PEACOCK SERIOUSplay Modern Clown Performance Louise Peacock SERIOUS Clowns’ slapstick is their primary mode of performance and allows them to provoke audiences to laughter wherever they perform. This innovative book, focusing on contemporary practice in the USA and Europe over the last 50 years, investigates the nature and function of clown performance in modern society. Through analysis of clowning in a range of settings – theatre, the circus, hospitals, refugee camps and churches – Peacock establishes a theoretical framework for the evaluation of physical comedy. Play Peacock explores clowning that takes place outside of conventional venues, and also the therapeutic potential of clowning in clown doctor organisations, refugee camps and war zones. Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance Modern Clown Performance is the first book of its kind to consider clowning performance venues and performance styles in the light of Play Theory, including comparisons of traditional clown SERIOUS comedy with contemporary circuses such as Circus Oz and Cirque du Soleil, and an in-depth look at famous clowns such as Nola Rae, Angela De Castro and Slava Polunin. play About the author Louise Peacock is a lecturer in Drama at the University of Hull. ISBN 978-1-84150-241-0 00 Modern Clown Performance 9 781841 502410 Louise Peacock intellect | www.intellectbooks.com Serious Play Modern Clown Performance Dedication For my Mum Who was always ready to watch clowns with me In memory Serious Play Modern Clown Performance Louise Peacock ^ciZaaZXi7g^hida!J@8]^XV\d!JH6 First published in the UK in 2009 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2009 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Heather Owen Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire ISBN 978-1-84150-241-0 EISBN 978-1-84150-330-1 Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta. CONTENTS Acknowledgements 7 Introduction – Play: Serious and Frivolous 9 Chapter 1 Clowns and Clown Play 19 Chapter 2 The Development of the Circus Clown: Frame and Content 41 Chapter 3 Clowns on Stage 65 Chapter 4 Clowns who Act: Actors who Clown 87 Chapter 5 The Truth Tellers: Clowns in Religion and Politics 107 Chapter 6 Clown Healers 127 Conclusion: The Centrality of Play in Clowning 153 Clown Index 161 References 169 Index 177 AC KNOWLEDGEMENTS My interest in clowning was inspired by Slava and his Snowshow. I have watched it three times over the years and each time I have discovered something new about clowning. When I watched it for the first time I had no idea that the green clown ‘Rough’ would turn out to have such a strong impact on my understanding of clowning. The performer was Angela De Castro and since then I have been inspired and enlightened by her teaching and by her generous sharing of her thinking on clowns and clowning. I am grateful also to Bim Mason for talking to me about Clowning and Mummerandada. Without the student clowns who worked with me and whose sense of play sustained me my understanding of clown training would be considerably poorer. Thank you: Arwen Prosser, Beth Lower, Clare Partridge, David McCaul, David Moss, Emily Stephenson, Eve Langford, Jackie Sanders, Jess Clark, Kate Mail, Leah Milner, Matthew Pereira, Phil McDonnell, Saffy Horrocks and, last but certainly not least, Steven Bell. Together we discovered new clowns and set them to play, with each other and with the audience, informing my thinking on play and complicité. Thanks are also due to those who supported me through the completion of my PhD and through the drafting of this book; to Kate Adams, Channy Hall, Jessica Hartley, Ness Highet, and Amy Simpson, without whom my sanity would be in even greater doubt. In the hunt for photographs the following people were particularly helpful Terry Lorant, Beatriz Paiva (of Gwenael Management), Andrea Lopez, Thierry Craeye (of Les Witloof) and Luc de Groeve (of Walrus Productions), Roly Bain and Jo Baxter, Claire Andrews (of TIN Arts) and Mark Dowd (at Topfoto). My special thanks to my husband, Keith, for reading draft after draft and for offering such sound advice; to my father for listening to endless conversations about clowns; to my son, Toby who has watched so many clowns with me and who is always keen to watch more and, finally, a wish that my small son, Jonty, will grow up appreciating clowns too. INTRODU C T I ON – PL A Y : SER I OUS A ND FR I VOLOUS Serious play: the notion contains an internal tension, establishes a dichotomy. How can play be serious? How can something serious be play? Contemporary Western society undervalues play, assigning to it a frivolity, a time-wasting quality (or lack of quality). Children play; adults may play, but only in their spare or free time; the words spare and free indicating the extent to which play sits outside the main serious business of making one’s way in the world. How then does modern clown performance bridge the two? That is what this book sets out to establish. In Homo Ludens (1944) Huizinga presents a somewhat idealized view of the nature of play, First and foremost, then, all play is a voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be a forcible imitation of it. By this quality of freedom alone, play marks itself off from the course of the natural process. It is something added thereto and spread out over it like a flowering, an ornament, a garment. (Huizinga 1944: 7) Huizinga’s views are contentious. Firstly he appears to imply that play is superfluous (unless, as he asserts elsewhere, you are an animal or a child). In relation to clown performance Huizinga’s view that play to order is no longer play is problematic. Obviously, when the clown plays in front of an audience, he is playing to order. According to Huizinga, then, this is a ‘forcible imitation’ rather than what might be termed ‘pure play’. However, this ignores the ability of the clown performer to ready himself for play. It also disregards the mutability of any clown performance in which, whilst an overall structure may exist for a performance, a clown will still respond to his audience. The nature of the interaction between the clown and the audience is spontaneous and here, genuine play occurs, creating an energy which also affects the planned sequences of the performance. In Homo Ludens, Huizinga presents the argument that play has no moral function and that, being voluntary, it stands outside ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. In Huizinga’s view play ‘interpolates itself as a temporary activity satisfying in itself and ending there’ (1944: 9). 10 | SERIOUS play Later chapters of Huizinga’s work examine the connections between play and contest, play and law and play and war. These are of no relevance to clowning. Even when Huizinga comments on play forms in poetry, philosophy and art, he offers little of relevance to clowning. Huizinga does, however, offer the following direct comment on clowning: ‘The mimic and laughter- provoking art of the clown is comic as well as ludicrous but it can scarcely be termed genuine play’ (Huizinga 1944: 6). Given the time at which he was writing, Huizinga appears to have been referring to circus clowns. He may otherwise be evoking the activities of sacred clowns in primitive societies but gives no indication that this is the case. Huizinga connects clowning, not unreasonably, with laughter, but from there it is a short step for him to claim that it ‘comes under the category of the non-serious’ (1944: 6). This concept of play as serious or non-serious recurs in the work of other theorists. The subtitle of Turner’s book, From Ritual to Theatre, is ‘The Human Seriousness of Play’ (1982). Turner is an anthropologist but his focus on ritual as performance means that his theories are much more readily applicable to clown performance than those of Huizinga. In the first chapter of his book, Turner offers definitions of the liminal and liminoid, together with ‘communitas’ and flow. Whilst he notes that ‘there are undoubtedly “ludic” aspects in “tribal” culture especially in the liminal periods of protracted initiation…such as holy fools, and clowning…’ (Turner 1982: 32), his definition of the liminoid is more relevant for the modern societies in which both circus and theatre clowning occur. Initially clowning may have been located in ritual and, therefore, what Turner would identify as liminal space. However, as performances that are enjoyed as part of leisure time, clowning, in common with most theatre, is liminoid. ‘Optation pervades the liminoid phenomenon’ (Turner 1982: 43). An audience can choose whether to attend a performance; having arrived at the theatre, there remains an element of choice as to whether to stay. Turner makes the following key distinctions between the liminal and the liminoid. The liminal is ‘collective, concerned with calendrical, biological, socio-structural rhythms’, ‘centrally integrated into the total social process’, and tends to be ‘eufunctional’ (Turner 1982: 54). On the other hand, the liminoid is characteristically more individual, more experimental and marginal and more idiosyncratic. Most importantly, perhaps, ‘liminoid phenomena…are often parts of social critiques’ (Turner 1982: 54). Given the potential of clowning for parody and subversion one can see how it sits more readily within the liminoid than the liminal.