Clowns a la Carte
Liminality, Marginality and the Flop. What?
As I learned more about clowning, I realized that Loonisee and Pierrot were following traditions like water follows a river bed. We were discovering and uncovering as we created shows. We were following our noses.
Clowns A la Carte
Loonisee had a regular following for their shows at the West End Cultural Centre. The children in the audience wanted to climb on the stage to get close to the clowns. We had to get volunteers to guard the stairs to the stage. Because Loonisee invited the audience onto the stage at least once in every show, when the audience was not allowed on the stage it was hard to keep the boundary clear. In some ways our shows were more like events than performances. There was great excitement in the audience.
Pierrot cooked up mime food for the other clowns and one by one they said “Yuck.” Poor Pierrot. She was so upset that she took her imaginary plate of food – without tasting it – and dumped it into the imaginary garbage by raising the lid with the foot pedal. I heard someone whisper in the audience, “She’s throwing out her food.” Then Loonisee went into the song “Yuck.” We ended with several of the clowns and children from the audience dancing in a row under a huge, long, orange and black cover as a garbage monster.
In one scene, Mister would sit down to eat a whole chicken dinner with condiments including olives while Robo, who was obviously hungry, sat beside him with nothing. After much deliberation, Mister offered Robo the pit from his olive.
For each performance we used a roasted farm chicken and we would stew it for supper later. When a girl came to our show for the second time, she saw a drumstick fall off the platter. Her little sister picked it up and the girl said, “Don’t eat that, it’s stale!”
When we did the same piece at the Manitoba Council for International Cooperation, the jar of olives accidentally spilled all over the floor, which was our stage. The children in the audience ran onto the stage area and stuffed the olives into their mouths and then exclaimed as they spit them out. They had thought they were chocolates!
Popcorn Philosophy
Lequoc says in “The Moving Body”:
The clown is the person who flops, who messes up his turn, and, by so doing, gives his audience a sense of superiority. Through his failure he reveals his profoundly human nature, which moves us and makes us laugh. But he cannot flop with just anything, he has to mess up something that he knows how to do, …Ask a clown to do a summersault: he fails. Give him a kick in the backside and he does it without realizing. In both cases he makes us laugh. P 146
The clown is unable and able at the same time. He embodies paradox. Lequoc says:
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…. This discovery of how personal weakness can be transformed into dramatic strength was the key to my elaboration of a personal approach to clowning. P 145
How can this clown/trickster be so different but the same? I think that in our present culture the focus is very much on the individual as an entity by itself, whether it be clown or patient, we are concerned with the individual’s psychology and health whereas in the aboriginal cultures focus has been more on the communal self and community health.
Erdoes and Ortiz, quoted John Fire Lame Deer (Sioux holy man) as he described the trickster, “Coyote, Iktomi, and all their kind are sacred. A people that have so much to weep about as we Indians also need their laughter to survive” (xxii).
Odds & Ends
Maude from the December ’05 Therapeutic Clown Program Report, St. Boniface General Hospital, Winnipeg:
Constantly busy today—lots of delightful kids. One little girl was delighted with my rubber chicken but couldn’t quite pronounce it. Am getting all sorts of wonderful comments from people passing by like, “You made my day,” “It always makes me laugh to see you,” “Keep up the good work!” My clown Maude met the staff in “Admitting” today with the chicken in a sock on my hat. The part-time receptionist at the Ped’s clinic asked me to visit her there. The staff were making remarks about my chicken and laughing and laughing. I was introduced to the boss. It is hard for them to imagine being a clown!
One boy was waiting in the hallway of Emergency with his mom. First he kind of hung in the doorway of the Pediatric Clinic and watched; then he gradually inched his way into the waiting area of the Clinic to see Maude. Then he would run back to his mom and come back again. In a little while, we were buddies, and had a great time in the play area. The chicken was driving the fire truck, but he was a terrible driver and he kept crashing. Poor chicken.
Kids that are used to the clown come and sit down beside me right away, and we would start to play. Playing is very serious for the kids—it is like their work.
Silly Scripts, Stories and Scenarios: Blackberry and Redcurrant
References
Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz. American Indian Trickster Tales. New York: Penguin Publishers, 1998.
Lecoq, Jacques. The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre. Canada: Routledge, 2001.
Proctor, Sue. The Archetypal Role of the Clown as a Catalyst for Individual and Societal Transformation. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/977096/