Clowning in Unlikely Places
Back in the 80’s and 90’s I would get hired as a clown by an agency and not know what kind of situation might be waiting for me.
Through playing a mime clown character I discovered a unique sense of myself and the world around me. By participating in my environment with silence and humour, I enjoyed the bizarre differences and paradoxes of being human. I felt that clowning and mime transported me and my audience to another world. In Mrs. Lipton’s Restaurant customers that came every day formed a sense of community. As a waitress and cook at the lunch counter, I enjoyed a similar position of reflecting on fragments of people’s lives.
Pierrot at The Bank
I was asked to entertain people as Pierrot while they stood in line at the bank teller on the Friday before Dominion Day. Apparently, the year before the bank had been swarming with impatient people, so the bank hired Pierrot to keep them happy.
Unfortunately, the bank hadn’t realized that the introduction of bank machines that year had made a big difference. The bank was not very busy at all. However, Pierrot had been hired for two hours and I needed the money for the weekend at the lake. Not only were there not many people there, but the people that were there did not want to be entertained by a mime clown while they waited in line at the bank.
Pierrot had a difficult task. Children do not usually do banking, or even accompany adults into the bank. As Pierrot approached people and attempted to engage with them, they would turn their backs and look the other way. It is impossible to mime to a person’s back so Pierrot would scoot around to the other side and they would turn around again. At one point Pierrot was miming fishing and going in a boat but it was not getting a good reaction.
Pierrot became a mime leaning on an imaginary shelf at the back of the room, but I could only do that for so long. There was a little storage room with a clock on the wall that I was allowed to go in to rest. As I felt the panic rise, I would run into the little room and look at the clock. Time had stopped. Two hours was the length of three days.
I decided that to keep busy, I would greet people as they came in. That way they would have to acknowledge me before they turned around and ignored me. Pierrot opened the door, curtsied, and waved them into the bank. Everyone likes to have a mime greet them at the door of the bank except for …… the police. Yes, one of the tellers accidentally pushed the emergency button and the police came rushing to the door. Pierrot was ready. She opened the door and curtsied. The Police looked menacingly at Pierrot and very confused for a moment, but then realized that she was not the prime suspect. In fact, there was no suspect at all. Pierrot hid in her little room. It was almost time. She would be free.
As Pierrot lined up at the teller to receive her payment in cash, the teller looked up and said in a clearly not amused tone, “That was easy money!”
Pierrot at Rainbow Stage
I got a call from a company that wanted a clown for a work party at Rainbow Stage. Rainbow Stage is a huge outdoor stage in the middle of Kildonan Park where they put on a few musicals every summer. It has a dome that protects it in the rain and a huge lobby area. At first, I thought the gig was for a small non-profit company and asked how much they could afford to pay. Later I realized that it was an international bank and I could have named my price. At any rate, there I was transformed into Pierrot at Rainbow stage with hundreds of people in fancy dress milling around.
Now, the organizers explained to me that all of the bank managers were dressed as clowns, so the people would be trying to guess who was who. Pierrot was thrown into the mix as a wild card. I roamed around and around the building greeting guests and having non-verbal interactions with them in the hope of making them laugh. It was all adults. They had fun guessing which bank manager I might be. The evening wore on as I roved in circles.
First, I entertained the long line-up at the bar, then the long line-up for dinner. Next the line-up moved to the dessert table, then to the washrooms, then to the bar again. The clown was in the line-up to the washroom, entertaining all the way.
Finally, people realized that I wasn’t really a bank manager, I was only a clown. As they became inebriated, they started to become abusive, which they thought was really funny. After a woman threw her drink at me, I knew it was time to leave.
I felt like I had witnessed the cycle of humanity. For all our fancy dress and sense of grandeur and status, we cycle with the needs and desires of our bodies every day. Standing over the clown, being higher than the low, can give us a sense of control over our own human folly.
Popcorn Philosophy – Finding Wholeness in Clowning
The role of the clown reflects the need to deal with disorder within the order, to find joy in the face of loss and sorrow, to pull the truth from a nest of lies, to be able to learn from and laugh at our human foolishness, and to “tolerate a margin of mess” (Babcock-Abrahams 1975). The human reality of being caught between the poles of birth and death creates a need to learn with humour from the shadow side; even the darkest, messiest, sickest and banished parts of human existence can be funny. Through the laughter we can find a context for healing, for wholeness. The context of the laughter holds meaning and intention; the laughter itself could be either creative or destructive. That is why the context of “sacred” in Indigenous societies or the “art form” in Europe, is so important for clowning – because it demonstrates partialness within the sense of a whole, so that we are not overcome by entering the darkness, we know that there is light and harmony that clarifies within the darkness.
Our bodies are the bridge between the finite and the infinite. When our emotions, our pain, our grief can flow through us like water, we can move, we can sing, we can breathe fully. As Peggy Phelan writes in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance:
Like a rackety bridge under too much weight, performance keeps one anchor on the side of the corporeal (the body Real) and one on the side of the psychic Real. Performance boldly and precariously declares that Being is performed (and made temporarily visible) in that suspended in-between. (167)
For me, the clown represents those broken places where the energy gets stuck, those places where we try to fly, but fall on our faces instead. What can we do but laugh, get up, and try again?
Wolseley Tales: Remembering Mrs. Lipton’s
The usual clientele at Mrs. Lipton’s restaurant was casual. The musicians who were taxi drivers came in every day. It was a time when long hair for men marked a certain kind of person. There were lots of long hairs, artists, theatre people, and carpenters. The ambulance drivers made good contrast, as did the business people at lunch. Not to mention the House of Ill-repute down the street.
One day Karen, the owner, was serving two men in suits up in the booths. She tripped and managed to spill a whole cup of coffee on the man’s lap. She apologized profusely. The man looked down and said, “It’s okay. I wasn’t going to use it today anyway.”
It is amazing how a lunch counter creates community. It was like a theatre. Being behind the counter was like being on a stage. People lined up on the stools and watched you cook. Often there was a lot of interaction between the three or four servers behind the counter and the customers at the counter. The servers all did a little bit of everything, serving, cooking, washing dishes and baking. Sometimes the regular customers would come behind the counter and wash dishes during the rush. People felt welcome.
Most customers were regulars – that is, they came in a few times a week, some every day. Often, they ate the same thing. When there were two orders up together, the staff would know a certain couple was having lunch. One day, one half of the order changed. In surprise the waitress looked up at the booth – “It’s his wife,” the other cook informed her.
Miss E came in every day. She lived in a large house by herself that she had grown up in and then lived in as an adult with her mother. She said to the cook behind the counter, “I don’t need to go on a holiday. I turn on the radio and pick up the Tribune and that is my holiday.” One Sunday evening she was sitting at the counter eating the Scotch stew and she said, “My mother would roll over in her grave if she saw me eating stew on a Sunday.”
She would meet regularly at a table with Mrs. B and another Wolseley couple to discuss the goings on in Wolseley. Once they wrote a letter to a neighbour’s boss about him using the company car for recreational purposes. Of course, they didn’t know that it was part of his contract.
When Mrs. E died you could be sure the house would be haunted. In fact, the next owners did call in a priest to exorcise the house because of strange noises and footsteps upstairs.
Odds & Ends - My Take on Clowning
I think of performing in terms of energy. In my body, there is a surge of energy like a magnetic force that pulls energy from the audience and channels it through my body, which articulates the energy back through the art form. It is a love relationship with the audience, a receiving, a giving, and a receiving again. Together in the space, audience and performer are actualizing themselves through the role of the clown.
The clown has a direct connection with the audience because there is no fourth wall, so wherever she is on stage, she’s moving with the audience. For me as the clown, some moments have felt eternal, as if the energy of performer and audience had entered the forest of dreams and struggles where renewal and hope persist.
References
Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara. "A Tolerated Margin of Mess": The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered”. Journal of the Folklore Institute 11.3, 1975. 147-186. Print.
Phelan, P. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Proctor, Sue. The Archetypal Role of the Clown as a Catalyst for Individual and Societal Transformation. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/977096/
Old Photos
Author as Pierrot with puppet by Rubina Sinha in Cradle, 1997. Photograph by Sasha Kucas.