The Mime Clown Tells a Story
Pierrot discovers the use of silence, masks and puppets to tell a difficult story.
Constructing original theatre is full of exploration and discovery. Following my intuition, I dip into this river of images and hope that I can find a solid expression of feelings, ideas and visuals that communicate to the audience. It is imperative to speak with a common language. Sometimes silence and music work best.
Cradle
In 1997 I developed a show called Cradle. It involved Pierrot the mime clown telling a story about a mother who abuses her child. Pierrot connects with the audience as the silent narrator and then uses masks to create different characters. I worked with Rubina Sinha, an East Indian dancer, storyteller and puppeteer who played with a child sized puppet in response to Pierrot’s characters and we performed the show at the Gas Station Theatre. The puppet and the clown gave distance to the story which enabled it to be told. No words were used. I wrote the scenario like a parable:
Natasha was a little girl with dark hair and a strong spirit who lived with her mother by the side of a wide, clear river.
One day while they were washing their clothes in the river, the mother began to act strangely. She became very still. Her face became like a mask. Out of the darkness a demon danced. The demon danced like a whirlwind. The demon persuaded the mother to push the child into the water and hold her there. With a face like stone the mother pushed the child into the water. She held the child there until she was still. The mother turned and walked into the darkness of the forest.
A river spirit found Natasha's limp body and raised her to the surface. She cradled the child in her arms and helped her to breathe. She helped Natasha to climb on the bank and watched as the child ran into the forest to find her mother.
One day Natasha and her mother were working in their small garden near the banks of the river. They were digging deep into the dark earth to prepare for planting potatoes. The mother began to act strangely. She became very still. Her face became like a mask. Out of the darkness a demon danced like a whirlwind. The demon persuaded the mother to bury the child in the earth. With a face like stone, the mother pushed the child into the earth and covered her until she was unable to move. The mother turned and walked away into the darkness of the forest.
The river spirit found Natasha's limp body and carried her back to the water. She cradled the child in her arms, cleaned her and revived her. She did not want the child to return to her mother, but she watched as Natasha climbed onto the bank and ran into the forest.
One day Natasha and her mother were building a cooking fire near the river. Her mother was adding sticks to the fire when she began to act strangely. She became very still. Her face became like a mask. Out of the darkness a demon danced. The demon persuaded Natasha's mother to burn her child in the fire. With a face like stone, Natasha's mother pushed her child into the fire, then turned and walked away into the darkness of the forest.
The water spirit pulled Natasha from the fire. She soothed her wounds in the river. She revived her. Natasha wanted to run to find her mother but the water spirit would not let her go. She kept Natasha in the water and they played.
One day soon Natasha's mother came to the river and found the child. She wanted to take her home into the forest. The water spirit held tightly to Natasha.
The mother began to act strangely. She became very still. Her face became like a mask. Out of the darkness a demon danced. The demon danced like a whirlwind.
The water spirit danced against the demon. Their powers swelled in a fury. Finally, they found a balance of forces, a communication, a calmness between them.
The mother stood transformed. Her roots grew into stone. Her arms became branches. Her eyes turned towards the sun.
Natasha grew into a wise young woman on the banks of the river. The water spirit watched over her. The tree sheltered her, nourished her and protected her.
Popcorn Philosophy
In the process of creation, I struggle between the idea and the manifestation of what I envision. Ideas and images are so clear to me. I feel an urgent desire to embody the ideas and make them actual. Even before I begin, I lament because I know that the outcome of the project will be different from the idea behind it. Yet it is the persistence of this vision that enables the project to be born. Bogart writes: “The translation of page to stage is the translation of the logic of ideas and words into the logic of time and space.” and then, you act. Bogart 2007, p 12
Between each part of the story, I would come back to the audience as Pierrot and mime, “Did you see that? Would you believe that?” The mother would begin a task in mime, like digging in the garden and the puppet child would join her. Before long the mother would become still and transform into the demon. When Pierrot became the water spirit, she put on the headdress with many aqua coloured scarves flowing from it. During the fight scene, she would dance part as the water spirit and then switch to the masked demon. The demon’s mask was cut from a plastic seven-up bottle with black feathers glued to it and a peacock feather in the middle. We used lights and music to denote the characters but otherwise we performed on an empty stage. The piece was evocative and ended with the child swinging under the tree who was her mother who was Pierrot to the song of “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child.”
The clown, silence, dance, stillness, music and puppetry combined to tell the story. In the Yukon at the storytelling festival, I performed the piece by myself and had to perform the child too because there was no puppeteer. The audience understood and responded well. When I was looking through a large pictorial book of healing practices around the world, I found a figure with a headdress of a shaman dancing as a healing water spirit. It looked like my character. Bogart writes: “The job of the poet… is to remember where the waterholes are…when people forget where the water is, the poet can lead them to it.” and then you act. P 1.
What did I learn from this? What can we draw from this? Did clowning help to deal with difficult issues? Once a connection and rapport are established with an audience, a mime clown can bring the audience into another world. The distance of a silent storyteller, clown and puppeteer allow stories that are unacceptable to be told.
Odds & Ends
What was effect of Cradle? It was healing for me as an artist and thought provoking for the audience. Although this was not circus, I can see where the circus can give even more distance between the audience and difficult subject matter, but this is not the custom. Circus performers show virtuosity and athletic skill but don’t usually deal with difficult issues other than the mastery of the body. Social circus addresses the issues of youth at risk and homelessness by offering them the possibility of making circus. The circus itself doesn’t necessarily address the roots of issues that have put the youth at risk.
Helen Stoddart describes clowning as the inverse of virtuosity in the circus, “circus clowning is nothing but the flip side to this coin in the staging of bodies which are made the object of laughter precisely for their physical ineptitude and failures of social and physical perception.” She writes that “the circus has rarely included overt political dramas” but that there are sometimes “latent, and highly ambiguous, political implications” P 27. Stoddart describes a circus piece of political commentary that became one of the most repeated circus pieces in the world in the late 1700’s called “The Taylor Riding to Bedford”. Stoddart writes:
Astley’s pastiche involved recycling an already popular narrative of a tailor named Billy Button whose abortive attempt to make his way to Brentford has him (often drunk) making several attempts to mount his horse, being unable to get his horse to move, and being thrown off a speeding horse which eventually chases him out of the ring. P 27-28
I think this is a commentary on the effectiveness of politicians. Stoddart writes that political commentary became a rare occurrence. In my view, performances can utilise art and humour to stress the fact that we are not helpless - that we do have agency, that sometimes we have to see through metaphors, schemes and lies to get to the truth of things.
Silly Scripts, Stories and Scenarios: Charlie the Chipmunk meets a Talking Worm
References
Bogart, Anne. and then you act: making art in an unpredictable world. New York: Routledge 2007.
Stoddart, Helen. Aesthetics. Routledge Circus Reader (Tait and Lavers, ed., 2016) P 27-28.