Pierrot & Dilly
Loonisee grew by spontaneous combustion.
What is a clown? Gradually or suddenly, we had become a clown troupe and had a venue. We were creating new shows every month. “In Honour of Clarence Steen” was a monologue Agnes the clown presented at the Gas Station Theatre based on a true story as told to me by Clarence, then 93 years old.
Rainbow Piece
A friend David from a commedia dell’arte class was organizing a fundraising coffee house. His girlfriend Lynn was interested in clowning, so he suggested that Lynn and I do a piece together.
Lynn and I met to try to decide what to do. We both liked the song “Over the Rainbow”. I liked doing bird imitations. Lynn decided to be the clown, Dilly and she made up wonderful little verses to go with the song. One was about a bird eating pancakes, one about a little bluebird, one about an ostrich hiding her head. We felt so silly in rehearsals that we wouldn’t allow anyone in the room.
With clowning I had been taught to play out characteristics about myself that I might not necessarily like.
The show started with Pierrot being too shy to come into the room. Dilly was particularly bossy and had to encourage, bribe or cajole Pierrot into doing anything. With the help of the audience, she convinced Pierrot to come on stage. Then Dilly convinced Pierrot to pretend that she was the Rainbow by holding up a big brightly woven Guatemalan blanket and dance across the room with it. Of course, Pierrot and Dilly became entangled and fell over.
Pierrot was so embarrassed she sat down at a table and refused to get up. Dilly bribed her with pancakes and red licorice. Pierrot was a blue bird and flew into a wall. She was an ostrich and got her head stuck under a chair. She was a sea gull and dove for pancakes. Finally, she was a chicken laying an egg, but she didn’t want to get off her nest. Dilly pleaded and cajoled but Pierrot remained a chicken.
As a last straw Dilly started crying and saying that her toe hurt. Reluctantly, Pierrot stopped being a chicken and came over and kissed Dilly’s nose. They happily ended the piece together.
People loved the show. It was a gem. David, the friend from my class who organized the coffee house was playing music that night with my husband and nephew. They all decided to become part of Loonisee. We were set.
Popcorn Philosophy
In his book , The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia Dell'arte and the Modern Imagination Green writes:
“The characteristics of even Pierrot and Harlequin changed over time, and you can find the one figure so played as to have the other’s (opposite) personality. Not to mention the shifts of names, which means that what we here call Pierrot is sometimes Pedrolino, sometimes Gilles, or Pagliacci, or Petrushka, or other things. Besides, what matters to us is something the commedia shares with other forms of unofficial theatre, as we shall see – with circus, carnival, pantomime and the like. What we are interested in is the spirit of all “illegitimate” theatre (that is, nonliterary theater) of which commedia is only the most striking example.” P 1
It is hard to pin down Pierrot. This time frame is 1890-1930 but beyond that Pierrot has all kinds of changes. It wasn’t until Pierrot came to France that he took his popular form that we can identify today. Green says that the Pierrot is not an archetype but I think it is. I think that Pierrot puts a face to sorrow, an identification with the moon and dreams. When I began to play Pierrot, I found those qualities in myself. Playing the clown became an expression of deep, deep nameless sorrow that I carried within me. When I first became Pierrot and performed, bringing joy to my audience, I would be sick the next day and weeping. Pierrot became an avenue for expressing and then realizing my feelings. I often experienced those feelings as outside myself. They were the clown’s feelings, it took me time to recognise that they were mine as well. I felt that for children it was important – that they could identify with Pierrot on stage and recognise their own feelings without having to name them. There was a child of a performer that used to come to many of my shows. One day she brought Pierrot a rose and I could recognise in her face that deep sorrow. The clown gives a place for sorrow in the world. when that sorrow is so exaggerated, we can laugh, the energy of the sorrow transforms to joy. This was a process that performing as Pierrot led me through.
Peacock Performance - Dand Road
“In Honour of Clarence Steen” was a monologue Agnes the clown presented at the Gas Station Theatre based on a true story as told to me by Clarence, then 93 years old.
What you read in the newspaper is often only a little bit of the truth – just enough to let you think that you know something. But you don’t really, you just think that you do!
And it’s always been the same. I have here a newspaper article from 1925. Well, I bet some of you weren’t even born then! Here it is in black and white. Well, yellow, now. It talks about rum running out by Hartney, Manitoba back then. It talks about a big bust in 1925 when they uncovered a local still. Well, it says in the paper that this still had been bringing in $250 every day for two years. It also says the fellow that ran it was a very hard worker. Now that sounds virtuous, doesn’t it? So, the implication is that you can be virtuous and still run a still. Now that makes sense, doesn’t it, supplying all those poor folks with fine whiskey. Well, you can suppose he had some friends in the community because they fined him $400 for running the still. Now if he was making $250 dollars a day, in the last 5 days he would have made, 5 x 250, which is, let me see, $1250. Well, it is not a surprise that he had $400 cash in his pocket to pay the judge, is it?
When I say he, it is not really correct, although just one fellow took the blame for it, it was a family business into the second generation. You might wonder how I know so much about it. My father-in-law had a farm right across the Dand Road where all this happened. My friend Clarence Steen, who will be celebrating his 94th birthday next winter, kept that newspaper article all these years, and it is here in my purse if any of you want to see it after, and he told me the real story behind all this.
This family brewed some of the best whiskey in South Western Manitoba, and believe me there is lots of stories about boot legging in these parts. Clarence said he had some of the cherry whiskey himself, for a deep congestion, and had trouble walking afterwards. All the neighbours knew about it because there were big black roadsters that would drive up to the farm in the night. This farm had special fences that would lie down flat as a pancake so that cars could drive over them, right up to the barn. Then the fence would swing right back into place. They’d load it up with whiskey and then high tail it for the border. There were several gravel roads that headed straight across the border into the U.S.A. (To be cont’d)
Odds & Ends
I am asking myself – where is clown and story in contemporary circus? What is clown about? Is clown about identity and story? With character comes ethnicity as well as individual choices that create identity and indicate a story of development through time. Is this separate from athletics and circus skills? Why would it be?
I was looking at old circus posters in the Cirque de Soleil building and in the first six posters the clown was front and center. All the areal skills etc. are smaller and at the edges of the poster. One could presume that the clown was at the heart of the circus. In the many posters after that the clown is not at the center, if shown at all. What would that mean about the shift in the circus?
What I have heard from various performers is that as the circus became larger, the role of the clowns became more difficult because there was not much room for improvisation and spontaneity in the corporate picture. The corporation requires a different kind of master performer. Clowns seem to still have a place at the edges of the circus, interacting with the audience at the beginning of the show.
Which brings us back to clowns and character and identity. Slava Snow Show creates a world and the clown exists within that world and has his own story. No language is necessary.
In the circus street performing days, the clown would have been part of the troupe of people creating the shows. They would have had a shared identity and story. The clown would have played a role within that group but as the group became a circus business and the circus became an international entity, why did the clown lose its place of importance?
It was interesting that at the American Youth Circus Organisation (AYCO) conference, there was no representation of clowns. No workshops on clowning. As I talked to people, I heard many stories of people experiencing trauma at the hands of clown trainers. As a result, many people turned their backs on clowning altogether
References
Green, Martin, and John C Swan. The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia Dell'arte and the Modern Imagination. Rev. ed., Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.