New Travels
I couldn’t believe I was going to perform at the International Storytelling Festival in the Yukon by myself!
In this issue: Me performing in the Yukon! Playing a clown can be joyous or terrifying. When I write and create a show, the audience reaction will tell me what works. When the audience doesn’t react or reacts negatively, I feel myself slipping … Clowning touches on all kinds of traditions. The Trickster of Indigenous traditions emerges as a form in many stories and myths. Stories can surprise us – like at Mrs. Lipton’s - we think that we know what goes on in other people’s lives.
Pierrot in the Yukon
People are always surprising me. I met a storyteller from the Yukon at a Winnipeg International Children’s Festival party. She invited me to the festival in Whitehorse because I was a mime and she thought stories without words are important.
In the Yukon as the clown Pierrot, I found myself to be very alone and shy without the confidence to approach people. I decided that even though I had flown all that way, I was going to hide and get away from everyone.
Just as I approached the edge of the field, a ten-year-old girl came up to me. The girl asked me my name and I signed it to her. She said, “Come with me.” She took Pierrot’s hand and led me back onto the field.
She led Pierrot from booth to booth and introduced her to people. She said, “This is Pierrot. She’s shy.” It was just what I needed to be able to interact with people. Pierrot could play out my shyness and people found it delightful. After lots of play with the girl and the people of Whitehorse, the girl led me to the edge of the field and said, “Tomorrow I’ll be like you.” And she let go of my hand.
The next day, there she was, dressed in black and white, face painted like a Dalmatian puppy. She took my hand and said, “Today I’m a mime like you.” We went happily through the field, two mime clowns, meeting and greeting.
It turns out that her mom was a performer at the festival, so the girl knew all about performing. Each year that I came back to the festival, our friendship grew. I sent her some black and white striped tights and she started performing as a mime for her friends’ birthday parties. Now she’s a mom and has kids of her own.
Getting out of clown can be hazardous. One day after we finished, I ran to the tent to get changed so that I could go and see the other performances. I took a vial out of my make-up bag to put oil on my face to remove my make-up. I rubbed it all over my face before I noticed that it had an odd smell. Looking carefully, I realized that it was spirit gum, or nose glue. My eyelashes were stuck together.
I was half out of my costume, my eyelids were stuck together and I was still covered in clown white. I stumbled into the kitchen tent to try to find some salad oil. There was nothing. It was just a tent stuck in the middle of a field by the river. I was desperate. I was a sticky half-dressed clown and I was missing the show. The volunteers looked at me in shock with wide eyes. I found some pats of butter on the table. Aha. I grabbed clumps of butter and rubbed them on my face. Everyone in the tent began laughing hysterically. It worked. The glue and make-up were mostly off my face. I finished changing, grabbed an apple juice, stuck it in my back pocket and ran for the performance tent. I found a good seat close to the front and plopped myself down. Juice spurted everywhere.
Popcorn Philosophy
From my notes on “Under the Nose: Memoirs of a Clown, July 31, 2011.
The struggle between the joy and the abyss leaves me heaving emotionally. The shift between the identities opens cracks where overwhelming feelings that were pushed down years ago roar up and push me under—under consciousness of identity, under the consciousness of self-value —into the liminal space without a place in the world. The connection to the world is a thread that is both spiritual and physical. It is spiritual in the inspiration and physicalness of my body, in the cloth of the costume, in the tiredness of my aging body.
It feels impossible to repeat things, because no moment is the same. The clowns seem to come and go as they will—I can make space for them, I can invite them. I give up my identity and enter that zero space and wait for the magic. If it doesn’t come, I am lost. I feel like I am nothing and I scramble along with what I can remember of the script until something clicks. As soon as I feel blamed or that the audience doesn’t like what I’m doing, I slide into the cracks. I lose my confidence to trust, to go with, to fly. My vision becomes foggy, smoky, I want to cough, I am choking. And I keep going, watching for a thread to hang on to…
Peacock Performance: Remembering Mrs. Lipton’s
One time a regular customer came in with a story to tell. It is odd to see someone every day, but to only see them when they are drinking coffee, or having a sandwich. They talk about other things in their lives but it is hard to imagine them having lives outside of the restaurant.
One day a regular customer that everyone called ‘Fish’ came in, sat at the counter and ordered coffee like every other day. He says that he has had a narrow escape and he is shaking his head. Apparently, he had gone to sleep with the candle burning. He woke up and his second-floor apartment was on fire. He couldn’t get to the entrance so he ran into the bathroom and slammed the door to keep the fire out. He smashed the bathroom window and jumped out. He was naked. He landed exactly in the space between two fences. He wasn’t hurt. It was amazing. He didn’t look any different when he was drinking his coffee than any other day – except that he kept shaking his head.
The ambulance drivers that worked in the Hall across the street came in for coffee and lunch. One fellow always sat at the lunch counter and told the staff stories as they worked. He had a great sense of humour and would get everyone laughing. He was away for a while and when he came in, he looked quite shaken. He had had a heart attack. “I can’t understand it,” he said. “I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I’m under forty.”
The strange thing was, that when a staff stopped working at the restaurant, they didn’t see many of the people again. One day they were part of a community, and the next day all the relationships were gone.
One older fellow would walk slowly up Aubrey Street every day to go to Mrs. Lipton’s to get his cup of coffee. He did that for years. One day he stopped..
Odds & Ends - My Take on Clowning
When I was teaching clowning at the university, we worked with the transformation of objects. The precept being that a trickster or clown is transformative. The clown turns the world – or our perception of it - upside-down. This can be demonstrated by transforming the use of objects. For example, a plunger becomes a microphone, an umbrella an oar, or a bowl a helmet. In the class we were joined by students who were learning performance tricks with hula-hoops, so we incorporated hoops into the play.
When I read “Trickster swims in Ocean inquiring where shore is” (Radin p.11), I was reminded of a performance piece that emerged spontaneously from students holding hula-hoops above their heads as hats asking, “Excuse me, have you seen my brother?” and another student would answer “I think he passed that way,” as they walked around in circles. We all found this repetition satisfying. In the trickster story, trickster asks the fish the same question again and again, although all he has to do is look up and see the shore. Radin writes:
‘My younger brother, you have always had the reputation
of being very clever, would you not tell me where the shore is?’
‘I do not know, brother, for I have never seen the shore,’
answered the fish. (11)
This repetition gives the idea of foolishness at the same time as persistence and leaves trickster with plenty of time to make mistakes before he gets things right. It also makes storytelling fun because the audience can see what is coming before the trickster can. The introduction and naming of all kinds of fish brings the listener into the present moment and incites a sense of wonder at the universe.
The performance piece that we developed about water included individuals as clown fish involved in transformation and play. The piece was thoroughly enjoyed by the university audience. A hula-hoop was a portal, a ship, a tea cup and even a birth canal. The performance echoed the simplicity and ridiculousness of these trickster stories.
References
Proctor, Sue. Unpublished Paper, 2011.
Proctor, Sue. The Archetypal Role of the Clown as a Catalyst for Individual and Societal Transformation. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/977096/
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, New York: Bell Publishing, 1956.