Clowning is Tricky Business

It snowed for Christmas inside this year!

Christmas shows come around each year. It’s funny how the disasters can become fond memories. It snowed tissues inside for one show. Performing outside in Winnipeg winter does have its drawbacks. The crowd is a bit thin or I should say, frozen if they stay.

The Christmas Show

A department store, Mister and Robo are shopping at Eaton’s. Pierrot is a wonderful Angel statue in the middle of the department. The Messiah sounds over the loud speaker. The Angel comes alive and begins to move to the music.  

Robo passes boxes of tissues down the aisle and then conducts the audience in time to the Messiah as the audiences waves their Kleenex wings in the air.  

Mister takes offense at the flying insects and starts to spray imaginary DDT at the audience. Robo runs into the audience to encourage them to flap their wings. Mister chases Robo with DDT. The Messiah reaches a crescendo….and finishes. Mister brings Robo back to the store. The Angel is still. The shopping trip is over.

PIerrot as an Angel

Christmas Show #2

We were asked to do a special Christmas show for youth at the University Athletics department. The organizers specified, “No audience participation.” I told the group, but Robo insisted we couldn’t do a show without participation, so we planned the Messiah.

As we handed out the Kleenex, the kids grabbed the boxes, ripped them apart and started throwing all the tissues and the boxes in the air. It looked like it was snowing. We decided to go through the piece as fast as we could but the audience was in chaos. The organizers came backstage and told us to end the show. We could see clouds of Kleenex flying above the partition and hear raucous laughter from the audience.

Improvising at top speed we worked our way to the end of the show. The kids loved it but needless to say, we didn’t get hired again. However, the experience has remained a fond moment of memory, looking up in surprise and wonder as hundreds of Kleenexes rained over the stage.

Buffalo Buck, Rockbert & Humphrey

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Popcorn Philosophy

Mady Shutzman explains that jokers, fools and tricksters are:

“constellated within divinatory systems; they point to that which our intellectual comprehension cannot fathom (the realm of unseen forces) but are “real” all the same, in the way images, dreams, magnetic fields, and inexplicable coincidences are real. They function between the mundane and the sacred, the known and the mysterious, and ultimately confuse the two. It is not a spirituality of apolitical disengagement that is invoked but something quite the opposite—a spiritual dimension of political engagement itself.” (P 142)

Many times, when I was performing a mime story as Pierrot, a child would shout out from the audience to say what I was doing almost before I did it. In one show, a boy with a learning disability came up spontaneously to join Pierrot on the stage. As the teachers came to pull him away, the clown indicated that he could stay. He communicated silently with the clown and performed the rest of the show with me. We both flew away with our imaginary balloons and landed in some unknown place. After the show, the teachers said that he was the most unlikely boy to go up in front of the audience. Later that day, I learned that he was sent home for miming in class.

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Odds & Ends - Loonisee Christmas

Performing in all different places creates a need for quick adaptability and improvisation. As a group we needed to change plans sometimes instantly. Once we were going to mime to some Leonard Cohen for the Poverty Association. Rockbert looked at the crowd and said, “We’re doing the Beatles.” The change was perfect.

Loonisee was invited to do an outdoor Christmas show at the Forks. It was 40 degrees below but James insisted that he could play the guitar. His hands were numb and his strings froze, but he did it. Mister hung decorations on a clothes tree and Pierrot mimed writing a letter to Santa. It was a frozen 15 minutes in front of a few frozen people.

One time, Loonisee was asked to do a Christmas breakfast show for poor people. We had never done an 8am show before and our guitar player simply couldn’t wake his hands up. It was dismal. The high point was when Pierrot, the mime clown, took an imaginary Santa’s sack and gave invisible gifts to everyone. The early morning smiles were amazing. 

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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/

Schutzman, Mady. “JO(KER)ING: Joker runs wild”.  A Boal companion: Dialogues on theatre and cultural politics. Eds. Mady Schutzman and Jan Cohen-Cruz.London: Routledge, 2008. 133-145.