And Then There’s Poop
Clowning takes us into all kinds of situations with humour and play.
The practice of clowning is so diverse it touches on all aspects of humanity. Sometimes we need to laugh a little to get our trials and challenges into perspective. From a troubling disease to rolling down the hospital corridor with a clown.
Perspectives on clowning
Although I never did become a full-time therapeutic clown, I was fascinated by the stories of what these clowns had the strength and vulnerability to accomplish in a medical environment. Now there are stories from around the world of the clown’s social interventions in hospitals and seniors care homes.
This story is based on an interview with Melissa Holland and the boy’s mother. I wrote it for an unpublished paper on the theme of how clowns can fill a need and help illuminate taboo subjects like poop.
“There was a twelve-year-old boy who was admitted to the hospital with Crohn’s disease. Once admitted to the hospital, he became quiet, withdrawn and embarrassed by the procedures that he needed to go through. The clowns came to visit him in his hospital room and one sat down on the commode. When the clown stood up, it looked like there was poop on the lid of the chair. Everyone was surprised, the clown was embarrassed. The laughter that followed was a big release because poop was causing some serious problems. The nurse was astonished when patient and clown ran down the hall with the commode sporting a pile of plastic poop. After playing with the clowns, when the patient was bored, he decided to make a power point about his disease called “My Crohn’s and Me.” A nurse noticed it and asked him to talk to the meeting of nurses the next morning. One of the nurses asked him to come and talk to the university class when he was well enough. His family went with him and their openness about the disease contributed to their emotional health. One day they visited a walkthrough colon set up at the Mall. The twelve-year-old advised middle aged men what to expect from a colonoscopy.”
Clowning for Connection
Melissa Holland (Dr Fifi Se Pense Bien)
Melissa has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts with a specialization in drama in education from Concordia University, and a degree in education from McGill University. She has taught theatre and English to children, teenagers, and adults in Montreal, Madrid, Edinburgh, and Chibougamau, Québec. In Scotland, she trained and worked as a clown doctor for the charitable organization Hearts & Minds. She also carried out a two-month pilot project in Windsor, Ontario, which led to the establishment of a program called Fools for Health. Melissa is also co-founder and artistic director of Dr Clown which has now expanded to include other programs.
From personal interview with Melissa Holland, November 2012.
“It’s something that we were aware of when we set up the company of Dr Clown, in Montreal, that we would be dealing with three different cultures: business, healthcare and the arts world. The business culture includes raising money, corporate funding, and foundations, which are all different within themselves—but we put that into the business element. You’re also working within a hospital setting, so the whole healthcare structure and the world of [the] culture of hospitals and senior residences. And there’s the artistic world—the world of the artist, the clown. All of these cultures all work very differently.
How are we going to get them to all gel together? It goes back to being open—to be able to listen to the concerns and needs of each group. The clown in the hospital is a creature of adaptation. You have to adapt at every moment to different people, to different rooms, to different moods that are going to happen.
You’re constantly in a state of flux in terms of adapting. The clowns are very special artists, because they can bring their clown character into a hospital setting, which has so many restrictions in terms of space, in terms of noise, in terms of confidentiality, in terms of hygiene. And they’re willing to play within that framework, and it almost delights them, because they say, “How can we be creative within this, and what’s going to come out of this when we’re gowned up and the only thing that’s showing is our nose? How do we elicit a visit that is going to bring something out?”
There was a boy that I knew in the first year that I was working here in Montreal, and we got to know the family when the little boy was about four years old. He had a really rare blood disease, and we couldn’t go into the room because he had a suppressed immune system. So, we had to just interact with him through the window. At first, he was a little unsure. “Who are these clowns? I don’t know who these guys are?” He ended up understanding that we would do whatever he wanted. He had these two cars; he liked Volkswagen Beetles. He had a red one and a blue one, and each of them represented one of the clowns. He would make us run races and go in all kinds of crazy directions. We would have to follow him and turn and stumble and of course he liked us to crash into each other—that was the height of the game. He would make scary faces and we would go “Augh!!!” and run away. We would sing Shania Twain songs, because he liked Shania Twain. We got to know him quite well over eight months or so.
A few months later he ended up dying. I remember going to the funeral as myself, and seeing the family. I was a mess. I was in tears. The parents comforted me and said, “Thank you for all the joy that you brought to our son and to us.” I think it was at that moment as a young therapeutic clown that I realized, “Okay. What we’re doing here is more than playing ten minutes in the day.” To people who are living with such a huge amount of suffering, to have any moment of lightness and to see your child smiling and playing means the world, gives so much hope, and our child is still a child and still wants to play. That was a big moment for me.
A couple years later, the couple ended up having two other children who were healthy, and they started a foundation for alternative therapies or complementary therapies within the hospital, because for them that was the thing that helped them—whether it was music therapy, or the clowns, or art therapy—and that was the thing that gave them life and helped them keep going.”
References:
Proctor, Sue. The Archetypal Role of the Clown as a Catalyst for Individual and Societal Transformation. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/977096/