own world of work as a sweeper, she must find how her actions, when witnessed by an audience, transform themselves into the impromptu performance the clown gives without having imagined it before. The exercise can give some good results, but I confess I was always hopeless at it as a student. That failure was in great part what lay behind my search for what eventually became ‘steplaugh’. The key difference is the level of fiction involved. In the sweeping exercise, you are asked to create a fictional situation whereby you don’t see the audience. This effort of pretence has always been beyond me. Especially when one adds the obligation to subsequently pretend that you have only just now spotted the audience. In ‘step-laugh’, however, there is no pretence, only the required actions of step backwards/forwards when the audience laughs/does not laugh. These are all concrete, objective things – stepping, looking, laughing, being silent for a certain time – and personally, I prefer to watch clowns who perform in such an ‘objective’ way, rather than those who assume a layer of theatrical fiction which I can never really believe in. Duos The next stage is to try the same exercise with two people at a time. Both attempt to enter and cross the stage at the same time, only now if either one thinks the audience laughter is for them they take a step forwards, otherwise they don’t. Also, the two clowns must look at each other from time to time. In that sense, they are always ‘together’, whether or not they advance together, seem to help or hinder each other, or whatever other kind of relationship emerges. ‘Being together’ really is that simple, consisting of being in the same space and time frame, whilst maintaining a minimum of connection via eye contact. It doesn’t even require both of you to look. As long as one clown of the two (or larger group) is concerned to look at their partner(s) as well as the audience, we as spectators will have our connection to all the



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performers kept alive. Thought of like this, this ‘togetherness’ entails simple, objective actions (mostly looking), and for many performers can make more sense than worrying about ‘complicity’, a notion which appears altogether more abstract and thus harder to understand or achieve. The instruction ‘move if you think the laugh is for you’ creates a lot of ambiguity and even dispute, which is half the fun. Sometimes the audience might be clear that they just laughed at Clown A, but Clown B assumes it’s for her and takes a step. This presumption by Clown B is of course ridiculous and may get a laugh in itself, which Clown B can now take a further step for. Or, Clown B might not realise this second laugh was for her and so not move, which error might get a third laugh from the audience. Alternatively, it might not be clear to anyone present who the laugh was ‘for’. Both might move, or neither. In the end it starts to become clear that laughter of this sort is not as attached to an individual as we thought; the laughs are not personal possessions at all. As long as there is some laughter happening, it seems like we as the audience can happily accept anyone taking a step. To be honest, I have set up this confusion from the beginning by saying ‘take a step if you think the laugh was for you’, thus planting the idea in their heads that the laughs ought to be personalised. I have encouraged their egos to claim, or indeed disclaim, the laughter. I do this in order to challenge the notion of laughter as personal possession and encourage the thought that laughter might be more free-floating than that. Which is another way of saying that clowns are not personal. Trios work well in this exercise, too, but bigger groups make the focus required difficult to maintain, in my experience, although it isn’t i­ mpossible. I would say that if a clown performer requires a certain level of self-­ awareness, of realising how stupid they appear, in this moment happening now, then the presence of too many others will dilute that awareness since the audience awareness of the clown’s stupidity, which feeds the clown’s own self-awareness, will be dissipated in trying to keep track of so many people on stage. More complex scripts Now that we have the dynamic of step-laugh established, we can look at more complex situations. Instead of the simple script of ‘enter, cross the stage, exit’, we can have: ‘enter, cross the stage to the chair, sit down, stand up, continue crossing the stage, exit’. If you like, you can do the exercise in the same way as before just with the additional element of the chair which must be sat on. Once you are near enough to the chair, your next step won’t be a step in the literal sense, but the action of sitting down. The next step will be the action of standing up, then followed by literal steps as before. Next, try the same script, but this time divide the action up into longer ‘steps’. This could be as follows: the first step is to step onto the stage; the second step is to walk over to the chair, centre stage; the third step is sitting down;

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the fourth standing up; the fifth walking away from the chair to near the exit; and the sixth and final step is to take one last step in order to leave the stage and disappear from the audience’s sight. Now ‘step’ means ‘bit of action’. Remember that each one of these bits will still need an audience laugh before the clown can carry them out. And silence will mean going back one step in the script. Having got that, try the chair script with two people. The rules are as before, each clown taking a step (bit of action in the script) when they feel the audience has laughed at  them. Be careful with the potential conflict if both arrive at the chair around the same time. As there is only one chair for two people, decisions may have to be made. Work it out! Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that this ‘conflict’ will be what the audience wants to see, and then trying to ‘act’ what you think such a conflict should be. Just play the game. It’s not a race for the chair, though maybe the audience will interpret it this way on ­occasions. It’s not up to you, the clowns, to tell them what they are supposed to think, since you are merely barometers responding to their laughter. Solve any problems as simply and logically as you can. (We shall come to problem solving and logic in a more extended way later on when we look at methods of ­devising.) Just as in the initial simple version of the game it may well happen that you, the clown performer in the exercise, experience feelings related to and stimulated by your progress to and fro, but ultimately must be happy to go either way, so here the two clowns will likely feel joy, disappointment, frustration, anger – anything is possible. Let us see it, but don’t try to use it to drive what you do. The exercise and its rules are there to do that for you. Some performers ask, at some stage of doing this exercise, things like, ‘Why am I crossing the stage/sitting down?’ So why does the clown cross the stage? Answer: to get to the other side. Why does the clown sit down? Answer: to be sitting down. Each step, or bit of action, contains its own motivation or objective within the act of doing it. I approach the chair in order to be near the chair. Once near, I sit on it. I would say that this kind of thinking, or ‘one-step-at-a-time’ acting, is very is beneficial to all actors, not just to clowns. Which is not to say that it produces anything ‘truer’ than, say, psychological realism or method acting, just that it produces a different kind of effect. But the case is even stronger in clowning, which demands a heightened attention to the present moment. If I am projecting too far into the future (‘I approach the chair in order to sit in the chair’, for instance) then I will lose my anchor to what is unfolding right now. Also, it will be useful when composing sequences of action, to rid oneself of preconceptions as to ‘what will happen next?’ Clown action sequences often contain multiple surprises or unexpected outcomes, and it helps to cultivate in yourself a feeling that anything could happen next. Focusing on each action as you do it aids this kind of focus. As in the sweeping exercise mentioned earlier, the clown does not seem to arrive on stage in order to perform. It is only the awareness of witnesses present which sets in motion the actions of the clown. The metaphysical state



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of the clown, if you like, is this, not knowing the answer to those ‘why’ questions, including ‘why are you here?’ Or at least this is the way it appears, since even this state of ‘non-acting’ could be said, in a sense, to be staged. In the chair script it doesn’t actually matter which order the actions take place. Apart from only being able to perform the action of sitting down if you are already standing up (and vice versa), the to-ing and fro-ing is interchangeable. So now start to improvise the sequences. By improvising I don’t mean ‘invent any old kind of stuff’, but instead choose which of the available optional actions you do next, making your choice in the moment it happens (when you get a laugh). Remind yourselves of the options and stick to just those (sit, stand, walk, enter, exit). The point in such an impro is not to come up with supposedly amazing ideas or make insightful proposals, but to remain connected to the laughter and to perform your actions with its ‘permission’. Script and audience relationship Note how there are at least two distinct things happening simultaneously here. One we can call the script and the other the relationship with the ­audience. The script consists of a sequence of actions. The sequence, so far, can be pre-ordained or improvised from the options agreed upon. Either way, it’s still a ‘script’ – or ‘material’, or ‘text’, or whichever term you p ­ refer. The relationship with the audience is produced by the step-laugh rule, establishing a kind of conversation between spectators who laugh or remain silent and clowns who do actions or leave the stage. Once we have it clear what this separation between script (improvised or not) and audience relationship is, let’s move on to trying the exercise with other scripts. Take a few minutes in a group of three or a pair, or alone, to agree upon a series of actions. They might be like the ones we’ve already done or they could include anything, as long as it’s possible to perform. Decide exactly how many times Clown A sits, or when Clown B enters, or whatever. It only needs a half dozen moves to make it work. Then perform your script for the others, using the step-laugh as the rule: only advance through your agreed-upon script a step at a time when the audience gives you a laugh. It’s rather amazing how many times the setting up of this exercise fails at this point. Some groups come up with scripts with so many steps that they cannot remember what they thought of. Other groups include actions which are impossible, like ‘flying’ or ‘winning the World Cup’. Others make it up as they go along. I think all are motivated to do the exercise wrongly by their desire to be, or appear to be, ‘creative’. Even though they have probably just seen some amazing clowning in the basic step-laugh exercise, they cling on to their belief that in order to be a good clown and keep the audience from being bored they are going to need something ‘more’ than walking, sitting, standing and looking. They are mistaken, but it is a common mistake.

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Keep  trying to come up with scripts in this way until you get it. Remind yourself that such a script consists of ‘who does what, when’. The work will pay off. And later on in the training process you will be able to come back to the step-laugh and use it to perform your newly devised pieces of clowning. You will be clear about the difference between your material and the actual moment of performing it. Script and performance If you want to, you can then try the exercise using improvised action sequences that can include any element or action which occurs to you in the moment. But even here the action and the choices you make are not the same thing as your relationship with spectators. Maintain your sense of the independence of one from the other. The audience are not telling you what to do in this exercise, so you can choose anything, but they are telling you when to do something. This separation between performing clown and scripting clown (and I insist, improvising actions is still the script in this sense) is a lesson with far-reaching consequences for the clown performer. On a practical level it can improve both the quality of the material which you devise and also the way you perform. On a theoretical level, it challenges one of the great myths of contemporary clowning, that clowning is identical to play and improvisation. Myths don’t help anyone engaged in such a practical and complex activity as clowning. Variations on scripts One quick way at this stage to reinforce that distance between script and performance is to have one group perform another’s script, always according to step-laugh rules. Try swapping scripts between groups. Having watched each other, one group will have to perform, without time to rehearse, what they just saw another group do. This creates a larger distance between moment and script. The script is second-hand, not yours, alien, something you aren’t familiar with and don’t identify yourself with. This helps reinforce just how different the script is from the actual moment of performing. Then try two groups, each with their own separate pre-agreed script, performing at the same time in the same stage space, with the same audience. Two worlds must coexist, or be together, despite the probable impossibility of this occurring. Rich results may ensue. Two solo clowns with different scripts also works well. Include, if you haven’t already done so, the spoken word. Short texts are easiest, maybe in the manner of those three-word and two-word sentences from earlier. Treat a line of spoken text as a ‘step’ or bit of action. Speech is an action and here requires an audience laugh in order to be delivered. Then try using some existing text, or indeed a script of actions.



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Any old script will do: I have tried Shakespeare, Jarry, Chekhov, Mamet, all with good results. It doesn’t change how the exercise works. A word of advice: if you get interested in working with longer texts, don’t feel the need to come up with new actions to go with every bit of dialogue. Stick to the basics of walking, standing, sitting, entering and exiting (a very serviceable definitions of ‘theatre’). The actions don’t need to ‘fit’ the text. When you get more practised at this, you might find that laughs sometimes just keep coming. If so, then just keep going with your actions. You are on a roll: when the laughter dries up, stop. If they don’t want any more, leave the stage. But come back if that gets you a laugh! In theory, the intensity and frequency of the laughter should be matched along the way by that of the action. Non-clown applications Finally, it is even possible to extend this exercise into non-clown or noncomedy territory. Instead of waiting for a laugh as the cue to continue the performance, pick up on other kinds of audience reactions: intakes of breath, sighs, silences, groans, anything at all. This is a more subjective affair than spotting laughter, but it can help a performer stay in closer touch with his audience and generate a similar sense amongst the spectators that their presence matters and is having an effect on the unfolding of the performance they are witnessing. As a spectator, my experience of a performance is different if I feel acknowledged, as if the performance came from a necessity on the part of the audience (and not on the part of the actor, which is how we often think about this). So instead of fretting over ‘what is the actor’s motivation?’ we could state that it is ‘to do what the audience wants and when they want it’. Do what they want That leads us to a brief mention of this lovely little exercise. One person leaves the room and the others all agree on something they want that person to do. Choose actions which are possible. The person is then invited back and must go before the audience and perform that action, without knowing what it is. When they succeed in doing so, the audience applauds loudly as a sign that the game is over. If they get close to the goal, the audience may applaud a little to signal how ‘warm’ they are getting. No other signals or deliberate questioning or prompting are allowed, however long the exercise goes on for. This is a kind of literal staging of that clown metaphysics. You have no idea what is being asked of you, but you are happy to do it. As in the steplaugh exercise, have no fear! You will inevitably do plenty of ‘wrong’ actions. You cannot avoid failure in this exercise. So relax, try anything, checking all the time how the audience are responding. This trains you to pay a high

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level of attention to your public. Consequently you are paying almost zero attention to your own ‘wonderful ideas’, despite having to come up with loads of them. It’s just that they are almost all rubbish, by definition, because they are the wrong answer. Played like this, you will find that your relationship to the situation and the audience before you will become fascinating to them, and produce excellent clowning. Not that Related to this last exercise is one which I call ‘Not that’. The name came from my interest in the concept in some spiritual practices that the truth, or reality, is an ungraspable thing, it is never ‘that’. Consequently, searching for the truth means realising that it is always ‘not that’. The exercise relies very much on the part played by the teacher. One participant is free to do whatever they want. Each time they start an action, the teacher says ‘no, not that!’ If the student insists on carrying on, the teacher insists on saying ‘no, don’t do that! It’s not that!’ One of two things normally happens here. Either the student happily continues to try different things, unperturbed by the denials coming from the teacher. In that case, nothing really interesting is happening. It’s just a mechanical exercise which does not change anything. On the other hand, if the student begins to feel something about the seeming impossibility of ‘getting it right’, then something interesting may occur. Your feelings about not succeeding are what we are looking for. Once they come out we can get somewhere. Occasionally, these feelings will seem to provoke a different kind of choice of action, with a different quality, one which comes from the full acceptance of the impossibility of ‘being right’. When the student does this, the teacher says ‘yes!’ It’s most probable, though, that the next action will draw a ‘not that!’ Laugh stop A kind of sibling exercise to the ‘step-laugh’ one, ‘laugh stop’ inverts the instruction to act when we laugh. Now the performer must continue their action as long as the audience do not laugh. When a laugh occurs, the clown stops, and looks at the audience. Use crossing the stage to begin with as your basic action. Keep crossing from one side to the other and back again, halting on each laugh. ‘Laugh stop’ might feel a little more familiar to some, and certainly less fear-inducing. But don’t let such familiarity breed contempt – contempt for your audience, I mean. Stopping and looking at someone when they laugh at you could, depending on your nature, easily become a way of expressing your resistance to being laughed at, which is of course a non-clown sort of thing to do. Clowns want to be laughed at. Are you seeming to stop and look because of this? More importantly, does this attitude make them laugh more at you? If it does, then that’s all fine.



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They find your resistance or puzzlement or contempt ridiculous. But if your negative response to their laughter doesn’t make them laugh, then you are on the wrong track. Experiment with other reactions. Accept it. Welcome it. Now we have two matching formulas for responding to audience ­laughter. Try combining the two, in any number of ways. It could be that you spend a while with one formula, then switch to another, and back again. Or you could choose which one to use in each moment. Or two performers could each have one each. After a time, they will probably become second nature and you will be using them as your basic mode of relating to the audience. Other things will start to happen, too. The ‘laugh stop’ tends to pull the performer towards where the laugh has come from. It’s as if she has heard her name called out from over there whilst going about her business, and has instinctively looked in the direction of where the sound came from. Try approaching the laugher when this happens. Then go back to the laugh, and try the same thing. Take a step towards the laughing spectator, instead of crossing the stage. Six seconds Now it’s time for an exercise with more freedom within it to do what you want, but where you can draw on some of the skills learned in the other exercises in this chapter. The situation to set up is the following. A group of three are to perform for the rest who are the audience. On one side of the performing space a screen is placed, or something similar, in order to allow one person, usually the teacher, to be hidden from view of the onstage performers, but able to see the audience. Fictionally speaking this figure is the ‘theatre manager’. The only thing the theatre manager cares about is whether the audience is laughing. He doesn’t care what the performers do, as long as it works. Hence there is no need for him to see the show, just the audience and their reactions. Whenever things go badly, which we shall define as being six seconds without a laugh, the theatre manager will come out onto the stage with a rolled up newspaper and hit all the performers there in the middle of their act. That’s unless there is a laugh from the audience during the time it takes the manager to get as far as the performers. Then he goes back to his hiding place. Once three punishments have been delivered to the company, the show is over and they must leave the stage. Al three of the company get the punishment each time. It’s not personalised, and indeed could not be, given that the manager hasn’t a clue as to who did what. This exercise evolved pretty rapidly from a simple instruction to perform anything as a group, as long as the audience is laughing. At first, some performers were reluctant to admit they weren’t succeeding in getting laughs, so the punishment was added in order to bring them to this realisation. The hiding from view came about as I noticed that some students direct their play straight at the teacher often, in an attempt to gain credit, so this

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was a way of cutting that out. The fact that students are not being watched in their improvisation by the teacher is a key element in this exercise and has ended up being the thing I most like about it. The teacher never getting to see what the students do is an interesting educational philosophy which appeals greatly to me for some reason. I think it has to do with not directing students too much, leaving them to their own devices. In a way it reminds me of Opie’s approach to collecting children’s games, in that they were interested primarily in what children did when adults weren’t around. They weren’t concerned about games that adults taught or led children in. And it emphasises that the true concern of the clown is not any kind of supposedly revealing content, but spending a ridiculous time with an audience for a time. Once again, there is no message, at least explicitly. Saving the show A related exercise sets up a kind of ‘musical chairs’ format, whereby it is the music or its absence which signals to the performers whether they are flopping or ‘saving the show’. Saving the show means that the audience is enjoying fully what the performers are doing. In clown terms: laughing at their stupidity. The teacher, usually, controls the music. Old-fashioned circus music works well for this exercise as it is energetic, uplifting and rather silly, but other music could work just as well. A pair of students walk around in circles to the music. When the music is turned off, they must ‘save the show’. They must do anything they can not to flop. When they fail, the music comes back on again and they return to their parading around the circle. The exercise can also be done as an extended musical chairs, where the person who fails to sit on a chair must ‘perform’ in a similar way, starting from their failure to win and turning this flop into something the spectators enjoy. Exercises and performance Just as we ended the previous chapter by looking at the potential for games played for a non-workshop audience, so I want to offer an example from the present chapter in a similar vein. I have a particular preference for the steplaugh exercise, as you may have gathered already. And not just as a training method, but also potentially as a performance. So as a kind of example of how this transference from class to stage might, or might not, be possible, here are some thoughts on how I attempted to do just that. In a workshop there is a contract between the clown student and the audience of students, which can function smoothly in part due to the frame for the exercise being set out explicitly by the teacher (see above). The subtext has been declared. In live performance, though, the audience is not privy to what is now a secret strategy of the clown performer (I move when they laugh).



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Should the audience know this ‘secret’ for the exercise to become a show? I tried a few times to perform the step-laugh without any explanation, just like in class, and my impression was definitely that the audience were thinking ‘what’s going on? I don’t get it!’ In that case, how will I ‘tell’ them the ‘secret’? Describing the ‘exercise’ before performing it would be an awfully clunky and pretty pretentious thing to do, I thought. So I  decided to use the step-laugh in a way which I had overlooked. This was the commentated version, which I developed in clown workshops when explaining to students the strategies as I saw them in the step-laugh as a training exercise. For some years now I have occasionally explained an exercise whilst walking through it in front of the students. This isn’t a demonstration, as I do not actually engage fully with the exercise in the way I am asking the students to do. As a teacher I do not believe that such a demonstration would help students at all. My walk-through is simply a verbal explanation done in the actual space where the students will have to perform the exercise. So, I walk from one side of the space to the other, saying that ‘I walk across’, ‘I take a step’, ‘I go back’, and so on. To this ­commentary of actions I then add a commentary of the dynamics of the exercise which depend on a particular relationship between the audience and the clown student doing the exercise. These comments are such as: ‘Shall I  come in?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘No?’ ‘I’ll leave, then.’ This commentary thus speaks the dynamics, or subtext. Explaining this, and other exercises, in this way, I soon discovered that students would laugh. Having had no intention of using my students as an audience to show off to, I was surprised at this discovery. With experience, I began to realise that I actually liked this way of doing things and that it could serve me in a performing situation. In class, with no pressure to perform or make people laugh or even do the thing properly, I served up a version of the action which was extremely light whilst being entirely engaged. This engaged lightness was one of the things I had been struggling to achieve as a clown performer. From then on I attempted to transfer this mode from the classroom to the stage. But up until now, I had only tried to use the step-laugh to perform with in its basic, student-done form, with no commentary. In rehearsal I prepared a repertoire of usable texts, thus: Shall I? Shall I go on? Evening! ’Bye! Yes? No? Shall I go? Shall I come back?

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Run-throughs seemed to confirm that these would do the job, but they also threw up another text of a different nature, ‘Thank you!’ which seemed to me a new way of voicing my response to a laugh. In the performance, this phrase took on a key role. Performance of the commentated version7 In a cabaret setting, audiences are ready and willing to clap. This response is so expected that performers can openly ask for it, and get it. It is an explicitly recognised and established contract in this particular performing context. However, my strategy was based on the laughter response, not the applause response. So, when my text and action led me to say ‘thank you’ and to step forwards whenever the audience laughed, I was initially taken aback by the applause which followed my expression of gratitude. The audience obviously had the following ‘script’ in mind: Clown: Thank you! Audience applauds.

Whilst I had: Audience laughs. Clown: Thank you!

So, I didn’t respond to the audience’s applause, but instead waited for the next laugh before replying with another ‘thank you’. The fact that I and the audience had, as it were, been rehearsing different scripts, produced some confusion at first. It crossed my mind to indicate somehow that they shouldn’t clap, but I immediately judged this would be too negative and kill any chance of establishing a relationship with the audience. So I stuck to my strategy. I then realised that I could use my elongating tie gag whenever they applauded. This gag was there, waiting to be made use of, if and when necessary, and would not interfere with the action of crossing the stage which I had set up as my prime focus. The audience duly responded with ever greater rounds of applause, until the tie was pulled to its longest extension and was pulled free of my collar. The successful conclusion of this action seemed to satisfy the audience’s desire to stick to their applause script, and so let me off the hook. By now, the audience were going along with my laugh-script, whether consciously so or not I was not sure. And so I reinforced the link between their applause and my ‘thank you’ by also bowing when they laughed.

Epilogue to Part I: Noses and Hats

Nearly all the work in the three chapters up till now has been done without the need for anything other than your own body. Aside from an occasional ball, chair, newspaper, rope or mirror, all you needed was the space to do it in. And none of those exercises has really been about the objects themselves. The chairs were mostly there just to sit on, the newspapers were mostly just for hitting, and we weren’t really ever looking to achieve mastery or greater knowledge of those objects. They were just helpful tools in our exercising in playing, playing for an audience and discovering the dynamics of clowning. Even when some of those exercises are used to perform with, the spectator’s focus is on you, not on the objects, doing the clowning. Later on, when in Part II of this book we come to look at devising clown performance material, objects will sometimes take on more important roles as starting points for devising clown numbers. Then they will become indispensable elements in your clowning;, the performance will in a way ‘be about’ those props. But before we get there, I want to look at one special kind of object: the red clown nose. Nose history As in the previous chapter, I just want to mention a little bit of history as regards contemporary clowning before we go on. (If you want more clown history, I suggest you take a look at my first book, Clown Readings, which is a kind of introduction to the many things written and said about clowns over the centuries, and has a large bibliography to lead you to further reading.)1 Over the last 50 years or so the red nose has become almost synonymous with clown training, although rather less so in the field of actual clown performance. Some teachers use the nose more, or less, than others do, but it is usually referenced in some way or another. Some regard it as the prime means by which to learn clowning, considering the nose responsible for reaching the clown state or mode of performing. Others avoid it altogether, but may substitute a hat for the nose. There are many historical reasons why the red nose has become the icon of the clown. Although its origin is a controversial question, I think it fair to say that, in performance, the large oversized prosthetic nose rose to 87

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huge prominence due to the fame and success of Albert Fratellini, one of the three Fratellini brothers, some of the most famous and popular clowns of the 1920s and 1930s. Copied by many, the aesthetic associated with such a nose became the dominant one on both sides of the Atlantic. So when, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lecoq came to experiment with clowns, this was the established norm as far as what clowns were supposed to look like. Curiously, although Lecoq rejected out of hand what he saw as the decadence of clowns, whose home at that time was the circus, he retained the red nose, in great part, I would say, due to the ease that this would fit into a scheme and method of educating actors which envisioned the skills and genres of theatre as a series of different kinds of masks. Lecoq had begun with a fascination with commedia dell’arte, which used half-masks, and had developed the notion of the neutral mask, an unattainable ­depersonalised state, as well as working with full-face masks and character masks. Lecoq placed the clown’s red nose in his system, as a mask. Whether something that does not conceal (or mask) the face or eyes can be considered a true mask or not, well that is a big debate which I will not get into here (though to come clean, I will gladly state that I don’t consider it a true mask). In this way the red nose takes on an added importance, appearing to morph into a kind of absolute symbol with a magical function purely dependent on its innate form and nature. The other way the red clown nose influences us as both performers and audience is, of course, as purely a symbol of the clown. The identification of clowns with the red nose is so entrenched that some are moved to warn that ‘being a clown isn’t just about wearing a red nose’. The warning is deemed necessary precisely because, in a sense, wearing a red nose does make you, symbolically, into a clown. In the western world (and, more and more, globally) it is generally accepted as indicating that the wearer will do something foolish, silly or stupid, and that others have permission to laugh at them. Try, for example, doing some of the exercises we looked at earlier in the street, both with and without a nose on, and observe the differences. Do people expect you to be funny when you have the nose on? Does that make it easier for you? Or harder? Do you feel funnier or more stupid? Or is there no real difference for you? Those teachers who treat the nose with a certain reverence tend to ask that you put the nose on out of sight of the audience, or with your back turned, in order not to break the illusion. Personally I don’t worry so much about this in a workshop situation, although in performance I would agree that the nose should always be on you when in view. My own technical concern is another one: the nose should not fall off. That means, in class, having it secured with elastic, so none of those foam noses that fall off as soon as you jump or roll around. I would also limit the colour to red (it sounds obvious, but there are other colours, but I think we would be getting into the realms of fantasy or additional meanings with black or green noses, for instance). Finally, use more or less spherically shaped noses, not square



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or long ones, which have such a particular character to them. Later on you might choose to use a specific kind of nose, of course, but for the purposes of these ­exercises it’s worth sticking to something more neutral. Nose exercises Most of what we did in Chapter 3 could also be done whilst wearing a red clown nose, and I often use one or other of those exercises to introduce the use of the nose. You could start using it, for instance, on the second round of ‘semicircle’, or of ‘mirror-laugh’, or ‘step-laugh’. All these exercises are quite sparse and focused, bringing the student’s awareness towards their own sense of ridiculousness in front of an audience. The nose is at home in these conditions, where we are paying close attention as an audience to the student-clown. Equally, you could choose to use clown noses from earlier on in the training, or from the very start, or whenever you see fit. I have left consideration of the red nose until now, as I wanted to allow the previous exercises to speak for themselves, as they are more than capable of giving great results without using the nose. Leaving the debate aside for now as to whether the nose generates the clowning or not, let’s look at some exercises which are ideal for use with the red nose. Two of my favourite ones in this category both come originally from improvisation exercises by Ruth Zaporah, which I later adapted. I first started using versions of them after reading her book, Action Theater,2 and it was only later, after some years, that I was able to study with her. Which just goes to show how useful books can be in the process of training. The following couple of exercises are, then, intended to give an idea of how the clown nose can support and amplify your clowning. Three on a bench There are two phases to this exercise. There is a bench or three chairs placed next to each other centre stage. Three people enter, it doesn’t matter from where, at more or less the same time, and sit on the bench/chairs, at more or less the same time. As well as choosing their place, each person must decide, probably in the moment of doing it, whether they look at the audience, in front of them, or at someone else sitting on the bench. Once they’ve sat and chosen their focus point, they don’t move. As in previous exercises, make sure you solve as simply as possible any conflicts over where to sit. This isn’t about the conflict. Just let us look at you. I then ask the spectators, ‘Who is together, and who is alone?’ Opinions may differ, especially at first, but we repeat the exercise several times with the same people: enter, sit, look ... and who is alone? After a while we begin to agree more. How do we judge if someone is alone or with one of the others? Perhaps two people are looking each other in the eye while the third is looking out at the audience. Then the third one

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is alone. Perhaps two are looking out at us while the third is looking to their side, at one of the first two. Then the third one is alone again. Mostly, we can judge which two people are more or less in the ‘same world’ by interpreting where they are looking, most commonly at each other or in the same direction. It’s not an exact science, though. What is most fun, in my view, is when you repeatedly find yourself in the ‘alone’ position, despite wanting to be ‘with’ someone. It’s the clown position. In the second phase, we begin from having the three people sitting on the bench. They will not have to decide where to sit, but they will have to decide where to look, either at us or at each other, and they must do this constantly. Keep making these decisions: now look there, now there, now here. Each individual is completely independent and free to choose when and where they look. Don’t let the others’ actions or decisions influence you in yours. For instance, if you look at the person next to you, while they are looking forwards at the audience, but then they turn their head to face you, so that you are looking into each other’s eyes, don’t automatically turn away. I mention this example as one of the most common ones, and one that, if corrected, can change the way you respond to others’ decisions for the better. Hold the eye contact and see and feel what happens. Perhaps you blush, perhaps you laugh. From a spectator’s point of view, that would be far more interesting than any kind of presumed ‘story’ you try to make up to explain why you turn away. What happens eventually is that we have three autonomous individuals making free choices, yet being together in the same space and time, and relating to each other by means of eye contact, as well as communicating with the audience and letting us ‘see’ what’s going on. Then it’s up to us, the audience, to interpret and see stories or relationships if we so wish. To this decision about where to look we can then add another set of options. Now you must decide whether to cross your legs, or not to cross your legs. Again, keep making those choices, without trying to make them mean anything or letting yourself react in an automated fashion to your partners’ choices. The action of crossing legs alters your posture and position, which alters the meaning we can read into that position, but it does so without your having to think about that meaning. It is an easy move, but it has no meaning as such so you cannot manipulate it. Well, people will try, crossing their legs in such and such a way as if to tell us ‘now I am being snooty’ or ‘now I am being seductive’. Please don’t do this. Don’t tell the audience what to think. We are not stupid. It is you the clown who is the ­stupid one. Keep the two sets of options and choices separate. Don’t link the looking choices to the crossing legs choices. Just as each person is autonomous, so each of your choices are autonomous and independent from each other. When successful, the audience sees far more than what is ­supposedly going on for the performers here. If you do this exercise without the red nose and then repeat it with the red nose, you will find that it works in both cases, and in similar ways.



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However, if you don’t manage to achieve that autonomy of decision, then when you come to use the red nose you will find that it could well amplify the bad effects. When decisions about where you look are so important, as in this exercise, the clown nose will work best when those fixed points of focus are clear. The effects of self-ridicule can be further developed by cultivating the moments when a person laughs while doing this exercise. This can happen at any time, but often it will be when there is eye contact, either with another clown or with the audience. Whenever it happens, use that cracking up as an opportunity to do more. The ‘more’ can be a range of things: laughing more, making a gesture, or saying a few words. It’s similar to the ­mirror-laugh exercise when laughter drives action. Cracking up on stage, or ‘corpsing’, as actors refer to it traditionally, is generally frowned upon in non-clown circles. But many comedians use it deliberately, fake it, even. It can be scripted and manipulated. If it comes easily to you, take advantage of it. For a clown, self-laughter is a gift. For an audience, it seems to indicate that the performer is unable to maintain the pretence of their role, that somehow the genuine laugh is evidence of that performer having a ‘real moment’, showing their ‘real self’. It convinces the spectators that what they are watching is the ‘truth’. Whether that is the ‘real truth’ or a ‘staged truth’, well, that discussion needn’t concern us now. Whatever your relationship with your own laughter, get to know it and use it. You might let it out, you might channel it into physical action, or speech, you might keep it under control, you might not do it at all. All can be used to generate more self-ridicule, which as a clown is what you are looking for. Turning The set-up in this exercise is related to the previous one but is much simpler. I usually prefer to do it after three on a bench, as it benefits from the practice in autonomous decisions in that exercise, but now there is less place to ‘escape’. Two people, each wearing a clown nose, stand side by side facing the audience. Each person must make continual decisions, choosing between two options only: stand facing the audience, or stand with your back to the audience. To move from one to the other, simply turn. No other movements or positions are permitted. No half-turns, no moving away from your spot. Stand close enough to each other to begin with such that you can be perceived by the audience in a single gaze, not as it were on two sides of the performing area, but neither should you be right on the same spot. That way you will be independent yet in relationship. As you turn you can glance at your partner if you want. As before, make your choices free from the influence of the other person. Don’t try and construct storylines, don’t try to find justifications or reasons for moving. You move in order to be in the new position. Do it as slow or fast as you wish, as frequently or infrequently as you choose.

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Improvisation (which this is, as you must keep making free choices) based on binary choices (either A or B, where A and B are opposites) is one of the simplest and most effective forms of creating theatre. Freed from the pressure of having to come up with new ideas, you can remain fully committed to what you are doing right now. I would say, even, that in any moment, in performance or in ‘real life’, we always have at least two options. Whether we like either of them is a different matter. All you have to do is not stop making choices. If you wanted to construct a story with your improvisation then that would need something else, but since clowns are not particularly drawn to narrative, it is of no consequence to us here. By using the clown nose with these rather minimal exercises, hopefully you will gain more confidence in being in that rather indefinable ‘clown state’, or whatever you want to call it, which isn’t linked to doing anything in particular, except being out there in front of a group of spectators, and not really knowing what’s going to happen or what you are going to do. If you haven’t already done so, now go back and do the exercises from Chapter 3 with the clown nose. Hats As I mentioned before, some clown teachers prefer hats to noses. A hat can function to some extent in a similar way to the nose, bringing home the wearer’s awareness of her own stupidity. Like the clown nose, wearing a hat doesn’t change or mask much of the person’s appearance but can indicate or amplify their ridiculousness. But, unlike the clown nose, there is no such thing as a definitive ‘clown hat’, although some styles of hat have been associated with certain clowns at certain times (the white conical hat with the whiteface clown; the bowler hat with Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy). So we shall now have to choose which hat. If you have a large selection of ­headwear, then all the better. Otherwise, spend some time in a hat shop ­trying on hats! There are certain criteria which, if followed when choosing a hat, can then be applied to selecting other items of costume or clothing. I think of the basic principle as one of anti-shopping. When I go clothes shopping I look for garments which I think will make me look good, whatever that means to me, and I try on those clothes and look at myself in a mirror in order to check if indeed I look good, or awful. I then buy the clothes I think I look good in. Sometimes I have a companion along who I ask questions like, ‘Do I look good in this? does it suit me?’ And they reply, ‘yeah, that really suits you’ or ‘no, you look a weird shape in that jacket’. When choosing a clown item of clothing, though, I look for the opposite. What might make me look like a fool, a laughing stock? One nice way to do this is to have your classmates dress you. Only when they think you have the best (worst) hat possible are you allowed to look at yourself in the mirror. The test of stupidity is simple.



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If, as soon as someone, or yourself, sees you in the hat they laugh involuntarily, then you look right. All other reactions are invalid, and you should discard the hat and try something else. Resist at all costs the desire to look nice, handsome or attractive in the conventional sense. It is easy to be drawn towards finding something you think is pretty, as we are so conditioned in this way. But it won’t make you a better clown. As the great Latvian clown, Coco, said, ‘an august ]clown[ must be funny at first sight’.3 Some people find a hat easily, or various hats; others search in vain. If you don’t find one that makes you look instantly stupid, try wigs. Generally I’d advise you to use either a wig or a hat for the moment. The two together probably give too much information and create a confused image. When you think you have the best hat or wig available, you can go back to the step-laugh exercise and do the basic version wearing your headpiece. The semicircle exercise is also good here. Both exercises allow lots of attention to be drawn towards what you look like, as there isn’t much action going on. And of course, there are the two exercises above which I used with the red nose.

Part Two Devising Clown Material It’s one thing to work on how you as a clown interact with an audience in the moment of performance. It’s quite another to prepare your material before you encounter the audience. How can you know what will work? If the relationship between clown and audience is a kind of conversation, albeit an unequal one, where you are called upon to respond in the moment to the spectators’ responses, then how can such a conversation be prepared in advance? Well, unless you are dedicating yourself to the practice of improvisation as a performance technique, generating all your performance as and when it happens (and the vast majority of performers, clowns or others are not), you will clearly have to bring something ready-made to that encounter with the audience. We already saw, with the step-laugh exercise, how the relationship of clown to audience is a separate thing to the script the clown has. This ­second part of the book will focus on ways of constructing those scripts, from the smallest of gags to larger overarching structures for long shows, in such a way that your chances of success as a clown performer will be maximised. The identification of clowning with improvisation has a long history, but in recent decades this idea that clowns ‘just make it up’ has taken deeper root. That most likely has a lot to do with contemporary training methods which have generally based themselves on the fate of the clown student who must survive the encounter with their audience of classmates. These methods pretty much follow in the footsteps of the early flop experiments carried out by Jacques Lecoq, as discussed earlier. But whilst it is true that this can and does produce some remarkable clown performances on many occasions, these performances take place in the workshop studio, whose conditions are very different to the ‘real world’ of audiences out there. On occasions you might be able to reproduce on stage something you discovered in a workshop, without working further on it. But mostly, even the most inspired bit of workshop clowning will need considered work on structure and form. We might say that a clown could be ‘present’ just through the medium of the dynamics of how the clown relates to an audience. But for clowning

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to be sustained it is wise to understand that clowning is also produced by means of how your material is put together. To take a simple example, if you want to get an audience to laugh by you throwing a bucket of water over them, you would do well to consider the best way to get the most laughs. What happens if I pour some water in a bucket then throw it over the audience? It has a different effect, or meaning, if they see me, or don’t see me, pour water in the bucket before throwing it. If I do it in the opposite way, or forget to pour water in the bucket, I won’t get the same response. It won’t ‘mean’ the same thing to an audience. A bucket they ‘know’ has water in it, when thrown over them, creates a bigger reaction. A bucket which they have no idea what if anything is in it, has a lesser effect, or a confused effect, or none at all. Add to that, if I have a trick bucket, with two compartments, so that the water stays in it when I throw it, but confetti comes out, or cotton wool instead of foam, then the meaning is added to it. If nothing came out, the throwing would be kind of meaningless. So whatever you want to do with your bucket, whichever effect you prefer, the question is always: ‘how do I construct numbers to have a desired effect?’ This is a kind of science of meaning, or how the placing of elements within the number (actions, objects, words, costume) obtains an effect. All clowns who work on their material, whether they start from a well-worn number or from scratch, know these things without perhaps thinking about it in these terms. Just as all speakers of a language, say English, know how to construct sentences which mean something to other speakers, without necessarily knowing how the grammar or even the spelling works. It really isn’t any different to other kinds of performance, each genre of course having its own ‘rules’ or ways of producing its effects. Non-literary forms of performance have frequently been misunderstood in this way, though, as if the fact that they are not usually written down in a script means that there is no ‘composing’ going on at all. So clowning suffers from two misconceptions here: first, that contemporary clowning is supposedly tied to the ‘authenticity’ of the ‘inner self’; and secondly that, clowning being historically an ‘oral’ form, it somehow just happens without any individual consciously moulding it. A similar fate has been suffered by contemporary stand-up comedy, as post-alternative comedy has claimed ‘not just’ to deliver jokes, which anyone can tell, but something more ‘personal’ to the comedian. This has inflated the myth that comedians ‘just make it up as they go along’. This chapter goes against all of those assumptions. Having spent the last chapters looking in considerable detail at the training of ‘clown presence’, I want to now turn to composition of clown material, before putting the two things back together again. Working on clown presence obviously involves the doing of exercises in real time in front of a real group of spectators (either fellow workshop ­ erforming). participants or audiences in places you have chosen to practise p



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And the learning usually happens in the moment, as you are doing the thing. It is experiential learning in the most part, although short discussions post-exercise can sometimes enlighten as well. But working on material often requires a different way of going about things. Ideas, bits of action, gags and whole numbers can be prepared away from the audience’s gaze. The better you get at this, the more you will be able to know or predict what will work, and be right enough of the time (not always) to justify taking the risk of preparing a show before going out and performing it for strangers. Coming up with material is thus an exercise in using more abstract, structural or analytical thinking, and less ‘in the moment’ than other clown-training exercises. As human beings, we are stuck with both sides of this coin. On the one hand we are living individual bodies alive in the present moment and place only, unique and autonomous in our actions and responses right now. On the other hand, we use languages, signs, learned experiences, forms and cultural forms in general in order to relate to each other, work, play and live our lives. Clowns are no different and so we must learn to take advantage not only of our clown presence or state, as it were, but also our ability to pre-think and devise the best we can in order to create the best conditions for our clowning at some point in the future, when we have to perform. We already did this when we selected hats or costumes which made us look stupid, before going out on the street to see their effect. We made our selections using certain criteria. And so it is when we select or design or make props, or scenes, or sequences of action, or dialogues. The job is highly complex, using many different elements, and also always unpredictable to a certain extent, given that the actual performance will happen in that unique moment with new, unknown groups of spectators. Anything could happen, but some things are more likely to happen than others, and with more experience we will be able to predict more accurately. We can learn from both our own experience and that of others. The exercises and suggestions in this chapter partly come from my own experience as a clown performer and teacher and will hopefully be of use to others. They also come from a period when I was deliberately researching how to understand how clown material works, in order to be able to teach it. This was fundamentally inspired by my perception that while clown students might do well in the early stages of training, the actual performances they produced at the end were not of similarly high quality. The bias towards believing all clowning is improvisation, play or just ‘being free’ was having a detrimental effect on clown training, leaving students with almost no resources for generating their own material. The contemporary clown ‘orthodoxy’ of rejecting ‘traditional’ clowning as out of date and too ‘impersonal’ has ignored the fact that what looks good in a class in front of their friends isn’t enough to sustain them in front of strangers who have not been told that this is a ‘safe space in which to explore your vulnerability’.

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This pushed me to search for practical means to teach clown devising. I then began to realise that I had always sensed that my own clown education wasn’t enough. When I took to creating substantial pieces of clown theatre back in the early 1990s, with Clara Cenoz as Companyia d’Idiotes, we found that much of what we were putting into those shows, much of the decisions we were making, were not founded upon our studies with Gaulier and others, all of which we held in the highest esteem. No, those decisions were about form, structure, how many times to do a move, exactly when, and so on. Some of those decisions could be answered in part by referring back to our clown teachers’ philosophies and exercises. For instance, we spent much time and energy trying to work out how to move from one number or scene in a show to the next one: how do we connect those gags? How can we avoid having to invent loads of narrative in order to justify the development of the action? In the end our answer was that there is no connection, no need for a connection, for the clown. Instead, the clown drops one idea and picks up the next one. That came from what we’d been taught, but it had never been taught specifically as a way to make a show, and putting it into practice required different skills. The result of the research was what I called an Encyclopaedia of Clown.1 In it, I listed as many different forms, structures and concepts which seemed to me to help understand how and why clown material works. Having understood it, we can then come up with new examples along the same lines. I posted some of my discoveries online and have discovered some of the concepts in my first book, Clown Readings. Still more details have remained in my handwritten notes which I have used in teaching devising clowning over the last five years or so. What follows is an attempt to get all of that information down onto the page in a usable format.

Chapter

5

An Encyclopaedia of Wrongness

Wrongness There are a number of words and concepts often used in an attempt to describe the kinds of things which clowns do. Clowns are said to: make mistakes, err, misunderstand, misconstrue, act inappropriately, break the rules, misbehave, fail, flop, be misfits, contradict, be contrary. Each word refers to a certain kind of thing in a certain kind of context, but I find it useful to look for what these words have in common. Very roughly speaking, they might all be summed up by the word ‘wrong’. We could translate the above list something like this, saying that clowns: do the wrong thing, hear wrong, understand wrong, act wrong, behave wrongly, get the wrong result, look wrong, speak wrong and think wrong. At least in the English language, the word ‘wrong’ is general enough to cover most cases. Let us define a little more precisely what ‘wrongness’ could be in clown terms. How do we judge that something is wrong? It could be expressed in a number of ways, such as: not what we expected, not what was intended, not what we wanted, not what someone else wanted, not what should have happened, not what usually happens, not what one should say, and so on. ‘Wrong’ is by default a negative, it is the absence or the opposite of ‘right’. From these few examples, we can see that wrongness can apply equally to phenomena which occur in several spheres of human activity: the social (saying the wrong thing for the occasion), the relational (falling in love with someone who doesn’t love you); the economic (not having enough money to pay the bill); the physical (trying to catch a ball with your ear); the anatomical (having two heads); the intellectual (thinking 2 + 2 = 5); the linguistic (using a word which sounds similar but is not the right one); the aesthetic (combining misfitting items of clothing); the theatrical (acting in a melodramatic style in a realistic TV play); and so on. In other words, we divide just about any field of human activity and existence into right and wrong, clowns being associated with the wrong side of that binary. Most of the above categories are familiarly simple to accept. But there are others which grate: gender ‘wrongness’ and ethnic ‘wrongness’ seem to be barred from

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contemporary clowning, but they are not so easily banished from our habitual ways of thinking. The following exercises will break down some of these categories into more manageable bits, so that we can see how they work and start to generate new clown material. Breaking the rules of the game We already saw in earlier chapters how certain rules generate certain games or activities, and the creative possibilities for clowning in cheating as well as messing around with the unspoken rules of how to play those games or engage in those activities. Evidently the breaking of these norms will threaten or even destroy the activity. This contrary or contradicting urge might be one of the key elements of what makes a clown a clown: ‘Clown logic does not have an essential meaning other than to contradict the environment in which the clown appears.’2 Let’s now look at how a simple game can be used to understand this further. Chair game This is quite a commonly used game in the world of theatre training. One particular experience I had with it was in great part responsible for many of the realisations and insights into play and rules which I have tried to expound in this book. The game goes like this: set out in the space the same number of chairs as there are players, then everybody except one person sits down on a chair. We now have one free chair and one person standing. The standing person must try and sit down on the free chair, while the sitting people must prevent this happening by changing chairs in order to occupy the free chair. As one sitter stands and goes to sit on the free chair, their own chair becomes free, which is then occupied by another player, and so on. There is in fact a rule about how to play this: the standing person, the one in search of a chair, may not run, but only walk. All other players can run as fast as they want. The illuminating experience I just alluded to occurred when I proposed this game as a post-lunchtime wake-up with a large group of drama school students I was working with for a full day. My proposal was greeted with groans of ‘we do that game all the time!’ I reassured them that we would only do it for a few minutes to get everyone moving and then we would pass on to something more interesting. When the group began to play I  immediately noticed something odd: the game didn’t look much like the game I thought I’d proposed. Stopping them, I asked why they

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were doing some things which I found inexplicable, such as when someone sitting on a chair right near the empty one didn’t move to occupy it. The group replied that they were playing the game the way they’d been taught it. I asked what their rules were, and the answer was a lengthy list of ways to play or not to play, such as ‘only the person furthest from the empty chair can move to occupy it’. Puzzled, I asked them why they used so many extra rules, to which the reply was ‘because our teacher told us to’. It was becoming clear to me that the two versions, mine and theirs, produced very different things. A rather heated debate ensued, where I became very interested in asking what these extra rules actually ‘did’, or what kind of set of relationships they produced. Most of the group considered the extra rules were there to make it more ‘fair’, but some also considered this also made it more ‘fun’ to play. I suggested we play the game my way to compare. The group remained split as to the benefits of the two versions, some still considering that the rule-heavy one was more enjoyable, while others preferred the more risky version. This split not only suggests different kinds of people or personalities, with their personal preferences (with which one cannot argue), but also different ideas about what might be ‘good theatre’. As I have already made clear, I consider imbalance, risk, unfairness and potential disorder to be more productive, at least for clowning, than fairness, balance, safety and rigid structure. Having said that, in this chapter I am proposing some structure for clowning, so it’s not as simple as setting up structure and freedom as two good/bad opposites. This experience led me to place growing emphasis on the opportunities for freedom within a game, or indeed an activity whose rules can be identified. So much so, that I even started devising ways of adapting the chair game in order to play it for its rule-breaking value, and thus train clown students in breaking the rules. So let’s get back to the game and see how this can work. Having played the game in its basic version, so that it becomes something you don’t have to think much about, we introduce another level of play. The teacher now designates, by touching their shoulder, one person who will have permission (actually, the obligation) to disobey or disregard the rules of the game. Get the basic game started first of all, then designate this person as the game is in progress. The ‘free’ person does not necessarily coincide with either a sitting or standing person in the game. The two layers of playing overlap but don’t coincide with each other. So being the free person isn’t just a way of winning the game, but instead a way of being freed from the obligation to keep the game together. The non-free players are obliged to do just that: keep the game together. In the basic game, there seemed to be a split between the standing player and the sitting players; it was a competition between one against the rest. That competition continues, but now there is a different kind of split, and probably a more radical one, between the

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players who want to play the game by the rules and the one player who is not concerned with this. The players who obey the rules now have to work together, regardless of whether they are standing or sitting. The ‘threat’ of the free person is greater than the competition itself. After a while, designate a new free person, until everyone has a turn. Note that there can only be one free person at a time such that, when a new one is designated, the previous one returns to the rule-obeying camp. At the end of all this, ask yourselves what happened. Try and recall the details of what people did, both when they were free and when they were rule-bound. What strategies or specific actions did players perform when they were free? Commonly occurring ones include: running when you are the standing player, which is forbidden by the rules; removing a chair or several chairs from the playing area so that there aren’t enough chairs for the game to work; the opposite, of adding more chairs so that there is no competition; occupying more than one chair with your body spread out over two or more; pulling chairs out of position so that people can’t sit down; knocking chairs over so they can’t be sat on; sitting on top of sitting people so they can’t move; doing nothing, so refusing to play; leaving the playing area entirely, making the number of players wrong; pushing people off their chairs; tickling people; or playing a completely different game, like football, in the middle of the playing area. These could be summed up as: obstruction, disruption, not playing, or playing something else. What do the rule-bound players commonly do? In order to keep the game in order, these players typically: replace removed chairs; remove added chairs; reset fallen chairs; play with fewer players if chairs have disappeared; ask or tell the free player to obey the rules or stop doing what they are doing; physically remove the free player from their place if they are causing an obstruction; restrain the free player; or ignore the free player. These can be summed up in the categories of: repair the damage; try to verbally control the free player; try to physically control the free player; or ignore the disruption. It’s worth playing another round of this after having fed back on your observations, and try and explore more some of these strategic options if you haven’t already played with them. There are many interesting insights to be had from this exercise, but one I particularly value is that the rule-bound players, who are driven by the obligation to obey, are often led to ‘break unspoken rules’ in order to maintain order. Ultimately, chaos can only be avoided by the use of force, first verbally, and finally physically. The converse of this is that the free person will always have options, whatever the others do. In the final instance, no one can be obliged to play. The only case where they wouldn’t have any more options for freedom would be if the others exerted the ultimate in physical force, resulting in their physical disappearance (‘death’). But then, of course, a dead person can’t play! Obviously here I  am not

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considering death a possible event in clown training! I use it to make the philosophical point about how freedom is unquenchable. Clowns are, in this sense, unstoppable, always finding a new way to get round the limits imposed upon them. The free person in this exercise is easy to identify as a clown, but the rule-bound players are also clowns in another way. Especially when they are led to break their own rules in order to keep things how they want them, they are failing. Actually, it’s worth asking yourself which role you prefer. Some people enjoy the free role while others take more pleasure in the obedient role. Or you might enjoy both equally. Knowing this might give you some indication as to which kind of clown you are (not that it’s necessary to know this!). We all have the impulse to disobey, as well as the impulse to maintain order. Both are key elements in clown. From this we can see that there are many ways to disrupt the orderliness of an activity, beyond the obvious ‘cheating’ or ‘disobeying’. Perhaps the most radical ways are to ‘refuse to play’ or ‘play something else’. The Olympic 100-metre runner who takes drugs (cheats) is abhorred by the sporting community, but is ultimately understood, as their behaviour is motivated by the ethic of winning the game, and thus shares the same values as sporting society. But the runner who strolls down the track instead of trying to win is an affront to the community’s ideals that cannot be assimilated within its value-system. The clown’s role thus situates him/ her as an outsider, one who knows that ‘There are no rules that require us to obey rules. If there were, there would have to be a rule for these rules, and so on.’3 Correct and incorrect use Having got the concepts clear in this game, we can now use them in any number of situations, away from the limited field of competitive games themselves. Let’s now stay with the chairs, but forget about the chair game itself and its rules about occupying empty seats. Form smaller groups (three per group is ideal), each group with chairs matching the number of people. Take a few minutes to agree on a few simple actions involving chairs which are ‘correct’. Rehearse these actions. Then ask each group to show everyone else their set of correct chair actions. This demonstration of correct chair use often throws up the question of ‘what is correct?’ In the main, it seems that clown students are resistant to the very idea of correctness. However, it’s important to know what counts as correct in order to be able to play with what’s incorrect. It simply won’t do to just blandly claim that our freedom to do anything we want means that the notion of correct/incorrect is of no use. It is patently obvious that notions of right/wrong or correct/incorrect are forever popping up in the way we do things and think about the meaning those actions have. As clowns, our

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aim is not to abolish the notions of right/wrong (at least not initially), but to play with them, play them off each other. In spite of our constant breaking of the unwritten rules that surround us in our activities, those rules never go away. They may change, but new ones are continuously appearing. The goal of eliminating them is an unattainable utopia. Clowns are content to play infinitely with the rules, and thus take up no permanent political or ideological position. They are constantly responding to and contradicting the context, which is constantly changing. Clown is far simpler than the rather vague ideas of self-expression, or creativity. It does not consist in having far-fetched ideas that bear no relation to reality. In brief, clown is not a short-cut to escapism. Only by accepting and coming to terms with reality does the clown truly free himself from the weight of materiality. You can’t change reality – it will always remain reality. This acceptance parallels the recognition of the flop in performance, when one accepts one has failed, and the audience duly laugh. Not only do clown routines depend on playing with the real, they actually serve to define what is perceived to be real and unreal. You could almost say that a clown’s job is to find the unspoken rules or limits and step on them, bump into them or sit on them, as a way of showing up for all to see just how we construct the world we live in: ‘clown performances demonstrate the basic but unwritten rules on which our construction of a culturally bound meaningful universe rests’.4 So what is ‘correct chair use’? Obviously it partly depends on context. In the privacy of my own bedroom I can sit on a chair however I choose, whilst if I attend a formal dinner and sit on the chair back then the majority will judge my action to be incorrect. But for the moment, in the workshop exercise, we don’t have those social contexts, we just have the object which is the chair. Here I suggest we look to the design and intended function of the object itself. What is the chair designed for and how would a hypothetical ‘inventor of the chair’ envisage us using it? This throws up a more limited number of options: sit on the chair with your feet on the floor, stand up from the chair, pick the chair up and move it to another spot, offer your seat to someone else, ask someone to give you their seat, stack the chairs (if they are stackable), and not much else. ‘What a boring set of options!’ moans the student of clown. Maybe, but this is just the starting point. Now go back in your groups and practise and rehearse a series of correct chair actions. When I have witnessed groups do this exercise with great precision, I  have to say the results can be hilarious. It’s almost as if the attention to being correct becomes in itself so odd, so ridiculous, so ‘incorrect’ that we have to laugh. And I have seen some very good finished numbers made in this way. But that is not the real point here in this exercise. So what do we do with this now? Working from the base of correct behaviour, take some

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time to agree with your group on a series of incorrect actions, which you will intersperse among the correct ones. Then let all the groups show each other what they’ve prepared. Generally, the instruction to ‘behave incorrectly’ sets off all kinds of crazy ideas. Not all of them will work well for clowns, though. Here are some of the common ones which crop up first time round: sit on the chair facing backwards; sit on the back of the chair; sit on the floor; pull the chair away when someone is going to sit on it; lie across three chairs; two people sit on one chair. These are fine to begin with, and resemble some of the free actions in the previous chair game. But there are two large categories of incorrect behaviour which don’t occur in the previous game usually, which I want to look at in more detail. Altering object use or transforming objects? Some clown students will habitually resort to this way of incorrect behaviour, which consists in using the chair for some other purpose than it was intended. This purpose might be feasible or logical, or not, or it might involve transforming the chair into an entirely different object (in the imagination only). These three categories are actually quite different. As an instance of the first type (using the chair for some other purpose in a manner which is feasible and logical) I could use the chair to bar a door to stop someone entering. Or I could use a chair to stand on to change a light bulb. Or I could break it up to use as firewood. Or, more unusually, I could slam its legs on the floor to kill a mouse, or to bang a nail into the floorboards. All these examples remain within what I will call the ‘real world’, in that I can imagine actually doing them at some moment in real life, if the situation presented itself. That is what I mean by ‘logical’. With these examples in mind, it is relatively easy to come up with more. In fact, it is so easy that you could do it sitting down at a desk with a pen and paper. You don’t have to do any clowning in order to come up with these ideas. Try making a list of ten. Or twenty. Or fifty, or a hundred. Not all of them will be of use, or possible, or to your liking or that of an audience. So just try them out. In a class, follow the same pattern as before, with small groups of three taking a few minutes to come up with, say, four examples, rehearse them and present them to the rest of the class. What are the criteria for a ‘good idea’ of this type? First, that it is doable. If you can’t actually stage your idea, then it’s pretty useless. Often ideas will come to you which might be possible on film or TV, if you had all the resources Hollywood could muster, but that’s no good if you want to perform a show with what you’ve got. The best ideas for clowns, I believe, are the ones which can be performed in the here and now with the

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obtainable props. If you really want something complex, then of course you can construct it, but if all your ideas are complex to realise you will have a hard time putting them into practice. A second criterion for a good idea is if it’s funny. If, when you present the idea to your peers, they laugh, then you are on a good track. At the very least they should be able to understand where they would laugh if you practised the idea enough to be able to perform it as you imagine it. A third criterion is simply whether you like the idea or not. There’s no point trying to work with material that just doesn’t appeal to you, and you don’t need to know why you don’t like something. If these three criteria are not easily met, then throw the idea out. Ideas are cheap; you can have hundreds of them in no time at all. So don’t be afraid of moving on and trying something else. Make a list of the ideas you want to keep, with some notes to remind you what it was that worked and why. When you come back to work with them you will need this information, as your memory can’t be trusted to remember the details, especially when you are playing with so many options, as we are here. And don’t be afraid to use someone else’s idea, especially if they don’t want to continue with it. Ideas aren’t possessions, at least not at this early stage. Only when a fully formed number has been completed and presented in front of audiences could a clown idea be said to ‘belong’ to anyone, and even then it’s debatable. So much for ideas which change the use of the object which are feasible/ logical or not. What about if I transform the chair into a different object? For instance, instead of a chair I use it as a boat, or a machine-gun, or as a dancing partner? Immediately we can see that the criteria of ‘do-ability’ is completely absent in this type of idea. If I want to use the chair as a boat, I will need water, and even if I can get water into my act, the chair will have to float. This is possible, to construct a floating chair, but it is pushing the limits of scenographic construction, I would say, for most performers. Equally, if the chair is a machine-gun, how will it work? Will it have ammunition? How? These are stupid questions, but I ask them deliberately. Of course, the person who ‘transforms’ the chair into a machine-gun is not asking us really to believe the object is what he is saying it is. He is pretending. We all know the chair is a chair and not a gun. In a way, that is the point. But what happens to the idea if we go along with this pretence? The performer uses the chair/gun to ‘shoot’, maybe at another performer. The latter, let’s say, ‘dies’. Or maybe the opposite, she ‘survives’. Now we have a couple of versions of a bit of action. But what do we have if we ask the question, ‘where is the wrongness?’ What is ‘incorrect’ here? The only thing which is wrong here is the (mis)-use of the object. The rest of the subsequent action is purely predictable, following the pattern of expected behaviour. There is nothing ‘clown-like’ about it.

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What would happen if we did introduce some ‘wrong’ actions’? Let’s say the second clown gets ‘hit’ by the gun, but instead of dying, drinks a glass of water and the water leaks out of the bullet holes. Or ‘explodes’? These examples try to maintain the fantasy level of the original machinegun idea, but all they do is demand more mime skills of the performer. Generally, I would say, this kind of transformation leads you inexorably down a path of ever-increasing demands, none of which will be satisfactorily performed. There is a very good, clown, reason for this. If clowns perform wrong actions in a ‘real world’ which expects us to perform ‘right actions’, then the creating of a fictional world could be classed as a kind of ‘wrong action’. I mean here simply the creating of a fictional time and space (what theatre is generally supposed to do), on stage, one which is not the here and now of the audience and actors present at the performance: clearly, one time and place is today’s date in the National Theatre, whereas the fictional world on stage might be hundreds of years ago in Denmark. In this latter example (Hamlet), the appearance of a clown could possibly involve the breaking of that theatrical illusion by means of which the clown performer speaks to the audience ‘in the here and now’. Again, this is a classic kind of clown thing to do, a recognisable ‘clown mode’ of performance. But what happens if the clown herself attempts to create the theatrical fiction? What ‘wrong’ or illusion-breaking actions can that clown then do? Obliged to maintain the illusion, she becomes trapped within it, rather than free to break it. Forced to expend her stage energy on constantly convincing the audience of the veracity of the fictional world, she has none left for the breaking of it. On the other hand, the breaking of the theatrical illusion itself is a simple matter. And so it is always easier to mess around with something which is already there, the at least apparent reality the clown finds herself in. Not only easier, but more effective too, I would say. The ‘clown effect’ you can get from wrong behaviour within the ‘real word’ is far greater than that obtained by placing yourself in a fantasy, because the ‘real world’ needs no effort on the performer’s part for it to remain convincingly visible before the audience’s eyes. And the irony is that, by creating a ‘pretend world’, you must then act ‘normally’ within that world. In order to maintain the pretence (chair = gun), the rest of what you create must hold firm to the expected reality. Creating a fantasy world condemns you to behave, within that fantasy, in an entirely conventional manner. For all these reasons, I strongly advise avoidance of ‘transforming objects’ for clowns! At the most, there is a place for a momentary transformation, couched within a series of ‘real-world’ actions, as a kind of aside or momentary escape, but always coming back down to the material reality in front of the audience’s eyes. In this sense, I think clowns are more masters of material reality than they are creators of imaginary worlds.

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Being wrong in the real world As a kind of opposite to the above, we have wrong behaviour which exists within what appears completely normal, everyday and possible. How would this work with our example of the chair? I already mentioned using the chair to change a light bulb or kill a mouse, both of which fall into the realms of possibility. But what if we don’t even use the chair for these other, different aims? What if we remain within the realm of wanting to use the chair for what it was intended, to sit on? In this case, we would keep the aims ‘normal’, so what could possibly go wrong? The answer is an amazing number of things. Remember that wrongness can apply to social, physical, linguistic or any number of kinds of contexts. If we focus on the aim of using the chair correctly, it’s easy to see how, for instance, two people might go to sit down on a chair at the same time. Two people on a chair is ‘wrong’, so they will normally try to negotiate who gets the chair, in any manner of ways from politely to starting a fight. Note here that if the two people both sit on the chair, which is classed as ‘wrong’, that’s kind of the end of the story, as it were. The ‘problem’ of having only one chair for two people has been ‘solved’ by accepting a wrong situation. We will come back to the way clowns work with problems and solutions in a while. But for the moment it’s enough to see that although this resolution could work, it doesn’t let us play any further. If, on the other hand, one person sits and the other doesn’t, we still have the issue of one chair for two people to deal with. How will the standing person get the chair? Let’s say she asks the sitting person for the seat, and the latter stands, letting her sit. Then the same thing happens the other way, but the first person sits down immediately after standing up, so not letting the second one sit. Or whatever combination you like. Note here that all the elements of the action are in themselves ‘correct’: standing, sitting, asking for a seat, offering a seat. The wrongness isn’t in the things the clowns are doing, but in the original situation and in the combination of sequences of moves. This kind of wrongness is very different to the chair as machine-gun type. This way of working will seem to some clown students to be initially not so exciting as the possibility of flying to the moon on a chair. But in the long term it will give you endless possibilities to play with in constructing clown material. Curiously, perhaps working within the bounds of ‘normality’ turns out to be more creatively productive than what at first sight seems to be more ‘imaginative’. Other objects Once we have grasped these principles using a chair, we can pass on to practising with other objects. My advice here is to begin with equally ‘easy’ objects. What do I mean by ‘easy’? Well, first of all, that their design and

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intended use be clear, obvious and unquestioned. And second, that their existence be common and unquestioned. These criteria pretty much match those discussed above when thinking about ideas. A chair is, at least within cultures where it is common, of unquestioned usage and design, and in many contexts its presence would be unquestioned. If you bring a chair on to a stage or into a circus ring, for example, spectators will probably not ask themselves ‘why on earth has he got a chair with him?’ They might wonder what you are going to do with it, but they won’t find it strange that you have it. At the other extreme to such objects are those which are more difficult to work with, which include anything which has already been changed, ­transformed or adapted so that its use is somehow undermined. These include props for magic tricks (a piece of rope with a core which allows you to make it stand vertically) and children’s toys (a doll’s house is like a real house, but shrunk, transformed into a house it is impossible for an adult to live in). These objects can be useful, but at a later stage. So pick an equally common object and go through the same process as before with it, in a small group, first finding the correct usage, then the incorrect usage, avoiding fantastical transformations. What counts for ‘common object’ will in the end depend on where you are going to do your clowning. Just think which objects might easily be to hand in any given situation. It’s not for nothing that so many clown numbers have involved chairs, brooms and the like. So far we have come across a number of important concepts in clowning structure, just by looking at these few examples of wrongness (using an object for an unintended, but logical, use; finding problems in the normal use of objects; and the issues around transformation and fictional worlds). Let’s now run through different categories of wrongness which apply these principles. Object in the wrong place Once I began searching for underlying structures of how clowns organise their material, two seemingly different authorities provided some important clues. I have already referred to Bouissac’s theories, which come from the world of anthropology and semiotics. Semiotics sounds like a scary word, but all it means is that structure is responsible for meaning: ‘Obviously, the elements of “jokes of construction” are not combined at random; they are the result of a systematic operation within a structure.’5 Bouissac comes up with five categories covering the wrong placing or use of objects and people. Very similar in its categories is the system proposed by Rowan Atkinson in his TV documentary, Laughing Matters, in which he discusses the rules of comedy. According to Atkinson, ‘an object or person becomes funny by being in an unexpected place’.6

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It’s simple to practise this form, as before, in small groups, with the task of coming up with five or six examples which you can perform for the rest of the group. Feed back to each other whether the examples presented are indeed within this category. Although at the end of the day it is irrelevant which category your ideas are in, as all you want is a number which works, it’s well worth the mental effort involved in being precise. That way you will have a finer-tuned sense of what might be funny and why. What kinds of examples might we get? Here are a few to get the ball rolling: A chair in front of a door Salt in the sugar bowl Spectacles on the seat of a chair Shoes in the fridge

The ideas can be anything from the tiniest and most normal error (like having your keys in the ‘wrong’ pocket) to the more far-fetched or surreal (a little rubber duck in your mouth). But be warned: the more surreal you get, the harder it will be to generate more ideas along the same track, as we saw with fictional and fantastical ideas. Once you’ve gone surreal, the only place you can go is surreal again, which actually takes you nowhere new. Once the group has made a list of the ideas everyone likes best, go back into groups and try and improve on the idea and its execution. How can you make the error clearer in performance? Whittle the action down to just two essential elements: the showing of the context so that the audience understands what would be expected normally, and then the error itself. The audience is really only interested in these two things, and the clearer they are the better they can be contrasted, and laughed at. Eliminate from your performance all traces of explanation, justification or trying to transform one thing into another. Simply present the elements and let the spectators do the rest.

Person in the wrong place Now do the same exercise but thinking about people, rather than objects, in the wrong place. Here are some examples: The person you are talking to is standing behind you A clown is in the audience (not on the stage or in the ring) Standing in the middle of a busy road Standing in a bucket of water

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Some of these are so common and familiar that they might not even seem like ‘ideas’. In a way, a clown in the audience is a place we could expect him to be. But it is precisely because of its wrongness that this habitual act belongs in the repertoire of clowns. A sub-category of both the object and the person in the wrong place is the absence of the person or object.

Absence of an object If we habitually expect, for whatever reason, a particular object to be in a particular place, its absence disrupts this order of things, as in: A coat hook on the wall is missing, so the coat hung falls to the ground I go to open a door but my keys are missing The matchbox is empty The cake I had made is no longer on the plate

Likewise, with people:

Absence of a person A class of students sit in the classroom without their teacher A tennis player waits for her opponent The next act is announced but no one appears I continue to talk without realising that my conversation partner has left

I have tried here to give the most obvious kinds of examples, which are simpler to think up, but this kind of thinking, if you set yourself the task of coming up with a hundred examples, will lead you into more unusual ideas, no doubt.

Objects used by the wrong person This follows the first part of Bouissac’s second category, which begins thus: ‘an object that should be manipulated in a certain manner (or simply be seen) by a particular person or class of persons, is manipulated in this manner (or is seen) by an unqualified person’.7 In this category, the wrongness is not about the location of an object or person, but about the user of an object. Note that the object is used correctly; it’s just that the wrong person’s doing it. Some examples could be:

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A baby drives a car The ringmaster sets up the clowns’ equipment A businessman sucks a dummy A bald woman uses a hairdryer

One simple way of coming up with ideas of this kind is to ask the question, ‘what’s the worst birthday present you could give someone?’

Object used wrongly I have separated this category out from Bouissac’s second, which continued thus: ‘or is manipulated in an inappropriate manner’.8 These examples are different, then, from the objects used correctly but by the wrong person. Now the focus is on the wrongness of the usage: Use a hammer to break an egg Wipe your nose with your sock Dig the garden with a dining fork Drying your hair with a bike pump Eating a shoe

There are a couple of important things to note here. First, that we are only ever varying one element of a situation. Only one aspect is wrong. This applies to all our categories so far. What would we get if we made two of the elements wrong? For instance, we might then have: The ringmaster sets up the clown’s equipment in the audience. Wrong person, wrong place. This might be doubly wrong, but it’s unlikely to be doubly funny. Actually, it appears not half as funny. Secondly, and partly as a result of the above, the situations retain a large portion of logic. They are not entirely unreasonable. They could happen and, if you don’t have the right tool or person, another could substitute. Some of these substitutions might even seem like marvellous ideas, ingenious lateral thinking which solves a potential problem. A bicycle pump can be imagined to dry hair, since it share the characteristic of a hairdryer in that it blows air, just that it’s not hot and it would need a lot of energy to make it work. Likewise, a hammer will definitely work to break an egg, but it will most likely destroy the egg, thus making the breaking pointless. But breaking an egg with a bicycle pump is simply absurd, without logic. It could work, but there is nothing in the function and use of a pump which suggests breaking. Nor would throwing an egg at someone’s head help their hair dry.

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This is all pretty obvious stuff, but there is a common and deep temptation among many clown students to go for these more outlandish ideas, in the hope that by being more ‘original’ they will be funnier. The opposite is the case. A little care for logic will make your ideas a whole lot better: funnier and more instantly effective. So stick to one element being wrong at any one time, otherwise the spectator doesn’t really know where to focus and the effect will be dispersed. Logic is essential to clowns, but not in any special way that is different to non-clowns. Clowns might make the wrong ‘choice’, but their thinking is not any different to our everyday thoughts. There is no such thing as a separate ‘clown logic’. Logic is logic. Action done by the wrong person This one is related to the object being used wrongly, but now the focus is on an action, not an object. This group covers those actions that are not so strictly attached to a particular object and its inappropriate use. We could have: A magic trick is manipulated by the assistant Hamlet’s soliloquy is spoken by Ophelia A tramp buys everyone else a drink A king spits water over a spectator

Action done for the wrong person Here the emphasis is not on the person doing the action, but the receiver of the action: A comedian tells jokes to dogs Continuing a conversation with someone who has just died A conductor conducts the audience

Objects behave wrongly (malfunction) When the agent of an action isn’t present or it’s not clear who’s responsible, it seems like objects themselves have agency, that is, a ‘life of their own’: A chair breaks when you sit on it The door won’t open A glass leaks (bottomless)

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Much of this category consists of usually familiar objects which ‘misbehave’ in familiar ways. Misbehaving means not doing what I want or expect the object to do, in other words, the normal function it was designed for fails. Again, I emphasise that if you start your ideas from the point of the most obvious malfunctioning, you will give yourself a wide range of opportunities to develop things, whereas if you begin with the most outlandish thing you can think of then you won’t have anywhere to go. Also in this category are objects which fail to perform their function in more extreme ways, such as the bottomless glass. But although the failure is more extreme and not of an everyday variety, the problem is still one which is easily imagined. Another way of generating these ideas would be to ask yourself: ‘what would be the single biggest fault that would render the object utterly useless for its intended use?’ Often the latter kinds of ideas will require you to adapt an object in some way, which also applies to the next category.

Objects behave wrongly (unexpected outcome) Here the unexpected outcome is not a pure failure to do what was expected, as in the glass which failed to hold any liquid. Instead of a simple lack of success in the functioning of the object, we now have a different result from using the object, although it will always be ‘logical’, as already discussed: A water pistol shoots backwards A newspaper unfolds endlessly, being an enormous single sheet A candle lights when you blow on it Throwing a bucket of water, confetti comes out instead

Many times these objects will need considerable adjustments in order to do what you want them to do, so much so that they come into the class of objects we think of as magic props. If you want to use such ideas you will have to either find the prop already built or make it yourself. Prop-making has traditionally been a large part of the profession, and you can see why, just thinking through some of these ideas. The effect of the gag will depend in very large part on the way the prop is built or modified. It’s one thing to imagine, say, an exploding tuba, another thing to actually build one, and quite another for the exploding effect to actually raise a laugh. If you work with such props you will need patience and not get too attached to an idea which is proving hard to make real. No matter how much time you spend trying to get a prop to do what you had imagined, it will be useless unless it actually works. Sometimes a lot of work will come to nothing, but

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don’t be afraid of junking ideas which don’t come up to scratch. There are hundreds more to be had. If you work with a prop-maker, it’s important that they understand this, too. Clown props must function well, whereas theatrical props often only need to look right. A prop-maker used only to working visually may think they’ve done what you asked for, but if it’s not funny they will have to go back to the drawing board. Approached with an open mind, this process is extremely creative. It may well be that the prop, not doing what you had wanted it to do, will suggest a different way of constructing the idea. Sometimes you must let the object take the lead over your imagination.

Objects made out of the wrong material Some objects malfunction precisely because they are made of the worst kind of material for their use, although they may look right at first sight. A hammer has a rubber handle, and bends on impact A paper umbrella An egg breaks the plate (the egg is made of stone) A bubble doesn’t burst when held, because it’s made of glass

These examples all use a kind of ‘opposite function’, where the object does the opposite of what it normally does: something strong gives way, something fragile causes damage, something protective dissolves, and so on. ‘Opposite’ is a useful concept for clowns. It’s another way of thinking about ‘the worst kind of x, y, z for a, b, c ...’. An opposite result to the one we wanted is perceived to be the biggest failure, the ‘worst result’. Then again, the unexpected outcome might delight us, as in the case of a glass bubble: here our normal expectations are of failure – bubbles burst quickly, especially when you try and capture them. Reversing this predicted failure gives us a kind of ‘miracle’, an impossible happening, but it is always one which we have already imagined and probably wished for. If the previous categories might have needed some work on your props in order to make your ideas manifest, this one will clearly not be possible to repeat immediately in a class to the rest of the group. Don’t let that stop you, though. Keep working in the same way as before, in small groups, coming up with a list of examples which you present to others. When you’ve selected ones you want to develop, you will then embark on constructing, finding or otherwise making props. The categories we have looked at so far have all worked via a wrong person, a wrong object, a wrong use or a wrong action. Another common and useful variable is ‘time’, and ‘wrong time’ can be divided up into several categories.

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Action is done when it shouldn’t be done I raise my hand to catch a ball after it has already passed The winner is announced before the competition begins

These are simple matters of getting the timing wrong; the action is correct for the situation but just happens too early or too late. Other examples could also be understood as ‘wrong actions’, but the key is that they happen at the ‘worst’ moment: The announcer falls asleep while announcing Laughing at bad news

Laughing and sleeping are two bodily functions which are easy to find wrong contexts for. Both are considered frequently disruptive of normal behaviour and are expected to be limited to their appropriate contexts. Most bodily functions have socially restricted correct contexts such that they easily lend themselves to being done when you shouldn’t: farting, peeing, shitting, burping, yawning, having sex and dying are classics of comedy, precisely because it is so easy to find the wrong moment to perform them. Action not done when it should have been done Earlier we had ‘absence of person or object’, but when we have the ‘absence of an expected action’ then the wrongness can also be understood as a mistiming: The bride doesn’t say ‘I do’ I forget to open the door before walking through it A bomb fails to explode The trapeze artist doesn’t catch their partner

There are still simpler ways of understanding mistiming: Action stops too early in time Hamlet leaves the stage, having uttered ‘To be or not to be’ without continuing

Action stops too late in time I continue talking to my friend even when she’s fallen asleep

These last two lead us neatly on to two similar categories, but applied to space rather than time.

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Action stops too early in space The ball trickles up to the goal line without crossing it My arm stretches out to open the door but I don’t reach the handle

Action goes too far in space I walk right past the door I wanted to go through Backing up to get into camera shot, I fall back over a cliff

There is a very useful clue in these last few categories: the word ‘too’ is a simple key opening up a wide variety of possible wrong routes for clowning. Phrases with the word ‘too’ basically reveal that we have judged that something is wrong. Here are some common uses, but you could come up with more. Reaction is too big (overreaction) A fly lands on my forehead and I fall over backwards

Reaction is too small (understatement) I get hit hard on the head by a frying pan and merely scratch my head a little

Both of these are about physical reactions. In related fashion, the wrong reaction can be emotional, too: Emotion is too large The glass is empty and I cry inconsolably for minutes

Emotion is too small My magic trick is destroyed by my partner but I only utter a barely audible ‘ooh’ in anger

Emotion is wrong A declaration of love is met by the other’s laughter

Underreactions can be so small that we could call them ‘absence of ­reaction’, otherwise often referred to as ‘deadpan’. Think Buster Keaton.

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Following on with our ‘too’ examples, we can have: Person or object is too small I am too short to reach a light bulb A car is too small to get inside without great difficulty I am too small for my boots

Person or object is too big A watch the size of a huge alarm clock I’m too tall to get inside a car without difficulty My boots are far too long for my feet

As we can see, the perception of which element is ‘wrong’ is sometimes ambiguous. Which is ‘wrong’ in the car example, the car’s size or my size? That will probably be judged with reference to what we regard as the normal size of each. We know what a normal car looks like so we can spot one which is ridiculously small. Such notions of normality seem innocuous enough when it comes to objects. But when it comes to people, what does judging someone to be ‘too tall’ really mean? As I mentioned before, the categories of gender and national or ethnic identity have historically been the sources for many jokes and other humour, based on notions of gendered or racial ‘norms’. This is highly problematic, and the best we can do is realise that distinguishing between sexist jokes, for example, and jokes about small cars, is about seeing what the ultimate political message is, if there is one. It’s unlikely that humour about car size will have a political message (though it’s not inconceivable, if the cars or their size have become associated with particular political or ideological stances), but humour based on normative notions of what human beings should or shouldn’t be takes us immediately into political territory. The mechanisms of the wrong-based humour might be the same in all cases, but the ‘meaning’ is of an altogether different ilk. Humour based on wrongness, then, isn’t inherently innocent nor inherently political. No general rule can apply, and we will have to judge each case on its merits. Body is wrong Body types don’t only vary in apparently ‘normal’ ways, such as height or weight. They may be ‘wrong’ in less common ways, too: A three-legged person Arms which extend telescopically to double their length

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Feet facing backwards A headless body A bodiless head

Such bodies are generally impossible in nature, though that hasn’t stopped some claiming to exhibit extreme ‘real freaks’ throughout history. Likewise, obviously mock versions of these extreme eccentricities have occurred throughout clown history and continue to do so. Despite their outrageousness, they generally will have a link to logical possibility, albeit tenuous. They must be ‘imaginable’, at least, otherwise the effect will be lost. Contrast Going back to the issue of which element is the ‘wrong’ one, it might be that we have two contrary elements in an idea, both of which are wrong. For instance, if my car is tiny and yours is a never-ending limousine, we both have atypical, ridiculous vehicles. Neither is ‘right’. But didn’t I say that two ‘wrongs’ don’t make the joke funnier? Well, if the two wrongs are within the same category, giving us two extremes, then we have a slightly different kind of structure to the joke, which is contrast. Very roughly speaking, the greater the contrast, or difference between two opposites, the greater the potential laugh. This isn’t always true, but it’s a good guide, if only to encourage you to look for more extremes (always within the realm of the possible). Ideas of this type are easy to spot in the most basic forms of clowning: A partnership of a very tall person with a very short person A duo of a very clever person and a very stupid person Juggling one tiny ball and one huge ball

These examples all contrast two examples of the same kind of thing, in opposition. But it can also work if the contrast is between different classes of thing, but only as long as each element reinforces the wrongness of the other. The boots example from before works like this. The shorter the person, the bigger the boots look; and the longer the boots, the shorter the person looks. The example is a real and very famous one, the music-hall comedian Little Tich. Which brings us to costume in general. Costumes You might not yet be concerning yourself with costumes at this stage, but as we are on the topic we may as well cover the basics now. As I mentioned earlier when looking at hats, the principle of anti-shopping applies here. Let

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others dress you if possible, and avoid too many elements on top of each other. Some people are tempted to treat this as an opportunity to decorate somebody with as many ribbons, accessories, belts, hats, jackets and stuff as possible. It won’t make you look more stupid, which is your only criteria at this stage. Costume is too big/too small Chaplin’s trousers were too baggy whilst his waistcoat was too small A hat is so small it perches in the middle of the head A hat is so big it covers the whole head down to the shoulders

As I said before, I am trying to keep the examples the most basic I can, in order to illustrate the principles, rather than particularly wonderful ideas. Whether the ideas work or not is another matter. That will depend on other factors, not least of which is the individual clown and their whole way of performing. This is easily understood when looking at costume. Too big/small might be a place to start, but the test is whether we laugh instantly when we see you dressed in particular garments. All we can do with these categories is bring to light some of the underlying structure, or grammar, of clown humour which is not based on the individuality of the performer. Clothes are wrong Obviously, when it comes to costume, there are other kinds of wrongness apart from too big/small. Clothes may be wrong in any number of ways, judged by aesthetic or other social norms in place: ‘Wrong’ combination of colours Posh jacket with no trousers Astronaut’s helmet worn with miniskirt

Cross-dressing Cross-dressing is a very specific case of ‘wrong clothes’. Here we are not just dealing with whether the shape or colour of a particular garment brings out something ridiculous in your body shape or movement. Cross-dressing relies on a whole load of cultural knowledge and assumptions about how women and men ‘should’ be dressing. I think it’s a valid thing to play with as clowns, but you should be aware that it isn’t as simple to deal with as choosing whether your trousers are too short or too long.

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I think it’s a fair observation to make that generally men who perform dressed as women provoke more laughter than women who perform dressed as men. Why that should be is a huge question, and a very interesting one, but it’s not the place here to go into it in depth. Suffice to say that not all types of wrongness are equal. As a clown, my priority will be to choose the wrongness which has the most effect. But then I will also want to question whether I like what that wrongness and its ridiculousness ‘mean’. Moving on from costume, some other useful ‘toos’ are about levels of skill, ability or intelligence:

Skill level is too high A pianist plays complex arpeggios and scales improvising around the tune when playing ‘Happy Birthday’ I do a tap dance in order to cross the room to open the door While preparing breakfast I throw and catch plates, cutlery and food unnecessarily

Using more dexterity than is required in order to achieve a task successfully often involves special techniques or skills not practised by everyone, as above (improvisation, tap-dancing, juggling). Many of these are indeed performance styles or disciplines, but they may also be skills less commonly seen on a stage, such as the mental skills of arithmetic. I would even say that, from a clown’s perspective, such performance skills are almost defined by this quality of ‘excess’. The virtuosity in them serves no purpose, in terms of getting a job done. Later on we will look at such skills in more detail and how they can be exploited in clowning.

Skill level is too low In contrast to the highly skilled virtuoso we have the inept booby. Here, the clown lacks sufficient dexterity, awareness or intelligence to perform the task successfully. And the easier the task, the stupider he must be in order to fail: The plank of wood won’t go through the doorway sideways I run away from a ‘fox’, which is just fur stuck to the heel of my shoe

Actually, many of the categories of wrongness we have already looked at could provide material which could be classed as ineptitude. It all depends whether we judge the failure to achieve the task to be due to circumstances outside the control of the clown, or whether the failure appears to stem from their own lack of ability or awareness.

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Virtuosity and ineptitude make good partners. Most typically, the two will be manifested in two different and contrasting clown types, who go under a whole range of names, depending on when and where they occur, from virtuosic whiteface clowns, harlequins or tricksters, to foolish auguste clowns, zannis or stooges. Occasionally, the two qualities may be seen in the person of a single clown. Grock used highly developed skills in music and object manipulation whilst projecting a persona who seemed bereft of ‘normal’ intelligence. Metaphorical pantomime Somewhat related to virtuosity is a particular kind of acting skill which Joyce Rheuban, analysing Chaplin, calls metaphorical pantomime: ‘Nearly every movement or gesture that Chaplin makes is either a mimed allusion or a demonstration of his technical skill, or both.’9 Pantomime refers here to a gestural acting style which allows the clown to portray actions and contexts in great detail, so that spectators are able swiftly to understand information telling us things which would not otherwise be there. Like the occupation of the person doing the action, for instance. If that occupation is not the same as the one who is actually doing the action, then the acting becomes ‘metaphorical’. For example, Chaplin: listens to a broken clock using a stethoscope, tapping it

His ‘real’ occupation in this scene is as a pawnbroker, checking the value of the clock. His ‘metaphorical’ occupation is a doctor, conveyed by gestures which are appropriate to listening to a patient’s heart, as well as using an object belonging to doctors and not pawnbrokers. Chaplin used this technique on numerous occasions to great effect, but most performers would find it hard to master it to such an extent, and I would advise you to use it sparingly.

Misunderstood words A brief word on verbal wrongness. The field of verbal humour is so vast and not all is applicable to clowning. The debates on the nature and function of verbal jokes are wide-ranging, with a number of theories about how such humour works. So I will limit my comments to forms of verbal wrongness which parallel the forms already discussed, and which seem to be of some use to clowns in the most general way. There are, of course, no hard and fast definitions or distinctions between clown and non-clown humour, but we can mark out some very rough differences. On the one hand we have verbal humour which deals in ideas or images, where language is used to describe

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situations or scenes which then become humorous. Broadly speaking, we refer to these as ‘jokes’. On the other hand, we have verbal humour which doesn’t quite get as far as describing or narrating whole situations, but instead trips up, as it were, in the language itself. In this category are puns, malapropisms, and the like. This more ‘childish’ kind of verbal humour could, arguably, be said to suit clowns better. Bouissac’s fifth category of inappropriateness sums this up nicely: ‘a word or text to which a prescribed interpretation is attached, is interpreted in another manner or, still worse, the consequences of this new interpretation are actually implemented’.10 Here are some well-known examples: I’ve got one, too Who’s on first base Four candles

Malapropisms are favourites with some clowns, as they seem to evidence an innocent lack of linguistic sophistication: I had a day off in loo of pay (‘in lieu of’) Mr Punch, you have broken the laws of the land! – But I don’t want any bread and jam!

Other routes to verbal chaos traditionally used by clowns have been through foreign-language misuse. English-speaking clowns, working in Paris at the height of the clown boom at the end of the nineteenth century, such as George Footit or Billy Hayden, were expected to speak ‘bad French’, as in Billy Saunders’s ‘volé-vo joer avé moa?’ The technique is omnipresent, more recent examples including Fawlty Towers’ ‘Spanish’ waiter, Manuel, or Borat’s invented ‘foreignness’. If you have fun making linguistic mistakes, experiment with as many kinds of verbal error as you can come up with.

Wrong character As a final category in this section on wrongness, I’d like to suggest a way in to working with what I will hesitatingly call ‘clown characters’. I use the term ‘character’ with caution, as it conjures up all kinds of ideas which won’t be appropriate for clowning. I will come to that issue in a while when I look at ‘clown roles’. For the moment, then, I will roughly define what I mean by a clown character. How can a character be ‘wrong’? Well, one simple way would be to imagine you were given the completely wrong job, one which didn’t suit

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you at all, whether that’s because you don’t have the right skills, or the right personality or temperament, or it involves doing things you hate doing. Think of it like this: as a job interviewer, who would be the person you would never give this job to? If you can answer that question, then you know which person, as a clown, should take the job on. Thinking of these characters as jobs makes the process easy, I find, even though not all these characters could strictly be termed jobs. As well as including nurse, fireman, teacher, builder, accountant, boxer or priest, they could also include king, princess, fairy, monster or god. What these roles have in common is that we instantly ‘know’ what actions these people will be doing. This process, then, starts with selecting your character (or maybe try two different ones, to see which gives you more to play with). Make sure the character is a ‘bad fit’ in some way for the person. Next, think which actions this person would normally do. Think basic: a king will tell others what to do, an accountant will count, a boxer will punch. It’s that simple. Think of three or so basic actions for your character. Then do the same for props and costume elements: which three objects would this person normally have? A crown? Gloves? Pens? Wings? These will be the elements you can work with. Note that all these elements fall into the category of ‘normal’. The character will be ‘correct’; it’s just that the person embodying them will be totally ‘wrong’. That is where the humour and the ridiculousness will come from. Practising wrongness Once you have an idea of some or most of the categories, you will hopefully find that this new way of thinking will start to implant itself in your imagination. It is possible to re-educate one’s way of thinking to an extent, and I can safely say that it gets easier with time. And as it’s actually just a way of thinking, it can be practised in the abstract, as it were. Here is a simple exercise in ‘thinking wrong’, which I find a lot of fun. Wrong storytelling All sit in a circle and one by one tell the group one thing that has gone wrong for them so far today. If you protest that everything has gone right so far, then think again. It might be the smallest detail, like forgetting to put milk in your tea before carrying the cup into the living room. No grand consequences, admittedly, but still an error. I find this is a good exercise to do at the beginning of the day, when it seems like nothing has really happened yet. Focusing on the short time between waking up and being here in the

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workshop can reveal just how many little mistakes can happen in such a limited time. With practice, I reckon you will find more mistakes than you do successes. Whether that is an accurate assessment or not is irrelevant; the important thing is to think like a clown, which means noticing all the little mishaps. Go around the circle a few times, in order to get the idea. Then you can start to introduce bits of information that are not strictly true, details that didn’t actually happen quite like that. It’s a fairly natural and easy process, to elaborate on your story a bit, making it sound a bit worse than it really was, just to impress your friends. Follow a sequence of events in time, as in: ‘I forgot to put the milk in the tea, then I went back to the kitchen, picked up the milk but the phone rang so I put it down, then after I hung up I couldn’t find the milk, so I had black tea ...’. Work up gradually to the point where you are telling downright lies. A pattern starts to emerge, where one mistake seems to lead to another. Think of it this way: what would be the worst thing which could have happened next? That way the mistakes will snowball. Such a structure has much in common with dramatic narrative, but it is also essential to some kinds of comic narrative based on failure. Being wrong in the street You can also practise your wrongness skills whenever you feel like it out in the wide world, testing out wrong behaviour of all kinds amongst ‘normal’ people. To start with it is best to decide which kind of wrong behaviour you are going to try out. Let’s say you choose to practise things in the category of ‘too slow’. Prepare yourself with some examples that you can imagine doing in the context of your local shopping street: moving too slowly to catch the bus; reacting too slowly when it’s your turn to be served in a shop; and so on. The results would probably be: missing not just the bus but all the buses which come along, and spending all afternoon in the same shop without ever getting served. That could sound just like having a bad time, so what makes it into clowning? We know that already: the audience and your pleasure in your own stupidity. Instead of just never getting served and ending up frustrated, as a clown you will seek out eye contact with someone every time you fail to get served, and maybe exchange a smile at your failure. If you communicate with the same person more than once, they will be able to enjoy your continued failure, augmenting your own pleasure. Most of the examples from this chapter can be practised in this way, always remembering that wrongness does not in itself produce clowning. Spending time on devising in this way can lead you to over-indulge in thinking. It’s almost inevitable. But these ideas, images and creations must

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always be combined with the particularly clown way of relating to others, your audience. And they must generate pleasure through your own stupidity. I’m not saying that you cannot generate laughs just with these kinds of ideas. I think you can. Personally, I find I have to work doubly hard to keep my clowning to the fore whenever I am performing using something which has the capacity in itself to make people laugh, such as the three-legged dance I sometimes perform. Good jokes do not produce clowning. They may be the backbone of the comedian’s job, but the best joke for the clown is always herself. Otherwise they are merely comedy.

Chapter

6

Structure

These ways of categorising clown action tell us something about the sorts of things clowns do, but they doesn’t necessarily tell us much about how those things are structured. We may get some fully formed ideas from working like this, but we are more likely to have a very long list of bit and pieces. It’s like having a lot of words, phrases and sentences but no idea how to make paragraphs, chapters and whole books. If we merely were to say that ‘clowns do wrong things, like mispronouncing words, farting, over-reacting and using big props’, then we wouldn’t be doing them any justice at all. This is why such definitions of clowns as ‘contradicting their context’ or ‘breakers of social norms’ are entirely insufficient for understanding how clowning works. And since this book is primarily written with a practical purpose in mind, that of training in clowning, we need something more if we are to create clown material that has a chance of working. The next two sections look at two simple and basic ways of combining these elements in grander structures: the rule of three, and problem solving. The rule of three The rule of three is a veritable cliché of all forms of comedy, the theory being  that humour is structured in sequences of three, the first two elements setting up expectations and the third element undermining them and revealing an unexpected new image which provokes laughter. The format is simple and eminently easy to understand and apply, and gives enough decent results to justify its use. That practicality is all we need worry about, so I will leave aside any debates as to why laughter might occur at other intervals, such as the fourth element or the eleventh time you do something, or whatever else might work. Not only that, I want to emphasise how the rule of three can interlock with the way we have been looking at categories of wrongness, and how it provides a way of combining elements into longer chunks which get us nearer to the basis for a whole performance number. Throughout some of the previous exercises in this book, the rule of three will most likely have shown itself, perhaps without anyone noticing. 127

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When, for instance, you stand in front of the audience, in the semicircle exercise, and find that you, and they, have just laughed at a silly little gesture you made with your right hand, you might then repeat that gesture with your left hand, so as to vary it (remembering that finding variations was one of the recommendations in this exercise). And you find that this too gets a laugh. If then you choose to make the gesture a third time, but this time using both hands at once, well then you have used the rule of three. Or if, while doing the step-laugh exercise, you get a laugh and step forwards, then a second laugh and take a second step forwards, but then no laugh comes and you take a step backwards, which gets you the ­biggest laugh of all, then you are again manifesting the rue of three, without even trying. These examples are some of the simplest. In them, the first two elements are either identical or mirror images of each other (left/right), and the third element is either a synthesis of the two or their opposite (front/back). In spatial terms, this resembles simple dance choreography, which is a good model to bear in mind for clowning structure. Another way of describing this would be to note that the third element is a kind of surprise. The first two elements, on the other hand, being repeats of each other in some way, have established a pattern, rhythm or expectation that the third occurrence will be the same. But if we were to do this a third time in the same way, the laugh would very likely not come. Hence the surprise when it comes escapes the repetition and breaks the pattern. It’s easier to set up an expectation using two elements than it is using just one. Doing something once doesn’t suggest anything to us about what might happen next. It might be just a ‘one-off’. But when we see the same thing a second time, something in us assumes that this will reoccur. Musical rhythm works precisely on this principle. A single handclap doesn’t give you a rhythm, but clap again and there will be a time interval between the two claps which, if repeated, would be a rhythmic pulse. But if I delay the third clap I have broken the rhythm and surprised you. If the fundamental requirement for the third element to work is that it ­ surprises us, consider for a moment what things in general perform that function. Surprise resides in the unexpected, and the unexpected is that which is not ‘supposed’ to happen. In other words, that which is ‘wrong’. That means that wrongness likes to occur in the third element of a three-part sequence. Practising surprise In small groups, the exercise consists of coming up with a few example of three-part sequences where the last element is a surprise, taken from one of our wrongness categories. So, first choose a category, as before, then think of an example. Once you have your example, look for two repeatable actions

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which could logically precede that instance of wrongness. Many of the examples given earlier would serve this purpose. How about: The glass is empty and I cry inconsolably for minutes

Assuming I want to drink from the glass, two normal and repeatable actions could be: I hold the glass to my mouth and tip it to drink from it

If I do this twice, my third action can be not to try and drink again, but to see the hole in the bottom of the glass. And cry. It’s not a literary masterpiece, nor a clown one perhaps, but it illustrates the principle. If you come up with twenty or so of these, one might take your fancy and you can note it down for further development later on. Here’s another one: I use a normal hammer to try and bang a nail into a piece of wood (done twice), but the nail hasn’t shifted. I get a gigantic hammer and bring it down onto the nail, driving it right through the wood and smashing the wood in the process.

In these examples we can also perceive the other way of structuring ­material I mentioned before: Problem solving In the hammer example, there was a problem, which was that normal hammering with a normal hammer didn’t achieve the desired outcome. Normal behaviour failed. The proposed solution, which came from a category of wrongness (object too big), promised success, but in fact went on to make a new problem, the broken wood. There are a number of elements here: The initial intention (to hammer the nail into the wood) The normal attempt to achieve this (using a normal hammer) The problem (the nail won’t go into the wood) The new attempted solution, which is ‘wrong’ in some way (using an enormous hammer) The solved problem (the nail went into the wood) The new problem (the wood is broken)

With this scheme in mind, experiment with as many different situations as you can think up. It’s an exercise which can be done in a small group, in pairs, or alone. I suggest coming up with a few examples first, then trying them out to see if you can stage them in a rough way, so that you and your

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spectators can judge if the idea has potential. If it does, you can work on it further at some point. If it doesn’t, forget about it and don’t waste your time on it any more. It’s really worth your while being careful with the details when devising these sorts of sequences. If you don’t know what your initial intention is, then the audience won’t know either, and so anything you do afterwards will make no sense. Beware the temptation also of thinking that the intention should be ‘interesting’ in itself. The trap of ‘original thinking’ is a real ­danger in clown devising. The more normal and ordinary the initial ­intention, the easier it will be to subvert it, obstruct it and come up with surprising solutions. Similarly, don’t waste your wrong solutions at the start, but instead try first the normal ways of solving your problem. These attempts serve as the set-up of the problem, telling us exactly what it is you want to achieve. It may be that we understand this instantly from the objects you have: just seeing a plank of wood and a nail in it, with a clown holding a hammer, will in all likelihood tell us what the clown wants. Equally, don’t overdo the first normal and failed attempts to solve things. Twice is plenty, as we know from the rule of three. Two attempts are all the spectator needs in order to ­understand what’s going on. And that is all you need them to understand. Once you’ve made your intentions clear, move on to the next bit of the sequence and resist the temptation to try and make the normal attempts ‘interesting’ or ‘creative’. They are only interesting in that they are both normal and failures. That is all. If all his is clear, then so should your problem be. Ask yourself ‘what is the problem I have here?’ If you can’t define it in a short sentence, that means you don’t know what it is, and neither will your audience. For example, if I see someone pulling at a door handle, I might assume that she wants to open the door. But it may be that she wants to remove the handle to replace it with a nicer one. Each problem will require a different attempted solution, as the outcome desired is different. Next, the ‘wrong’ solution must follow the guidelines we have seen ­previously. It must be logical, imaginable, possible and related in some way to the ‘correct solutions’. Using a huge hammer fits these criteria: it is still a hammer and it promises a bigger hit for a resistant nail. It is only ‘wrong’ in that it is ‘too big’, as hammers this size don’t exist in the ‘normal’, ­non-clown world. Instead of the huge hammer, I could have picked up a different object, of course. If it was done without realising what I was doing, the object could have been something that is useless for hammering, something fragile like a plate, for example, which breaks. Then it would be the fragility of the object which is wrong, having the opposite quality of what would work. The plate wouldn’t solve my problem, evidently, so then I would have the choice of either looking for another solution to the nail problem, or switching my attention to the new problem of a broken plate. It’s up to me.

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Whichever route I take, ultimately if there is a solution to anything then that solution must actually do the job. It seems like a silly thing to point out, that a solution isn’t a solution unless it solves something, but it’s amazing how many ‘solutions’ proposed in clown workshops on devising don’t actually do this. Instead they look more like new problems. Or at least they appear so because the performer is performing the solution in such a way that they are almost suffering. I think this stems from an earlier issue, which is the tendency to perform one’s clown problem as if it were a problem. What do I mean by this? If I were to try and bang my nail in with my normal hammer, in a normal situation (forget about audiences and clowns for a moment), then I expect that my action, the way I use the hammer, would also be ‘normal’. I expect the hammer to work. Why should I suspect that there will be a problem? Hammers work. So there will be no anticipation of the problem arising. Even when I try a second time I will be expecting things to turn out well. It is only after my two failed attempts that I ‘know’ that there is a problem. So when I come to perform this sequence as a clown performer in front of an audience, what will be convincing is if I do not anticipate my problem. If I anticipate my problem, not only will I be confusing my audience with my powers of seeing into the future, but I will also probably be projecting a kind of ‘suffering the problem’ kind of ‘acting’ onto the action. The moral of this is that it is better not to ‘have a problem with my problem’, but simply to acknowledge it and apply a solution. Likewise, when I apply my solution, I should do so without ‘suffering’. And, once applied, the solution which works must, by definition, have changed the situation. Decide whether it’s a good or a bad solution and stick to this. Confusing the two only confuses everyone. Hopefully this will become clear the more you practise working with these structures of devising. Finally, we have the issue of the new problem. If I look for a solution to this, I am beginning what could be a chain of problems. A chain of problems will only have one solution, to the last problem, and this will end the sequence. The rule of three will still apply, but instead of the simple threepart sequence of two normal failed actions followed by the third ‘wrong’ successful one, the third element becomes the first element of the new threepart section. It is the first stating of the new problem. You might then need to re-state that new problem once more, before trying your ‘wrong solution’, which creates your third problem, and so on. I have occasionally tried to express these structures in number sequences, but I won’t bother here as it would probably only create problems of understanding! Note that these chains of problems are not the same as a structure built up of several rule-of-three sequences, of the ‘dance choreography’ type. An example of the latter would be an extended version of one from earlier: 1. I take one step forwards, I take a second step forwards, I take one step backwards.

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2. I take one step forwards, I take a second step forwards, I take one step backwards. 3. I take one step forwards, I take a second step forwards, I take lots of steps backwards and leave the stage.

Here we start with a simple three-part structure (expected action done twice, its opposite done once). That sequence is then repeated in its entirety. Now I am creating the expectation that I will repeat the sequence itself. So the third time round, if I simply do it all the same again, there will be no surprise. Hence the bigger action of a step back that takes me offstage. Now that we have some tools not only for generating ideas but also for structuring them, let’s have a look at a more detailed example where we can apply all we know in devising a number. In order to do so I will start with a performer’s skill, which I mentioned earlier when looking at virtuosity.

Working with personalised skills to generate material Given that we associate the clown with failure, we tend to assume that in order to fail, the clown should be inept. This is true, but it does not necessarily exclude the set of skills or the ability to do some things well. As we have seen when looking at wrongness, we only need to make one element in a situation wrong or failed in order to create clowning. That leaves all the other elements, in theory, successful. So it would be a mistake to assume that the clown has to do everything wrong all the time. A clown playing a musical instrument, for example, does not have to get everything wrong: the tune, the tone, the way of holding the instrument, the timing, the type of instrument, the moment of playing, the style of music, and so on. Put bluntly, if you can play music, you don’t have to pretend you can’t; you don’t have to ruin the music in order to clown. Let’s have a look at the process of working with your own skills in devising a clown number. We’ll start with identifying what you’re good at and end with a first draft of a number ready to be tested in front of an audience. I’ll follow the steps I take with all students in this phase of the training, but I will refer to a specific example so as to clarify what I mean. 1. Make a list of your skills. This will include all the things you are good at doing. In fact, make several lists, in various categories. I usually like to divide these into five: (a) things you are good at which are recognised arts and which people habitually pay money to go and see, like music, dance, circus, football; (b) things you are good at which are not generally recognised as skills worth paying to see, although often they crop up in variety, vaudeville or eccentric performance of some kind, such as waggling your

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ears, crossing your eyes, or singing while gargling water; these are things you might entertain your friends with at a party, perhaps; (c) things you are good at which are not usually formally performed at all, like sleeping, thinking, arguing with your brother or getting your own way by crying; (d) things you are bad at, although you may enjoy them or wish you could do them; (e) things you hate doing, although you may be good at them. Put a few examples in each list if you can. Half a dozen or so is good to begin with. This can be done in class, in the moment, or it can be set as homework. 2. Sharing and editing. Once everyone has their lists, the information is shared. This can be done in different ways, depending on how much time you have. The longer version involves each person in turn reading their lists, or you read out one thing from your list at a time and go round everyone like that several times. A shorter version involves reading out only the things on your first-category list (recognised arts), as we will begin with these. As you listen to others’ skills, remember the ones which alerted your attention, for whatever reason. We then make a list for each person of the things the rest of the group were interested in or intrigued by. In other words, you will have your list edited down to the things which other people want to see. In the example I will use, the student had experience as a dancer from an early age, trained in classical, contemporary, folk and popular forms. 3. Showing. Now each person in turn must show the skills from the edited list. Demonstrate what you are good at to the maximum of your capabilities. Use this moment to show off. Don’t think about clowns, or failing, or wrongness, just try and do it incredibly well. A skill presented in this way often has the effect on an audience that we feel that we are seeing something special, in other words, something we are not capable of. This marks the activity out as a ‘skill’, perhaps a virtuoso one. Take note, though, that it is not necessary to have a particular skill level. All we want to see is you at the limit of your ability. In our dance example, the student showed a mixture of traditional ­ballet and semi-improvised street dance moves. 4. Immediate feedback. Having watched the skill, the class answers the ­question, ‘which bits most impressed or appealed to you most and you wanted to see again?’ These may not be what the performer themself likes or values most, nor the most skilled things. As a clown, one must focus on the audience response, to the extent that if they like something, one will do it again in order to achieve the same success. In our example, we preferred some ballet steps which were clearly recognisable and beyond our capabilities; and the most ‘grotesque’ full body moves from other styles.

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5. Expectations. We ask the student to perform these ‘best bits’ again. There follows further questioning. We ask, ‘what is the expected attitude, state of being or emotion of such a performer?’ More generally, ‘how do we expect them to perform?’ This may be obvious or not. The more restricted the skill, the easier it is to identify the attitude: flamenco dance/pride, ballet dance/light, juggler/focus and concentration, magician/confident or dominant, and so on. We agreed in this example that the performer exhibited what we interpreted as ‘seriousness’, confidence and a certain amount of pride, with focus on a point in space. This we perceived as ‘correct’, or ‘expected’ for a ballet dancer. By now, of course, we should be expert in identifying what is the ­correct and incorrect element in all kinds of contexts. 6. Opposites and wrongness. We then ask, ‘what is the opposite of this attitude? What is the wrong attitude/emotion/style?’ There are many ­potential opposites, so we will try them all to find which one gives the most result. In this example, we suggest: frivolity, smiling, focusing on the audience. 7. Perform incorrectly. The student then re-performs with these ‘incorrect’ attitudes. We then give feedback on the result. Some of these attitudes appear immediately to us to be not just wrong, but funny. Wrongness in itself can never be simply equated to funny. The best way to discover what works is of course to try it. And what works for one performer will not necessarily be a good idea for another. 8. Contrast. We then look at what happens when the performer uses two opposing attitudes, one correct, one incorrect. Simply alternate between two emotions as you perform, for example. It doesn’t matter at this stage when these changes happen; it’s still experimental. Having just two choices (like serious or frivolous) gives us the same binary freedom to improvise as we saw in the ‘turning’ exercise earlier. In our example, some switches from silly frivolity to composed seriousness make us laugh. However, the student exhibits such an extreme, to us, seriousness, that this outmatches his episodes of frivolity as far as wrongness goes. We decide to go with this over-seriousness rather than the frivolity. It is almost impossible to predict how an individual will be funny and make us laugh. We cannot say that one person will be funny by displaying sadness, or another by showing anger. And it would be complicated to explain just why person X is funny when angry. We could speculate that perhaps this emotion is one that this person does not habitually reveal, such that they are not well-practised at it. They ‘fail’ to be angry ‘correctly’. Or perhaps they are able to go to extremes with such an emotion, giving us ‘too angry’. Or maybe the two things at the same time.

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In order to find the best ‘surprise’ in a sequence of three, for example, one would be well advised to push oneself to crazy limits. In order to bring richness to the contrast of emotions/attitudes, one would ideally commit oneself fully to the play of emotions and their ridiculous effect. There is no point using ‘anger’, for example, if anger expressed by you as a clown doesn’t make the audience laugh. Hence, many of the choices made in the devising process will depend on the particularities of the performer as a clown, as someone who makes us laugh with their own ridiculousness. In this sense, some parts of your clowning could be said to be very ‘personal’. But it is a difficult job to rely solely on these ‘personal clown qualities’ to create a well-formed number. They need help.  9. More wrongness. Now we start to look for more categories of wrongness. If we wish we can go through all the categories, relating to wrong person, wrong action, wrong time, wrong material, and so on, relating to the skill we have chosen. In the ballet example, we find plenty of ideas when we ask the question, ‘what activities would be completely wrong, utterly prohibited, in a ballet class?’ The student himself has easy access to several answers by recalling what things would have got him chucked out of a class during his training: laughing, chatting, smoking, eating, drinking ... . We then try and see what happens when the ballet dancer dances ballet to his best ability, but also engages in prohibited activities. We find that we like to watch a good ballet dancer sipping from a beer can, smoking a cigarette and stuffing his face with biscuits. Not only that, but we find we like seeing him do these prohibited activities with the super-seriousness he applies to his dancing. In a sense, this seriousness is the wrong attitude for drinking and smoking. We prefer this and decide to dispense with the need for a ‘wrong dance attitude’ from now on. We also look at how some ballet moves can be performed wrongly: too many spins, or moving too far so that he leaves the stage. We could ask which costume would be wrong: too tight, too big? And so on. 10. Rule of three. Now that we have some moves and ideas which we like, we start to find ways of doing them in sequences. The work now becomes more specific, looking for actual action that will become part of the number. We establish a series of assemblés while drinking from a can of beer; followed by a kind of changement while nibbling a biscuit; finishing with a double tour en l’air to the knee while smoking. 11. Overall form. With several bits of action now working, we begin to order them. We decide that the beginning of the number must establish the correctness and the frame of reference, also demonstrating the virtuosic skill.

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This point is a new one, as it is difficult to envisage until one has the beginnings of a whole number to work with. Audience expectations kick in the moment you begin your performance. Well, they begin before that, depending on what the audience believes they are about to see, but let’s leave that to one side for now. The question to ask yourself is, ‘what do I want the audience to expect and want to happen, from the moment the number begins?’ A more metaphorical way of asking that could be, ‘what am I (the clown) here for? what have I come here to do?’ In our example, we are clear that we want the audience to see the performer and think, ‘Ah! He is going to do ballet dance’. Just as correct attitudes are easier to spot when it comes to highly defined art forms, so expectations in general will be more specific with these forms. But the same principle applies to whatever your number is. Ask yourself, ‘what am I promising the audience at the beginning?’ If you don’t know or it’s not clear then the spectator won’t easily follow the action. The promise can be anything you want, but once established the audience will expect it to be fulfilled. The clown has two choices here: fulfil it, or don’t fulfil it but give us something beyond our expectations. Simply not fulfilling it won’t do, and will set your audience against you. Going beyond expectations is the best option, and matches the same structure we found in problem-solving. So in our dance example, the promise will be ballet dancing. What will actually be delivered is ballet dancing plus something else. 12. Music. We choose a musical accompaniment which reflects the audience expectation of classical dance, the ‘Dance of the Flowers’ from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. We use eight bars of the music to establish the skill, the first four bars being almost ‘pure’ skill, the second four bars introducing some ‘wrong’ moves, where body movements and arm movements are isolated and separated from each other. Here we have an example of how to preserve a performance skill whilst also clowning. It does not involve trashing the skill at all. These isolations we then order according to the rule of three. The rule of three can be understood in many ways, for example here we establish the sequence: parade in a circle, then move our arms from horizontal to vertical. This happens twice, and the third time the arm movements are also ‘extra-wrong’ as they do not come from classical ballet. The whole sequence thus follows the pattern: expected, expected, surprise. We continue in a similar way with eight bars of dance while drinking, eight bars eating and finishing with smoking as the ‘wrongest’ of our behaviours, using the student’s highest level skill as a finale. A note on music more generally here. In our ballet example we expect music, as it forms part of the recognised performance. It is highly useful

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in structuring the moves, sequences, rhythm and as such the gags themselves. Music has much in common in this way with c­ lowning and can sometimes aid it. But beware of using it where it has no place. Unless music is an integral or expected part of your performance, I would advise against using it for clowning. At first it might seem to you that using some recorded music to accompany your performance helps you. It might seem to add more energy, more emotion. In part that is true. But where is that emotion, that energy coming from? From you? From the moment you are sharing with the audience? Ask yourself also: is the music filling in the gaps in my material? What would the number be like without it? Clowning often needs breathing space. The clown needs time, to act, to fail, to connect with the audience, to act again. Depending, of course, on the individual clown, it is a performance mode which often requires time. Music, of the pre-recorded type, kills time. Its timing has already been set and cannot be varied. Pre-recorded music also fills the audible space, so to speak, killing off any other sounds or the audibility of other responses. Not the least important of these are the laughs. If you can’t hear the audience laugh because your music is too loud, how will you respond to their responses? I am not saying that there are no circumstances where music can be a positive help to clowning. But don’t waste the opportunity to discover how you can clown without it. It would be like deciding not to bother to learn to walk. 13. Does it work? Finally, after so much structural thinking, we come back to the present moment. Does it work in front of an audience? We have just been concentrating on the form of the material, but now we must go back, as it were, to the present, and the necessity of actually making the thing work in the moment of performance. One aspect of what I do in performance is my material, my plan, my script. Another aspect of my performance is how I engage in the here and now with the real audience I have. This conversation is necessarily made up as I go along, I must take the audience with me, they must be convinced of my clown-ness in every moment. How can I combine this seemingly spontaneous moment with my rigorously built material? There are some clown exercises which serve us both at the beginning and the end of a course of study. I like to use one, the step-laugh, as both an initiation into the dynamics of clown and as a re-training and final fine tuning of a number before we let it loose on the general public in a public show. So the next stage is to perform the newly devised number to the rest of the class, but following the rules of ‘step-laugh’: advance one step in your script when we laugh, and take a step back when you receive six seconds of silence. Remember that this exercise frees you from

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­ enerating material in the moment: it is simply about doing or not doing g according to the audience’s response. So concentrate on using your script as devised. By re-performing the worked out number with these rules, you re-learn the importance of the moment-ness, whilst hitching your material to this dynamic. And it is this dynamic which guarantees that the number will indeed be a ‘clown’ number, and not any old kind of humour.

Chapter

7

Making Shows

Case study: performance workshops In this section I want to have a look at some processes in devising longer pieces of clown performance. To do that I will use some examples from some actual workshops which I ran. It’s the clearest way to be able to discuss the ways in which we can make decisions in clown devising, and on what basis and with which criteria. It would be an impossible job, or at least an extremely lengthy one, to try and extract specific exercises from these experiences. So in place of exercises for this chapter, I propose a kind of case study, as a means for students of clown to learn. By looking at these extended examples, I hope you can draw parallels with what you want to work on yourself. The workshops took place a few years ago as part of the research I was doing on clown training, specifically on how to devise. That meant I was mainly asking myself the question, ‘how do clowns devise?’ The process was spread over a weekly series of three-hour workshops, running for ten weeks in autumn 2009. The participants included professional clown performers, postgraduate and undergraduate students with an interest in clowning, clown teachers and academics. In these workshops we employed a number of different strategies with a view to generating material that could build into a longish performance. These included all the tools discussed in the ‘encyclopaedia of clown’, which can give us anything from an image to a sequence of actions. Over the first five weeks, these ‘encyclopaedia’ methods were predominant. They were added to by considering how sequences could follow each other, how one ‘scene’ might lead to another, and another, to form an ‘act’ (in the playwright’s sense of the word). We could call this ‘clown dramaturgy’, or the art of writing clown shows. In the second block of five weeks we came at things from the other side. Instead of looking to come up with action from scratch, we began by looking at how some already existing clown ‘dramas’ work. We set about trying to uncover how some classic clown numbers function, specifically the ones whose dialogues and stage directions were written down and published in Tristan Rémy’s Entrées Clownesques.

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The overarching question throughout the whole ten-week period was whether it might be possible to create a full-length clown show, weaving together original devised material and adaptations of classics. What follows is a week-by-week summarised account of those workshops, drawing on my notes at the time and videos of most of the work done, and describes how we worked, what we did and what we thought and concluded. Week 1: Using furniture correctly and incorrectly I decided to start by working with furniture (chairs and tables) as our props of choice. I wanted to avoid questions like ‘why are they using that?’ or ‘where is this supposed to be happening?’ Chairs and tables are such common objects that they rarely raise such questions in an audience. We generally only ask ourselves more interesting questions, like ‘what is going to happen?’ If a clown enters a stage with a chair, the numbers of expected outcomes are immediately limited to a well-defined set of possibilities. Correct and incorrect uses are clearly understood from the outset, and so leave one’s path clear and free of the need to justify or ‘create a world’. I had the idea that these two pieces of furniture might be able to provide more than enough setting for a long show performed in the round. I was already leaning towards a preference for performance in the round, partly due to experiments in clown training at the Barcelona Clown School taking place in a tent of 11 metres diameter. Chairs and tables can operate at the centre of a circular performing space, as they are three-dimensional, unlike sets or doors, or even more bulky furniture like sofas. They also have a history of involvement in clowning, and are easily portable. Additionally they allow us to do scenes with food and drink, which I  was curious about exploring when we came to playing with the classic entrées later. So already, before beginning, I had some ideas about where I wanted to go, and not to go. I think this is probably nearly always the case. And it helps to realise what one’s initial assumptions are. It helps to have some idea of what you are envisaging for your show: how long? Who for? Where and when is it to be performed? A seven-minute number for a variety show with other acts? A half-hour street show aimed at all ages? Or for a night-time crowd? A 50-minute indoor theatre show? A full-length show with interval for a circular ring? Where do you want to perform it? Hence our first practical task in the first workshop was to set about defining and practising how to interact with our bits of furniture. This began by asking what the primary, normal or correct actions and behaviour with tables and chairs were. We addressed this task by giving ourselves the same



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exercise to do as I recounted earlier when talking about wrongness: in small groups, spending some time discovering and agreeing on a set of correct chair actions. Then doing the same for wrong chair actions. Then presenting our ‘repertoires’ to the rest of the group. From these exercises would come two kinds of information. We would be able to observe actions and then categorise them as correct or incorrect, although how to do this was always up for debate. And also we would have sequences of actions which began to look like potential routines, rather than just isolated moments or images. For example, one group of three began their ‘demonstration’ by bringing on stage, simultaneously, a table and two chairs, the table carried by two people and the two chairs carried by a third person. The chair-carrier and the table-carriers, if they don’t look at each other when making their decisions as to where to place their furniture, can easily place their objects in the wrong place, i.e. not with the chairs next to the table in readiness to sit down at the table (this would be one of the most primary, or correct, scenarios with these three objects). The three, consequently, constantly get their placing wrong, leading to the chair-carrier ‘chasing’ the table-carriers, all three with furniture in hand. The execution of this action sequence wasn’t, at first, perfect by any means, but it was enough for us to understand the idea’s potential. Once the table and chairs were in position, the three ‘carriers’ became furniture ‘users’. What followed was a failed attempt to stage the same problems in sitting as they had done when carrying the objects. Two chairs plus three people should make that problem easy to find and develop, as there will always be one chair too few. However, the group mixed in other ‘wrong’ behaviour, such as one person sitting on the table, or two on one chair. Although these wrong actions could have been used, they were unsatisfactory when used to solve the problem of having too few chairs. This mixing of solutions with problems is a common enough error, leading to confused narratives and unclear intentions. It also highlights how having more than one ‘wrong element’ at a time in an action or scene is somehow less satisfying than focusing on just one piece of wrongness set against a background of correctness. Other important reflections arose amongst the group, centred on the issue of ‘meaning’, which seemed to link to the above: ‘it’s good when you know what you’re doing with your object, and it’s not good when you don’t know, or when you’re looking for meaning’. With chairs and tables it’s actually quite simple to know what you’re doing. You don’t have to worry about meaning, you just put the chair somewhere and sit in it, for example. We understand that, as spectators. But when you’re worrying about meaning and about making meaning, it starts to get messy. The answer, then, is not to worry about meaning, as it’s much simpler than that.

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Through repeated practice of this exercise and prolonged debate over what is right and wrong, we gradually began to clarify how we wanted to categorise actions as correct/incorrect, resulting in something like this: Primary/correct uses Chair: sit on it, stand up from it, pick it up, move it, offer it, accept it, change places, lean on it Table: sit at it, walk round it

Next came the secondary, incorrect, but possible and logical uses: Secondary/incorrect but logical-possible uses Chair: stand on it, fall off it, pull it away, jump off it, fight with it, share it, leap over it, put feet up on it, sleep on it Table: stand on it, leap on it, hide under it, lie on it, dance on it, block the door with it

Next we extended our categories to create a tertiary one, which includes unusual uses which are only possible for skilled, or virtuoso performers: Tertiary/skilled uses Chair: tame a lion Table: balance it on feet

The items in a fourth category, where the object is transformed into something else, were discounted and not considered. Whilst workshopping these ideas with only chairs and tables as objects, it only took someone, getting warm from the physical activity, to leave their T-shirt on the back of a chair for the question to arise: are chairs designed to put things on? Is that a primary or a secondary use? Probably secondary. And then: which objects are correctly left on a chair? So, aside from direct actions with these objects, we can combine them (correctly or wrongly) with other objects. For example, normal objects to put on a chair might be: cushions, clothes, hats, newspaper, a bag. These correct pairings might produce correct, or incorrect, behaviour: sit on cushion (correct); sit on hat (incorrect). Secondary ones might be: plates, glasses, drawing pins. These pairings are most likely to cause incorrect outcomes. All of these examples so far are about objects being placed on the chair, which is the most obvious and common relationship. For tables, the primary objects such as tablecloths, plates and cutlery, papers and books would also be on the table, but other objects might accompany the table in a different way, the most obvious being, of course, a chair, which habitually stands beside, rather than on top of, the table.



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The greater we went into detail in this way, the clearer it became how, by building an accurate staging of correctness, we could tweak one small element in order to unbalance the picture and generate clown action. What might at first sight have seemed like a dry exercise in reproducing conventional behaviour became a fascinatingly practical method for creating clowning. Week 2: ‘Scene 1’ Now we had clarified what kinds of actions we could call upon with our chosen props, it would hopefully become easier to build longer bits of action. You may find this way of working very useful, partly useful, or just too methodical for your taste. I don’t know myself if I would necessarily use it quite so extensively again, but more often than not I have found myself revisiting it as a method to expand the possibilities of a new idea for a number. It is really only a kind of structured brainstorming, after all. It all depends on what you want to achieve and at what stage you are in your creative process. It might help unlock possibilities or it might give you more of a headache ... or both! It might feel flowingly liberating or more like hard work. The job of making a show usually involves both. It isn’t always ‘fun’, and hard work, time, thought and lots of patience must be given their due. The description I gave just now of the workshop in week 1 combined periods of activity, doing stuff on our feet, with periods of sitting around thinking and talking. How much thinking and talking and how much doing depended on what we wanted to achieve. When we came to wanting to come up with ideas for ‘wrong chairs’ made of ‘wrong materials’, then it was more productive to do the thinking and talking about it first, rather than trying to make some of those ideas as real chairs. Our thinking went: normal chairs are made of wood, metal, plastic, etc.; abnormal chairs would be made of paper, rubber or bubble-wrap. Normal chairs support your weight when you sit in them. That’s what they are designed for. But abnormal ones might fall apart, or bend, or give you an electric shock. Clowning itself may feel liberating when you do it, but the work to prepare it won’t necessarily give you the same buzz. The early stages of clown training are very playful, but clown-as-play alone won’t give you satisfying shows. Pleasure on stage is essential, but that’s not the same thing at all. What you create might resemble freedom on stage, but the process is not likely to resemble a holiday on the beach. Clowning, I believe, involves giving up certain things. You could call it a sacrifice of sorts, of the ego. Clowning isn’t an opportunity for you to ‘get your message across’. Instead of being driven by a desire to ‘self-express’, let the fundamental characteristic of clowning, the demand to make people laugh by means of your own stupidity, drive you. This is the discipline which is appropriate to clowning. We went back to work, in groups, on devising action sequences with chairs. This picked up on what we had done the previous week. At the end of the workshop we had two examples. One felt pretty satisfying, and

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could form the starting point for a decent show. The other was frustratingly incomprehensible and lacking in appeal for an audience. What were these differences, and why did they occur? Briefly, the first piece took as its premise a first action which was clown ‘A’ bringing a chair onstage. This makes a simple promise: someone will use this chair to do something chair-like, such as sit down, to play an instrument or to eat, or whatever. ‘A’ then exits. While ‘A’ is off, ‘B’ enters and removes the chair (no justification is needed, as removing a chair is a perfectly ‘correct’ action). ‘A’ comes back, finds the chair missing, and exits to get another one. (Here we see how a sequence of actions, each in itself ‘correct’, can, together, give us something ‘wrong’, as clowns ‘A’ and ‘B’ each have different aims.) ‘A’ then exits as before, having forgotten something. Same business with ‘B’. Then comes the surprise: ‘A’ brings on a chair for a third time, but ‘B’, instead of waiting and removing it, comes on at the same time, also carrying a chair. Both leave with their chairs. ‘A’ returns, and finding no chair, exits and returns with ‘B’ together, with all the chairs accumulated. And so on. There are numerous routes you can take through this maze, and many which will work. The logic remains, based on attempts at solving the basic problem of getting the chair on. At some point the end must come, the chair is on, the promise to the audience is fulfilled, and the ‘scene’ is over. ‘Scene 2’ can begin. Just a quick further note on ‘justification’. Many performers can struggle to do ‘B’’s actions, as they will be looking for the reasons for removing the chair. But there is really no more need to ‘explain’ this action of removing than there is to explain the action of placing the chair. It’s that simple. Wanting to fool ‘A’ might work, but it might overload you with ‘acted’ motivation and spoil the scene. Personally, I found that in the role of ‘B’ I took great pleasure in removing anything that ‘A’ placed there. It wasn’t anything personal or even about emotional conflict, just a joy in ‘undoing’ stuff. Getting tied into emotional narratives is a danger for clowns, as they easily lead you into reproducing the most conventional kinds of emotional schema (‘he did X so I felt Y’). One of the joys of clowning is to break free of such traps, I find. So, if possible, stick to doing the action ... with the pleasure that comes from your sense of your own stupidity! The second piece had no such clear premise to begin with. (And hence none of these subtleties of acting were possible.) Instead of a clear action in space, things here centred around non-actions motivated by embarrassment: people not wanting to sit close, or not being sure if was their turn to bring on a chair, and so on. The comedy of embarrassment, though popular in some British circles, is severely limited in terms of clowning, as it works in the opposite direction to the release which wrong behaviour brings. Embarrassment only serves generally to keep our actions under tight, conventional, control. By all means feel embarrassed, but then carry on regardless and make your actions emphatic and fearless!



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We took our relatively successful example as a first attempt at a ‘Scene 1’, the beginning of a potentially longer show. Having got the chair onstage, we could now move on to ‘what happens next?’ (Which, remember, was the audience’s probable question.) Week 3: Rhythm, status and dramaturgy I think it is still very much an open question in clown dramaturgy just how we construct the action. There are plenty of models to choose from, if we look to stage and cinema: variety (one self-contained piece after another), linear narrative, episodic narrative, or indeed from music: classical sonata form or Wagnerian climaxes, to name some of the most obvious ones. The most developed clown entrées, from the ‘golden age of clowning’ (around 1890–1945), can last anything from 10 to around 20 minutes, based on a single, strong premise. The same has often been said to hold true for vaudeville numbers, as well as other forms of premise-driven comedy such as the TV sitcom, which, in its most highly developed state in the USA, fills 22 minutes. In other words, one idea can last you approximately 20 minutes, as long as you know how to develop it.1 In this case, I was interested in how we could develop the simple premise of the chair brought on, avoiding any kind of fictional worlds or narratives outside those plots implied directly by the object itself. Scene 1 had been built by focusing on correct/incorrect uses, in the context of a ‘story’ which was the simplest of ‘correct’ premises: bring a chair on (in order to sit on it). Having got our chair on, I now wanted to see a change of rhythm, perhaps movement in space rather than an obsession with the object and its placing. In order to get things moving in such a direction, we used two exercises. The first developed as we looked for ways of generating continual movement of bodies and chairs in the space. If we wanted movement, then why not begin with that: we set the condition that everyone had to be in movement at all times. By ‘movement’ I mean the moving from one place to another. The English language doesn’t have any common words for this action, in contrast to Spanish (desplazar) or French (déplacer), for example. It’s the ‘A-to-B-ness’ we were after here, so not ‘movement’ in the sense of parts of your body moving while you stay roughly on the same spot. Furthermore, in this exercise, we established that the movement was to be ‘correct’, that is to say it would be walking, perhaps running, but not rolling or crawling on the floor. In order to focus on the action of movement from A to B, and not be sidetracked into having to make decisions about direction of movement, we limited this movement to the circumference of a circle (bearing in mind also my preference for a performance in the round), so we could only move along that circle’s boundary. On meeting someone else, you could change direction or go around them, but all the time remained in the circle. Next,

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some chairs were introduced. Chairs could be carried (correctly) or placed on the floor (correctly). They could be sat on. If a chair blocked your path, you could also go around it, change direction, pick it up or even (new freedom here!) jump over it. These elements and choices were introduced gradually, such that we began to build up a way of moving bodies and chairs which was essentially ‘correct’ but which in its complexity, patterns and unpredictability became something way beyond what we would expect to do with chairs normally. Admittedly, the key here may have been the ‘special permission’ to jump the chairs, enabling an escape from the pure correct actions. This kind of action had clearly differing qualities to the scene where chairs were merely brought on and off. It seemed that, although each action remained pretty much within the bounds of the correct (barring the jumps), as a spectator one was not looking for each bit of action to be motivated by correctness, since the constant movement in itself appeared to ‘justify’ itself. Or, to put it another way, there was no time for a spectator to wonder or ask questions like ‘why did she pick up the chair?’ The action seems to become, by these means, more abstract. The key here was rhythm. If we were to look to shape the action into a ‘scene’, the most obvious shape was to go for a build up to a climax, perhaps leading to a chair collapsing or some such surprise. Our second exercise for generating movement was a simple status/space game, one which I use occasionally during earlier stages of clown training. In this exercise, three performers are free to use a table and chairs in any normal way, but must maintain certain fixed distances from each other. Performer ‘A’ is arm’s length from ‘B’, who in turn is a leg’s length from ‘C’. ‘A’ and ‘C’ have no specified relationship. I chose to work with groups of three, as I also had in mind that I wanted to explore fully the possibilities of clown trios. (It’s curious how one’s assumptions sometimes only start to pop up later on in the process.) This exercise works in a very simple fashion in teaching a kind of clown status. There are many status exercises around, but they mostly base themselves on psychological concepts of behaviour, demanding that the performer use their head in order to create status relationships. And so they generally create relationships based on a psychological understanding of character. In clown, we don’t need or want characters, we just want you. Fixed spatial relationships give you more than enough to play with and you don’t have to think about what or why you are doing whatever you are doing. You can repeat this exercise several times, with different combinations of people, but the same objects, and come up with completely different scenes. The next step is then to pick up some of the best ideas and edit them down into something usable. Even before reaching that point of editing and forming such a ‘Scene 2’, it seemed to me that we would also then want a third and final scene, which would bring the action to a satisfying fulfilment, a kind of end of Act I, perhaps.



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Week 4: Context, setting and playing in the round It might seem logical to then move onto the third and final scene of Act I, but in order to get a perspective on the whole, it’s worth taking a step back and looking not just at Act I, but also at how it might set up Act II. The premise so far in Act I seemed to be the placing of the chair, but this doesn’t answer the question that must be in the audience’s mind, ‘what is the chair for?’ This necessitates thinking through the possible answers to the question, ‘what did you bring the chair on to do?’ The most obvious perhaps is to eat, and suggests a need for a table. Other options, rather over-situated are: to have your teeth pulled out, and to have your hair cut, or get a shave. These are all classics in the clown repertoire, of course, scenes with barbers and dentists giving plenty of scope for clowning. Even more common, though, are scenes with food and drink. Rémy’s collection of 60 entrées includes no less than 16 which deal with the subject.2 As well as eliminating the more situated dentist or barber options, we can eliminate weaker ideas like: to reach something up high; to read; or to put your shoes on. All of which suggest questions of ‘why?’ ‘what?’ and ‘where?’ - ‘what are you reaching for?’ ‘what/why are you reading?’ ‘where are you going, and why?’ Eating and drinking don’t require such justifications, and would, I hope, give us more freedom as a result. So let’s go for the eating and drinking. Now, if we actually situated the eating and drinking in a restaurant, for example, then we would be asking the audience to do the same work as when they watch the barber or dentist scene. Which, in my opinion, is a very good reason not to create that restaurant. For, once you have your restaurant, you will have to keep referring to the damned thing, and will be more restricted in your choices, but without gaining anything from the situation. But what about all those silent comedy movies in restaurants? Of course, film is another matter. By definition, a film must be situated in a specific place. Theatre or circus, on the other hand, takes place in a ‘non-place’, the stage or ring, which has no need to be transformed in to a kind of real-world location. Cinema lacks this possibility and will always be obliged to come up with a location. It’s no surprise that Chaplin and others kept returning to the restaurant, taking the situation and finding as many gags in it as possible to generate material: ‘Although I hadn’t a story, I ordered the crew to build an ornate café set. When I was lost for a gag or an idea a café would always supply one.’3 In live performance we can have all those gags without the need to set the scene so specifically. We can perform without set, without costume, without lights, without just about everything except the actor and the audience. The performance doesn’t so much represent a reality, copying it like film does, as exist as a primary reality itself. And the less we use fictional time and space, the more real the performance becomes in itself. I personally believe that clowning belongs more in this kind of ‘real performance’, and that this

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brings it closer to circus, which is also a performance of real rather than ­fictional actions. After all, the catching or dropping of the ball by the juggler is always ‘real’, as is the fall from the trapeze. In contrast, the death of Hamlet is always ‘unreal’. Circus draws this ‘realness’ from two principal sources. The first is the nature of feats of difficulty (juggling, trapeze, etc.). The performance of difficulty or danger is, in itself, dramatic. It is ‘enough’. We need no story, no fiction, no theme. The second source of realness in circus is of more general appeal, at least to me as a clown and actor. It is the circular performing space. Performing in the round means you cannot hide anything. All is visible, physically, and therefore psychologically and emotionally too. This makes it practically impossible to convince the audience of the existence of fictional worlds, or to create places which are not actually present. It thus also inhibits narrative, which is essentially fictional. Thus ended week 4, where discussion, reflection and realisation took priority over trying out actions. Clowning is always a combination of doing and thinking, sometimes at the same time, sometimes separately. Theory and practice always serve each other. Week 5: Show length, Acts I and II The task set in this particular devising process was to aim for a full-length show. Just what that means is debatable. These days when people talk about full-length new work in the theatre, they often mean barely 60 minutes. Is it because of a lack of audience attention span, or a lack of ideas? Is it because of the economics of small companies and limited resources? When we spent two or more years devising our first show as Companyia d’Idiotes 4 in the 1990s we scraped through to 50 minutes, or an hour on a good night. The devising and writing process had taken two years. It’s not easy devising a long piece of work. In this case, though, I was interested in how far the clown ideas and dramaturgy could stretch. Could we make a 90-minute show? 120 minutes? Or are we inevitably limited by the variety structure (separate, unconnected numbers of between 5 and 20 minutes’ length)? If we want longer shows, then do we have to resort to strong plotlines and a narrative structure borrowed from legitimate theatre? My experience had led me to the conclusion that on the one hand too much narrative will banish the clowning, and that on the other hand a variety show would not allow for any new developments in clown dramaturgy. The lack of good models or examples didn’t help. The longer clown work in recent times has tended to cobble together the variety format with a bit of overarching theme, without extending the structure beyond this. Are long clown shows impossible, or do we still need to learn how to do



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them? Part of this current devising process was aimed at exploring these ­questions. One guiding principle was to tread carefully, without rushing to fill in ­dramaturgical gaps with quick narrative fixes, musical padding or fake themes; instead we were hoping that the right forms would emerge. Back to our Act I: we now knew several key elements of how it could work. We knew the action would not need motivation, that it would 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 finished. We still had to decide if the objective of eating was to be stated from the outset, later to be fulfilled or bettered. Or if this objective was to emerge. My feeling was 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. (Although I have to say that right now, as I revise these notes for inclusion in the present book, I am inclined the other way, for the expectations about the chair to drive the audience’s interest.) This setting-up of expectations 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 was thus looking something like this: Act I Scene 1: business of bringing chair on, keeps getting removed, finally in position. 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 By this time, the direction of the show was becoming fairly clear. This part of the devising process, researching these structural matters and how they could build the premise for a lengthy show, had come to its conclusion. The nuts and bolts work on these scenes would be left for a future date, if and when there was a possibility of developing the work through rehearsals into a presentable performance.

More chairs Which is what indeed did happen. The following year, beyond the confines of researching how to devise clowning, some of us completed the process in order to make the show The Spaghetti Horse.5 Other chair business was added, drawn from classic numbers, such as Nikulin and Shuidin’s routine where eggs left on a stool seat mysteriously disappear when sat on.6

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And further chairs were constructed in order to behave in specifically wrong ways, starting from ideas of what chairs constructed wrongly or behaving wrongly might be. To imagine a wrongly functioning object is to retain the object’s main function and characteristics (it remains a chair) but to introduce one wrong element, preferably linked logically to the normal functioning of the object. The ‘egg-chair’ above isn’t really about a wrongly functioning chair, but about eggs which don’t behave. Instead of breaking (their primary characteristic, for humans), they vanish. But it’s the chair which must be redesigned in order for that to happen. On the other hand, another chair was designed so that its legs would splay out to the sides when sat on, the seat sinking to the floor, and would spring back to position when you stood up. This adaptation messes around with the properties of the chair itself. What I find interesting about this chair is that, despite the fact that no real chair ever behaved thus, the scenario presents itself easily as a fantasy. It seems somehow logical, although always in an impossible world. The first part is possible, of course: sit on a rickety chair and it will collapse. The fantasy lies in its springing back to ‘life’. A third chair was designed to collapse in a completely different way: bit by bit. This is a more commonly found kind of ‘clown chair’, where each bit, each leg, falls off. The design question here was: how many bits should the chair break up into? Three? Four? More? This depends entirely on what you want to do with your chair. How will it break? As a result of what? A collision? Sitting on it? Throwing a hat on it? Sneezing? And what will you do with the pieces afterwards? Rebuild the chair? Try to pick up the pieces? Juggle the pieces? A chair broken up into half a dozen or more pieces doesn’t give you much scope for further action. There are too many bits to do anything with. A chair in only two pieces is hardly broken. Three pieces makes solutions possible, though problematic (amusingly, hopefully). All these decisions have a bearing on how you design and build your prop. In the end it is the prop’s function within the action which counts. Simply put: are three pieces funniest? The answers to these design questions are best sought after in trial and error with props. An idea you have might work in theory but if the actual object doesn’t behave how you imagined it would, then the gag won’t work. Clown prop-making can be a long process. It’s not a good idea, therefore, to simply commission a prop-maker by giving them your idea and then waiting for the finished product. The maker needs to be able to rework the prop according to its real effectiveness. Finally, a word of warning. If you do take a liking to large props such as furniture, make sure you have space to store them. In addition to those mentioned above, we also had a chair with a harmonica built into a leg, a stool and several folding chairs, as well as a couple of tables. Far more clown furniture than real furniture! But we are jumping ahead. Before we got to that stage, we still had those classic routines to explore, for the following five weeks.



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Clown drama One very highly developed form of clown drama which already exists is the clown entrée. The entrée is an extended clown act given in the circus, which saw its height during the ‘golden age’ of clowning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Paris. It usually employs at least a duo of clowns (whiteface and augustes), and frequently the ringmaster as well as occasional additional augustes. Structurally, entrées are pretty much theatre, rather than circus as physical dexterity, although the latter may be included. In an entrée we see the drama of conflicting interests between the two main clown types. As I have mentioned, entrées could, broadly, be compared to other kinds of comic scenes or pieces based on a main premise, and hence can fill 20 ­minutes in the hands of able performers. I was interested here in drawing on the tried and trusted dramatic structure of the entrée in two possible ways. First, could the entrée be extended in time, so that its premise could supply the overarching plot of a longer show? And secondly, could individual entrées be stitched together as scenes in a grander plan, moving the show along as a unified whole, rather than as stand-alone variety numbers? Copying and originality The whole debate over copying and originality is mostly a red herring in the clown world. Oral forms of culture, handed down through doing what others before you have done, are inherently tied up with ‘copying’. Despite many performers throughout history laying claim to have invented suchand-such an act, we all know that it’s a lost cause trying to find out who was the ‘original’ creator in this field. In the past, you would have had to go and see a performer, or work with them, or be born into their family, in order to learn to do something like they did. Today, in the age of online video, this is a whole lot easier to do. This accessibility might even point towards a reverse in fortunes for the entrée, which in the 1960s was already being thought of as old-fashioned and a thing of the past. On the other hand, the rise of contemporary clowning premised on the idea of a ‘personal clown’ has worked against this idea of a common store of clown material, preferring to see a clown as a purely unique and individual being. This book has been arguing for a reunification of these two concepts, and nowhere is this more productive than in approaching clown material which someone else has done before you. Analyse clowns Just as making lists of skills you have or don’t have is a useful source for generating your material, so too is watching other clowns. If you want to make lists, here is your chance: lists of clowns you like, and lists of gags

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and numbers you like. Don’t stop there, though. Note down, or discuss with others exactly why you like those clowns and those gags. If you like them, it may well be that this is the kind of clowning you want to do. Become more aware of what your criteria for good clowning is, and then you will be better placed to try and produce it yourself. Likewise, think about and discuss just why you don’t like the clowns or gags which don’t appeal to you. Once you start thinking about it, you might be surprised to find you have a lot to say, which would actually be no surprise, as anyone who is seriously interested in a field of activity is going to have strong feelings and opinions about it. There is nothing to be ashamed of in trying to reproduce a piece of clown business you have seen. Think of dancers: learning a new step is second nature! Being precious about these things has never been common in clowning, as long as you stop short of exactly reproducing a whole act by someone else (though more than a few of the most revered clowns in history have done so). Take the bit you want and make it your own, adapt it, renew it. Aside from watching clown performances, you can even get ideas from books. There aren’t many around but they do exist, listing clown gags and whole scenes.7 Again, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, although many will pontificate that ‘you can’t learn clowning from a book’. Obviously not everything, but they can help. Like this one. Week 6: Classic entrées – William Tell Tristan Rémy’s collection of 60 scenes from the early twentieth century, Entrées clownesques, is both a gift and a conundrum for clowns interested in this kind of work. These are not just any old bits of clown ideas. They are textual re-creations of performances given by some of the leading clowns from the period. The dialogues and stage directions are recorded in detail, but how to perform them? We began with William Tell,8 and the first question was, in fact, ‘how do we begin?’ I decided to first do a quick analysis of the text. At first sight, it is a simple matter 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 auguste by the clown. In the first part, each of their individual desires, needs or, if you like, superobjectives, are exposed. We are talking theatre here, where an actor will want to know what his role wants from the scene. I’d make a distinction between ‘roles’ and ‘characters’ in this instance. We customarily think of characters, at least these days, as being fictional personas defined in detail and highly individualised, and to a great extent seeming to resemble individuals offstage. At least in theory. Roles, on the other hand, could be understood as fictional personas which are defined not by specific individual or social characteristics, but by the place they take in the action and their status relationship to other roles. This is just my own, rather rough, working definition.



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An ­example of a theatrical role would be ‘The King’, ‘The Witch’ or indeed ‘The Clown’. Characters, meanwhile, would have personal names, like ‘Jimmy’, ‘Alison’ or ‘Blanche’. Obviously, this distinction is not hard and fast and raises a large number of problems. But we won’t go into that here. I think the concept of the role is more useful when looking at these clown texts, as they present both a general set of roles which can be shared among any number of performers (mainly whiteface clown, auguste clown and ringmaster), and are also a record of particular versions performed by specific clowns (Rémy mostly names these clowns at the beginning of each script). It would of course be absurd to try and copy the performance of a particular individual clown (especially working just from a printed text). Instead each clown must use their ‘own clown’. But equally, the roles are what they are. This question, of how to draw on your own clown, your own stupidity, your own style, whilst playing a set role, is vital for each performer. This actually gives a surprising amount of room for variation. If the functions of the role of the whiteface clown, for example, are well established, the manner in which you can interpret them is pretty much up to you. So what do the main clown roles consist in? We probably all have some notion of what happens in a clown duo and a close reading of scripts will most likely confirm this. The main points as I see them would be as follows. Whiteface clown: the stated aims of this role are often to demonstrate skill, wit, ability and superiority over others. This could be manifested in a number of ways, through magic and conjuring, or hoaxes and practical jokes, or simply through physical skills such as tumbling. As a trickster, the whiteface clown is often driven by the desire to prove him/herself. He/she is a strategist, setting up situations in advance in order to fool others. This may involve demonstrating that, by contrast, the auguste clown is inferior as measured by these criteria. It may also involve performing such a demonstration for the benefit not just of the audience, but also of the ringmaster, whose approval the whiteface clown seeks. Auguste clown: this role most likely does not share the ambition of the whiteface clown. He/she is instead driven by immediate concerns and physical drives, such as thirst, hunger, sex, love, tiredness, and so on. The auguste clown doesn’t think ahead, but instead reacts in the moment, emotionally and physically. Whilst the whiteface clown can easily set up a situation, the auguste clown is mostly incapable of doing so. However, the auguste clown, by means of his/her unexpected and disastrous reactions and actions, will tend to extend the action by complicating it ad nauseam. The ringmaster: known in France as Monsieur Loyal (from the famed circus family of that name), this role is not strictly a clown one, but is often called upon to act as a foil to the other two. He/she is, or represents, the owner of the circus, of the space. As such, the ringmaster has nothing to prove, unlike the whiteface clown. The role stands a little apart from the others, and is employed in an entrée whenever useful, being sidelined when not.

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As we can see, the roles are very distinct from each other. But there is nothing here to tell us the manner of performance. There is nothing which stipulates the temperament of any of the three. Thus a whiteface clown may be authoritarian, or a benignly father-like figure. The auguste may be a drunken melancholic, or a sunny-natured fool. The ringmaster may be impatient, interested or passive. In the case of the William Tell entrée, once we understand the basis of the three roles, it is easier to grasp the central conflict of the number: the whiteface clown wants to demonstrate his superior shooting ability to the ringmaster, whilst the auguste clown wants to eat the apple. In a way, that is all you need to know in order to start. The first part of the text presents us with this basic information. Rémy’s version is of course set in a circus, but the number has been done in any manner of venues. Clearly, the opening parts of the number must be varied, according to your venue. So let’s leave the first part aside and concentrate on the second. In the second part of the text we have the mechanics of the conflict, the whiteface trying to get the auguste to stand with an apple on his head, whilst the latter tries to eat the apple, or escape the danger of being shot at by the whiteface. Workshopping clown texts So how did we start to reproduce this action? Experimenting with ways to ‘learn’ the entrées in these workshop conditions, we found two broad ways to approach this. One was to simply read the dialogue, try and memorise some of it and then stage it. This would be standard practice with a theatrical text, and it can definitely work for these clown texts. This may suit some performers more than others. But there is another way, which we tended to prefer the more we worked on the texts. Instead of everyone reading the script, one person, who knew the scene (the teacher, the director, or whoever had read it or seen it ­performed), explained it to the others. This might involve summarising the main points of the conflict, and who does what when, together with maybe some details of the main gags. This oral transmission seemed to work a lot quicker than the literary one. It’s actually also a good exercise for any clown, as it demands that you communicate the most important aspects of the performance, rather than just the words of the text, and we found that it did also lead to more of those important details of the entrée being retained in the memory more swiftly. Once some progress had been made with learning and understanding the main body of the number, we returned to the first part of the text. In our case, we initially envisaged some try-out performances in pubs and bars. So we were looking to transfer this to a new context, without looking to alter any meaning or function of this prologue to the main action. Thus the



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r­ ingmaster could become the publican. The whiteface clown strides into the bar, weapon in full view, and causes a stir, understandably. The publican wants to know what on earth he’s up to with that rifle in here. The clown talks him round and he demands a demonstration. At which point the whiteface clown calls on the auguste clown, who has been sitting there at the back all this time, planted among the audience. This was just one of the imagined scenarios which we ran through and staged in the workshop, the ‘non-performers’ taking on the roles of pub customers who could intervene, encourage or try and stop the action at any point. Week 7: The Cakes in the Hat Next we moved on to look at another of Rémy’s entrées, The Cakes in the Hat, one that is structurally less clear than William Tell, but nonetheless fairly ‘classical’ in its premise. The principal action is the cake magic trick done twice, with the whiteface the clown trying to show his skill, and the auguste trying unsuccessfully to emulate him. The trick involves borrowing someone’s hat, maybe from the audience, pouring cake ingredients into it, ‘cooking’ it over a candle or suchlike, then producing a cake from the hat before returning the undamaged hat to its owner. Once the trick has been played on the auguste, he decides to try to play it on someone else, and in this sense does acquire a kind of objective, though previously he simply reacts to the proposals of the clown, as in William Tell. But the auguste soon wants to adopt the same objective as the whiteface, of doing the cake trick, but with disastrous results. This attempt to emulate the whiteface’s trick is the most common kind of motivated action one finds in augustes. Our rehearsal method was to first try running the piece without using any of the dialogue. The question is, how much can we do without the spoken word? 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. These limitations all arose in the course of trying to run this number, as we saw that to disobey them only obscured the clarity of the action. They also originated from observing over a period of time the behaviour of clown students and also clown performances, including even the best. How many times had I 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

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themselves. After all, they are just as intelligent as you are! If they haven’t understood, then it is your acting which is at fault. We then had a kind of ‘action-script’. Anything that appears in the text, but is not an actable action, was omitted. So we don’t attempt to act any non-actions. For example, to understand the difference: the first ‘real action’ in The Cakes in the Hat is when the auguste hides his hat from the clown. That’s real, in that it can be done by the real body in real, present space. Only by first getting the mechanics of the number clear, can we later work on the details of motivation (why does he hide the hat?) and the emotional reactions (is the auguste offended when the whiteface shows no interest in his hat?). When working with numbers that already exist, what ‘already exists’ is the action. So: action first, motivation and emotion after. Actions still work even without motivations or emotions, but not the other way around. A motivation or emotion that is not manifested in an action is non-existent, invisible. Having got this far, we could then add back in some of the spoken text, but only if we felt that the words would add to the audience’s pleasure. Week 8: Performing William Tell Back to William Tell, as we had 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 in London, the Rose and Clown. Three of us were available, so that was the casting sorted out. We dedicated our time to a straight rehearsal of the three performers, with three other participants 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 the English-translated text was outdated, requiring a non-naturalistic and therefore, in her opinion, false delivery. It’s true that the available translation has no great pretensions to literary merit, being an American English that nonetheless tries to retain some kind of period, vaguely 1920s-ish ‘European-ness’, which ends up sometimes as a bit of a linguistic mishmash. But I didn’t agree that the two performance mode options were naturalistic and convincing, versus theatrical and false. Nor did I think its outdatedness necessarily a disadvantage. Comedians use this kind of language, often repetitive and standardised. The entrée form is highly theatrical, and yet must be convincing in order to be funny. We experimented with making the auguste role high-status and knowledgeable, the one who drives the action, whilst the clown became the ­victim.



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It worked better in some ways for me, playing whiteface clown, as it was nearer to my natural style, but for the auguste it was like introducing psychology into the performance, having to think all the time how someone different would play it. It became a constructed character. All this led us to the simple conclusion: ‘play it as ourselves’ (whatever that means!), and with our real names. This new attitude proved 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 M. Loyal of the demonstration of shooting, introduced as the result of the research fellowship investigation being undertaken via these workshops. 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, the issues of the relationship between the actor and the role, which was 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 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 is beyond the reach of clowns? I had been performing in and watching quite a few over those past weeks. At first sight they are all different kinds of places, ranging from smoky squats to West End neoburlesque. But they still seem to have something in common, and it is a something which doesn’t sit well with clown. In a cabaret, the performing space is often tiny, much smaller than the auditorium. Cabaret needs a minimum of space for one or two people to stand. They don’t need to move. The performance style that this results in is not one given to an audience seeing much. That non-seeing might apply both to physically seeing little on a cabaret stage and also to seeing little metaphorically, which works against clown performance which is seeking to expose and reveal. 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

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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 judged too harshly, but I was 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 wouldn’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 whiteface clown. Week 9: The Bottles One of my favourite numbers in Rémy’s collection is The Bottles, which unfortunately is one of the 12 scenes that remain unpublished in English translation. Lacking a text in English, I decided to translate it directly to the performers as they tried doing the scene, instead of writing out the full translation first. Would this oral-action method 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 five clowns through the scene, translating from the French into English. We needed to do that twice before anyone really got the idea of how the number worked, and so the conclusion is that it isn’t a very efficient method. For the next new number, I decided I would 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 auguste 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. In the end, this process was to lead me to prefer the method of transmission I mentioned earlier, where one person who knows the routine explains by showing it to the others. This raises the question of what a clown script should be and would also apply to when you devise your own material. What should you write down in order to remember it? Personally, I find that I will not be able to recall a new number unless I have recorded the important main actions, the numbers of times I do them, their sequence and the key words or phrases. Each performer will find their own best method. Some might just have a few notes scribbled on a scrap of paper; others will compile whole notebooks of numbers in detail, ready for future reference. A large part of the content of a clown number can be written down in some form or another, so don’t be fooled into thinking that clowning is ‘non-linguistic’ due to some of it relying on responding to the moment. Week 10: Conclusions My questions for this final workshop of this series were: ‘what were the best ways we found to develop the entrées?’ and ‘how should we proceed?’



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Some responses from participants 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 commit the scene to memory (either by watching, listening or reading); second, learn the main actions; third, perform it as your own clown; fourth, find the relationships with other clowns.

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. The whiteface clown wants to show off his trick, and the auguste wants the bottle. Once you have this central trio of relationships working, you can turn to the two counter-augustes, who function as a mini-duo of their own. In this session we worked on the first part of The Bottles, up until just before the entrance of the two counter-augustes. We did eight 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 as your own clowns they become delightful studies of human behaviour. Each clown’s objective 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 auguste 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. 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. But we can only ‘see’ those ‘performers themselves’ through the lens of the number, and in the case of such classic numbers that means the relationships between two or three figures. 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. Just to recap, working on clown numbers from a structural point of view is applicable equally to new devised material (the furniture serving as an

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example here), to classic clown numbers (such as the various texts from Rémy’s collection), or indeed any other material which has already been performed. Just as an analysis of what’s important in the classic numbers enables you to restage them, focusing on the main action and the relationships between clowns, so any attempt to rework numbers you have seen performed will need to start from a clear understanding of what is at the core of the number. This core can be reproduced, in your own clown image, as it were. This approach should help you avoid trying to do a carbon copy of someone else’s performance, which would only be frustrating in its impossibility, and at best give you a pale imitation of another’s work. From workshops to stage That’s as far as we got in that particular workshop series. Later on I would continue to use these discoveries in the teaching of these numbers to clown students. And beyond those first try-out gigs, in the coming weeks, we performed selections of classic entrées at Battersea Arts Centre, the Central School of Speech and Drama, the Rose and Clown, 195 Mare Street and Madame Jojo’s (two squats, one arts centre, one university/drama school and one Soho nightclub). In addition, the discoveries about what makes these pieces tick, what their prime elements are, led to a much better understanding of how to incorporate them into longer shows, such as stretching the main conflict of a number over a longer show, interspersed with other actions or numbers. We were then able to work in a much more focused way, devising and rehearsing with five of these numbers: The Bottles, William Tell, The Cake in the Hat, The Broken Plates and The Hidden Apple. This eventually fed into the making of an hour-long show, The Spaghetti Horse, together with the material from the first five weeks, as I mentioned earlier. This is not the place to discuss the production in detail, but a few points are of interest to those of us looking to create shows. Certain additional questions needed to be asked in the process of making that larger show, asking what else was necessary to add into this work in order to get a final product. Into the mix of ‘personal clown’, awareness of devising gags, form and structure and maintaining longer narratives and recycling old material (all of those points which I have been covering through the course of this book), further structures proved useful. The experience of The Bottles, with its complex five clowns, pointed towards the need to organise a large cast of clowns very carefully. Trios clearly made sense, whether Loyal/whiteface/ auguste, or whiteface/auguste/counter-auguste. The extra two tended to operate as their own private duo, or indeed to team up occasionally with the auguste from the other trio to form another trio. For the show, then, we planned for one trio of clowns, operating along ‘dramatic’ lines in the way of Rémy’s entrées. Then we would have



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a  ­separate duo, less given to advancing the dramatic narrative, and more towards physical slapstick. We also saw the possibilities for a further duo of clowns, who would do their business strictly within the confines of music. Three teams: (1) dramatic/verbal, (2) physical/visual and (3) musical. Plotting storylines for each team would be akin to sitcom plotting, where the main and secondary characters get their own plotlines which don’t impede each other but ideally meet at a climactic point. The trio would function as the principle carrier of interest. The themes of furniture, chair and table ready for food, were carried forward, and use was made of the food- and drink-themed entrées. What happened in addition, though, was a surprise, and had nothing to do with research workshops. The physical duo became a pantomime horse, which horse became the auguste of the clown trio. The musician became a soloist, an ‘eccentric’, and the spaghetti horse was born. But that’s another story!

Epilogue to Part II: What Now? End-of-course feedback If this book were in fact a clown course (following the concept mentioned in the introduction) then we would by now have arrived at the final day, or final session, or final moment, depending on the length of the course. Everyone is about to depart and return to their everyday lives. On a long course, some hours would now be dedicated to mutual feedback. Teachers would give each student a statement on their progress, consisting of a carefully thought-out series of observations and recommendations, made in consultation between the teachers. This feedback would include comments on how the teachers saw the students progressing throughout the course, if the student had grown to understand and embody the principal concepts of clowning as taught. Points of strength would be identified, either as potential or as actually achieved. These points of strength for the student’s clowning would be suggested as ways forward. Depending on whether the student wished to work professionally or not, and in which clowning context, these recommendations could be about ways of devising material, content of material, working solo or with others, types of audience, and so on. Or even about doing further training. Student feedback would be directed to address a number of important questions. What do you think your process of learning was? What do you think you have learned? At what points did you resist or struggle? In a ­process of learning, these are the only really relevant questions. Whether you got on with the group or liked the space are by the by. And the questions are self-reflexive, which will of course be the only way the student will be able to get feedback once they are no longer with the teachers. After the student leaves the course, I would hope and expect that they would at some point begin to act upon these recommendations: making new numbers, finding somewhere to perform, practising with others and, maybe, returning to study. All these things can be done on finishing this book. Repeat the exercises. Practise them with others, teach them to your friends. Perform. Then read the book again, or do another workshop. Revise your own criteria for clowning. What values or principles are most important to you in clowning? Which aspects of clowning do you relish? Which do you struggle with? Which kinds of contexts do you feel more at home in? Do you work better alone or with others? How much preparation do you like to make before performing? Which clowns you have seen do 162



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you like, or inspire you or you want to steal ideas from? Ask yourself what it is you like about those performers. Become an expert on what is important to you in clowning. The clearer you are about your own clowning, about what it means to you, the easier it will be for you to advance with confidence. Establishing your own criteria means that, even when you are failing to live up to your own hopes or expectations, at least you have some idea of where you want to go. When your friends or colleagues or audiences tell you things about your clowning, it is important to know your own position. Otherwise criticism, be it negative or positive, can easily mislead you. Most audience members or friends will make simple comments about your performances, not really going much further than ‘I really enjoyed your performance’. If they are close friends of confidence, then they might tell you when they didn’t like it. But occasionally you will get feedback, usually unrequested, which tries to give you a more in-depth analysis. Beware! If the feedback comes from somebody with experience and knowledge of clowning as a performer or teacher, then it may be of great value to you. But make sure you know where they are coming from. Do you like their clowning? If so, then their comments might well help you. But if you are not a fan, then what they are recommending to you may be pushing in the wrong direction. Obviously, with more experience, you will gain confidence in this respect (a popular opinion amongst some is that one cannot become a good clown until one is of a certain age, often said to be around 50 or more, but there’s no point waiting to have experience!). Generally, these days, I never ask a spectator for their opinion on what I’ve just done, unless they are a professional I have had certain respect for previously. The ones to be especially careful with are those who claim to be ‘professional spectators’, who begin their sentences with ‘I’ve seen a lot of performances …’ or ‘what audiences want is …’. In reality, they are only voicing a personal response, despite it being couched in language which suggests they know what everyone thinks. At the beginning of your clowning career, you are likely to be more unsure about your own clowning. But think of it this way: there must be a strong reason or drive in you which draws you to clowning. Even if you aren’t fully aware yet of what that is, have confidence that it is there and will be your guide. Always think for yourself. If someone tells you, ‘do more/ less’ of something, think, ‘do I want that? Is that what I am looking for?’ In the end, only you know what is important to you, even if you don’t know what that is yet! In this book I have tried to cover clown training as broadly as I can, and to encourage you to extend those possibilities via your own creativity and curiosity to discover more about your clowning. By reading and using this book, hopefully you will have found out something of use to you in one or more of the areas of playing, playing for an audience, clown dynamics, devising material and numbers. Or, if not, that at least you are clearer as to what your own best path could be, if it is not this one.

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But perhaps the most difficult step when moving from training to performance is not about finding how you clown, nor what material to clown with, but the issue of where to clown. So, before drawing this book to a close, I just want to look briefly at some options of how and where you might want to apply your newly developed clown skills. The enclosed environment of the workshop can engender a lack of perspective over time, so any opportunity to get out there and see non-clown students’ reactions is to be seized. I have already occasionally mentioned ways of using the street as a testing place. First experiments with costume are such opportunities, taking a casual stroll around the nearest populated area to see and feel how ‘normal’ people react. Going out onto the local streets or whatever the public space is near where you are training gives you instant feedback, untarnished by any of the relationships and habits built up in the classroom. It’s also a chance to escape the watchful eye of the teacher. Here are a couple of thoughts on how you might do that in a more structured way using some simple tasks to help you engage with passers-by in a way which will aid your clown education. Engaging spectators Walk along the street without looking at anyone. But keep your awareness of people’s reactions as much as possible. Don’t react to those reactions. It’s vital to do this alone. You will be able to work with others later on, but if you don’t try it on your own, you will never know how you feel being this strange-­looking person amongst the ‘normals’. After a time of doing this, now occasionally take an odd step as you stroll – just once, nothing too outrageous, maybe a step which is a little bit too long, and then back to normal. Check if anyone noticed. Don’t overdo it. You are testing people’s reactions, to see how much you have to do to be noticed as strange. If you spot someone looking, return their look for an instant. Smile. Then continue. After practising this a while, begin to repeat the returned looks, if someone keeps looking at you. And repeat the odd step, if they keep looking. You are now using the principle of ‘if they like it, do it again’. And you are building a relationship with someone. Whenever they have had enough, let it go. Don’t force people to like you; that’s impossible and pointless. It may be that you have a series of brief encounters, or it may be that you end up doing a kind of mini-show for one or two passers-by. Next, find someone to speak to, and ask them politely for directions to somewhere that doesn’t exist. Be serious about it, but all the time you will be feeling what it’s like to be regarded by this normal person as someone rather odd, albeit harmless. Then go into a shop and ask if they stock something unlikely, like cheese in a pet shop. Let them think you are stupid and ridiculous. You are, and you are letting them see this for their pleasure. That is your job as a clown.



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Now do all of this again, but this time, as well as wearing your stupid clothes, add your clown red nose. Observe what differences there are like this. Most likely you will see that on the one hand people will accept your stupidity more easily, as they recognise instantly that you ‘are a clown’ (of course this only applies in parts of the world where the red nose is ­recognised as a symbol of the clown, which is not everywhere). You might feel more accepted as a result, and less threatening to them. After all, how would I interpret seeing someone dressed bizarrely coming up to me in the street out of nowhere and asking me for directions to Moscow when we are in the middle of London? I’d think they were either crazy or perhaps a theatre student. The other side of this coin, though, is that once recognised as ‘a clown’ you may be expected to produce funniness. This puts more pressure on you than before. The paradox of clowning is such: there is an obligation to be funny and yet the means to be funny cannot be willed. The audience is behind you You may well find yourself thinking, ‘where are my spectators? Why is no one paying any attention to my best efforts?’ If this occurs (and it is not uncommon) then maybe you could turn the question around and ask whether you are paying enough attention to them. It would be a very rare event if no one at all was at least a bit curious about you. One easy way to remedy the situation is to think that the audience may well be ‘behind you’. The natural curiosity for observing ‘abnormal or unusual behaviour’ usually seeks out a safe place from which to watch. That usually means not looking the ‘abnormal person’ (i.e. the clown) in the eye or placing yourself in front of them. Safer places are behind them, or to the side or at some distance. Though the actual distance and precise positioning does vary ­considerably from one culture to another. Another element to consider is that the street audience, before it has discovered you, is generally walking somewhere. That means they may pass you, the average time for this action being just a few seconds, in which time you have the opportunity to catch their interest and confidence, so that they delay their journey towards their own private objective for a while. Many is the time I have videoed students practising in the street when they have complained that no one was interested. But when they look at the recording of themselves they are surprised to see that people were indeed looking at them and that it was the student who was not looking at that man who passed behind her or at that child who was watching from a distance. You can even practise this in class, with the clown moving past a static audience or with an audience passing the static clown. Such practice will benefit all clown students, but at times the results can go beyond learning street awareness and actually produce good material with which to perform, both in the street itself and in an indoor setting. I remember one particularly

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good example of this once when working with a group of students over a three-week period, where our experiments in ‘clown statues’ (the clown stays still as the audience passes by) fed back into the indoor show they were preparing. Clown statues We decided to place these clown statues at points along the audience’s route to the show, such that they would be obliged to pass by them. This would be similar in a way to how shoppers have to pass by you in the street on their way to a shop. And so we had, for example, one statue who tried to scare passers-by by declaring, ‘I’m a ghost!’ and waving her arms about. Another, without moving, or even looking at us, spat out the half-mumbled phrase, ‘You bastards!’ (it sounds aggressive, but I promise you it wasn’t, delivered as it was in such a stupidly unconvincing manner). Another couldn’t control his throwing up on us just as we passed (again, a very silly and innocent kind of vomiting). Another, in classic statue pose (Roman, perhaps), one index finger pointing nobly aloft, rewarded our interest with placing said digit up his nostril. These were placed strategically in order to heighten their effect. Three seemed enough to occupy the main corridor leading to the performance, with the addition of ‘You bastards!’ at the door to welcome everyone in, and the ghost, with a splendid white sheet and black eyes sewn on, hidden just beyond, and appearing just when you (didn’t) expect it. The best timing for the ghost was when people were being disgusted by the vomiter. We placed another pair, with a similar relationship, just outside the lift, the usual place of arrival. One, a kind of innocent clown, would leap out occasionally from the nearby toilets, to exclaim ‘Hello!’ very sweetly, then disappear again. This, just when people had been lured into helping another (not static) statue to order his dropped papers. Such fleeting encounters with spectators are typical of the street situation, but not exclusively so. Perhaps the street is the most easily accessible of places to ‘apply’ your clowning skills, but there are innumerable contexts in which to do so. Applying clowning Mostly, the exercises in this book belong to a theatre tradition, one which trains a clown to be ready to perform a show of some kind in front of an audience, who may have paid to see that show. That ‘theatre’ tradition includes circus, though we can obviously see clear differences between a circus and a theatre environment: but they both essentially ‘sell’ a show to an audience. In this, too, the street is comparable, despite the fact that much street performance concerns itself with gaining and retaining an audience.



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But what of the other contexts? How to apply what you’ve learned outside the strictly show context: streets, hospitals, prisons, demonstrations, refugee camps? I don’t consider myself a specialist in most of these contexts; my own origin is in theatre, later in street and circus to an extent. So I won’t be trying to teach you the detailed ins and outs of hospital clowning, for instance. But I do believe that it is more useful to view clowning in varied contexts for what those contexts have in common rather than for where they differ. So whilst each context has its own demands, and some will say that clowning in each place is almost a different art form, I prefer to see a through-line of clowning principles running through all of them. Placing hospitals and theatres in the same category is rather unusual these days in the field of clowning. Many teachers and students of clowning regard these two contexts as radically different. Of course, they are different, obviously. But I prefer to focus on the similarities, which are many and fundamental, and not the differences, which are limited and superficial from a clowning point of view. There are not two types of clown, one for the theatre and one for the hospital. Or another for the street. Plainly the different situations will oblige you to adapt in different ways, just as a different theatre venue every night will alter the way you do your show. But you will still be a clown. And if you are unable to perceive that you are in a different place, then you are unlikely to perceive clearly enough the responses of those for whom you are clowning in order to clown well. In that case you should probably be working more on your basic clown awareness and sensitivity than be worrying about rules of behaviour in a hospital. I am aware that many, especially in the field of hospital clowning, disagree with me here. Their opinion is that the specific environment requires specialised knowledge and skills which do not arise in clowning per se, and that as a result of this, only those ‘qualified’ to clown in hospitals should do so. Furthermore, in some countries of the world, the law even forbids you to do so. I have written elsewhere about the professionalisation of hospital clowning,1 but suffice to say that I strongly disagree with some of these opinions that conclude that ‘volunteer’ or ‘amateur’ clowning are a bad thing here. So I would only advise you to be aware of this issue if you are interested in working in this field, whichever side of the fence you come down on. The simple tasks described just now for trying out a costumed presence in the street can usefully be the starting point for a student to prepare ­himself for just about any context. In all cases you will be a clown ­engaging with other human beings. That fact remains constant whether those human beings are healthy, sick, rich, poor, isolated, in community, afraid or ­welcoming. Patch Adams, who has famously used clowning in health contexts for many years, regards his job as finding people who are disconnected and connecting with them. On its simplest level that could mean seeing someone in the street staring at the ground, unconnected to the rest of humanity or society; the clown engages in eye contact, a smile is shared,

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maybe a laugh; the connection is re-established and the clown passes on.2 I find this eminently applicable in all contexts. In a theatre, even though it is to be supposed that the audience will all be attentive, since they have paid money to watch a show, a spectator might have drifted off, losing interest in the clown. The clown cannot ignore this. Or on the street, perhaps nobody is looking to begin with, and all spectator relationships must be built from scratch. Or on a political demonstration, a policeman who stares over your shoulder rather than looking you in the eye can remain aloof, seeing you as a kind of enemy, but as soon as eye contact is made, play can begin to dissolve this barrier of inhumanity between two sides in conflict. Or if someone is in intense physical pain, the only way a clown can help them is if a connection through joy can be built. However much we are suffering, we remain human beings with a capacity for joy. Armed with this simple tool which tells me what my job as a clown is, I can take on any situation I choose, without worrying overly about whether I am properly equipped to deal with specialist knowledge about unfamiliar surroundings. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t find out as much as you can about the practicalities of the lives of those who spend their days on a cancer ward or in a prison complex, whether as willing workers or unwilling inmates. But that knowledge won’t tell you what clowning is. One-to-one clowning practice All clowning is one-to-one in the sense that when as a clown you look, you are looking at an individual, no matter how quickly you cast your gaze on to someone else spectating. Even with a large audience, it is better to pick out individuals to relate to as much as possible, rather than treat everyone as an impersonal mass. Equally, when building a street audience, you may have to start by connecting with one individual, then one more, then gradually build up your audience before beginning your show proper. The hospital ward is clearly another context where one-to-one clowning is vital. Practising one-to-one clowning can therefore serve all these contexts and occasions. Until now, all the exercises have involved the participants engaging in clowning themselves, while the onlooking non-participants function as the audience. But in order to be able to observe and learn something more about the dynamics of one-to-one clowning, it’s worth setting up a slightly different situation. Two people are needed for this exercise, one of whom will be the clown, and one the non-clown. Everyone else watches. Each participant prepares themselves separately. The clown must decide on one, simple thing she will do for the non-clown in order to make them laugh. This can be anything at all, but try and be specific in your decision and stick to it. Don’t think you are just going to improvise everything. It might be a movement, an action, even a joke or a trick, it doesn’t matter at this stage. Meanwhile, the non-clown



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has the option of deciding some state of mind and/or body which he will imagine he is in. Again, it can be anything, from a life-threatening illness to a mild case of boredom, or a state of shock from bereavement to an uncontrollable violent urge. Actually it needn’t even be something ‘negative’. The fictional state the non-clown uses isn’t, strictly speaking, a matter of clowning. It is done in order to help the clown practise. So don’t worry if you aren’t very good at this bit, as it is not a necessary skill for your clowning. So make your non-clown state as simple or as complex as you feel able. But it can help the clown immensely, as it sets up a kind of resistance to laughing which might not be there if you are just watching as a classmate. It’s easy to laugh at your peers, but this will not be the situation you find as a clown ‘out there’. The non-clown must make the clown work a bit for their laughs. If, as the clown, you find that your companion is making life very difficult for you, then set your sights a little lower. Instead of aiming directly for laughter, aim to raise a smile. Or aim simply to make eye contact and hold it for a few seconds. Or even to get a little closer to the non-clown and feel that they are comfortable. Stick to your plan but adapt in the moment to the non-clown’s responses, or lack of response. Although you have an audience present, think that the non-clown is your principal audience right now. It is them you must connect with, convince, make laugh. This exercise makes explicit that the aim of the clown is ‘making someone laugh’, although with the proviso that there are valid stages along the way (eye contact, smile, proximity). This issue is often raised by those who train clowns, or who are undergoing training in clowning. Some clown teachers and students object that the person who goes directly to try and make someone laugh will end up being a very bad clown. There is some truth in this. I think that what they are thinking of here is if you think you are funny, but fail to make someone laugh, and then insist on believing that you are being funny, then the result will be painful. Bad clowning. However, I don’t think the problem lies in having as your aim to make someone laugh. Instead the problem is if you do not respond to the other person’s response. Insisting on believing what you do is good, when the evidence of the spectator response is telling you that it is not good, you are doomed. In terms of the flop, this would be a case of not accepting your failure. But if you do respond to this moment of failure (to make them laugh), then your humility, rather than pride, will lead you in the good direction. But to begin without the aim or notion that the clown is someone who provokes laughter, well this would truly be disastrous. In that case, what on earth would your aim be? It’s no good saying that the clown provokes other responses or emotions than laughter. This may be true but it cannot define what the clown is or what the clown’s dynamic is. ‘Provoking ­emotions’ or ‘connecting’ are too vague to be the bases for clowning as a mode of performance. As guides they are not clear enough, as they are not ‘do-able’ enough.

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If the person you are seeking to clown with/for is very resistant, then you must accept this, and find new paths to get closer to them and your aims. Never push too much, but don’t give up either. Back off when necessary but come back immediately with another attempt. Remember that every human being is, well, a human being, no matter what state of mind or body they are in. Believe that there is always a way to share laughter with that person. That should remain your guide, even if in reality you may have to give up sometimes. Once you’ve done this exercise a few times, try pairs: it can be a pair of clowns, or a pair of non-clowns, or both, or whichever combinations you like. Experiment with a range of ideas the clown brings to the non-clown, from the simplest movements to whole numbers, if you have them yet. It’s a ­question of finding out which kinds of material suit the context, and yourself, best. Obviously, all this needs to be tested in the real-world contexts. The practice exercise here is working with fiction, so there is no guarantee the real situations will be the same. Which applies equally to clowning ­performed on a stage with a paying audience. The only way to find out is to organise some visits to the people and places you would like to clown for. As I have commented, applied clowning can operate in intimate one-toone contacts, and it may be that you want to concentrate on these kinds of encounters. Or perhaps you work better performing a small clown number after having initiated personal contact. Or it may be that your strength lies in performing a more formally organised show to a group of people, maybe followed by one-to-one contact. All these combinations are valid, and all use clowning. As such I don’t distinguish between ‘formal’ performing and ­one-to-one contact, as I believe they exist on a continuum and that both should contain the essential elements of clowning. Clown activism In the early 2000s a number of political activists began to use clowning to try and intervene in the context of political demonstrations and direct actions. The aim of the Clown Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA)3 wasn’t just to have a bit of fun, nor was it to make their protests more colourful and eye-catching, nor was it to entertain demonstrators and keep their spirits up, although all of these might have occurred. The prime reason they adopted clowning was that its effect, as clowning, seemed to offer, in practice, the promise of some of their political objectives. And not only in practice, since the thinking behind clowning seemed to match the thinking behind their political analysis. Their experiment spawned numerous groups throughout the world which took on a life of their own, continuing beyond the lifetime of the original project, although not all of them took their clowning politics so seriously. Recently some of the early initiators have taken up the project again.



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Those insights about clowning and politics, whilst strikingly original, are actually based on observations about how clowning works, which many involved in contemporary clowning would easily recognise. In this respect, the initiative takes commonly found aspects of clowning and applies them to the specific context, just as we might do when applying those same principles in another field, from health care to theatres. In other words, the clowning stays the same, but the context shifts. This is borne out if we look at how CIRCA trained and prepared themselves before engaging in direct political action. A large amount of time was spent on exercises taken directly from the repertoire of contemporary clown training for performers. Mini-training courses were offered to new groups, with the expectation that a group would spend just as much time honing their clowning skills as they would spend investigating the political issues which moved them to action. So what is the effect of a clown placed in the middle of a political demonstration or direct action? How can a clown, whose perspective on the world is that all is ridiculous and stupid, starting with himself, take action? Aren’t clowns destined to be passive observers of politics? Isn’t the very act of protest, claiming that ‘you are wrong and I am right’ anathema to a clown? Doesn’t a clown just dissolve all these kinds of two-sided disputes? Isn’t a clown primarily interested in finding a silly game where others only see drama, suffering and the clash of egos? If we followed the clowns, wouldn’t we forget about our entrenched positions, our desire to hold on to the power we think is ours, and our belief that our opponents must be completely defeated? Well, answering ‘yes’ to all these questions gives us the clue as to exactly why clowns might produce a different effect on a situation to the habitual response. Instead of shouting and waving a banner in the face of riot police and demanding entry to the nuclear base or summit of world leaders, instead of marking the line of difference between two opposing forces, forever alienated from each other and whose only success would be the removal of the other, imagine what the clown might seek, knowing what we know about how clown dynamics work. What would happen if both ‘sides’ engaged in play: eye contact, smiles, laughs, silliness? What would happen, for example, if the silly clowns, arriving en masse at the army recruitment office, innocently desiring to join up all at once in their garishly-coloured uniforms, inadvertently caused the office to have to close up for the day, unable to cope with the unprecedented huge numbers, and embarrassed by the very public event that was running out of their control? What if a whole office of army recruitment officers suddenly felt so foolish that they almost resembled clowns? (In fact, all of these ‘what if’s’ did actually occur, and are taken from a real piece of clown action carried out by CIRCA some time ago.) Clowning in this way can cause a kind of chaos which both defuses tensions and creates new situations where issues appear in a new light, with

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new possibilities. The disruption is thus creative and highly strategic. If you are going to get arrested, then make sure it’s done intelligently and with some useful result. As one of the CIRCA principles put it, ‘the real action is your target’s reaction’.4 Clowns are uniquely placed to take these risks, due to the perception that they are innocent, or can get away with anything. It is their very harmlessness which is their weapon. Clowning in this situation will, then, demand a similar set of things as in others. You will need to prepare yourself in a number of ways. First, through training exercises. Secondly, knowing as much as you can about the situation you are about to put yourself in. Thirdly, through being clear about your strategy, engaging people in play and always maintaining your position as a clown. The principles, then, are the same. Just as you would back off or approach closer a person you encounter as a volunteer on your stage, or in a bed in a ward, so you must gauge the degree of willingness and openness of a heavily armed police officer who is obliged to obey orders. And just as you believe that you can raise a smile from the recalcitrant passer-by or the child in pain, you know that the strangely dressed figure of authority barring your path is also a silly human being just like yourself. Aside from the awareness of the potential political consequences of your clowning, clown activism pays particular attention to working as a group. The nature of the expected situations demands an ability to respond to the moment – as a group. Clown activists have, for this reason, often concentrated on ways a group can playfully improvise their movement in a public space, maintaining coherence and flexibility. In the field of clown training, and in fact actor training in general, there are many exercises designed to do this. They are not especially ‘clown-like’ as such, but many of them are a useful platform from which to launch group clowning. so here are some basic principles, upon which to base exercises which build such skills. All move at the same time. Everyone in the group must begin their movement at the same time and end at the same time. A variation on this is where, if you miss the moment when the others have started to move, then you stay still and wait for the next opportunity. In other words, you wait until everyone is still. Then you can move. The result is that, although perhaps not everyone is in motion at any one time, no one can initiate their movement during the time that others are still moving. It could also mean that not everyone who is moving has to stop at the same time, but all must wait until the last person has stopped, before starting the next move. You can go into more detail on this one, by stipulating that a pause be made in between the end of one move and the beginning of the next. This can be counted in seconds, or in breath cycles (one in-breath, for example, or three out- and in-breaths). Or the pause length can be open to improvisation. Playing with the pause introduces more scope for complicity and fun, as well as more ‘mistakes’.



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The instruction to ‘move’ can confuse, despite its apparent simplicity. What do we mean by ‘move’? In the context of a class on movement improvisation, it could encompass all kinds of movement imaginable. Likewise in a clown class. But will this be the same in the street? It depends what you want to achieve. Decide whether you want your clown army to be in free movement, or whether their movements will be entirely ‘normal’ (walking, jogging, standing). In the latter case, what is interesting and striking, and perhaps clown-like, will be the unity and mutual understanding between all, and not the nature of the movements themselves. One moves at a time. The same structure as before can be adapted, so that when a movement has finished, the next move can only be done by one person, all others having to remain still. If two move together, then one must correct herself. as before, play with the pauses between moves. Formations. Taking their cue from regular army marching formations, clown activists have used ‘marching patterns’ appropriate for their purposes, creating a kind of clown army. These entail having the whole group keep close together, moving in the same direction as a unit. A couple of these formations are the ‘sock’ and ‘fish’. Socking. In this formation, the group is moving in one direction forwards. The people at the front peel off to the sides and join the group again at the back. Like peeling a sock off your foot so that it is inside out. In this way, the group seems to be continually marching forwards, whilst never advancing. Shoal of fish. In this formation, the group is all facing in one direction. Whoever is at the front of the group moves forwards. The person at the front is the one who cannot see their companions without turning their head round. Everyone else is slightly behind their line of vision. When this person chooses, they turn and hence their direction of vision turns too. Everyone else follows suit. This puts a different person at the front of the group, who then leads everyone for a bit, before changing direction of vision again. With some practice, this formation can become fluid and the effect for outsiders is striking. It allows a group to interact with their environment without having to have a single person in charge. Teaching clowning There is another way to ‘apply’ clowning, and that is to teach it. This whole book has been about teaching clowning, but a few afterthoughts come to mind. There are many motivations behind the desire to use clowning in specific settings, with specific people. I couldn’t possibly speculate on all of the ­possible reasons you might want to do it. But it seems to me that there is at least one underlying drive which many would share. And that is making the benefits of clowning accessible to all, and not just to those who are able to attend a paying show. Equal access to clowning also means making clown

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training available to all, not just to those who, due to income, location, ­education, social situation or health, are able to attend a clown workshop. Again, just as each clowning context is different yet the same, so each clown workshop situation is different yet similar. Some exercises will work with some kinds of groups; others will not. But beware of prejudging what might be the best exercises. Until you have worked with a group of people you won’t know what they really want, or what they are capable of. I’ve tried to show how, for example, finding out how to relate as a clown to a group of prisoners will be learned from experience of going into prison and interacting and performing, yet it can be prepared for as well in advance. So too the business of selecting which clown exercises you will use with a group will be made easier through experience but can be prepared for. I recently taught an intensive clown workshop for a group of students on a diploma course training to be professional actors. All participants were classed as having ‘learning difficulties’, though their conditions were varied. The course was conceived with their needs in mind. But what might that mean for a clown teacher? My own approach was to treat the class the same as any other group of adults who had chosen to study performing, and to keep an eye on what looked like it would work well and what wasn’t worth spending too much time on. In fact, this is what I always do in a teaching situation. Perhaps a group of drama school students find it difficult to stop playing ‘characters’, so I press them hard with exercises designed to focus on them as individuals without the mask of a role, such as ‘step-laugh’. Another group, attending only once a week, and with irregular attendance, might gain more from repeating basic exercises, whilst simultaneously working on individual clown numbers, which can be picked up whenever they are in attendance. Or maybe a group on a residential one month course have grown tired of each other and benefit from playing extremely competitive team games, forging new alliances and trust. With the ‘learning difficulties’ professional students, I followed a similar track as I normally do given the time available. That means one exercise from each phase of the early part of training: playing, playing for the audience, the flop, clown dynamics, and so on. I am used to this format and it usually allows me enough flexibility within a simple and familiar structure. In this case all went according to plan through the first two exercises. But when we came to do the ‘prisoners’ game/exercise, I found that something was seriously not ‘working’. I quickly observed with this group that their attention and focus was weaker than I had expected, and that this led to the fabric of the game and its pleasures unravelling. Students failed to wink, to respond to winks, to touch escapees or to move to the right place. I evaluated this as indicating a general lack of skills in awareness of others in space, which as it was widespread, affected the class dynamic. I then judged the exercise to be in



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effect of no use. I asked myself, whilst students continued to play the game, a number of questions. Firstly, did this mean that these students were incapable of learning clowning, due to their lack of awareness skills? Secondly, did this mean that I needed to find a more effective exercise to train them in this awareness? Thirdly, would they be able to continue with the sequence of exercises? A fourth question would arise when we came to those later exercises. But provisionally I was left with a sense that my clown teaching had failed to work here, and that I might not be able to teach students with learning difficulties. Pressing on, with ‘ball clap’, I observed that students took so enthusiastically to this exercise that perhaps my previous pessimism would be overturned. But it was only with the fifth and final exercise, ‘step-laugh’, that I was able to understand something more fundamental about clowning and its teaching. I was concerned that this exercise might not give good results, as I am accustomed to seeing students’ reactions to the exercise as being that of fear and not wishing to do it. It’s a ‘hard’ exercise. So, since they had ‘failed’ at an ‘easy’ exercise ‘prisoners’, I was pessimistic. And here is why it is dangerous to prejudge other people’s abilities, based on your own set of criteria. On this occasion every student threw themselves into the task, competing to be the next volunteer. This took me by surprise. I didn’t really know why this group were almost all so fearless in this game, but that wasn’t the big question. How was it that the students were unable to do exercise 3 but were expert at exercise 5? Is it necessary to be ‘aware’ (the aim of exercise 3) in order to stage failure to make us laugh (the aim of exercise 5)? Does this mean that exercise 3 can be dropped from the clown syllabus? Indeed, is ‘awareness’ itself of any use at all? As I witnessed the students continuing to succeed in this exercise, I became inclined to regard the awareness skills as unnecessary for clowning. Reflecting upon this afterwards, I would say that when an exercise fails to work, I as a teacher have two optional reactions: (1) I can fail the student; (2) I can fail the exercise. My teaching philosophy probably inclines me to the second option. If this is followed through, the consequences become rather interesting. Instead of insisting on an exercise doing its work upon a student, whereby the student will learn or develop an aspect of her/himself, I consider that the student has nothing to learn from that exercise. This also presumes that the supposed learning outcome of the exercise takes a back seat to the student ‘as they are now’. The specific exercise then loses its place within the general aims of the teaching (of clowning, in this case, but it might be applied in any field of knowledge), and the teacher refocuses upon the wider aim (clowning). In the specific context of this course, this consideration took on a more radical aspect. Students were by definition deemed to be lacking certain learning abilities. The question then became, is there any particular condition or disability which would impede that person from learning clowning (or anything else, perhaps)? Is there any defining aspect of clowning which not all human beings have? Again, my own clowning philosophy pushes

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me towards answering ‘no’. For the moment I prefer to work with the ­hypothesis that everyone can clown, until I discover otherwise. Things aren’t so straightforward, though. Right at the end of that workshop, all of the students had done the final exercise and we had a few minutes to draw things to a close. Since one student had previously been enthusiastically telling me about his favourite game (a kind of mirroring game), and wanted to show it, I suggested he do it together with the course leader and assistant, as the class were eager to see their two regular teachers try the exercise and make fools of themselves. Everyone laughed helplessly at this trio combining the mirror game with the step-laugh exercise. It was a satisfying means to round off the session, but it also suggested that the issue I had been questioning was more complex. I now observed at the same time the two forces which had been at play during the session. On the one hand, the student in the game exhibited seeming fearlessness over revealing his foolishness and being laughed at. On the other hand, the two teachers exhibited some of the awareness (of what was going on around them and to them) which had been lacking in exercise 3 (‘prisoners’). I judged that what I was now seeing was richer in terms of clowning than what had gone before. This would seem to come from the combination of the fearless urge to fail and play the fool, together with an apparent openness and awareness of the moment which allows the spectator to reflect upon the goings-on. Two elements of clowning appeared to be working both against each other and in producing something more productive. Given that this was a trio performance, there was no need for any one member of the trio to be able to demonstrate both sides of this clowning at once. It was enough for the skills, if we can call them that, to be split between the three performers. This is reminiscent of the classic duos and trios of clowning. different qualities are exhibited by separate clowns. It would only be necessary, ­presumably, for a single person to possess these qualities, if the act were a solo. There is no reason why this should be a problem. After all, no one is obliged to perform solo, surely? However, the contemporary tendency in clown training has been to assume that the clown is personal, unique, individual, and thus able to stand alone. I think this tendency has less to do with the nut and bolts of actual clowning, and more to do with ideas about individuality in contemporary society. I will leave this discussion for a more detailed exploration of clown theory in a future book, but my feeling is that there can be too much pressure on clown students and performers to produce a complete clown. And finally … If clowning has come to occupy an important place in your life, as it does so for many, try not to pay too much heed to such pressures or indeed to the worries about how to clown, what to clown or where to clown. You



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can clown anytime, anywhere. With a friend, a group or alone. Grab every opportunity, whether it’s a formal gig, a prearranged visit, or an impromptu moment in public or even in private (yes, you can clown at home, at mealtimes, in the shower, in bed!). A lot of this book has been about exploring ‘how’, and this last chapter has been worrying about ‘what next’. But in the end we cannot know what happens next. I don’t know what will become of clowning next, and I certainly have no idea what you the reader will do with clowning or with this book and its contents. I can never tell you how to read it and use it. Despite my, at times polemical (or more sympathetically, ‘passionate’), positions on what makes good or bad clowning, this is not a method in the sense of being a sacrosanct holy book. It is an open ­invitation … … to clown!

Notes Chapter 1 1. From an interview with Philippe Gaulier, ‘Philosophy of Teaching’ (2010), at http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=k-TXju3W-ik. 2. Ron Jenkins, Acrobats of the Soul: Comedy and Virtuosity in Contemporary American Theatre (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), p. 96. 3. Iona and Peter Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 65. 4. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 23–4. 5. Jon Davison (2008), at http://www.jondavison.net/clown-actortraining.html.

Chapter 2 1. Institut del Teatre, Barcelona, June 2005. 2. At http://youtu.be/turPdvtltpE.

Chapter 3 1. Jacques Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, ed. David Bradby (2006), pp. 114–15. Originally published as Le Théâtre Du Geste: Mimes et Acteurs (Paris: Dessain & Tolra, 1987). 2. C.W. Metcalf and Roma Felible, Lighten Up: Survival Skills for People Under Pressure (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992). 3. Jon Davison, Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 201–5. 4. Keith Johnstone, Improvisation for Storytellers (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 120. 5. Jacques Lecoq, The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre (London: Methuen Drama, 2000), p. 154. Originally published as Le Corps poétique: un enseignement de la création théâtrale (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999). 6. Ibid. 7. At several venues in London, including Soirée Pompette and The Hive. A video of the latter is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnnRhMRViSQ&list=UUpcMgxiezNC vTR46FUxh46A.

Chapter 4 1. Davison, Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice (2013). 2. Ruth Zaporah, Action Theatre: The Improvisation of Presence (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995). 3. Nicolai Poliakoff, Coco the Clown: By Himself (London: Dent & Sons, 1941), p. 198.

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Chapter 5 1. Jon Davison, ‘An Encyclopaedia of Clown’ (2009), at http://jondavison.blogspot.co.uk/ 2009/09/encyclopaedia-of-clown.html. 2. Donald McManus, No Kidding! Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), p. 17. 3. James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 10. 4. Paul Bouissac, ‘The Profanation of the Sacred in Circus Clown Performances’, in Richard Schechner and W. Appel (eds), By Means of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 195. 5. Paul Bouissac, Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 171. 6. Rowan Atkinson, Laughing Matters (Tiger Television for the BBC, 1993). 7. Bouissac, ‘Profanation of the Sacred’. 8. Ibid. 9. Joyce Rheuban, Harry Langdon: The Comedian as Metteur-en-Scène (London and Toronto: AUP, 1983), p. 112. 10. Bouissac, ‘Profanation of the Sacred’.

Chapter 7 1. Rheuban, Harry Langdon, p. 46. 2. Tristan Rémy, Entrées Clownesques (Paris: L’Arche, 1962). 3. Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London: Bodley Head, 1964), p. 180. 4. Companyia d’Idiotes, Mamiydaddy, Barcelona, 1996. 5. Premiered at Stratford Circus, London in October 2010. 6. Никулин и Шуйдин – ‘Табурет’ at http://my.mail.ru/mail/baks-Show/video/Nikulin/ 1066.html. 7. For an extensive bibliography, see Davison, Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice (2013). 8. For the English translation, see Tristan Rémy (trans. Bernard Sahlins), Clown Scenes (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997).

Chapter 8 1. Davison, Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice (2013), pp. 303–4. 2. Private conversation with Patch Adams, ‘Planet of Smiles’, Dresden, 2009. 3. The Clown Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA), at http://www.clownarmy.org (­website now unavailable). 4. http://beautifultrouble.org/principle/real-action-targets-reaction/.

Index absence of a person,  111 absence of an object,  111 abstract thought,  13, 19, 99 acting,  2, 3, 5, 20, 46, 54, 78, 79, 101, 123 action done by the wrong person,  113 action done for the wrong person,  113 action goes too far in space,  117 action is done when it shouldn’t be done,  116 action not done when it should have been done,  117 action stops too early in space,  117 action stops too early in time,  117 action stops too late in time,  116 activism,  170–3 Adams, Patch,  167 all move at the same time,  172 altering object use or transforming objects,  105–7 amateur,  167 analyse clowns,  151 Anderson, Frank,  4 anticipate/delay,  30 anti-shopping,  92, 120 applying clowning,  166–8 apprentice model,  5 arm wrestling,  44 attitude,  134, 135 audience eye-contact games,  43 audience is behind you,  165 audience’s perspective,  39 auguste,  72, 122, 151–61 avoiding reproducing clichés,  43 ball tag,  14, 35–8 ball, clap, hit,  64 Barcelona,  3, 4 Barcelona Clown School,  3, 4, 140 Barker, Howard,  9 being laughed at,  37 being wrong in the real world,  108 being wrong in the street,  125–6

bemusement,  19 body is wrong,  118–19 boredom,  51 Bottles, The,  158–60 bounce off your body,  31 breaking the rules of the game,  100 breath,  13, 61, 172 Broken Plates, The,  160 cabaret,  86, 156–8 Caillois, Roger,  24–5 Cakes in the Hat, The,  155–6 case study: performance workshops,  139–40 catch low/high,  28 catch to the side,  28 catch with other body parts,  31–2 Cenoz, Clara,  3, 100 chair game,  100–3 Chaplin, Charlie,  123, 147 chasing,  24, 26 cheating,  18, 22, 101, 104 children’s games,  14, 16, 84 circus,  71–2, 84, 88, 110, 147, 148, 151–4, 166 classroom traps,  58 clothes are wrong,  120 Companyia d’Idiotes,  100, 148 complicity,  77 confusing,  15 conservatoire model,  5 consonants,  15–16 contrast,  119, 134 copying,  62, 151 correct and incorrect use,  103–5 costume is too big/too small,  120 costumes,  119–20 counter-auguste,  160 courses,  3–4, 11, 49, 59, 171 craziness,  42 creativity,  28, 50, 105, 159, 163 cross-dressing,  120–1 180

Index

cruelty,  66 curriculum,  48–9 dancing,  24–5, 135 Dartnell, Guy,  4 dead tag,  22 devising,  3–4, 12–13, 47, 48, 68, 95ff do clowns warm up?  9 do what they want,  81 drama,  151 dramaturgy,  139, 145, 148 duos,  62, 76 dynamics,  48ff eccentric,  161 education,  3, 17 Eisenberg, Avner,  10, 11, 61 emotion is too large,  117 emotion is too small,  117 emotion is wrong,  117–18 Encyclopaedia of Clown,  100, 139 engaging spectators,  164 entrées,  139, 140, 145, 147, 151–61 faire-valoir,  159 fairness,  21, 24, 67, 102 feedback and observation,  35, 133–4, 162–4 flop,  49ff Fool Time Circus School,  4 formations,  173 four chairs,  22, 41–2 Fratellinis,  88 free looking,  44 furniture correctly and incorrectly, using,  140–3 Gaulier, Philippe,  9–10, 20, 25, 52, 53, 62, 66, 100 grandmother’s footsteps,  17–18, 38–40 hats,  87, 92–3, 99, 120 helpers,  29 Hidden Apple, The,  160 hitting,  70–2 hospitals,  4, 167

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imaginary ball,  69–70 impossible playing,  40 inner clown,  74 Johnstone, Keith,  63 jumping, skipping and chasing,  24, 26 justice,  66–8 Kay, Jonathan,  4, 32 laugh stop,  82–3 laughter and the flop,  55 laughter pardons failure,  41 laughter plus action,  55 laughter response,  86 learning difficulties,  174–6 learning without explanations,  17 Lecoq, Jacques,  44, 49, 73–4, 88, 97 limited-word conversations,  12–14 look at someone else,  31 Loyal, Monsieur,  153, 157, 159–60 lying and fooling,  19–20 mask,  88 metaphorical pantomime,  122 mime,  26, 69, 108 mirror laughing,  53–6 misunderstood words,  122–3 Montaigne,  2 Morrison, Sue,  44 music,  23, 25, 43, 84, 132, 136–7 musical chairs,  22–3, 84 name body parts,  64 name tag,  23 narrative,  63, 92, 100, 126, 145, 148–9, 161 Nikulin, Yuri and Shuidin, Mikhail,  149 non-rule play,  24–5 non-clown applications,  81 nose exercises,  89–91 nose history,  87–9 noses,  87–93 not that,  82 object in the wrong place,  109–11 object used wrongly,  112–13

182 Index

objects behave wrongly,  113–15 objects made out of the wrong material,  115 objects used by the wrong person,  111–123 observations on the laughing, failing and falling body,  57 one moves at a time,  173 one-to-one clowning practice,  168–70 Opie, Iona and Peter,  16 originality,  151 other objects,  108–9 out-breath,  61 outside the classroom,  30, 44–5 ownership,  4, 53 person in the wrong place,  110–11 person or object is too big,  118 person or object is too small,  118 personalised skills to generate material,  132–8 playing and performing,  45–6 playing ball,  27–32, 64–70 playing for spectators,  36–7 playing for the audience,  49–53 playing in the round,  36, 147–8 playing to win and playing to play,  36–7 plotting,  161 Pochinko, Richard,  44 politics,  170–1 practising surprise,  128–9 practising wrongness,  125 prisoners,  50–3, 174–6 prisons,  167–8, 174 problem solving,  129–32 prohibitions,  14–15, 22 psychology,  56 punishment,  65–71, 83–4 queenie,  19–22, 40–1 RCSSD,  4, 24 reaction is too big (overreaction),  117 reaction is too small (understatement),  117 Rémy, Tristan,  153 repetition,  62–3 residential courses,  3–4, 11, 32, 59, 174 reversed catching to side and high/low,  29 ringmaster,  63, 72, 113, 153–5 risk,  20–1 rule of three,  127–8, 130–1, 135–6 saving the show,  84

script and performance,  80–1 self-laugh,  61–2 semicircle,  59–63 shoal of fish,  173 six seconds,  83–4 skill level is too high,  121 skill level is too low,  121–2 skills,  132–8 slap hands,  43–4 smiling,  164, 167, 169, 172 socking,  173 statues,  166 status,  145–6 step-laugh,  74–81 step-laugh performance,  84–6 street,  44–5, 88, 126, 164–8 teachers,  2–5, 9–10, 44–5, 59, 87–8, 92, 100, 139, 162, 169, 176 teaching clowning,  173–6 three kinds of laughter: real, fake and acting,  54–5 three on a bench,  89–91 throw high/low,  28 throw to the side,  28 triangle and square,  63 trios, 77, 146, 160, 176 turning,  91–2 Uncle Vanya,  47–8 unfairness,  66, 69, 102 unspoken rules,  20 use other parts of your body,  31 value-judgements,  25–6 vertiginous and non-rule play,  24–5 video,  151 volunteers,  167, 172 walking,  11–12, 27 whiteface clown,  72 William Tell,  152–60 workshops to stage,  160–1 wrong character,  123–4 wrong storytelling,  124–5 wrongness,  99–100 Zaporah, Ruth,  89 zones of a circle,  72