Going Deeper
Clowning is like a forest – it’s trees and so much else that you can’t see from a distance.
The deeper that I wade into clowning, the more I learn. Our shows try to work on levels that both adults and children will be able to relate to and enjoy.
Firerose
Loonisee’s performances were based on our clown characters and we put them together in an improvised scenario or action line, inspired by the Italian commedia dell’arté. Mister was a grouchy old geezer, Dilly and Humphrey were playful, Rockbert loved to sing, Buffalo Buck played the banjo, and in this show, he also played the Superintendent. Robo was like a two-year old – always enthusiastic and always in trouble.
We adapted a story called ‘Firerose’ by Susan Jesche about a girl who is born with a dragon’s tail. The gist of the story is that she needs to learn to love the tail before she can give it up.
At the beginning of the show, Robo’s alarm goes off from somewhere in the audience, then Robo bumbles her way half asleep through the audience on the way to school. The audience was in stitches. Pierrot comes back to school in the fall and she’s grown a tail. Mister is the teacher. The other clowns try to help Pierrot hide the tail, but eventually she gets found out. Mister is just about to expel her when the Superintendent comes in. He is a dragon that was born without a tail. The Superintendent insists that she is an unusually gifted student and Mister changes his tact. At recess the other clown students manage to pull Pierrot’s tail off and they give it to the Superintendent.
The shows unleashed an amazing energy. At one point in each show we would invite the audience onstage. The kids, sometimes with their parents would come up the stairs on one side of the stage, participate in an event and then go down the other side. The event would be something like shooting an imaginary puck into an imaginary net with an imaginary hockey stick or skipping with an imaginary rope. The families loved to participate. It made our shows into an event.
Popcorn Philosophy
When one is in touch with the complexities, it is impossible to be certain. If we fail to recognize that we might be wrong, we can only undermine any action done in the world.
The artist's job is to stay alive and awake in the space between convictions and certainties. The truth in art exists in the tension between contrasting realities. You try to find shapes that embody current ambiguities and uncertainties. While resisting certainty, you try to be as lucid and exact as possible from the state of imbalance and uncertainty. You act from a direct experience of the environment.” Anne Bogart P 3
Over the year, I have been thinking about different elements and effects of clowning:
Certainty - the clown disrupts the idea of certainty to entertain a new way of looking at things.
Communication - Often people do not have the language to communicate traumatic events. Sometimes we can do it through art, or performance but language can leave us, due to brain trauma, an accident, medical disruption and fear. Clowning can stimulate people and get them moving again - reduce shock and re-establish rapport.
Pierrot speaks with silence. She is able to give voice to taboo happenings by NOT speaking about them.
Aphasic individuals, given the options of expressing themselves in other ways, can learn to communicate and possibly even learn to speak again.
People can use the arts to communicate an experience or event through story.
Peacock Performance - Dand Road (Cont’d)
Now in case you didn’t know, this was during a time called Prohibition in the United States. That meant that there wasn’t to be any drinking or selling of alcohol in the whole country. Legally that is. There were lots of gangsters like Al Capone making a living off of selling illegal snootch. That’s what they called whiskey in those days.
Canada, was of course, just a little more backward so alcohol was still legal here. Enterprising Canadians figured out ways to help the U.S. citizens have a drink.
Well, this family on the Dand Road was pretty smart. They had a big kitchen with huge vats where they made their whiskey. Of course, making your own wasn’t legal in Canada, so they had to hide the whole operation because the RCMP was always nosing around. So where do you think they hid it? Under the barn. How did they get to it? Well think about the meanest animal in the barn, the one that you would never want to tangle with, even if you were an RCMP officer. That’s right. The BULL! So that is where they put the entrance to the operation. Under the bull’s pen. They carefully led the bull out of his stall and tied him somewhere else in the barn. Then they cleared away the straw and manure from the floor of his pen. They undid the latch and lifted up the floor of the stall – which was on hinges – and went down to cook the mash and make the whiskey.
This operation was going along just fine until the family got into a squabble with their neighbours. I’m not even sure what the disagreement was about, but the neighbour was mad. The RCMP had been snooping around, looking for a still, but they had never found anything. This just goes to show that it is always a good idea to get along with your neighbours!! And you won’t find this in the newspaper article! This is straight from the horse’s mouth!
One night the neighbour stayed up really late and hid in the bush at the edge of his property. He could see the lights on in the barn. Then he saw the family go into the kitchen of the farm house. So, he climbed over the barbed wire fence and he snuck into the barn. There was the bull tied to a post and the floor of his pen hitched to the ceiling and light coming from under the floor. He carefully went into the stall and down some rickety stairs into a brightly lit kitchen. There he saw it all. The huge vats for cooking the mash, the pipes for bring in the water, the stoves for heating it all up. Quick as a wink, he was up the stairs and back to his own property. He didn’t waste any time in letting the RCMP know where everything was hidden.
It must have been the next night that the RCMP came out because it says in the newspaper article that they spent the night in Brandon and then came out early in the morning. I don’t really know what happened then because Clarence wasn’t there. Well, the youngest son said he was guilty, so he’s the one that went to court and paid his $400. My guess is that he said he’d never do it again. Maybe they turned the kitchen into a factory for strawberry jam. Now that would be something useful.
Today if you drive down the Dand Road, all you will see is the big prairie farms and fields. You would never guess the intrigue and mystery whispered by the winds!
Odds & Ends - The Loudest Noise, the Quietest Sound
The loudest noise that I ever heard was a car engine coming straight for us in the tent. Loonisee had been clowning in a parade in Fort Frances in Ontario and we were camping for the night before heading home. We were lying in the dark in a tent in the middle of a field of tents. The fireworks on the lake were finished and the party had moved to the campground. How drunk were those drivers? The party continued with drinking and yelling. Now they were getting into their cars and driving around the field. The tent would light up. I would contract and shiver in my sleeping bag and the sound would curve away only to come back again. Finally, some brave soul made it to the camp office and complained. The party was over. The night was silent.
The quietest sound that I ever heard was the popping of bubbles. I was playing Maude the clown with a little guy in the waiting room of the St. Boniface Hospital. We were blowing bubbles from a yellow pop-up bear. Each time we blew the bubbles we would listen carefully to hear them pop. Whether we could actually hear them I’m not sure, but I know that the clown and boy found magic in the moment of listening.
References
Bogart, Anne. and then you act: making art in an unpredictable world. New York: Routledge 2007.