Ladies and Gentlemen and the rest of us…
I’ve been clowning the last week, and at the risk of sounding a little over the top, it has been a bit of a life-changing experience. I promised I’d let people know how it went, so here’s some writing on it.
For a week, 8 aspiring clowns and one workshop leader (the brilliant Micaela Miranda) met at 6.30-9.30pm every evening at Scrum Studios in Hammersmith. These evening workshops were all building up to a final full day on Saturday, including an open workshop in front of a small invited audience. In my case, it was more of a demand than an invitation to my other half to attend, mostly because I knew I couldn’t possibly explain the bonkers brilliance of it to him, and I needed at least one person in my ‘real life’ to understand what I’d been up to, why I was so utterly exhausted, and how this week-long workshop could have changed my perspectives so thoroughly.
My reasons for signing up for a clown workshop in the first place were fairly open ended. I wanted a practice to get into my body, in contrast to the often bizarre reality of choral singing where, despite singing being an all body experience, we stand in straight lines, dressed in black, more or less void of individual physical expression. I wanted to see if I could allow my body to take up space in a room with others, whether I could allow it to move freely without my inner critic shouting at me to stop, or that everyone would think I was stupid or a fraud or (insert your preferred self-insult here).
I also just wanted to do something completely different, totally separate to my serious professional life, and see what it threw up. Plus, you can tell a lot about a person by how they respond to you saying you’re off to clown school.
It probably sounds a little over simplistic, but I’d decided not to be nervous when I arrived. Excited yes, but this was something to just throw myself in to, because what did I have to lose? We’d been invited to warm up our bodies in the 5 minutes before the class began, and buoyed by the abandon with which my class mates were rolling and stretching on the floor, I threw myself into it, reaching and rolling, following what my body asked for.
And then we began. Walking to music, embodying different moods, being led by different body parts, encountering each other, engaging, disengaging, playing games, moving A LOT, singing our way through intense full-body warm-ups, always with an element of the absurd thrown in, playing with contrast, casting a net around each other, taking a clown oath, smiling so much all the while our faces hurt, building a single movement to an extreme, and back down, moving fast, moving slow, finding a metaphor for how we each felt and having the rest of the group reflect a physical and auditory embodiment of that back to us. And we received our noses, small, red symbols of the spark of relentless play.
On day two, we did an exercise that completely disarmed me. We were walking around to music, as we had done on day one, sometimes acknowledging with a small game, sometimes playing at turning away. But then, Micaela asked us to stop when we encountered each other and just look deep into each other’s eyes and to imagine we could see the other person’s whole life there, their whole history. For someone to look you right in the eye and see all the fears, pains, and vulnerabilities we all hide within ourselves and for that almost stranger still to keep looking and smiling just for seeing you is an experience so deeply moving I don’t really know how to write about it. I walked around that room crying for a while with the wild power of it, and then after a while it shifted to laughter, and we’d come right through the middle of the vulnerability and out the other side.
By day three, we were ready to dress our clowns, and we learned how to wake the clown and about the hierarchy of different clown types as we worked with more and more improv. Still by day 4 I would have told you I had absolutely no idea what might be going to happen on day 5, that’s how in the moment it all felt (though in reality it was obviously meticulously conceived and curated by Micaela, our teacher).
Once we got going with the improvisation, it became obvious to me quite quickly that I was considerably less experienced than my class mates, all of whom were working actors with many years of physical training behind them, and several of whom had done clowning before. Still, I decided it didn’t matter, the idea of being ‘good’ at clowning really was not important in that moment, it truly was about pursuing pleasure through play. Almost as if by magic I found that it was in those moments where I just left my brain and my thoughts on the sidelines and let my body lead the way, that truth and fun and real connection with the other clowns and with the audience happened.
The compound effect of everything in the week was something akin to tearing my chest right open and allowing people to gaze directly into my insides and fiddle around with my organs, such was the level of vulnerability and openness. It took me most of the day just sitting on Sunday to even halfway put myself back together and I’m still trying to figure out how / where what I’ve uncovered this week will find its place within my singing practice. For a start, the experienced understanding that leaving my thinking brain at the sidelines and allowing my body to take the lead is where I will find true connection feels invaluable. The rediscovery of my sense of play also showed me that somewhere along the way this had become obscured, a bit lost even, and I’m going to be making sure that doesn’t happen again. There will be some changes, and there will be some small clown funerals for things that don’t serve me any more.
It was a brilliant, visceral, life-changing and life-affirming experience, and if anyone is wondering whether Clown is for you, just believe it is and do it.