Feminist Clowning: Serious Pleasures and Strategic Possibilities

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2020-07-03 Feminist Clowning: Serious Pleasures and Strategic Possibilities

Russell, Jacqueline

Russell, J. (2020). Feminist Clowning: Serious Pleasures and Strategic Possibilities (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/112320 master thesis

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Feminist Clowning: Serious Pleasures and Strategic Possibilities

Jacqueline Russell

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN DRAMA

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JULY, 2020

This thesis is an investigation into the intersection of clown practice and feminist theory. I consider the work of historical and contemporary female clowns and the strategies they use to playfully break rules that restrict and oppress. Through analysis of the ways in which these clowns reconfigure traditional clowning strategies for feminist aims, my research discusses the pleasures and possibilities of a feminist clowning practice. By scrutinising the current literature about clown history and performance, I attempt to fill some of the gaps in this field of scholarly study, writing about the history and practice of feminist clowning and centralizing the voices of other female clowns/scholars. Aiming to address the erasure of women in clowning history, I document my process to revive proto-feminist clowns Cha-u-ka-o and Evetta Mathews, and my Practice as Research experiment, Bridge of Jests, that situates myself in a lineage of feminist clown ancestors. Drawing on interviews with contemporary Canadian clowns Karen Hines, Heather Marie Annis, Amy Lee, Candice Roberts, and Michelle Thrush, I consider the innovative ways that these clowns are harnessing the power of laughter to interact with serious, political content. I discuss the challenges and surprises that emerged from my efforts to develop a feminist clown working methodology during my Practice as Research experiment Allergic to Water. In this thesis I endeavour to draw connections between ways of thinking about feminism and the embodied practice of clown, to discover what emerges as feminist clowning in this interplay between theory and practice.

ii Preface

This thesis is original, independent work by the author, Jacqueline Russell. The research interviews included in Chapters 2-3 were covered by Ethics Certificate REB19-0280, issued by the University of Calgary Conjoint Faculties Research Ethics Board (CFREB) for the study “Interviews with Contemporary Canadian Clowns” on July 18, 2019. Portions of the text in Chapter 3 have been published as “A Clown of His/Her/Their Own: Clown and Gender Performativity.” Canadian Theatre Review, vol. 183, 2020, pp. 62-66.

iii Acknowledgements

With gratitude I acknowledge my family, particularly my ever-patient husband, Adam Toy, for his constant support during my graduate degree and my sister, Mariah Russell, for keeping my sense of perspective intact. Immense thanks to all my clown teachers for teaching me to follow my impulses and think with my blood, especially John Turner, Michael Kennard and Karen Hines. I am infinitely grateful for the vital comradery and rowdy laughter of my grad school cohort that sustained me throughout this process. Thank you also to my clown co- conspirators of the past decade: Alissa Watson, Alice Nelson, Michelle Brandenburg, Chris Gamble and Chad Bryant. And deep thanks to my clown partner, Jed Tomlinson, for teaching me how to care enough not to care. This research would not have been possible without the generosity of the clowns I interviewed: Karen Hines, Heather Marie Annis, Amy Lee, Candice Roberts and Michelle Thrush. Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences and insights with me. Thank you to Julia Lane for forging a path that other clown/scholars could follow and your thoughtful support of my research trip. Special thanks to April Viczko and The School of Creative and Performing Arts for their support of my Practice as Research projects and to my creative collaborators Ethan Mitchell, Lindsey Zess and Jeremy Gignoux for their tremendous talents and willingness to dive into the world of clown. I would like to thank my thesis supervisors, Penny Farfan and Valerie Campbell, for their ongoing guidance, mentorship and encouragement. In particular, my thanks to Penny for challenging me to sharpen my abilities to think and write like a feminist, and to Val for reminding me to let myself know what I know.

iv Table of Contents

Abstract ______ii Preface ______iii Acknowledgements ______iv Table of Contents ______v List of Figures ______vi Introduction ______3 Liminal – The Magic Space ______5 Critical – Clown Logic ______6 Playful – Get Yourself Off ______7 A Brief History of Feminist Clown ______9 Research Methodology ______10 Theatre Clown ______11 Clown Training ______12 The Rules ______13 Clown Ways of Knowing ______15 A Note about Pronouns ______17 Chapter One: Laughter is the Bridge: Searching for my Clown Ancestors ______18 Cha-u-ka-o ______19 Evetta Mathews ______26 Bridge of Jests ______32 Chapter Two: Poison-Tipped Arrows: The Personal Clown is Political ______42 Pochsy’s Lips ______46 Oh, baby! ______49 Citizen Pochsy ______53 Chapter Three: Soccer-Baseball, Head Banging and Lip Syncing: The Seriousness of Pleasure 61 Morro and Jasp Do Puberty ______62 Larry ______68 Inner Elder ______74 Chapter Four: Breaking the Rules: The Feminist Clown as Creator ______84 Conclusion ______99 Works Cited ______104

v List of Figures

Figure 1. The Clown Rules. ______14 Figure 2. Cluster. Images and desires of myself as the ultimate transgression. ______16 Figure 3. The Seated Clowness (Mademoiselle Cha-u-ka-o). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1896. ______20 Figure 4. Chocolat Dancing In Bar Darchille. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1896. ______22 Figure 5. La Clownesse Cha-u-ka-o at the Moulin Rouge. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1895. ______23 Figure 6. Joseph Grimaldi. Date & Artist Unknown. ______24 Figure 7. Lulu, Roman clownesque. Felicien Champsaur, 1900. ______25 Figure 8. The Strobridge Lithographing Company, American, 1867 – 1960. ______27 Figure 9. The Strobridge Lithographing Company, American, 1867 – 1960 ______29 Figure 10. Evetta the Lady Clown, photographed by Emil Constant Puyo, circa 1895. ______30 Figure 11. Evetta the Lady Clown, photographed by Emil Constant Puyo, circa 1895. ______31 Figure 12. Ethan Mitchell and Jacqueline Russell in Bridge of Jests. 2019. ______34 Figure 13. Ethan Mitchell and Jacqueline Russell in Bridge of Jests. 2019. ______35 Figure 14. Terracotta Baubo figurine from Priene. Date unknown. ______36 Figure 15. Jacqueline Russell in Bridge of Jests. 2019. ______41 Figure 16. Karen Hines in Pochsy’s Lips. 1992. ______47 Figure 17. Karen Hines in Oh, baby! 1993. ______50 Figure 18. Karen Hines in Citizen Pochsy. 2003. ______54 Figure 19. The Talentless Lumps. Photo by Leif Norman. 2017. ______59 Figure 20. Heather Marie Annis in Morro and Jasp Do Puberty. Photo by Joe Kolbow. 2008. ______64 Figure 21. Amy Lee in Morro and Jasp Do Puberty. Photo by Joe Kolbow. 2008. ______67 Figure 22. Candice Roberts in Larry. Photo by Kristine Cofsky. 2019. ______70 Figure 23. Candice Roberts in Larry. Photo by Kristine Cofsky. 2019. ______72 Figure 24. Michelle Thrush in Inner Elder. Photo by Benjamin Laird. 2019. ______79 Figure 25. Jacqueline Russell and Jeremy Gignoux in Allergic to Water. 2020. ______91 Figure 26. Jacqueline Russell, clown headshot. 2018. ______94 Figure 27. Jacqueline Russell in Allergic to Water. 2020. ______97 Figure 28. The Assembly. Photo by Tom Gould. 2018. ______101

The clown is not a hero, but she is heroic in her courage, in being available to the possible, no matter how absurd and unlikely. Pleasure, joy and fun in this context are not spectacle or escape, but rather the deadly game of living with loss, living despite failure, living even despite the humiliation of trying endlessly.

– Julie Salverson, Clown, Opera, The Atomic Bomb and The Classroom.

1 The Rules

Breathe Surprise Yourself Let us affect you More, more, more Rule of three Be honest Have fun Get yourself off Make contact Know when to leave Keep the audience safe Play with the rhythm Keep the conversation going Up and out Believe Drop the script (you can always go back to it) Follow the impulse Trust Surprise us Take us into your world Clown Logic Think out there the gods Go for the unknown Physicalize Visualize Follow the rhythm Be zany Impulse 6 Listen to us Listen to yourself Be specific Be visceral Take a risk Be flexible Break all the rules!

2 Introduction

There has been a significant resurgence of the art of clown in Canadian theatre over the past several decades. This surge is characterized by the diversity of artists engaging with the form, most noticeably the influx of female practitioners into a traditionally male-dominated practice. In this thesis I endeavour to unearth the history of women clowns in order to better understand contemporary feminist clown practice. How are feminist clowns harnessing the subversive power of laughter and, in doing so, how are they changing the ways that clown is performed? This thesis examines the relationship between feminism and clown, addresses the continued erasure of women clowns from theatrical history, and investigates the ways in which contemporary feminist clown practitioners are transforming clown practice. Through my research, I explore the intersection of clown ways of knowing with feminist ways of thinking and identify the pleasures and possibilities that emerge from this juncture. “The feminist clown writes with her body,” asserts Margaret J. Irving. She “imbues her sexed body with political agency and uses it as a resource to clown” (219; 205). This audacious testimony from Irving, herself a clown, defies centuries of rhetoric that paints women who clown as inherently non-sexual and genderless. Writing in 2013, Irving may be one of the first scholars to use the term ‘feminist clowning,’ using it as a point of inquiry into the “heteroglossia of the clown who through performance challenges patriarchal discourses” (203). The concept of the clown as genderless has pervaded clown training and performance for centuries. One of the most famous female clowns of the twentieth century, Annie Fratellini, always performed as a male clown. Fratellini’s daughter Valerie, when asked about her gender, proclaimed a common rhetoric that “[t]here is no female or male clown. There is just the clown” (qtd. in Davison 126). Valerie described how “[w]hen I started working, I never ceased to hide my femininity just as my mother did. I was ashamed of being a woman” (126). Performing drag, androgyny, and gender-bending can be useful strategies to the feminist clown. However, the Fratellinis are an example of how the notion of clowns as being ‘genderless’ was, and still is, used to perpetuate a homogeneous version of clown that excludes femininity. For myself, as a female clown teaching and performing for the past decade, questions of gender have been inescapable. Feminist clowns have always played with the performativity of gender, but their strategies have evolved. For much of the twentieth century, women who clowned performed as

3 androgynous or male clowns in order to inhabit a neutral-coded (and therefore funny) body. In the seventies, with the surge of second-wave feminism, women began to play female/feminine clowns, claiming space for their own sexuality and gender expressions. Ashley Tobias suggests that the “theatre clown does not represent a radical departure from, but rather a radical reconfiguration of the traditional clown” (42). “[O]vert, uninhibited sexual behaviour” has been a traditional characteristic of the clown for centuries, but this reconfiguration is defined by Tobias as a clown who is “actively … involved in the radical inquiry into the nature of gender identity and sexual behaviour” (42). Both Irving and Tobias’ definitions challenge lingering theories that clowns are genderless. Gender dilemmas are not the only concern of the feminist clown. Feminism, as defined by bell hooks, “is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” and thus the feminist clown aims to disrupt, provoke, parody and question all forms of oppression (Feminism is for Everybody 1). The question may arise, don’t all clowns do this? In my experience, they do not. Some clowns may remind us of awe and wonder and play, which is significant, but they do not engage with the world through a critical lens. I have witnessed clowns who reinforce narratives of oppression, using the tropes and stereotypes of domination to incite laughter. I also wish to clarify that not all female clowns inherently create feminist work. As bell hooks discerns, one of the difficulties of the feminist movement is that “anything having to do with the female gender is seen as covering feminist ground even if it does not contain a feminist perspective” (Feminism is for Everybody 112). In contemporary clown practice, there are many male and non- binary clowns who engage in feminist clown work. I have chosen in this thesis to focus on the work of clowns who critically and imaginatively engage with the realities of the world, using the pleasure and playfulness of clowning to subvert and disrupt. I have drawn from clown scholars and practitioners, as well as my own embodied knowledge as a clown performer, to identify three essential qualities of clown and the ways in which they intersect with feminist theory, in order to create an understanding of the term ‘feminist clown’ for the purposes of this thesis. Feminist clown is liminal, critical, and playful. These elements, I suggest, can be illuminated by feminist theory and criticism, particularly feminist theatre criticism, as a way of identifying and cultivating feminist clown strategies. In “Feminist Futures”, Sarah Ahmed identifies that “what characterizes feminist interventions is a presumption of a necessary link between theory and practice, between ways of understanding

4 what it is we seek to transform and forms of action that enable such transformation” (237). In this thesis, I endeavour to draw connections between ways of thinking about feminism and the embodied practice of clown, to discover what emerges as feminist clown in this interplay between theory and practice.

Liminal – The Magic Space

Clowns occupy a liminal space. They exist “both inside and outside of the dramatic fiction” and, as Donald McManus suggests, they will frequently comment upon the action of the plot, both from inside and outside of the narrative (12). What creates this liminal quality in clown performance is the relationship of the clown to the audience. One does not perform the character of the clown in the same way one performs Juliet, with a clear delimitation between the performative space and the audience space. It is the reason that Canadian clown Karen Hines does not grant the rights for other artists to perform her Pochsy plays. Another artist, even another clown, cannot play Pochsy, because Pochsy is a part of Hines. The clown and the person are inseparable. One does not perform the clown at all. European clown teacher Jacques Lecoq believed that “it is not possible to be a clown for the audience; you play with an audience” (qtd. in Peacock 33). As Canadian clown teacher John Turner further elaborates “the clown doesn't exist without an audience [....] It's not a clown getting himself off in the woods by himself, with no one around to see him fall down. That's not funny, it's not clown, it's not sad, it's not anything. It doesn't exist [....] the whole act of clown is a conversation” (qtd. in Lane Impossibility Aside 59). In order to invite the audience into a space where this conversation can take place, clowns physically disrupt the mimetic space in order to create a new space. In the clowning technique taught by Richard Pochinko, this space is referred to as the magic space. Within the magic space, anything is possible. The audience is invited to play with the clown, to enter into a conversation that is unknown and surprising to both parties. When the audience responds with a gasp of shock, a sigh of empathy or an unexpected coughing fit, the clown not only replies, but allows the audience to affect her. A sigh of empathy from the audience might be met with a plea for more empathy or an angry rejection, but it shifts the emotional narrative for the clown as well as her audience.

5 The majority of contemporary feminist theatre practitioners employ a disruptive approach to the performative space, breaking the convention of the fourth wall. However, in clown performance there is simply no fourth wall to break. In Impossibility Aside: Clowning and the Scholarly Context, Julia Lane explains that for a clown the fourth wall does not exist, because there “often isn’t even a first, second, or third wall in clown theatre. The clown’s performance takes place in a world, but it is a world that is not necessarily bound by the walls (physical or invisible and imaginatively created) of the performance space; it is a world that includes both clown and audience sharing the same space, intimately” (62). Lane relates this concept of the magic space in clown performance to spaces of engagement explored in feminist scholarship, such as bell hooks’ conceptualization in Teaching to Transgress of a space “in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity” (qtd. in Impossibility Aside 63). I concur with Lane’s association of these spaces: the liminal nature of the clown to transgress the traditional boundaries of the mimetic space in the theatre mirrors processes in feminist ways of thinking that blur the binaries of social and cultural ideologies and discourses. In this way the feminist clown can strategically exploit the ways in which the “disruption of the mimetic conventions usually implies disruption of cultural norms, and the clown’s difficulty with the cultural norms often leads to [her] disrupting the mimetic convention” (McManus 13). By playing with the audience, the feminist clown engages her audience in a conversation with transformative possibility.

Critical – Clown Logic

In The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Jill Dolan investigates how “[b]y exposing the ways in which dominant ideology is naturalized by performance’s address to the ideal spectator, feminist performance criticism works as a political intervention in an effort towards cultural change” (2). Twenty-five years later Dolan admits that “very little has changed since 1988” when she first argued “that the gaze remains unapologetically male” (The Feminist Spectator in Action 8). Thus, the task of the feminist critic was, and continues to be, breaking “through the male stranglehold on what’s considered universal or even worthwhile” by articulating different ways of viewing the world (Dolan The Feminist Spectator in Action 8).

6 One of the rules of clown performance is to use clown logic. Clown logic is a way of viewing the world that disrupts apparent realities. A clown may look down and realize that her shoes are on the wrong feet. Rather than taking off her shoes, she might solve the problem quickly by switching the position of her feet, which is funny and also complicates the notion of “wrong” feet. It may still look “wrong” to the audience but to the clown it looks right. In this way the clown solves problems by viewing the world in a different way. The critical nature of clown performance lies in this logic. As McManus explains “[a] good clown act is usually resolved by means of the clown finding a solution to the problem at hand that takes the audience by surprise because it is either not the solution that they had envisioned or had not been presented as consistent with the theatrical convention being used. The solution can redefine the problem” (13). By using surprising solutions to redefine problems clowns engage in a critical practice that encompasses political metaphor since “the relationship of the clown to the structure of the mimetic world has its correlative in the power structure of the non-theatrical world” (McManus 15). Thus, the feminist clown engages in a practice that articulates different ways of viewing the world as both clown and critic.

Playful – Get Yourself Off

Despite its critical nature, feminist clown is not instructive or moralistic. Using clown logic is part of the clown’s play, which often leads to another clown quality, the necessity of failure. I once sat next to renowned European clown Iman Lizarazu during a clown show. Throughout the entire performance Lizarazu muttered under her breath, “Oh, good problem. Yes, great problem. Hmmm … missed that one.” She was looking for the problems, understanding that by trying to solve a problem and failing, the clown can find more opportunities to play. This notion of failure, referred to in European clown traditions as the flop, is a part of the conversation between clown and audience. Traditionally, “[w]hen the clown provokes laughter by failing,” observes Louise Peacock, “[she] provides a release value and allows [her] audience to enjoy a feeling of superiority” (24). I would argue that laughter at the clown’s failure can also come from a place of empathy, of seeing oneself in the clown’s struggle. In the Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam suggests that “[f]rom the perspective of feminism, failure has often been a better bet than success. Where feminine success is always measured by male standards,

7 and gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures” (4). The feminist clown can use laughter to reframe the notion of failure as something advantageous and worthy of celebration. The playful nature of clown should not imply that the content is superficial or without dramatic stakes. A rule of clown performance is to get yourself off. Detached from its purely sexual connotations, this rule is about the radical possibilities of pursuing pleasure, satisfaction and joy through deeply committed play. The clown can get herself off in any emotional state, pursuing any kind of activity. This level of visceral, embodied intensity can be found “in the depth of torment, in the depth of joy and ecstasy, it can be sexual, it can be a religious frenzy, it can be any of those things, and it can be incredibly mundane” (Turner qtd. in Lane Impossibility Aside 37). This pursuit of pleasure is intensely useful to the feminist clown, as it allows her to dispute notions of pleasure as frivolous, irrelevant or “unfeminist.” In Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Adrienne Maree Brown links “the connection between tuning into what brings aliveness into our systems and being able to access personal, relational and communal power” (52). Exploring the politics of pleasure offers the feminist clown a way to “make the revolution irresistible” (Bambara qtd. in Brown 1). In “Feminist Futures”, Sarah Ahmed explores how in order to look to the future of feminism, it becomes necessary to: attend to the legacies of feminist pasts, in order to think through the very question of what it would mean to have a world where feminism, as a politics of transformation, is no longer necessary. It is certainly the case that what structures many feminist interventions is not only a way of thinking about how we can understand what is ‘wrong’ in the world, but also how what is wrong might be resisted and changed. (236) Lane defines clown “as a practice of possibilities” (Impossibility Aside 60). Considering new possibilities and enacting them onstage best describes the aims of feminist clowning. Through the liminal, critical, and playful elements of clown, the possibilities of feminism can be materialized.

8 A Brief History of Feminist Clown

Prior to the 1900s, there are few historical examples of female clowns.1 They take the form of fools and jesters, such as the female court fool retained by the wife of Seneca or “the flamboyant Mathurine, who presided at the French court from the reign of Henry III to Louis XIII” (Towsen “Women in Clowning”). There may well have been a host of funny female clowns playing the lovers and servants in the commedia dell’arte troupes that performed across Europe from the 16th to 18th century, but this is difficult to confirm since “performances were improvised from a scenario [and as such] characterization and comic business were in the hands of the individual actor” (Towsen “Women in Clowning”). Due to the fact that so little information exists about these early female clowns, the first appearance of identifiable proto- feminist clowns happened at the turn of the 20th century, coinciding (not coincidentally) with the rise of the first-wave feminist movement. After the insurgency of New Woman Clowns at the turn of the century, a tradition of feminist clown performers continued into the 1920s and 1930s, as slapstick comedy made the leap from vaudeville to silent film. Mabel Normand, who famously first threw a pie at Charlie Chapin, wrote and directed her own work like many early silent film stars. While Chaplin never “credited Mabel’s profound influence […] he built his iconic Tramp on comedic strategies she pioneered” (Ventura). Women were a driving force in the creation of early slapstick films and the results were often both hilarious and subversive. Slapstick comedy complicated gender roles “as the chaos and anarchy evident in the slapstick universe, including pervasive and persistent gender confusion go cheerfully unresolved at the end of the film[s]” (Wagner 36). In the post-war climate of the 1940s and 1950s, fewer examples of feminist clown performers can be found. Of the few examples of women who did clown during the 1940s and 1950s, many adopted a male or androgynous clown persona, no doubt a strategic response to the overwhelming societal notion that comedy was antithetical to femininity. Television of the 1950s and 1960s provided the screwball antics of feminist clowns Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett. Ball, with her vaudeville-inspired physical comedy, lampooned the “domestic malaise of the 1950s”

1 The written history of clown is overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Unfortunately, most written accounts of women and clowning in cultures outside of European and Settler culture are written by white anthropologists and are exotifying, racist and Othering.

9 and “made the repression and boredom of domesticity bearable” through her outrageous capers (Horowitz 37). In a darker, more aggressive style of comedy Burnett satirized images of ideal femininity and used grotesque portrayals of Hollywood sirens to “make those ideals ludicrous rather than intimidating” (Mizejewski 24). The 1960s and 1970s saw a huge influx in the number of women performing comedy in general, as the rise of second-wave feminism and the emergence of feminist criticism began to reshape the parameters of what women in comedy could do and how it was viewed. In the 1980s, a large number of women begin to create, perform and teach clown. Influenced by feminist theories, they also began to re-invent clown strategies and, as Elaine Showalter describes, “see meaning in what previously has been empty space” (435). The emergence of queer theory began to complicate ideas about gender and sexuality in clown performance. In Europe, Angelo de Castro, famous for her role in Slava’s Snow Show, was performing as a male clown but, unlike Fratellini’s shame driven choice, for Castro the choice was strategic: “mirroring her identity as a butch” and allowing her to explore masculine parts of herself she had to repress during childhood (Carolin 226). In Canada in the 1990s, Karen Hines, drawing on her training in clown with Richard Pochinko and bouffon with Phillipe Gaulier, created a new performance technique — neo-bouffon — which allowed her to explore the post- feminist, neo-liberal capitalist concerns that characterized the 1990s and early 2000s. In the contemporary moment, feminist clowns continue to reinvent the practice of clowning, responding to the concerns of fourth-wave feminism.

Research Methodology

During my research into the intersection of clown and feminism, I utilized three primary modes of investigation. For many years I have felt a longing to discover myself within the context of a lineage, a history, and a community. Surveying the existing literature on clowns presented a distinct gap. I began my research by turning to historical accounts of female clowns, in search of the kinship of feminist clown ancestors. In Chapter One, I detail my efforts to uncover the histories of proto-feminist clowns and reflect on my Practice as Research experiment to revive the lives and performances of these clowns, discovering a feminist clown lineage through the process.

10 Furthering my research, I selected case-studies of Canadian clowns who are transforming the practice and interviewed them about their processes. These interviews, combined with critical analysis of their performances, allowed me to identify the many inventive strategies at play in their work. In Chapter Two, I examine the strategies of Karen Hines’ Pochsy Plays and her innovative contributions to Canadian clowning. In Chapter Three, I consider the strategies of four contemporary Canadian clowns, Heather Marie Annis and Amy Lee in Morro and Jasp Do Puberty, Candice Roberts in Larry and Michelle Thrush in Inner Elder. These case-studies illuminate the diverse approaches to clowning in contemporary Canadian theatre and the nuanced strategies of these artists. In Chapter Four I focus on my experience of the feminist clown as a creator. I reflect on the challenges I encountered trying to create a feminist working methodology for my research and what these obstacles revealed to me about the nature of feminist clown work. I identify and critically examine the rules of the traditional theatre production model, and the successes and failures of my efforts to strategically break them using the rules of clown.

Theatre Clown

Clowns work in a variety of forms, from the massive arenas of the circus, to the intimacy of a tiny cabaret stage, to the sound stages of film and television, as well as therapeutic contexts like hospital clowning and humanitarian work. David Robb contends that the clown “[b]y its very nature … is an interdisciplinary phenomenon. In which ever artform it appears – fiction, drama, film, photography or fine art – this figure carries with it the symbolic association of its usage in popular culture – ritual festivities, street theatre, circus – and interacts with that artform” (1). During my research, I discovered countless examples of the influence of feminist clowns in all of these diverse expressions. The word ‘clown’ can be used in various ways. Laurel Butler describes how: [c]ontemporary ideas of clowns are often expressed as nouns, usually referring to a type of character. “Clown” as a noun bears particularly significant meaning in terms of the theatre, where it may indicate a specific performance idiom. Clown can also be used as an adjective, often to describe an aesthetic or stylistic approach to a play or performance (for example, ‘such-and-such is a clown piece’). Additionally, clown functions as verb,

11 with all the corresponding temporal-linguistic qualities: ‘We clowned all over New York City.’ The continuous present tense – clowning – can describe the technical form as a performative practice and as an art. (64) Theatre clown is a term used to describe both the clown who performs in the theatre, as well as the performative practice as an art form. I have chosen to focus primarily on theatre clown in this thesis, and the possibilities of what feminist clown can do when interacting with the artform of theatre.

Clown Training

Contemporary clown training and performance in Canada has been heavily influenced by Richard Pochinko. His work was highly experimental, searching for a training technique that could expand not only what clowns do, but the content they might explore. During the 1980s, Pochinko and his collaborator Ian A. Wallace played with notions of gender performativity and sexual deviance in their work. In Nion: Commedia Bizarre, an androgynous alien clown ricochets across the gender spectrum, playing the extreme femininity of Marilyn Monroe, the hyper masculinity of Elvis Presley, and everything in between. In an interview in 1987, when asked about the future of clowning in Canada, Pochinko remarked “[l]ately, I am amazed at how many women have taken up the study of clowning. It is a part of the whole [Canadian clowning] movement” (qtd. in Wellsman 158). There are many elements that make this practice of clown training and performance, referred to here as Pochinko technique, innovative and transformative. One of the essential components of the Pochinko approach that I wish to highlight in relation to feminist clowning is the absence of via negativa. Via negativa is a style of clown training that emerged from the European clown tradition “in which, supposedly, the clown finds themselves through negative criticism; that is, after being told ‘you suck, get off the stage’ enough, presumably, the clown will find a way to stay on stage, not to be told ‘you suck,’ and discover triumphant success despite all obstacles” (Fleysher “Via Negativa is Actual Bullshit”). But as Deanna Fleysher, who studied with notorious via negativa teacher Phillipe Gaulier, observes, this style of training is patriarchal, misogynist, and colonialist, because it ignores the diversity of ways in which individuals experience oppression and how that may socially condition them to respond to this type of training. “Highlighting failure is not the right teaching

12 mode for people who already feel marginalized,” says Fleysher, noting how it is most often white, straight, cisgender men who excel at “a certain kind of maverick rebellion against authority” that this training demands, because they have been socially conditioned their whole lives to do so (“Via Negativa is Actual Bullshit”). By contrast, my own experience of training in Pochinko technique has been about the celebration of ‘failure,’ an experience that Julia Lane describes as “a building up of student’s ability to face the directions of themselves and source creativity, vulnerability, and the clown’s deeply foolish honesty, from these places within themselves” (Impossibility Aside 19). It is this empowering, feminist approach to clown training that initially drew me to Pochinko technique. It continues to inform and inspire my own work as a practitioner of feminist clowning. Pochinko’s contributions to Canadian clowning continue to ripple 30 years later. Nearly all of the contemporary clowns in this thesis, myself included, have studied Pochinko technique, either directly with Pochinko in the case of Karen Hines, or with one (or several) of Pochinko’s students who now teach across Canada (e.g. John Turner, Michael Kennard, Jan Henderson, David MacMurray Smith). The rules of clown and clown ways of knowing derived from Pochinko technique are referenced throughout this thesis.

The Rules

I refer throughout this thesis to the rules of clown. These rules (listed in the epigraph on page 2) stem from my clown training, concepts that Pochinko initially articulated and which have continued to evolve. The rules of clown, though articulated through Pochinko technique, are not unique to this tradition. One can observe these rules at work in all good clown performance. “What is unique about the Pochinko tradition of teaching is … simply the awareness that is drawn to the rules” (Lane Impossibility Aside 26). My understanding of the rules comes from years of forgetting and remembering them in performance. They are the theoretical underpinnings of my practice and also a vocabulary for myself as a performer, a way of articulating why and how something on stage does or does not work. These rules are interconnected, working together to form a structure for performance. Through this structure, the freedom of clowning can be found. Lane explains:

13 paying attention to (or remembering) the clown rules is a necessary element in establishing the particular quality of attention that is clowning. This quality of attention is, therefore, characterized by the clown rules. It is attention that is filled with pleasure, honesty, fun, rhythm, breath, impulse, surprise, and the tension between safety and risk. It is a quality of attention in which all of the rules operate at all times, even when we are not conscious of them. However, the practice of clowning specifically involves heightening our consciousness of the rules and the myriad ways that they work. (Impossibility Aside 36) In the ongoing experiment of clown, rules continue to be added and re-evaluated. Pictured here is a summary of the rules, as taught by John Turner, in 2018 (see Figure 1). This image, taken during a Clown Through Mask training, conveys the working practice of the rules. They are an evolving methodology, meant to be understood viscerally and somatically, rather than comprehended through the intellect.

Figure 1. The Clown Rules.

14 Clown Ways of Knowing

One of my favourite books about clown doesn’t use the word clown at all. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert articulates a way of creative knowing, a process of accessing inspiration via intuition and impulse that precisely describes my experience of clown ways of knowing. Gilbert writes: [i]deas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us – albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way they can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only though a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual. (35) The exercises and theories of the Pochinko technique are expressly aimed towards escorting ideas out of the ether through an imaginative process. By tapping into the subconscious, “[t]his process is a way of exploring your own spirit … and bypassing your mind and your thought process” (Pochinko qtd. in Wellsman 148). Circumventing the brain’s constant need for logic and a sense of control, these exercises can free artists to follow their impulses and look for a feeling. The methodology of Pochinko technique is expansive and complex. Here, I focus briefly on two components of the technique, walking something through your body and clustering and god poems, which are referred to throughout this thesis, to give the reader a sense of their process and purpose. The exercise of walking something through your body is an imaginative process. In Pochinko Clown through Mask training, seven colours and six directions are walked through the body. This process uses breath to send the colour or direction through the body. It is a somatic exploration of looking for a feeling and listening for a rhythm in the body. As you physicalize and visualize the process of sending the colour or direction through the body, you are encouraged to let all images and desires come and go. Once the body is completely full of the feeling, you allow yourself to discover what is in your imaginative world. Through this embodied exploration, physicalization and visualization create belief. In my experience, this embodied way of knowing intersects with Anna Furse’s description of the feminist “need to work from our physical experience and find ways to articulate our embodied perceptions in the culture. We have to make sense of the world by thinking from our bodies in all their meanings” (158).

15 Clustering and god poems are a generative tool. In the centre of a large piece of paper, you write the phrase “Images and desires of myself as the ultimate ______” and fill the blank space with any word, theme, idea or character you wish to explore. You then circle the centre phrase until an image or desire pops into your head and you write it down, circle that idea until a new one appears and so on, creating a vast body-storm until the paper is entirely full. You then allow ‘the gods’ (in the agnostic, mystical, clown sense) to choose the poem by closing your eyes and spinning the paper, pointing to a random spot, opening your eyes and writing down the line. Once you have ten lines, that is your poem. You read it bottom to top. The poem can form the structure of the piece, provide ideas for costume and set, or become lines of text. Accessing one’s desires is a pleasurable tilt towards creation with feminist implications.

Figure 2. Cluster. Images and desires of myself as the ultimate transgression.

16 A Note about Pronouns

Throughout this thesis, wherever possible, I use she/her pronouns to refer to clowns. You will notice that other scholars like Delphine Cézard use the French word “clowne” or “clownes” to denote female clowns. However, Cézard observes that the word “clowne” “falls short … of any proposed oral change leaving women still subject to invisibility” (30) in the art form. My use of she/her pronouns is not to exclude non-binary clowns, nor to discount men from the realm of feminist clowning. Rather it is a conscious experiment in looking for a feeling. What does it feel like to centralize the feminine in an investigation about clowning?

17 Chapter One: Laughter is the Bridge: Searching for my Clown Ancestors

During my career as a clown performer and teacher, I have been continuously troubled by how rarely women appear in the existing literature on clown history. In the 400 pages of John Towsen’s canonical book Clowns, written in 1976 and widely considered one of the most extensive histories of clown practice, women are mentioned twice: once as medieval “glee- maidens, who, in addition to supplying sex appeal” (47) were accomplished musicians, dancers and acrobats and once as the passive female servants in the commedia del’arte, “who carried on love affairs with the male servants” (66)2. Inspired by the work of feminist playwrights who are motivated to “look under, over, and behind the official version of how events happened in the past”, this gap in scholarship served as an impetus to begin searching for my feminist clown lineage (Kelly 211). I longed to place my clowning practice within a lineage of clowns who resemble me. Katherine E. Kelly speaks to a tradition of feminist playwrights uncovering histories of ancestors by “[k]nowing where to find those ancestors and trusting to recognize them as kindred spirits” (211). My research revived two female clown performers from the period of first-wave feminism in the late nineteenth century, utilizing historiographical tools to resurrect their lives as well as a Practice as Research experiment to reimagine their acts. Through this process I proposed to ask: who are my clown ancestors and what can they teach me? I began my search for proto-feminist clowns by looking at female circus and cabaret performers during the period of first-wave feminism. Discussing the pervasiveness of the male gaze in nineteenth-century French art, Nichola A. Haxell emphasizes how, “the spectacle of each category of circus performer was coded for erotic display … by male writers and artists. … Although often acknowledging her artistry and the discipline underlying her address, the female circus performer rarely emerged from these male texts … as an autonomous creative being” (784). Haxell argues that the nineteenth-century female circus performer could only exist within a “Madonna/whore” binary, playing the victim (e.g. tightrope walkers, bareback riders) or the dominatrix (e.g. animal-tamers, muscular acrobats) (784). However, in this discussion, Haxell overlooks the category of clown and thus misses the subversive ways in which female clowns played with gender binaries in the nineteenth century. In Women of the American Circus,

2 Towsen has since attempted to address this omission in a three-part series on “Women in Clowning” on his blog All Fall Down (physicalcomedy.blogspot.com).

18 Katherine J. Adams and Michael L. Keene posit that, out of all the risky circus occupations for women, “the one judged ultimately as the most unnatural and unacceptable might seem surprising since it involved no real physical risk. In this most transgressive of acts – clowning – women remained a minority, and a myth continued that this profession included no women at all” (183). In recent years, seeking to address the continued erasure of female clowns from theatrical and circus history, many scholars squeeze as many examples of female clowns as possible into their articles and books. While this strategy does address the myth of the missing female clown, it results in a superficial portrayal of these women’s lives as artists. I decided to use nineteenth- century female clowns Cha-u-ka-o and Evetta Mathews as two case studies. Through analysis of the photographic and illustrative images of costumes they inhabited, I investigated the cultural climate of their performances and the ways in which their performances may have been received. During the course of my research, a fuller sense of these performers began to emerge – an illustration of “an autonomous creative being” engaged “in this most transgressive of acts” (Haxell 784; Adams and Keene 183). I used the historiographical data my research had uncovered to inspire my Practice as Research project Bridge of Jests, discovering a way not only to know my ancestors, but to invite them to play.

Cha-u-ka-o

The first case study I investigated was Cha-u-ka-o, a cabaret performer in Paris during the fin-de-siècle. The Seated Clowness (Mademoiselle Cha-u-ka-o), from the series Elles painted by Toulouse-Lautrec in 1896, depicts a female clown clothed in black pantaloons with a yellow frill around her shoulders, her head adorned with a white wig crowned with a yellow ribbon, her legs spread wide (see Figure 3).3 An anomaly in the Elles series, it is “the only image not of brothel life” (Kinsman and Guégan 145). Toulouse-Lautrec painted Cha-u-ka-o three more times, always in the same outfit and always with the same faraway look in her eyes. There is no doubt that Cha-u-ka-o’s compelling portraits as painted by Lautrec have secured her place in art

3 There are many variations on the spelling of Cha-u-ka-o’s name. I have chosen here to use the version that is most useful to understanding the phonetic mimicry.

19 museums around the globe, but there has been very little serious consideration of her as a professional clown within the context of the cabarets and circuses of fin-de-siècle Paris. An exploration of Cha-u-ka-o’s odd stage name may offer clues into the nature of her performance. Several other performers at the Moulin Rouge had nicknames that embodied the nature of their performances. Jane Avril, a French can-can dancer, was nicknamed La Melinite after an explosive due to her “jerky movements and sudden contortions” (National Galleries Scotland). Can-can dancer Louise Weber was known for her tendency to guzzle patrons’ drinks while dancing and was thus baptized La Goulue, or The Glutton (Conlin 48). Cha-u-ka-o’s “name phonetically mimics ‘chahut chaos’ (chahut being a high-kicking dance of the time)” (Kinsman and Guégan 145). Given this trend of stage names denoting actions within performance, it would be consistent to infer that Cha-u-ka-o performed some type of chaotic dance parody.

Figure 3. The Seated Clowness (Mademoiselle Cha-u-ka-o). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1896.

Lautrec’s paintings do not position Cha-u-ka-o inside the circus ring or on a stage, calling into question whether she was in fact a performer or simply a prostitute dressed as a clown. However, the constraints of performative and non-performative space found in the circus or theatre did not define Moulin Rouge performances. The world of Montmartre was an expansive performative space, where lines between audience and performers blurred completely. In Chocolat Dancing, Lautrec captures the clown Chocolat dancing mere feet from his audience, encircled by a maître d' and a table of food (see Figure 4).4 Julian Brigstocke notes how “[t]he Montmartre avant-garde not only explored ... humour in its literature and performances, but also took it directly to the spaces of everyday life,” describing the multitude of ways in which the Montmartre community would evoke the spirit of the clown Pierrot, “the timeless hero of the French pantomime,” in parades, masked balls and festivals (113). In a further contextualization of the cultural zeitgeist of clown humour at the time, Brigstocke explains that “[t]he Montmartre avant-garde adopted and radicalized pantomime buffoonery, using it as a way of developing an affirmative ethos that remained alive to modernity’s violences, injustices and degradations” by aligning themselves with the figure of the artist-clown in “a typically avant-gardist confusion of art and life” (118-9). It was this porous performative space, haunted by the brimming symbolism of the clown as archetype for the modern artist, into which Cha-u-ka-o would saunter each night to perform. Donatella Barbieri observes, “[t]he role of the Victorian circus clown was to capture and manage the audience’s focus, by counteracting, through physical comedy and imaginative visual tricks – often utilizing costume – the superhuman quality of equestrian and trapeze acrobats’ performances” (296). It is likely that Cha-u-ka-o played a similar role at the Moulin Rouge, parodying the skills of the can-can dancers whilst shifting the focus of the room to cover performance transitions. While she may have performed in pieces that headlined the evening’s entertainment, it is equally possible that she filled a role of the ‘roving’ clown, working the room by performing to small crowds and interacting with patrons in an improvised manner. In Barbieri’s article “Performativity and the Historical Body: Detecting Performance through the Archived Costume,” she uses the case study of a jacket worn by famous Victorian clown Charlie

4 Chocolat was the stage name of Rafael Padilla. Rafael was of Afro-Cuban descent and one of the most famous clowns to perform in Parisian circuses during the turn of the 20th century.

21 Keith to demonstrate how, in order to read performance written into a historical costume piece , “it is necessary to understand costume beyond its sense of belonging to a performer ... and embrace it as itself performing, having been constructed through the application of expert embodied, material and cultural knowledge” (283). Without primary source material to indicate the content and nature of Cha-u-ka-o’s performances at the Moulin Rouge, Barbieri’s approach to the performativity of costume can be applied to Cha-u-ka-o’s clown attire.

Figure 4. Chocolat Dancing In Bar Darchille. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1896.

Cha-u-ka-o’s rejection of colour, wearing all black with only a yellow frill and ribbon, reads as a minimalist, almost symbolic version of a clown (see Figure 5). Her costume appears as a parody of “the distinctive, flamboyant and highly decorated Victorian clown costume, complete with white face and stylized make-up” (Barbieri 288) made famous by Joseph Grimaldi (see Figure 6). In Barbieri’s analysis of the relationship between performativity and costume, she cites Shakespearean clown Launcelot from The Merchant of Venice, whose “language allows the

22 audience to sense that the character is stupid, but the actor is clever – clever enough to mock the character he plays. This suggests an ‘actor-character’ dichotomy, characteristic of the clown … who stands away from the action to comment upon it” (284). This self-aware actor-character dichotomy that Barbieri describes appears in Cha-u-ka-o’s costume. The token elements from the pseudo-Elizabethan Victorian clown style, a wig and a neck frill, seem to mock themselves. Within Montmartre’s climate of cultural obsession with the artist-clown archetype, Cha-u-ka-o’s cocky, minimalist clown costume performs as a parody of the very role it represents.

Figure 5. La Clownesse Cha-u-ka-o at the Moulin Rouge. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1895.

The placement of Cha-u-ka-o’s yellow frill around her shoulders reads initially as an odd choice. It is not a classic clown collar that fits tightly around her neck, nor is it a tutu worn around her hips. It appears as though Cha-u-ka-o is wearing her skirt around her neck. David Carlyon posits that “[h]istoriography’s erasure of sex from nineteenth-century circus fits the

23 conventional view of circus as small, sweet, and innocent but misses evidence in plain sight” (47). This evidence, Carlyon argues, includes how in “the most repeated image in the century’s circus art and advertising, the men are placed precisely as if they are looking up the woman’s skirt” (38). This focus on the female crotch is furthered by the “[n]ickname for tights, ‘symmetricals,’ suggesting two lines with a common axis” (Carlyon 36). The full skirts of Moulin Rouge dancers also shaped this focal point, where the ambition of the can-can dance was to offer a titillating peek at the dancer’s crotch framed by her skirt, her face virtually invisible. Thus, in wearing her skirt around her neck, Cha-u-ka-o creates a playful inversion of this focus, obscuring her body in a neutral black and framing her face instead. This choice simultaneously reveals her body as powerful and defiant, the strength of her wide-legged stance and the causal position of her hand in pocket read as the masculine observer, not the feminine object.

Figure 6. Joseph Grimaldi. Date & Artist Unknown.

The brilliance of Cha-u-ka-o’s subversive costume choices can only be fully appreciated when one considers that female clowns did not escape a sexualized gaze merely by the nature of their role. Indeed, the male gaze can sexualize truly anything, as “is evident in Felicien Champsaur’s one-act pantomime Lulu (1888) and his later novel Lulu, Roman clownesque (1901)” (Davison 124). The character of Lulu is “an eroticized clown of male fantasy” (Davison 124) (see Figure 7). The pantomime version was performed at the Nouveau Cirque and lewd images of Lulu, verging on pornographic, were drawn by multiple artists of the day. Given the widespread popularity of Lulu, it seems likely that Cha-u-ka-o would have been familiar with this hyper-sexualized clown and thus her costume may have been a direct response to Lulu. By constructing herself as a non-sexual performer in the sexually saturated atmosphere of the Moulin Rouge, Cha-u-ka-o cleverly avoided the erotic victim-dominatrix binary that constrained most female circus performers of the era. In Cha-u-ka-o’s critical, playful approach to costume I discovered a proto-feminist clown.

Figure 7. Lulu, Roman clownesque. Felicien Champsaur, 1900.

25 Evetta Mathews

During the same period, across the ocean in America another proto-feminist clown was making headlines. In 1896, programs for Barnum and Bailey circus advertised “The New Woman supreme in the arena for the first time anywhere. Novel and picturesque exhibition of the assertion of the rights of the twentieth-century girl. … A positive usurpation of the ring in which the man has no part” (Davis 82). In a New York Times interview, Evetta Mathews confidently asserted “a woman can do anything for a living a man can do and do it just as well as a man. All my people laughed at me when I told them I was going into the ring as a clown. But they do not laugh now…” (“Why Miss Williams”). The cultural phenomenon of the New Woman, “whether viewed as a free-spirited, independent, bicycling, intelligent, career-minded ideal or as a sexually degenerate, abnormal, mannish, chain-smoking, child-hating bore,” permeated all realms of the Victorian fin-de-siècle, including the circus arena (Buzwell). Billed as the ‘only lady clown on earth,’ Mathews performed in some of the largest circus rings in America, including Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth. Despite the growing number of female circus clowns and the widespread effects of the New Woman movement, Mathews’ contributions to this popular phenomenon were often dismissed. As Adams and Keene observe, in “newspaper coverage of … Mathews, as for so many other women clowns, she becomes a satirist of traditional mores but the one and only, an anomaly, not a participant in any sort of trend” (186). In a 1912 New York Times article, a suffragist named Miss Cook declared, “[t]here is no class of woman who show better that they have a right to vote than the circus woman, who twice a day prove that they have the courage and endurance of men” (“Suffragists at Tea”). While the suffrage movement claimed circus women for their cause and used their physical feats of strength as proof of women’s equality, circus owners and managers used the New Woman as a marketing strategy, capitalizing on the novelty of this “brand new woman” (Adams and Keene 186). Gillian Arrighi explores how “[n]arratives of ‘new-ness’ and ‘for the first time’ were intrinsic” to the promotional strategies and marketing initiatives of circuses during the Victorian era (177). In this unique relationship between the American circus and modernism, the surge of the suffrage movement coincided with circus managers’ relentless drive for novelty, offering context for the phenomenon of the New Woman arena like the one depicted on a Barnum and

26 Bailey poster featuring Evetta Mathews in a circus ring populated entirely by ‘lady clowns’ and a ‘lady ringmaster’ (see Figure 8). Despite the emancipated tone of the New Woman publicity strategy, circus producers and owners strictly controlled their female employees, forcing them to sign lengthy contracts that outlined morality clauses and “dictated their behaviour on the road” (Adams and Keene 74). Contracts also restricted what female performers were allowed to say to the press. In her interview with the New York Times, Mathews stated “I shall probably stop in this business until I get married. Of course, I hope to get married someday. Every woman does” (“Why Miss Williams”). This statement, no doubt a marketing strategy, strikes a careful balance between the titillating danger of the circus and the wholesome morality of “the single female big-top player ... who desired domesticity over the transient and potentially liberating life of sawdust and spangles” (Davis 95). In fact, no documentation has been found to suggest that Mathews ever married or had children.

Figure 8. The Strobridge Lithographing Company, American, 1867 – 1960.

Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth: The Matthews Sisters and Miss Dunbar, 1896.

Ink on paper, ht2005433. Collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Tibbals Collection.

27 Circus owners and managers also placed severe restrictions on the content of the performances. Hailing from a circus family, Mathews was an accomplished acrobat and contortionist, but James Bailey would not allow her to do either in the ring. Adams and Keene observe that, “[e]ven as women appeared on trapeze wires and in cages with lions and tigers, they did not get access to full physical clowning” (186). What Bailey did seek was the “shock appeal” of Mathews as “the surprisingly aggressive New Woman” (Adams and Keene 186). In one of Mathews’ acts, she sat disguised in the audience beside a young man. She would call “out to the ringmaster through a megaphone, pretending she wanted a job with the circus and that the young man had offered her money not to go, not to make the foolish choice” (Adams and Keene 186). Eventually she would remove her disguise and enter “the ring as a clown: as a woman who had already made the shocking choice, beyond the appeals of any one young man” (Adams and Keene 186). New Woman numbers were common among acrobats, equestrian performers, animal trainers and strong women. However, these athletic women were almost always nearly nude; scantily clad in body suits, short skirts and sleeveless tops. This “respectable” nudity, Janet M. Davis argues, was yet another elaborate marketing scheme, demonstrating how “showmen were keenly aware of circus women’s transgressive potential. As a result, they repositioned these strong, athletic, travelling women into traditional gender categories: as models of domestic womanliness, and as objects of titillation” (83). Most Victorian clown costumes worn by male performers “share a common performative aesthetic. They are often grotesque, exaggerated, drawing attention to the body underneath through their too tight fit or being too large” (Barbieri 291). Mathews’ colourful costume as pictured on the Barnum and Bailey’s poster is reminiscent of these traditionally male clown costumes (see Figure 9). Her too-large bloomers and frilly tunic obscure her body, complicating her image as a mere sexualized object. Within a climate of objectified female circus costumes, Evetta Mathews donned the traditional clown garb of her male colleagues in a successful attempt to subvert a sexualized marketing scheme and create new rules for the New Woman of the circus ring.

Figure 9. The Strobridge Lithographing Company, American, 1867 – 1960

Barnum & Bailey: Evetta Lady Clown, 1895

Ink on paper, 1 sheet (V): 38 1/4 x 28 1/2 in. (97.2 x 72.4 cm), ht2000167

Collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Tibbals Collection.

A more authentic representation of Mathews’ clown may be found in a series of photographs taken by Emil Constant Puyo, circa 1895. Puyo was a leading advocate of the Pictorialist movement that “championed the manipulation of photographs as a means of creating images not simply in recording reality but as expressions of beauty and emotion on par with other art forms” (Museum of Contemporary Photography). Given the artistic focus of Puyo, it can be inferred that these images are not circus publicity photos but rather an exploration of Mathews’ clown in a form where the favourite subjects were “[w]omen posed with flowers or situated in idyllic landscapes ... whose images often sought to create a feminine ideal” (Museum of Contemporary Photography).

Figure 10. Evetta the Lady Clown, photographed by Emil Constant Puyo, circa 1895.

It is unclear how much agency Mathews had in shaping the content of the photos, but the action does appear to be driven by the relationship between Mathews and the doll-child that appears in the photos. In this series of nine photographs, Mathews is playing with a doll-child, conjuring iconic scenes of domesticity and motherhood. Against a canvas backdrop that evokes the backstage of a circus tent, Mathews appears in a stripped-down version of her clown costume with no discernable face makeup. In a juxtaposition of the feminine ideal found in most of the photos, one photo shows Mathews lying on her stomach on a bearskin rug, gleefully blowing cigarette smoke into the face of the doll-child (see Figure 11). This behind-the-scenes look at the New Woman clown shows a multi-faceted persona, a complex character who is both embracing and rejecting cultural norms of femininity.

Figure 11. Evetta the Lady Clown, photographed by Emil Constant Puyo, circa 1895.

“The clown will always try to think through a given situation and either fail because of a hopeless inability to understand the rules or succeed because of a limitless ability to invent new rules” (McManus 15). Employing the cleverness of their clowns, both Mathews and Cha-u-ka-o managed to reject, parody, and reinvent the rules that governed their gender and create transgressive performances that have gone unrecognized in the canon of clown history for far too long. Cha-u-ka-o and Mathews adopted elements of clown iconography in their costumes that served to position them within the male-dominated profession of clowning, whilst simultaneously rejecting elements that sexually objectified their bodies and performances. There are many rules that shape the art of clowning, but the most sacred of these is the decree to break all the rules. Mathews and Cha-u-ka-o broke the rules and, in so doing, wrote a set of new rules, a strategy that would define subversive female clowning practices of the twentieth century. Investigating the case studies of these two proto-feminist clowns, I discovered some hilarious, rebellious ancestors. The next step was to undertake a somatic investigation of these ancestors, to listen to their bones and hear them sing (Kelly 211).

Bridge of Jests

In conceiving of my Practice as Research experiment Bridge of Jests, I was driven by the clown rule: take us into your world and bring us out with a new understanding. I desired to go into the world of Cha-u-ka-o and Evetta Matthews in order to better imagine their work and politics. Working with the historiographical material I had discovered, the impetus of this project became to reanimate these historical clowns through my own clowning practice. As a primarily physical, non-text-based form, the historical archives of clowns, particularly female ones, rarely contain scripts of their performances. Understanding that I could not revive these clowns the way one might restage a piece of long-forgotten text, I instead set out to ask: what could I learn about these performers and their performances by inhabiting their costumes and their images? My methodology for this research project was informed by Diana Taylor’s understanding of the ways in which “[e]mbodied and performed acts generate, record, and transmit knowledge” (21). Taylor’s concept of embodied knowledge in The Archive and the Repertoire motivated me to access knowledge about these historical female clowns via the repertoire, which Taylor asserts “enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non-reproducible knowledge” (20). The repertoire I accessed was informed by clown ways of knowing from my Pochinko training. I incorporated several Pochinko clown techniques into my process allowing for an immersive experience that invited the possibility of the magical space into the research. In order to move from being inspired by these historical clowns, to being in-spirited by them, I applied the walking something through your body exercise to inhabit Mathews and Cha-u-ka-o. I breathed their names through my body and discovered what was in their imaginative worlds. I also used clustering and god poems to generate images and desires for their turns. The ‘clown turn’ is a term used to indicate a short, physical, often wordless, performance. Veronica Coburn and Sue Morrison note that the choice of the term “is interesting. To turn, to turn around. Implied is the idea of a flip side, another side, what is presented and what is revelled” (261). To create these turns I clustered ‘images and desires of myself as the ultimate only lady clown’ for Mathews and ‘images and desires of myself as the ultimate chaotic cancan’ for Cha-u-ka-o. I also created a cluster for the entire piece: images and desires of myself as the ultimate

32 transgression. Taylor describes how, etymologically, repertoire means “‘a treasury, an inventory,’” which “also allows for individual agency, referring also to ‘the finder, discoverer,’ and meaning ‘to find out’” (20). Accessing a repertoire of clown knowledge via my Pochinko clown training allowed me to discover embodied data within the inventory of the imaginative world. I used this data to give both Evetta Mathews and Cha-u-ka-o a turn. In the Evetta Mathews turn I wore a long Victorian petticoat, which weighed a ton and greatly inhibited my movements as I attempted to juggle, stand on one foot, and turn a somersault. I also wore a white apron, a symbol of the expectations of domesticity that were constantly thrust upon Mathews. After I turned the somersault, a baby doll shot out from under my apron, surprising both the audience and my clown. Recovering from the initial shock, I became momentarily delighted with the baby doll. The soft cloth body of my doll prop offered some delightful gifts from the gods as the doll would not stay upright when I sat her on the suitcase. Gifts from the gods are unexpected things that occur during a clown performance. If accepted as a gift by the clown, they can illuminate the story in surprising ways. My confusion at the baby doll’s inability to sit up by herself conveyed the hilarious bewilderment of a new mother with her unplanned child. During the turn I chose to have Evetta smoke a cigarette and blow smoke in the face of her doll child as a way of inhabiting the image from the Puyo photograph. Somatically, the gesture felt both shocking and pleasurably naughty, an action that epitomized the New Woman trying to have it all: juggling being a modern woman, a professional clown and also a mother. But I wanted to discover a narrative motivation for the act. As the cries and wails of the baby doll increased in fervor, I became increasingly distraught, accidently blowing smoke in my baby doll’s face during my attempts to soothe. Finally, in an act of desperation, I threw the baby doll into a suitcase, accidentally killing her.

Figure 12. Ethan Mitchell and Jacqueline Russell in Bridge of Jests. 2019.

Inspired by Cha-u-ka-o’s chaotic parody of the can-can, I entered her turn with a frilly tutu draped around my neck, from which two small puppet legs emerged, and began to dance to Offenbach’s “Infernal Galop” (also known as the can-can song). The puppet legs were attached to stretchy nylons which meant that as the dance progressed the movements could become increasingly frenzied, the legs flying over my shoulders, spinning like pin wheels and knocking over the musician’s air horn. As I sat down to take a well-earned post-can-can rest, a long droopy labium slid out of my bloomers, scored by a slide whistle. Embarrassed, I quickly tried to shove it back up. Then two labial lips slipped out. Again, I tried desperately to hide them. Finally, I used clown logic to solve the problem by beginning to dance the can-can using my labia. The labia can-can became increasingly chaotic, with the labia eventually transforming into wings allowing me to fly (see Figure 13).

Figure 13. Ethan Mitchell and Jacqueline Russell in Bridge of Jests. 2019.

After creating the structure for the Evetta and Cha-u-ka-o turns, I realized that the piece was calling for another clown, to fulfill the rule of three. The rule of three is a clown rule often used to structure clown performance: things are funnier in threes. So, I began to search for a third clown. I discovered the myth of Baubo in Frances Gray’s Women and Laughter. Baubo, a female clown/trickster/fool archetype and oft-forgotten character in the Persephone/Demeter myth, manages to “make Demeter laugh in the midst of her grief and anger over the loss of her daughter Persephone” (Hyde 336) (see Figure 14). This version of the myth emphasizes the themes of female laughter and comic subversion I was interested in exploring. The figure of Baubo is widely regarded as, “a symbol of the … transformative energies of women, which combine with women’s resourcefulness and laughter” (Kulish and Holtzman 114). Once I had discovered Baubo, realized that I needed to give her a turn too. I chose to use text from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With The Wolves to incorporate the story of Baubo into the piece, and created ‘the professor’, a clown disguised as a scholar, to speak the words.

Figure 14. Terracotta Baubo figurine from Priene. Date unknown.

I cut the text from Estes’ Baubo myth into three sections and used it to frame the turns. I played a frazzled professor of Greek Mythology, teaching a class of uninterested undergraduate students (the audience) the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The professor had a slide projector and screen, which she used to project the images of Cha-u-ka-o and Evetta Matthews that I had uncovered through my historiographical research. Assisted by an incompetent and disinterested musician, I would run around the stage as the professor, having to do everything myself, a parody of my own bumbling attempts to be a feminist clown/scholar. The character of the professor was a version of myself, as clowns “enter into their clown persona as a way of being more generously themselves” in “whatever material they perform” and “whatever character they present” (Bridel and Lebank viii). Through this exaggerated performance I was able to investigate my process of trying to reconcile my work as a clown and an emerging scholar. At this point I was half-way through the first year of my MFA. I was struggling with my assumptions about the very serious nature of academic work and how to integrate this approach

36 with the playfulness of my clown practice. Embodying this paradox in performance, I surprised myself (a clown rule). The professor, with all her bumbling and fussing, admonishing late comers and breaking props, turned out to be the most ridiculous of all the clowns onstage, while the clown (myself, the creator) turned out to be deadly serious about my message to the world. The seriousness of pleasure was revealed to me through this process, highlighting how “[t]he clown ethos is always present in meaningful scholarly practices, which push us beyond the comfort zone of what we already know” (Lane, Impossibility Aside, 110). The stage was set with a music stand for the professor to lecture from, a table with the musicians’ various bells and whistles (i.e. cowbells, slide whistles and other circus-inspired instruments), and a projection screen for the images of historical clowns. Across the rest of the stage, a dozen suitcases and trunks were strewn in a haphazard manner with old fashioned clown costumes spilling out. The suitcases and trunks represented the metaphorical historical archive I was digging through, as well as evoking the transient lifestyle of the undomesticated New Woman clown. Each time I prepared for my turn as Evetta or Cha-u-ka-o, I would rummage through the suitcases searching for the right costume item, enacting the hunt for a piece of feminist clown history underneath all the male-coded costumes at the top of the suitcases. Once I had located the correct costume, I would rush backstage to change and then make a grand entrance as the musician hyped the audience to cheer and applaud, re-enacting the whoops and cheers these historical female clowns would have incited in the circus ring or Moulin Rouge. I wanted my research in Bridge of Jests to consider why the knowledge of these proto- feminist clown ancestors had disappeared. Reflecting on the attitudes and biases that have contributed to the erasure of women from clowning history led me to Christopher Hitchens’ theory that women and humour are antithetical. “There is no question,” argued Hitchens in 2008, “that for women, the need or ability to be funny is tremendously less than it is among men” (“Why Women Still Aren’t Funny”). It is easy to write off this arrogant assertion as merely the ramblings of a blowhard, but the trouble with Hitchens is that his views represent a permeating cultural attitude towards women in comedy. Similar assertions were made over a century ago, with a 1909 newspaper article claiming that “you do not find much in [women] to arouse your sense of humour…. Measured by the ordinary standards of humour she is about as comical as a crutch” (qtd. in Martin and Segrave 13). Just as Evetta Mathews was hailed as the exception, i.e. ‘The Only Lady Clown,’ Hitchens identifies certain “Jewish Bull Dyke comedians” (“Why

37 Women Still Aren’t Funny”) as a concession of a few funny women but denies a sense of humour to the female gender as a whole. In a study on gender bias in humour perception, Emma Speer notes how “[t]he stereotype of the unfunny female pervades throughout culture and history” (4). The distressing impact of this “humourless” stereotype lies in its dehumanization. “Being able to laugh and to be funny” observes Maxine Hong Kingston, “are really important human characteristics, and when we say that people don’t have those characteristics, then we deny them their humanity” (qtd. in Speer 3). Bridge of Jests aimed to recover the history of female clowns and, in doing so, respond to Hitchens, arguing that for women the need and ability to be funny is tremendous. Hitchens claims, “[t]hose who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous” (“Why Women Aren’t Funny” 5). In this statement, he misunderstands the symbiotic relationship between tragedy and comedy, grief and joy, sorrow and laughter. “What would happiness be that is not measured by the immeasurable grief of what is?” asks the philosopher Adorno (qtd. in Salverson 38). Hitchens also greatly underestimates the ability of the clown to navigate dark material with humour and embody paradox. Clowns have been playing at death since primordial times (see Boussiac). Enacting the death of a child became an echo of the Demeter story and a response to Hitchens’ declaration that women’s biological function as mothers imbues them with a “seriousness and solemnity” that prevents them from having a sense of humour (“Why Women Aren’t Funny” 3). “[O]ne pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like” Hitchens writes (“Why Women Aren’t Funny” 5). At the end of the Evetta Matthews turn, after performing a short funeral for the baby doll, I closed the lid of the “pathetically small coffin”/suitcase, squared my shoulders, picked up the suitcase and exited the stage. The audience laughed, confirming that, for women as well as men, life is both horrifically serious and absurdly hilarious. Hitchens’ theories continued to intrude, haunting my process. “Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she’s just had?” Hitchens taunts (“Why Women Aren’t Funny” 5). One of the central images in the Cha-u-ka-o turn was the flying labia wings. The image first came to me in a dream many years ago. It became a reoccurring dream that has long demanded my attention. In every version of the dream I am flapping my extremely long labia and flying. The image re-emerged in one of my Cha-u-ka-o clusters and god poems. The

38 image of the flying labia also mirrored the way that Baubo’s act of anasyrma (the lifting of one's skirt to display the genitals) is similar to the act of a can-can dancer. While psychologists primarily think of anasyrma as an act of seduction and entertainment (as in can-can dancing), historically and philosophically, it can be an act that evokes fear, or one that evokes surprise and laughter. I inferred from the shrieks of laughter and shock from the audience during the labia can-can that I evoked both laughter and a little fear. One audience member remarked afterwards “the labia was a bit much.” I chose to use this ancient act in my piece in a comical way, “to develop a radical new women-centred mythology which offers a creative interweaving of pasts, presents and imagined futures” (Babbage 13). Women, Hitchens argues “do not find their own physical decay” hysterically funny the same way men do (“Why Women Aren’t Funny” 3). But long, droopy, labia lips dancing the can-can refuted Hitchens’ theory. Eventually the labia transformed into wings and I began to fly, embodying the image from my dream as well as echoing the Demeter myth of flying “out over the land like a great bird” (Pinkola Estés 366). The pleasure of this moment continued to build, bringing me to a place of euphoric orgasm cut short by the sound of a cap gun. The musician took aim and I crumpled to the floor. A long moment of silence followed. I slowly stood up, removed my costume and returned to the music stand. During this sustained moment, an audio recording of a Christopher Hitchens’ interview played, uttering a haunting rhetoric that funny women have endured for centuries: [W]hat I think is my strongest point, namely that women don't need to be funny. That for most men, if they can't make women laugh, they are out of the evolutionary context. ... If you can't make them laugh, you don't have a chance with women. There's no need to be rendering yourself attractive to men in that way. We already find you attractive. Thanks. (“Why Women Still Aren’t Funny”) In the recording Hitchens situates female humour as being solely for male consumption, ignoring women’s need and ability to be funny for each other. He also describes “the sweet surrender of female laughter,” implying that laughter is somehow passive, an indication of being conquered by a man, as supposed to an autonomous experience (Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny” 2). The recording of Hitchens’ assertions juxtaposed against the riotous laughter I had just incited revealed his folly. It was evident that the transgressive potential of Baubo’s act to incite laughter and the power of Demeter’s laughter to restore life to the world elude Hitchens entirely.

39 Bridge of Jests concluded with the final portion of the Demeter and Persephone myth. Here I dropped the professor’s melodramatic delivery and instead allowed the words to be spoken simply, as myself, the clown: this woman [Baubo] danced up to Demeter wiggling her hips in a [suggestive way] and shaking her breasts in her little dance. And when Demeter saw her, she could not help but smile just a little. The dancing female was very magical indeed, for she had no head whatsoever, and her nipples were her eyes and her vulva was her mouth. It was through this lovely mouth that she began to regale Demeter with some [of the filthiest fucking jokes you’ve ever heard]5. Demeter began to smile, and then chuckled, and then gave a full belly laugh. (Pinkola Estés 366) The title Bridge of Jests refers to the gephyrismoi (translates as bridge jests) from the Eleusinian Mysteries. The Eleusinian Mysteries, also known as the Rites of Demeter, were yearly secret rituals of the cult of Demeter, observed regularly from c. 1600 BCE - 392 CE. The gephyrismoi was the portion of these rites that involved “dirty jokes, songs and dances performed by a woman” (Gray 1). The associated gestures of the ritual the “ana surami = lifting the skirt” and “aischrologia = indulging in indecent speech or joking” were a re-enactment of Baubo’s pivotal role in the Demeter/Persephone myth (Kulish and Holtzman 109).6 Baubo arrived as the third clown in my research to reveal the primordial roots of the feminist clown ancestors I was searching for. For the final moment of Bridge of Jests, I chose an audio recording of a group of women laughing to fill the space as images of Evetta Mathews, Cha-u-ka-o and Baubo played on the projection screen. The laughter on the recording was guttural, wild and rude. The kind of shrieks and snorts I have only experienced in the company of other women. After watching the images for a short time, I stepped in front of the screen, allowing the pictures to be projected directly onto my female clown body, and began to laugh too, discovering myself inside the feminist clown lineage I had been searching for (see Figure 15). A palimpsestic layering of female clown bodies, bones and flesh reanimated through collective laughter. Together we laughed at the absurdity of Hitchens’ theories, we laughed at a world that thinks women do not have the need or

5 I improvised this line. The original line in Pinkola Estés’ text is “It was through this lovely mouth that she began to regale Demeter with some nice juicy jokes”. 6 The feminist possibilities of these rites are discussed at length in the introduction of Frances Gray’s Women and Laughter.

40 ability to be funny, we laughed for and with each other, just as Baubo and Demeter had. We laughed because “laughing is the ultimate gesture that both sanctions and liberates” (Boussiac 170). Frances Gray proposes that laughter, “like nuclear energy, is power, to which we can relate in a number of ways. … If feminism is to change all that needs to be changed, therefore, it is essential for women to clarify their relationship to laughter” (33). This research experiment offered me a felt experience of my own relationship to laughter, the ways in which the need and ability to laugh are tied to my experiences of autonomy and equality. Using the corporeal act of clowning to revive the lives and performances of proto-feminist clowns through my repertoire of clown techniques, I realized that laughter is the bridge that connects us. Embodying the pleasures and possibilities of Cha-u-ka-o, Evetta Matthews and Baubo’s turns revealed a fundamental feminist tendency at the intersection of women and clowning. A transgressive and rebellious clown energy aimed at breaking all the rules.

Figure 15. Jacqueline Russell in Bridge of Jests. 2019.

41 Chapter Two: Poison-Tipped Arrows: The Personal Clown is Political

Having situated myself in a historical lineage through communion with my clown ancestors, I turn towards a more contemporary lineage. Karen Hines is widely recognized in Canadian theatre for her work as a playwright, dramaturg and director, but her innovative contributions to Canadian clowning are equally substantive. Hines’ work as a clown performer and teacher spans three decades, from the 1990s to the present, connecting my examination of the history of feminist clowning to the contemporary moment. The 1990s were marked by a shift towards neo-liberalism, which “recognizes and prioritizes the individual’s right to seek self- fulfilment and to do so in conditions unrestricted by state-instituted regulations. … In neo-liberal capitalism, these principles of diminished state intervention and enhanced individual liberty to seek self-reward work in the service of maximizing private profit” (Harvie 12). A parallel ideology emerged during this period, post-feminism, “an ideology that subtly undermines feminist activism by shoring up ideals of individualism, choice and empowerment” (Kandil and MacArthur 159). Post-feminism claimed that the collective struggle for gender and social justice was over, replaced by the individual quest for self-actualization. Elin Diamond, Denise Varney, and Candice Amich argue that these two ideologies are intimately linked, that “[p]ostfeminism is the happy creature of neo-liberalism,” given that neo-liberalism is the “restoration of patriarchal power, reconstituted less in terms of the family and the state than by the ‘invisible hand’ of corporate capital” (3). Responding to the increasingly individualistic, narcissistic, and destructive forces of the 1990s, Karen Hines created “a clown for our times” (Pochinko qtd. in Wallace). Merging her training in clown and bouffon, Hines generated Pochsy, “a kewpie with a toxic 50-50 cocktail of charm and vitriol pumping through her tiny veins” (Nicholls “Acid Meditations”). Through Pochsy, Hines invented a new clowning technique which she called neo-bouffon, allowing her “to wander into some horrific territory while still keeping the whole thing planted squarely in the realm of comedy” (The Pochsy Plays 14). Hines utilized this new technique to create Pochsy’s Lips (1992), Oh, baby! (1993) and, ten years later, Citizen Pochsy (2003). Through the political critique of her clown, Hines uses the performance strategies of bouffon to deconstruct and parody neo-liberal, capitalist, and post-feminist ideologies, and to investigate both her own complicity and the complicity of her audience in the absurd horrors of the times.

42 In the late 1980s, Hines was just another young actor in Toronto. While she was making a living as an actor, paying her bills by doing TV movies of the week where “the words practically catch … [in] your throat” was less than creatively fulfilling (10). Hines was also studying and performing improv with Second City, which she enjoyed but found that “[t]here was an economic imperative to some of what we could or couldn’t do” (11). 7 For Hines “none of it was quite satisfying” (11). Hines heard about the brilliance of clown teacher Richard Pochinko from friend Sandra Shamas, who credited Pochinko with her “capacities as a performer, mostly in terms of her ability to listen to the audience” but while Hines encouraged John Turner and Michael Kennard8 to take the training, she remained indifferent: “I was not interested in clown. I thought it was wussy” (2). After watching Kennard and Turner go through an incredible transformation, she eventually decided to take the class, discovering through her classmates’ performances that clown could be dark and edgy. Pochinko sought to re-infuse clown performance with its original subversiveness, creating a clowning practice “built on the principles of insurrectionary beauty, ingenious love, reverent justice, rigorous equality and rowdy bliss” (qtd. in Wallace). Central to Pochinko’s belief about clowning is the concept that “[i]f we ever faced all directions of ourselves at once, we could only laugh at the beauty of our own ridiculousness” (qtd. in Coburn and Morrison 27). Stemming from the belief that “the creative self can be understood as a sphere with an infinite number of points equidistant from a single, central point – the central point being the self” (Turner qtd. in Lane Impossibility Aside 25), six masks are created during Pochinko clown training that are expressions of the creative self. By facing oneself through this imaginative process, a “personal clown” is born. While Hines found the Pochinko work transformational in uncovering her personal clown, she still hadn’t found the clowning style she was seeking. “Even after studying with Pochinko and knowing that it was brilliant teaching, I still hated everything I did as a clown. I was very, very cute” recalls Hines (2). A few years later in 1990, Hines, Kennard and Turner travelled to Paris to study with renowned clown and bouffon teacher Phillipe Gaulier. Originally developed by Jacques LeCoq and expanded by Phillipe Gaulier in the 1960s and 1970s, bouffon is a grotesque and satirical

7 The Second City is an improvisational comedy company. Based in Chicago, there are training centres and live theatres in Toronto and Los Angles. 8 Michael Kennard and John Turner are Canadian clown duo Mump and Smoot. Hines is their director. Kennard, Turner and Hines have been collaborating together for over 30 years.

43 style of clown performance that explores the politics of oppression. The central components of bouffon are “the unholy trinity of … charm, parody/imitation, and affliction” (Hines qtd. in Lane “The C/a/r/tography” 5). In Gaulier’s training, affliction is expressed by performers padding their bodies with lumps and deformities, often with amputated limbs, representing grotesque and afflicted people of society, those deemed ugly and outcast. Bouffon performance also requires a point of attack, a designation of what is being parodied. The legend of the bouffon, invented by LeCoq and “based in the conditions and folklore of medieval Europe” describes the origins of the bouffon and their performative aims (Lane “The C/a/r/tography” 4). In the story, there is a village where the beautiful people live. The afflicted people are banished to the swamp. Once per year, the bouffons arrive in the village to perform for the beautiful people and, through the cleverness of the bouffons’ performance, through their charm and parody, they aim to reflect the grotesqueness of the villagers so well that “[t]he beautiful people will look at themselves in the mirror and see only distorted, hideous faces starting back at them. They will feel their own internal darkness squeezing life from their vital organs” (Lane “The C/a/r/tography” 4). Haunted by the bouffons’ charming parodies, the beautiful people eventually take their own lives “[f]or how could they live now that they have seen the ugliness inside of themselves?” (Lane “The C/a/r/tography” 4). This legend shapes the political objective of bouffon, to parody the horrors of the world with such skill as to create a new world where the outcasts can reclaim the village. 9 During her bouffon training, Hines recalls watching Gaulier coach another student through an exercise, singing “I Want to Be Loved by You” while inhabiting a padded and deformed body. “For me, it was a seminal exercise. Everything was so clear there. The parody, the affliction and the point of attack” (4). As bouffon became increasingly compelling for Hines, she began to reflect on how Gaulier was implementing the work. While intrigued by its satirical and political potential, Hines thought “[i]t seemed ill-mannered and ill-advised, not to mention deeply insensitive, for an apparently able-bodied performer like myself to ‘use’ affliction on stage” (The Pochsy Plays 12). She recalls being surprised when, towards the end of the workshop, the students were invited to come to class as contemporary bouffon and most of the students showed up as homeless people. “Yes, they’re outcast. But where is the parody? Where is the point of attack?”, Hines asked herself (4).

9 For the full story see Julia Lane’s “The C/a/r/tography”.

44 In order to address these problematic aspects of bouffon as conceptualized by Le Coq and Gaulier, Hines drew from her training with Pochinko to fuse the aims of the personal clown to “laugh at the beauty of our own ridiculousness” with bouffon performance strategies to create a personal bouffon that could laugh not only at the beauty, but also the horror of one’s own ridiculousness (Pochinko qtd. in Coburn and Morrison 27). Once she returned to Canada, Hines began to experiment, merging her training to create a personal bouffon named Pochsy. Pochsy, pronounced “poxy,” is an anagram of “psycho,” illustrating the mental and physical “dis-ease” of Hines’ bouffon, who suffers from mercury poisoning. Before she knew very much about the clown or the imaginative world, “[o]ne of the first clusters I did was images and desires of myself as Pochsy,” says Hines (8). One of the circles from the cluster – “wet head in my bed” – became the inspiration for the white medical bandages that Pochsy wears around her head in Pochsy’s Lips. Another crucial detail that emerged during this creation period was Pochsy’s affliction. Using mercury poisoning as “both as an affliction and a crime” became the driving metaphor for Pochsy, with “white heterosexual North America” as the point of attack (The Pochsy Plays 13-14). This internal affliction allowed Hines to create the foundation of her new approach to bouffon, centered on the idea of parodying the artist’s own complicity, as well as the audience’s complicity, in the horrors of the world; making the personal clown political. Hines would eventually name this new approach neo-bouffon, a term that has gained widespread use since Hines first coined it. In the traditional approach to bouffon, critical questions arise about attacking an audience who no longer represent the beautiful— read privileged — people of medieval times. In neo-bouffon performance, Hines explains “[t]he audience is not put on the defensive by a ‘them’ who comes to attack ‘us’ (and can therefore easily be dismissed as wrong and be destroyed with impunity), but is rather put at ease by ‘one of us’ who entertains in a way that we can ‘laugh at [and] hum along with’” (qtd. in Lane “The C/a/r/tography” 6). In Pochsy, proclaimed by one reviewer as “the perfect clown creation for our times – she is sweet on the surface, bitter at the core” (Kaplan and Lawless), Hines found the artistic satisfaction she had been seeking, a way to use clown to “go so much deeper. The comedy [could] be so much darker” (11). “Wrapping disturbing and macabre content in the slick, heart-tugging package of popular song and advertising” allowed Hines to use parody, charm and affliction to deconstruct her own complicity in the neo-liberal, capitalist and post-feminist concerns of the 1990s and 2000s (Kaplan and Lawless).

45 Elaine Aston notes how, during the 1990s, “having to contend with feminism as an unfashionable ‘ism’,” many women playwrights were “anxious not to be over-determined by the ‘woman’ label” (18). However, while women dramatists did not explicitly attach their work to feminism, Aston argues that “their work lays claim to a renewal of feminism through the adoption of various dramaturgies and aesthetics that work affectively on audiences so that they might feel the loss of feminism, and all, … that this loss might entail” (19). Using neo-bouffon techniques to respond to the cultural climate of the 1990s and 2000s, the Pochsy plays embody this felt loss of feminism through Hines’ parody of post-feminist and neo-liberal ideologies. Unpacking the phenomenon of a post-feminist perspective that began in the 1990s, feminist sociologist Angela McRobbie describes the perception that “[w]hat once may have had some role to play on the historical stage is no longer needed: feminism is associated with the past and with old and unglamorous women” (180). Post-feminism was responding to the boisterous feminism of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, where “[f]atigued by the idea of second-wave feminism, a third-wave generation of women were ‘sold’ on the post-feminist promise of personal freedom and empowerment” (Aston 24). McRobbie also argues that at this time post- feminism and neo-liberalism became inexorably linked in a “subtle process of marketisation, whereby the potential of young women comes to be attached to a new form of consumer citizenship” (182). Through Pochsy, “a human echo chamber for the slogans, the self-help truisms, the catchphrases of the age,” Hines is in dialogue with the cultural influences of neo- liberalism and post-feminism in the 1990s and early 2000s (Nicholls “Acid Meditations”).

Pochsy’s Lips

Hines’ first appearance as Pochsy in Pochsy’s Lips in 1992 begins with the line, “We live in a scary time” (25). After describing the terribleness of “ever-accelerating environmental poisoning, a continuing apocalyptic threat and mysterious and uncontrollable disease”, Pochsy then reveals an even scarier syndrome, singing brightly, “Everything’s falling apart, But everyone’s falling in love” (25). In Pochsy’s Lips, Hines dissects the obsessive preoccupation with the body and the self-policing gaze of post-feminist media culture and embodies the true horrors of neo-liberalism, loneliness and disconnection. Pochsy first appears clad in pink baby- doll pajamas, her head wrapped in white gauze and attached to an IV pole. She prances around

46 her hospital room, fantasizing about glamorous Hollywood romantic scenarios. Pochsy is dying, most likely from mercury poisoning, but she seems unconcerned, theorizing that the reason she is sick is due to the squid where her heart should be. This squid can be read as a symbol of the narcissistic core of Pochsy, a monster whose tentacles threaten to choke her at times. Pochsy hopes that a romantic hero will arrive to take the squid away, unaware that she is cause of her own chronic loneliness and isolation. Pochsy’s Lips explores Pochsy’s “delicate, mysterious relationship with her own death,” a parody of humanity’s self-destructive choices and apocalyptic tendencies (Nicholls “Pochsy’s Lips”).

Figure 16. Karen Hines in Pochsy’s Lips. 1992.

“One of the most striking aspects of post-feminist media culture is its obsessive preoccupation with the body,” observes Rosalind Gill (149). Pochsy embodies this “obsessive preoccupation” completely. Pochsy has been admitted to the ward of a hospital, awaiting the arrival of her doctor, with whom she is in love. “You know,” Pochsy declares, “I think it’s very important, even when you’re not feeling well, to look your very best!” (30). She then sings:

47 When you’re looking good, You feel good. And when you feel good, You look gre-e-eat! (30). This song nicely sums up the trap of post-feminism’s bodily focus, where “[t]he body is presented simultaneously as women’s source of power and as always unruly, requiring constant monitoring, surveillance, discipline and remodeling (and consumer spending) in order to conform to ever-narrower judgements of female attractiveness” (Gill 149). Following this cheerful jingle about looking great, Pochsy applies red blush to her face, explaining in the tone of a television commercial that it “[s]tarts off as a powder, but goes on so smooth and creamy…. It makes you seem lit from within” (31). With Pochsy’s next line, “Is that about right? Oh, I know, what’s right, right? I mean it’s so individual,” Hines then attacks the post-feminist notion of individualism and choice (31). Hines draws attention to the ironic notion of “individual” beauty in a consumer-driven society, drowning in images of how women should look and feel, not only through her words but also her physical actions on stage: her constant monitoring of the placement of her pink pajamas and her diligent surveillance of her body positioning. Neo-liberalism has played a role in a variety of crises in the past 30 years: the collapse of eco systems, the erosion of public health and education. But perhaps the most personal crisis to manifest has been the epidemic of loneliness (see Monbiot). As the play progresses, Pochsy’s deep loneliness is revealed, from the get-well card from her co-workers that she has clearly written herself, to the image of Pochsy dancing with her IV pole as she enacts a filmic scene where a “small Nebraska-town doctor” arrives to save her from her loneliness “[a]s he touches the squid in me” (35, 38). Pochsy thinks mournfully about “all the sad and lonely people who wander through their whole lives without ever finding (gravely) that special someone,” but then declares “it’s probably their own fault. They just don’t have a positive attitude” (27), parodying the neo-liberal myth of individuality where “everyone gets what they deserve” (Monbiot). After realizing that the small Nebraska-town doctor of her fantasies “never actually washed away the squid – he simply anaesthetized it temporarily,” Pochsy’s fantasies become increasingly fevered, traversing a beach where a small child feeds “Minute Rice to a three-legged bird,” to a boxing ring with Mickey Rourke to the road less travelled, which is very crowded, all

48 the while chasing a “shiny, sparkling thing,” leading towards her own death (44, 47, 48). In a post-feminist world, “[p]atriarchal power is stealthily handed over to the self-punishing regime of the fashion and beauty industry, which has the added value of promoting the idea that women self-police and have become their own toughest judges” (McRobbie 183). Thus, as Hines performs a series of convulsive physical eruptions, even in death Pochsy continues to self-police her physical appearance. After she collapses, “[t]here is a long silence as she realizes she is in an ugly pose. She smiles for the audience, points her toes, then speaks with great difficulty” (stage direction 50). Through Pochsy, Hines is examining the post-feminist gaze, “a shift in the way power operates from an external, male judging gaze to a self-policing, narcissistic gaze” (Gill 152). Gill argues that this gaze “represents a higher or deeper form of exploitation than objectification — one in which the objectifying male gaze is internalized to form a new disciplinary regime” (152). Pochsy physicalizes this “self-policing, narcissistic gaze” throughout Pochsy’s Lips, externalizing a grotesque internal affliction (Gill 152). In Pochsy’s Lips, the destructive forces of post-feminism are parodied by the poison-tipped arrows of Pochsy’s words and the gestural commentary of Hines’ body.

Oh, baby!

Themes of obsession about appearance and loneliness become reoccurring motifs for Pochsy, as Hines continued to delve further into the devastating effects of neo-liberal times. After the instantaneous success of Pochsy’s Lips, which toured to fringe festivals across North America, Hines immediately began to create a prequel, Oh, baby! (Pochsy’s Adventures by the Sea), which premiered in the summer of 1993. In Oh, baby!, Hines furthers her eco-criticism by parodying Pochsy’s desire for a baby and the implications of motherhood in an age of eco-catastrophe, while simultaneously exploding the paradoxes of post-feminist media culture. At the beginning of Oh, baby!, perched atop a “gargantuan aqua-blue clam shell” (55), Pochsy claims that she has taken herself on a dream vacation to “the Last Resort” on a lovely “little island just off the coast of the state of Grace” (63). While at the Last Resort, Pochsy places several calls to a dating hotline speaking with various men. “Would you like to have an ‘intimate conversation?’” she asks her first caller, before outright rejecting the notion of intimacy in dating, when she responds, “Oh, good, me neither! What do you look like?” (65). An affliction of post-feminist media

49 culture is the treatment of sexual activity as a disposable commodity: selling women the concept of the new ‘empowered’ woman who has sex ‘like a man’ and can objectify men in a ‘knowing, ironic’, post-feminist way. Gill discusses how, in post-feminist media culture, “achieving desirability in a heterosexual context is explicitly (re-)presented as something done for yourself, not in order to please a man. In this modernized, neo-liberal version of femininity, it is absolutely imperative that one’s sexual and dating practices be presented as freely chosen (However traditional, old-fashioned or inegalitarian they may be)” (Gill 154).

Figure 17. Karen Hines in Oh, baby! 1993.

Pochsy playfully performs this “new sexual contract” as she uses her sexual power to flirt with the men on the hotline (McRobbie 182). With each call she changes her description of herself to fit a traditional model of heteronormative attractiveness. She begins with a relatively accurate account: “Hi. My name’s Pochsy. I’m five feet tall, I have curly hair, and I weight about a hundred pounds,” but then applies the clown rule of more, more, more to arrive eventually at “Hi, my name’s Pochsy. I’m five foot seven, I have long curly blonde hair, and I weigh about,

50 um … sixty pounds” (65, 70). While Pochsy, the character, is performing objectified and objectifying femininity, Hines, the performer, is parodying femininity by commenting on these pop culture narratives. As Pochsy places herself in sexualized poses, Celeste Derksen notes how “Hines will often subtly distort those seductive movements so as to draw attention to, and undermine, their expected effect” (“The Attack Behind” 236). Hines disrupts the gaze, charmingly mirroring back to her audience the absurdities of post-feminist media culture. In Oh, baby!, motherhood, or rather the absence of motherhood, is a predominant area of concern for Pochsy, serving as a performance strategy to explore a growing eco-anxiety. Eco- anxiety, as both a human experience and an area of feminist inquiry, has intensified since Pochsy’s first appearance in the early 1990s. The themes of environmental devastation that appear in the play(s) mirror Hines’ own anxieties: I write … about the world, consumer culture, escapism, narcissism, the land and the animals. Because these things make me anxious. I find that by creating humour around them, albeit black humour, I am released from my anxiety, at least temporarily. My compulsion, my artistic aim, then, is to release others, if only for a moment, so that they can more readily face this dark mirroring of their reality that I’m offering up. It’s purgative. (qtd. in Derksen “Complexion as Metaphor” 37) Hines’ exploration of eco-anxiety brings her into conversation with the gendered binary dimensions of climate change. As Semma Arora-Josson observes, “Dual themes recur throughout the existing though limited literature on gender and climate change – women as vulnerable or women as virtuous in relation to the environment” (qtd. in Probyn 105). But Hines, as Pochsy, manages to avoid this binary, playing both the “victim as well as villain” (Crew). In Oh, baby!, Pochsy confides in the audience that one of the reasons for this vacation is her recent departure from Mercury Packers, where, during a company physical, “the doctor asked me a series of questions, one of which was, did I plan on having any children?” (68). The audience recognizes that Pochsy has been laid-off from the company due to her mercury poisoning and is thus unlikely to be able to have children. But Pochsy remains unaware of these facts, replying to the doctor with a wink, “Why? You offering?” (68). Through her relentless images of environmental devastation, “I went down to the beach to collect some seashells. They were fresh out,” Hines implicates her audience in the question: is motherhood a sensible choice in the current climate crisis (83)? Never one to make sensible choices, in Pochsy’s final speech she

51 reveals her wildest fantasy: “I would like to have a baby. That looks just like me … only littler” (84). The way Hines frames this desire for motherhood, as a “wild fantasy,” furthers the question of motherhood as an eco-dramaturgical strategy. Conversations about eco-criticism and eco-dramaturgy within theatrical performance are a recent addition to the cultural zeitgeist. Hines recognizes that in the early 1990s no one was particularly interested in that dimension of her work, so instead it fuelled her poetry (6). Forging a path of theatrical eco-criticism, Hines continued to investigate the environmental devastation that underpins Pochsy’s world. Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May have identified the eco- dramaturgical concept of “[m]otherhood as both sociopolitical-ecological site and radical strategy” in the work of many contemporary female playwrights (190). They argue that “[m]otherhood can be seen as an organizing index not only of individual experience, but of community and of transglobal events such as dislocation, diaspora, war, environmental injustice, and the ways in which late capitalism rides on the backs of women, children, and families world- wide” (Arons and May 189). Hines uses this concept of motherhood as a global stage in her parody of Pochsy’s fantastical desires for a child in an age of environmental catastrophe. Pochsy paints a bleak image of what her life with her imagined daughter might look like in a post-apocalyptic world: When the time comes, we will move further north, where the wheat still grows. She’ll work at Mercury Packers, in the new branch plant. And she will be exalted. At night she’ll come home from work and we will sit on the front stoop and watch the icebergs float south and listen to the penguins crying way up high. (86) This picture of the futility of motherhood in the face of the current ecological crisis is grim. Pochsy’s relentless optimism about the future makes it all the darker and funnier. That the only future Pochsy can imagine for her child is to work at the very job that has removed the possibility of her having children is both hilarious and devastating. It is one of many moments in which Hines turns the mirror on her audience and draws attention to their passive role as spectators. By laughing at the horrific implications of Pochsy’s imagined future for her child, the same future their own children may face, Hines’ words “suddenly implode with relevance” (Kirchhoff).

52 Citizen Pochsy

Ten years later in 2003, Hines returned to Pochsy, creating another prequel, Citizen Pochsy: Head Movements of a Long Haired Girl, which finds a younger, slightly less-ill Pochsy in an office building, nervously waiting to be audited. In Citizen Pochsy, Hines adds a new layer to Pochsy as metaphor for ‘white, heterosexual, North America,’ exploring her/our complicity in the ways in which neo-liberalism has eroded the notion of citizenship. Throughout Citizen Pochsy, Hines conducts an audit of the neo-liberal trends of the early 2000s: rampant individualism, the compulsive search for self-improvement, the sexualization of young girls and the infantilization of women, and the consequences of post-emotionalism. As Pochsy waits to be audited, she explains how, “[f]or a while I was really into the whole Buddhist thing. But then who wasn’t, right?” (93). She then admits that she is over Buddhism, now she is “sort of a Neo-Buddhist. Or … Post-Buddhist more. All I know for certain is, I just wanna live long enough to be young and beautiful … forever” (93). Pochsy’s philosophy parodies the post-feminist sensibility that requires a constant “focus upon the psychological — the requirement to transform oneself and remodel one’s interior life” (Gill 155). Moments after declaring herself “post-Buddhist,” Pochsy advises, “They say, in Buddhist— mmmm, ‘If you want to know what you were doing in the past, look at your body now. But if you want to know what will happen to you in the future, look at what your mind is doing now” (97). Pochsy’s compulsive search for enlightenment and self-improvement while never really improving is a parody of what Gill terms “the makeover paradigm,” which “[r]equires people (predominantly women) to believe, first, that they or their life is lacking in some way; second, that it is amenable to reinvention or transformation by following the advice of relationship, design or lifestyle experts and practicing appropriately modified consumption habits” (156). In addition to the constant drive for self-improvement, neo-liberalism and post-feminism also create a cultural phenomenon that commodifies the sexualization of young girls and the infantilization of women. While she worries about her upcoming audit, Pochsy confides in her audience that she has a cute dress from Kinderslut on layaway, declaring cheerfully, “I don’t want to have children, but I want to look like one” (130). This “‘girlification’ of adult women,” Gill notes, “is the flipside of a media culture that promotes female children as its most desirable sexual icons” (151). Creating Citizen Pochsy in the early 2000s during the rise of infantilized pop

53 stars like Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton, Hines explodes these commercially driven desires for perpetual youth with a shrewd anecdote from Pochsy: I was walking down the street the other day, and this girl came up to me? And I think she was trying to ask me for directions, but there was something funny about her voice, and something weird with how she walked and something very wrong with her skin. And then I realized: she was old. (118) This comedic observation about our youth worshipping culture “has the rare ability to make the audience laugh while feeling queasy” (Kaplan and Lawless). In fact, most of Pochsy’s remarks have this intended effect, inciting laughter that “catches you by the throat” (Nicholls “Pochsy’s Lips”).

Figure 18. Karen Hines in Citizen Pochsy. 2003.

In her analysis of feeling of the loss of feminism in the work of contemporary women playwrights, Aston points to a dynamic of the post-feminist era, the concept of post- emotionalism: It is a society in which people do not react to what, in an earlier era, would have been stirring occurrences and crises. Rather, individuals have become blasé, allergic to involvement, yet intelligent enough to know that the events are significant, and perhaps even to know that in an earlier era individuals would have responded with deep emotional

54 empathy, or equally deep emotional antipathy, to particular individuals, and to the events surrounding them. (David Riesman qtd. in Aston 22) By embodying this post-emotional type in the persona of Pochsy, one “who knows so much, but is able to feel, genuinely, so little,” Hines creates a space in which her audience can feel horror at the sexualization of young girls, disturbed by environmental devastation, terrified about aging and death (Mestrovic qtd. in Aston 22). As Peter Birnie from the Vancouver Sun observes, Hines exposes afflictions that are so “disturbed and disturbing that it’s a good thing Pochsy is also funny as hell” (“Pochsy: a gem”). One of Pochsy’s symptoms is dementia, caused by her mercury poisoning. This forgetfulness acts as both a comedic and critical strategy throughout all three Pochsy plays. In The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam proposes that “[f]or women and queer people, forgetfulness can be a useful tool for jamming the smooth operations of the normal and the ordinary” (70). For Hines, forgetfulness becomes a tool to draw attention to what is being forgotten, what is being lost. As Pochsy struggles to remember words like “holocaust” and “compassion,” her audience identifies the words before she does, allowing the memory of the words to hover in the silence. In Citizen Pochsy, Pochsy grapples with her civic duties, claiming, “I do understand that I am a citizen of this country and everything, but I mean, yes and no: (irritated) I never even vote” (92). McRobbie reflects that many social scientists have noted that in the post-feminist age, “democratic participation in public life and civic society was downgraded in a context where self-improvement and the need for constant makeovers were considered the best kind of extracurricular activities for young women” (183). Parodying the trading of political engagement for “consumer citizenship,” Pochsy is hyper focused on her appearance, the maintenance of her long beautiful hair and ownership of her “new Pontiac Impatience” (95). In Citizen Pochsy, Hines is simultaneously skewering the societal structures that remove civic agency from workers who are treated as exposable commodities. At the end of the play, Pochsy goes to fling her long hair over her shoulder but it flies off, “underneath the wig, she has very short fucked-up black hair, covered in a thick black hair net” (stage direction 144). Pochsy places her wig into an envelope, seals it and puts it in the box of her audit evidence. This evidence of her affliction, the slow poisoning of mercury in her/our system, betrays the perky promises of consumer citizenship.

55 Through Pochsy, the limits of “being confident” and “leaning in” are exposed. No matter how deeply Pochsy believes in herself, she is still a product of her world. As Pochsy gleefully kicks small children, calls her sister to tell her she was adopted, and bounces cheques for her foster-child, Pochsy impishly oozes neo-liberalism’s most grotesque qualities of narcissism, selfishness and materialism, exposing the afflictions of a post-feminist age. Through Pochsy’s embodiment of “environmental degradation, marketplace morality, spiritual decay, unhappiness, uncertainty and loneliness”, Hines creates “an experiential, viscerally and emotionally-charged articulation of feeling the loss of feminism” (Ledingham; Aston 21). Citizen Pochsy is the last play written but the first sequentially in Pochsy’s life. Both Oh, baby! and Citizen Pochsy are prequels of the play written before them. Examining the trio of plays backwards and forwards, both sequentially and in the order written, illuminates how little has changed in the decade that separates them. Reading the scripts in 2019, twenty-seven years after Pochsy’s Lips premiered, the themes of a looming apocalypse and a population distracted by a post-feminist, neo-liberalist cult of youth, beauty and consumerism feel painfully even more acute. The prequels foreshadow Pochsy’s growing illness, from her termination from Mercury Packers in Oh, baby!, to the loss of her hair in Citizen Pochsy. Small details evolve throughout the plays, like the white bandage on her arm in Citizen Pochsy, which becomes medical bandage- esque head scarf in Oh, baby! and a full-fledged medical head bandage in Pochsy’s Lips. The play cycle also tracks Pochsy’s evolving, or devolving, relationship with God, a parodic take on a North American consumer culture that believes even God is there for our own consumption and immediate gratification. Pochsy sweetly sings to God at the beginning of Pochsy’s Lips, “I’ll believe in you, if you’ll believe in me” (29). But at the end of Pochsy’s Lips, right before her death, Pochsy fires God, decrying, “Dear Lord, I regret to inform You that Your services will no longer be required. Your position has been rendered redundant. Best of luck in Your future endeavours” (49). These words eerily echo Pochsy’s own termination from Mercury Packers, rendering God as disposable as Pochsy herself in the grinding incinerator of late-stage capitalism. Hines plays with the circular nature of the trio, making Pochsy’s lines at the end of Citizen Pochsy, “Oh, well, I guess it’s like they say: the only two sure things in this life are taxes and, um … I forget the other one,” an ominous foreshadowing of Pochsy’s eventual demise in Pochsy’s Lips (149).

56 The thrill of Hines’ performance as Pochsy is cultivated by the tension of watching her walk the very fine line between “innocence and cruelty, sweetness and acidity, darkness and light” (The Pochsy Plays 18). The charm of Pochsy is what allows her to get away with predicting the end of the world, and this charm lies in Hines carefully choreographed parody of a fetishized femininity. The physical precision of Hines’ performance where “[h]er slightest move is deftly choreographed and effective” is combined “with breathy little-girl voice, innocent expressions and stylized gestures” to create a bouffon that is so innocuously charming that Hines can get away with pretty much anything (Kirchhoff; Kaplan “From Pochsy to Napoleon!”). Teachers and performers of bouffon often describe “that bouffon feeling” as the ultimate aim of the bouffon performer. It is a visceral reaction, a feeling in the gut when “this person who we identify with so closely, says or does something that makes us feel that the floor has dropped out from underneath our feet … but we needn’t worry because it will only be a moment before we are on to the next charming thing that allows us to laugh and hum once more” (Lane “The C/a/r/tography” 6). But this desired effect does not always land. The bouffon can go too far, mock something without the right amount of charm and alienate their audience. Hines describes how, when there is a disconnection in an audience “between ‘expression and understanding,’ it is the performance that can right the wrong by easing off, sharpening up or just taking a moment to let things land” (The Pochsy Plays 19). The delicate balance of charm required in bouffon performance is mastered by only a few. In creating Pochsy and the neo-bouffon technique, Hines expanded the possibilities of what bouffon could offer to feminist clown performance. Contemporary bouffon performers are generating new work that utilizes the neo-bouffon approach of affliction as an inner state. In Adam Lazarus’ 2016 neo-bouffon show Daughter, Lazarus explores his own complicity in the affliction of “a secret and extreme masculinity … which demonstrates how we – collectively and as individuals – become desensitized to shock and then endanger our ability to judge our own collusion” (Jacobs). American clown Deanna Fleysher, like Hines, refuses the binary of clown- bouffon, insisting that all clowns can and should employ bouffon thinking in their performance strategies. With her clown/bouffon Butt Kapinski, a film noir private detective, Fleysher parodies gender-stereotypes and explores her own complicity in their perpetuation. Derksen observes how “[t]he development of some women’s comic strategies resembles that of bouffon,” noting how women have historically occupied a position of the social outcast

57 and developed strategies that allowed them to satirize and critique (“The Attack Behind” 235). “As with bouffon,” Derksen notes, “much feminist comic performance seeks to offer a pleasurable, entrancing experience to the audience while, at the same time, to make strategic forays into the realms of difference, even ‘deviance,’ and to provide social critique of those very terms” (“The Attack Behind” 235). In her discussion of the female grotesque, Mary J. Russo discerns how the grotesque body is primarily understood as a social body, the way Bakhtin imagines it as “not separated from the rest of the world; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects” (qtd. in Russo 8). However, Russo conceptualizes the female grotesque body in a second way, as “related most strongly to the psychic register and to the bodily as cultural projection of an inner state” (9). Many contemporary bouffons have found freedom in externalizing the grotesque female body. The Talentless Lumps, an all-female bouffon ensemble from Winnipeg, inhabit externally grotesque bodies to reject notions of an ideal femininity (see Figure 19). Members of the ensemble find it satisfying and liberating to parade around in exaggerated and padded bodies, subverting social expectations of what women should look like. “We celebrate the so-called ‘ugly’ parts of ourselves and our world,” says ensemble member Heather Russell, “[a]s members of a society obsessed with perfection, it’s a terrifying and exhilarating experience”. In Death Married My Daughter, creators Danya Buonastella and Nina Gilmour inhabit externally grotesque bouffons to portray the ghosts of Desdemona and Ophelia who “look as though they have been plucked from the earth, where they had been rotting for hundreds of years; they are effectively zombie incarnations of their Shakespearean selves” (Kandil and MacArthur 157). This external affliction becomes a performance strategy that mirrors their inner state; their desire for catharsis after four hundred years “arrested, suspended in their suffering” (Kandil and MacArthur 160).

Figure 19. The Talentless Lumps. Photo by Leif Norman. 2017.

In their discussion of the possibilities of bouffon performance in applied theatre, Yasmine Kandil and Michelle MacArthur propose that the goal of the contemporary bouffon is not to destroy the “beautiful people” of the original LeCoq legend, but rather to inspire the rest of the village to collective action, to “encourage its audience to question, reflect upon, and also resist the individualizing forces of post-feminism and neo-liberalism” (170). A review of Citizen Pochsy written by Jo Ledingham demonstrates Hines’ ability to provoke this type of response. “Who among us hasn’t begun a well-intentioned act of charity and failed to follow through?,” Ledingham asks. “Is [Pochsy’s] maxim ‘the future is now; it just hasn’t happened yet’ some pop culture gobbledygook or a challenge to seize the opportunity to make the world a better place tomorrow? You can’t simply dismiss Pochsy: she is, as she says, ‘only human’” (Ledingham). Through the exploration of her own humanity, her own complicity in this “terribly perfectly horribly beautiful world,” Hines has created a personal clown that is deeply political (Citizen Pochsy 147). Pochsy’s widespread appeal stems ultimately from Hines’ love of her audience. While Pochsy declares that “we live in a time when imagining a meaningful future is irrational and unrealistic,” she also tells us that “[t]he terrible is beautiful and everything’s divine” (Pochsy’s

59 Lips 51; Oh, baby! 80). Hines has a bouffon brain, yes, but a clown heart. “I hope that you’re all falling in love” Pochsy cries to the audience before her melodramatic death as she “arranges her baby dolls around her, then collapses, draped artfully over the edge of the bed” (Pochsy’s Lips 52). Hines invites her audience to laugh at both the horror and the beauty of life “[b]ecause my ultimate goal is to create, in the laughter that springs from a shared sense of futility, a persistent glimmer of hope” (The Pochsy Plays 15). The gestus of this hope materializes when Hines arises from the bed to take a bow and greet her audience. “You need to be a great clown before you can be a great bouffon,” states Deanna Fleysher. “And if you're already a great clown, then for Satan's sake …. Get out there and make a point! The world needs your hot, angry, loving love!” (“Bouffon Brain”). The experiment of bouffon performance, reinvented and radicalized by Hines, continues to evolve, offering new performance strategies to feminist clowns. It is a practice that blurs the traditional bouffon/clown binary and demands the rigorous work of clowns that are politically relevant, who speak to the age in which they are creating and performing; clowns that differentiates themselves from the irrelevant “land of striped-socks and whimsical umbrellas” (“Bouffon Brain”). These bouffons come to do the work of clowns for our time, to research further the performative possibilities found in the grotesqueness of the bouffon and hold up a mirror to the paradoxical truths of being human.

60 Chapter Three: Soccer-Baseball, Head Banging and Lip Syncing: The Seriousness of Pleasure

For feminists “[t]o be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality,” writes bell hooks (Feminism is for Everybody 110). In Chapter Two, I identified the political potential of clowning and the ways that the tools of bouffon: charm, parody and affliction, can be used strategically. In this chapter I explore the uses of pleasure as a strategic action in clown performance and the ways contemporary clowns are addressing the concrete realities of their lived experiences while simultaneously “imagining possibilities beyond that reality” (Feminism is for Everybody 110). My interviews with the contemporary clowns in this chapter revealed a common theme: the power of the clown’s radical vulnerability to explore personal experiences that often feel shameful or taboo. Jan Henderson suggests that “[c]lowning is about the freedom that comes from a state of total, unconditional acceptance of our most authentic selves, warts and all. It offers us respite from our self-doubts and fears, and opens the door to joy”. This chapter examines three contemporary Canadian clown shows, exploring the ways in which these artists use the authentic vulnerability of clown and the seriousness of pleasure, to joyfully share their lived experiences. In Morro and Jasp Do Puberty, Heather Marie Annis and Amy Lee reinvent the traditional dynamics of the clown duo, examining the possibilities of playing with status within the context of a female clown relationship. Created in 2008, the show deconstructs the cultural signifiers of modern womanhood, exploring the experience of adolescence and the stigmas of menstruation through the playfulness of clown performance. Candice Roberts’ Larry wrestles with the current crisis of masculinity. Described as “a gender bending physical comedy about a hoser’s foray into feminism,” Larry was created in 2017, in the wake of the #metoo movement. Through clown, Roberts subverts the traditional use of comic cross-dressing to reveal the mask of masculinity and probes gender constructs, exposing all that is outrageous and horrific about patriarchal masculinity. In Michelle Thrush’s Inner Elder, clown is used to resist the colonial gaze, parody racist stereotypes, and create space for joyful celebration, harnessing the healing potential of humour. Inner Elder premiered in 2018 and carved out space for a story of Indigenous survivance amidst a three-year inquiry by the Canadian government into the crisis

61 of missing and murdered Indigenous women across the nation. These three clown performances demonstrate the imaginative possibilities of pleasure as a political act.

Morro and Jasp Do Puberty

The creative partnership of Heather Marie Annis and Amy Lee began in 2006 when the pair were classmates in the creative ensemble program at York University. Fellow classmate Byron Laviolette had originally written a script with two male clowns in mind, Morris and Jasper, but after seeing Annis and Lee perform together, he wanted to work with them. Laviolette invited them to perform the clown turn he had written and gender-neutralized the names to Morro and Jasp, beginning a process whereby Annis and Lee would reconfigure the dynamics of the traditionally-male clown duo.10 Both Annis and Lee studied Pochinko clown technique in school, and when they created their first full length clown show, Morro and Jasp Do Puberty, in 2008, it was an opportunity to marry their training, “which was very free and exploratory and silly, … with saying something about our own lives and experiences” (Lee 2). Both women had imagined themselves doing serious dramatic work when they finished school, but discovering clown was a revelation that changed their trajectory. “I never thought I could be funny,” says Annis, “it seemed there was a certain way a woman had to be in order to be funny, but clown smashed all that for me and it allowed me to access the ways I could be funny” (24). Excited by the possibilities of clown, the duo started a company in Toronto, Up Your Toes and In Your Nose Productions, to self-produce their work, creating seven full-length clown shows together over the past twelve years. As clown sisters Morro and Jasp, Annis and Lee have tackled a gamut of topics, from the relentless grind of capitalism in Morro and Jasp: 9 to 5, to existential questions of faith in Morro and Jasp in Stupefaction, to the fears and anxieties of planning a wedding in Morro and Jasp: Save the Date. The duo has toured their work to festivals across the world, including The International Women’s Clown Festival in Vienna in 2015 and the Red Pearl Womxn Clown Festival in Helsinki in 2020. Their first show, Morro and Jasp Do Puberty, is a roller-coaster of “[s]ibling rivalry, teen crushes and fantasies, the awkwardness of a school dance, the horror of a first period and the concern of not yet having it,” performed by “some of

10 Laviolette eventually became the director/dramaturg for Annis and Lee, collaborating with them for the past decade.

62 the best clowns in the country” (Kaplan “Fringe Review”). Originally produced in 2008, the piece has become Annis and Lee’s longest running show. When the pair decided to tour to the mammoth Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2015, Morro and Jasp Do Puberty was the show they decided to bring, given that they had spent the last decade refining it. A 2015 review of Morro and Jasp Do Puberty praised the show for its ability “to remove any sense of taboo for the men in the audience during their performance” (Corbett). While this may be a success of the show, it falls prey to the tired expectation that clown humour must endeavour to appeal to everyone. This expectation of a universal sense of humour is enforced by European clown Jos Houben who suggests that “physical comedy based on malfunctions of the body, such as falling over, can generate laughter from audiences around the world because the body is the one universal human trait, thus everybody can understand the malfunctions as deviations from a recognisable norm” (qtd. in Amsden 5). In Morro and Jasp Do Puberty, the “malfunction of the body,” menstruation, is actually a function of the body—or of some bodies. Yet the expectation that the body act as a site of universal experience is often equated with the body as a site of male experience. The bodily function of menstruation as a focus onstage calls the validity of this expectation into question. Morro and Jasp Do Puberty is a show about a uniquely female experience of puberty, a story that begins with the line “I’m bleeding from the crotch” (1).11 In creating this show, Annis and Lee did not seek to make the performative body a site of universal experience or to portray a homogeneous tale of becoming a woman. Rather, in Morro and Jasp Do Puberty the body is a site of agency and experimentation, a place that tries on womanhood with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. When Annis and Lee first began creating the show, they quickly realized that the topic was terrifyingly vulnerable. Centralizing the emotional narrative of their clowns, a strategy they discovered in their Pochinko training, allowed them to go to “shameful places” in an unconventional way. Some practices of clown creation begin with developing the physical lazzi – the comic business – of the show. But for Annis and Lee, the lazzo emerges out of the emotional journey of their clowns. Rather than beginning with a box of tampons and trying to

11 Not all bodies who menstruate are female, and not all women who go through puberty menstruate. Morro and Jasp Do Puberty is about two young women and their experiences of puberty and menstruation, performed by two female identifying clowns. All references to femaleness and womanhood are made within this context.

63 figure out a funny tampon gag, they discover the physical comedy through the exploration of their clown relationship, uncovering vulnerable material as they work.

Figure 20. Heather Marie Annis in Morro and Jasp Do Puberty. Photo by Joe Kolbow. 2008.

Creating and performing the show “was scary,” says Annis, “but I wouldn’t have done it in any other theatrical form” (2). Exploring the taboo subject of their experience of puberty grew out of their desire to talk about something that, at the time, was largely unexplored. “It was at that point that we started to feel [the] permission of what clown as an art form allows you to share and where it can take you,” Annis explains (3). Lee adds, “We also wanted to be able to laugh at it and go through a catharsis with it because it was such a wrought time” (3). When they toured the show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015, they were surprised at how taboo the topic still seemed to be. Audiences still didn’t want to talk about menstruating bodies, “which we found out very quickly when flyer-ing, and people went, ‘Ewww, I’m not coming to this,’” says Annis (5). But many other audience members and reviewers loved the edgy content, praising the show for its willingness to “get dirty in all senses of the word, and tap into the darker, angrier, more sensual sides of clown performance” (Maga).

64 In Morro and Jasp Do Puberty, two clown sisters ride the roller coaster of emotions that accompany the experience of puberty. The show’s structure is a montage of experiences, incited by the arrival of Morro’s first period. Jasp, the older sister, is obsessed with boys, make-up, finding a date for the dance and getting her period, ASAP. Frustrated with boys’ lack of interest in her, she enacts scenes of romantic passion with her stuffed animal, Peabody. Morro, the younger sister, who has already begun to menstruate and to receive attention from boys, is distressed by it all. Her primary concern is figuring out how to open a menstrual pad quietly, which turns into a hilarious bit of physical comedy culminating in dozens of menstrual pads stuck all over Morro and members of the audience. On a comic level, the play may appear to be about the visual humour of dry-humping stuffed animals and the absurdity of trying to use a tampon for the first time, but what Annis and Lee are really probing is what it means to become a woman. Judith Butler posits “[t]o be female is … a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to become a woman, to compel the body to conform to a historical idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become a cultural sign” (522). In celebration of Morro’s first menses, Jasp throws her a period party, inviting an audience member onstage to join them. Jasp then performs the supreme act of femininity, a makeover, on the audience member, asking them, “Who do you like to look beautiful for?” (8). This awareness of female “to-be-looked-at-ness” resonates as the true cultural signifier of womanhood in the play, beyond the biological function of menarche (Mulvey 11). As Morro and Jasp navigate these cultural signs of womanhood, they simultaneously comment on their construct. As she applies blush, Jasp remarks, “A friendly pink flush says come sit with me at lunch” (9). She then looks directly out to the audience and adds, “I didn’t make that up either, it says it right here. They publish this stuff!” (9). The political agency of Annis and Lee as a clown duo lies in their ability to present a spectrum of female experiences. Jasp fantasizes about getting her period with a level of ecstasy that requires the underscoring of the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme, during which she exclaims, “I begin to slide the tampon up, up, up it goes, going where no object has gone before! Reaching new heights! Catching and floating and floating and catching my beautiful period blood! I am a woman! Hear me roar!” (6). Morro, already sick of menstruation, offers a counterpoint, lamenting, “I am in mourning. For one week out of every month. That’s one out of four. That’s one fourth of my life where I’m practically dead” (13). This dichotomy is characteristic of traditional clown duos, often referred to as the Joey and Auguste. However, Annis and Lee have

65 observed that playing the conventional Joey/Auguste power dynamics doesn’t always work for them as female clowns. The Joey (high status) and Auguste (low status) relationship is traditionally described as the manipulator (the Joey) and the victim (the Auguste). Conventional Joey/Auguste duos, most often played by white men, regularly involve slapstick violence, with the Joey playfully beating the Auguste in punishment for his mistakes. But when the Joey/Auguste relationship is played out by clowns who do not have a neutral-coded, white, male body, the dynamic changes. Audiences will not laugh if a male-coded Joey hits a female-coded Auguste, no matter how cartoonish the violence. Slapstick violence between female clowns, or clowns of colour, or clowns with disabilities, shifts this dynamic as well. Contemporary clowns must find new ways to navigate the dynamics of this comic relationship and discover physical comedy outside of traditional slapstick routines. “It doesn’t feel right to always be in this really high-status, low-status place,” says Annis, “so we play a lot with that” (24). There are many times when their sister relationship demands that the power dynamic flip or that they get closer in status. “I wonder if that sort of play is also just a more modern response to relationship,” Annis notes (24). Another definition of the Joey/Auguste relationship is offered by David McManus, who considers this relationship as “representative of the cultural norm and its inverse” (16). Within Annis and Lee’s contemporary version of the Joey/Auguste relationship, this tension of cultural norms plays out as the pubescent sisters try on different identities, from Jasp’s hyper-feminized fantasies featuring a Titanic-era Leonardo DiCaprio to Morro’s rejection of feminine norms, dabbling with a goth look. These opposing identities that Annis and Lee embody illuminate the constant state of inane contradictions that performing modern femininity demands, to be confident but not bossy, sexy but not slutty, clever but not intimidating. Sociologist Laura Fingerson observes how “[g]irls’ power over their own bodies is reduced by the imbalanced gender power structure of our society. Put simply, boys’ bodies are powerful, and girls’ bodies are not” (57). As Morro and Jasp enact the four stages of sexual intimacy, from “[f]irst base … tonsil hockey, spit swapping, sucking face” to “[t]he big finale … Bumping uglies. Going all the way. HOME RUN,” the two performers throw themselves around the stage, running, cartwheeling, and careening through the physicality of their hilarious, soccer- baseball version of sex (3). The strength of their bodies as performers, exhibited during their visceral performance, reclaims female sexuality, removing it from the passive domain of “something men do to women” and enacting it in the realm of an autonomous experience (Gray

66 6). As Frances Gray observes, “[t]o control the discourse of sexuality is to wield enormous social power, precisely because we feel that our sexuality is part of our individuality, our selfhood” (6). While this type of control and power is rarely felt during adolescence, Annis and Lee, two adult women, reclaim the pleasure and power of their adolescent female bodies through the outrageousness of their clowns.

Figure 21. Amy Lee in Morro and Jasp Do Puberty. Photo by Joe Kolbow. 2008.

67 The play’s climax involves Jasp making the ultimate sacrifice to save Morro from a stuck tampon, which, once dislodged, goes flying out into the audience. With their sisterhood restored through this act, the two sisters decide to go to the dance together, only to discover, in the final twist, that Jasp has started to menstruate too. Stories of female sexuality are most often played out in relation to male characters, but through Annis and Lee’s “radical reconfiguration of the traditional clown,” Morro and Jasp Do Puberty is a story of emergent sexuality and evolving womanhood within the context of a female relationship, a friendship and a sisterhood (Tobias 42). Annis and Lee use the authentic pleasure of their clowns to explore adolescence and menstruation, topics usually marred in taboo, shame and silence. This strategic use of clown liberates Annis and Lee’s lived experiences.

Larry In a similar manner, Vancouver clown Candice Roberts uses clown to explore the parts of herself and society that she finds absurd and shameful. When Roberts took Pochinko Mask Through Clown training with David McMurray Smith in 2007, she didn’t initially “get the play [of clown] because [she] didn’t really know how to play” (3). Eventually, Roberts began practicing with a group of Vancouver clowns called the Poupon Parade where she began to discover several different clown personas, including Larry, a “FUBAR-esque mechanic metalhead … who loves dick jokes, ball jokes, and beer” (Warner). Roberts explains: Larry is inspired by the small, working class, BC town I grew up in, where it was acceptable for men to be socially dominate, misogynistic, and homophobic. Although I’ve spent a good deal of my life recovering from the education of gender I received in this place, there was always something absurd and beautiful about the way I understood the men I grew up with. They were funny, they were awful, they were powerful, and also so powerless … [A]s much as I have battled patriarchal norms, these men have never left my imagination. (Roberts, Artist Statement) Delighted by her clowning discovery that “shame can dissolve through exposure,” Roberts continued to explore the possibilities of Larry (Artist Statement). Larry was a constant hit at cabarets and Roberts’ collaborators kept encouraging her to give Larry his own show.

68 In 2018 Roberts premièred Larry at the Toronto Clown Festival, and the show toured across Canada in the summer of 2019, eventually landing Roberts an Off-Broadway run in New York City in December of 2019. The instantaneous triumph of Larry is due, in part, to the way the show speaks to a cultural moment, the crisis of patriarchal masculinity that it tackles and its playful approach to gender identity.12 But the show’s success is also grounded in Roberts’ raw vulnerability as a performer, her willingness to dive into her own shame and get messy. Using feminist clown strategies, Roberts explodes Larry’s preoccupation with sexual dominance and the suppression of his emotions into the realm of the outrageous in a satirical examination of patriarchal masculinity that is both hilarious and heartbreaking. As a cisgender woman playing a man, Roberts is employing a centuries-old clown tradition of cross-dressing for comic effect. Traditionally “male clowns … do not pretend to be credible when they impersonate female characters…. By keeping their terrifying makeup intact, they explode the ideological pretense of these codes to express natural norms” (Bouissac 157). For the feminist clown, this exposure of gender coding can be more than just comic: it can be strategic. Subverting this “failure of credibility,” Roberts is costumed in mechanic’s overalls and wears a beard made of faux leather, neither of which even vaguely conceals the fact that she is a woman playing a man (Bouissac 155). Within this humorous failure of disguise, the mask of masculinity is apparent. This awareness of Roberts as a female clown performing masculinity is what gives her audience permission to laugh when Larry says things like, “I ain’t no pussy feminine.… I’ll leave that to the pretty little ladies. (He pauses and points to audience members) Pretty lady! Pretty lady, Pretty lady … and YOU, you should smile more!” (Larry 10).

12 The term toxic masculinity is often used as a “narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression” (O’Malley). But John Stoltenberg questions the usefulness of the term in that it suggests a concept of healthy masculinity. Stoltenberg equates “the idea of ‘healthy masculinity’ with the oxymoron of ‘healthy cancer,’” viewing “manhood as an identity built entirely out of oppression” (qtd. in Cooper). He argues “that the parts of manhood that we view as non-toxic don’t actually have a designated gender—and describing these actions or qualities as masculine just reflects our disdain for women” (qtd. in Cooper). bell hooks furthers this discussion by offering the term “patriarchal masculinity,” which she claims “teaches men that their sense of self and identity, their reason for being, resides in their capacity to dominate others” (Feminism Is for Everybody 70). As a counterpoint, hooks offers the term “feminist masculinity” which she defines as “a vision of masculinity where self-esteem and self-love of one’s unique being forms the basis of identity” (Feminism Is for Everybody 70). The term “patriarchal masculinity” is most useful to Roberts’ compassionate inquiry into the troubling nature of masculine identity through her lovable construct, Larry.

Figure 22. Candice Roberts in Larry. Photo by Kristine Cofsky. 2019.

In her discussion of the interplay between persona and performer, Celeste Derksen notes how, when “the physical gender codes of persona and performer do not cohere, we see that the gendered body is not a fixed, or singular, entity. The possibility of subverting and/or expanding the body’s gender coding lies in this unfixed space” (237). Larry’s loose, slovenly shuffle and crude words are contrasted by the precision of Robert’s physical skill as a performer. As a woman performing masculinity, Roberts dances between the unfixed space of oppressor and victim, where “[t]he body of the persona and performer are put in critical dialogue with each other, and so resist any singular, fixed gender encoding” (Derksen “The Attack Behind” 236). Judith Butler observes that “[g]ender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519). Throughout the play, Larry performs several carefully choreographed sequences of redneck masculinity: he opens a beer, chugs it, crushes the can and repeats. He gets out his tools and some boards and begins to measure and saw wood, the

70 goal of his project unclear. Roberts’ abilities as a physical performer are utilized skillfully throughout the play, engaging her audience in an adept “stylized repetition of acts” that situate Larry within a rigid choreography of both technical and social patriarchal masculinity (Butler 519). Larry is on a quest to become more “woke” in order to impress a woman he likes. As the play progresses, he tries various tactics towards self-improvement: journaling, therapy and meditation. Larry invites an audience member to try out his DIY counselling technique, dubbed the “life couch.” Convinced that if he can fix a car, he can fix himself, Larry teaches the first lesson of patriarchal masculinity on the life couch: “Don’t talk about your feelings” (5). He advises the audience member to “[t]ake those feelings, and shove em deep down inside, put em where the sun don’t shine. Somewhere darker than the inside of a cow … Ok? You knock back two cold ones, and don’t call no one” (6). The humour of Larry’s philosophy is situated within a growing awareness of how patriarchal masculinity has precipitated an epidemic mental health crisis in men. After the audience member complies with Larry’s advice, bottling up their feelings and returning to their seat, Larry praises them with a “Yeah … nailed it!” (6). The understanding that suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 40 puts Larry’s life couch advice into a sobering perspective (see Fogg). When Larry “nails it,” the audience laughs, but they must simultaneously grapple with the destructive reality of his lesson. As reviewer Liz Nicholls notes, “Larry is one of those shows that will make you laugh, out loud and often, for reasons you will never be able to quite explain to others. Or even to yourself” (“A clown in a gender war”). At the play’s climax, Larry attempts meditation and, in a moment of transcendence, finds himself inside a different body. Roberts removes Larry’s mechanic’s onesie to reveal her naked woman’s body, blurring the line between persona and performer. Inside a woman’s body, Larry begins to access emotions he has never experienced before, asking, “Woah … what is this? I feel … I feel … I feel … SO MUCH! … (he begins to cry) What is this (he touches his eyes) There’s water coming out of my eyes!” (12). This innocent statement is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, within the context of a society that does not permit men to cry. Awestruck and amazed at his new androgynous state, Larry begins to clothe himself in a pink dress and then “commences a contemporary ballet style dance in exploration of his feminine body. Part way through he picks up his onesie and puts on one leg and one arm” (13). Clothed in half-dress, half-suit, and still wearing the beard mask, Roberts’s grace and beauty as a mover make this moment sublime (see

71 Figure 23). The image creates a striking physicalization of Virginia Woolf’s rumination on what Samuel Taylor Coleridge meant by the androgynous mind. In Roberts’ body, we see a mind that is so “resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided” (Woolf 98). Without speaking a word, this liminal moment allows Roberts’s clown to engage her audience in a nuanced conversation about gender, writing with her body an experience that transcends language.

Figure 23. Candice Roberts in Larry. Photo by Kristine Cofsky. 2019.

72 For Roberts, playing Larry has allowed her to feel more seen “[a]s a person, as a performer, and as a woman” (6). The pleasure of the character has been the permission to “[t]ake up more space. Or just to take up space” (6). Within this space, Roberts says, “I found delight in my body and the presence to play with an audience” (6). This delight and presence have, in turn, created a space where she and her audience can have a shared joyful experience while exploring “feminism, gender fluidity, and [her] own queerness” (Roberts, Artist Statement). Penny Farfan suggests that, in its current usage, the term queer can be considered not just as a noun for non- heteronormative identities but also as “a verb that refers to the action or process of unsettling established cultural forms and modes of reception as they intersect with sexual norms or themes” (3). Using this definition, the queerness of Larry lies in his inability to hit the right note of masculinity, both literally and figurately. As he strums an acoustic guitar and attempts to sing the first note of “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd, his voice is first too high, then too low. Up and down the scale he goes, desperately trying to find the right note. This bit goes on for several minutes, as Roberts rides the waves of laughter, applying the clown rule more, more, more to increase the hilarity. When building the show, Roberts was interested in devising situations for Larry to fail. The effect is unsettling, and watching Larry fail repeatedly is both hilarious and hard to watch. The play ends with Larry waking from his meditation and gratefully realizing he has returned to his own body. While his audience is left uncertain to what degree Larry has been changed by his experience, we are assured that there is a large part of Larry that wants to change. He invites audience members up on stage to head bang to Guns N’ Roses “Paradise City” and then begins to tap dance, an impulse he has been repressing though out the entire show. The will to change, bell hooks confirms, is the most necessary requirement for transforming ‘patriarchal’ masculinity to ‘feminist’ masculinity (see The Will to Change). “I stand here before you,” Larry proclaims, “[a] better man. Because I put on a fucking good show.… And there wasn’t a dry eye in the house” (13). In this statement, Roberts applies clown logic to gender performativity. “As a corporeal field of cultural play,” Judith Butler remarks, “gender is a basically innovative affair” (531). Thus, Larry has put on a good show, both in the theatrical sense and in the performative sense, acting out a highly innovative show within the corporeal field of Roberts’ feminist clown body. The joyful celebration at the end of Larry, with audience members head banging and Larry

73 tap dancing exposes Roberts’ strategic use of pleasure to tackle the current crisis of masculinity and the vulnerability of her own lived experiences of gender performativity.

Inner Elder

Annis, Lee and Roberts all contend with the realities of lived experiences through the imaginative potential of their clowns. In Inner Elder, Michelle Thrush tells an autobiographical story of her childhood experiences of growing up as a Cree woman in Calgary in the 1970s, and her search for strong Indigenous female role models. Thrush plays herself through much of the performance, shifting seamlessly between re-enacting the experiences of her child self and the narrative commentary of her adult self. Thrush’s clown Kookum emerges later in the performance, confronting racial stereotypes and destabilizing the colonial gaze through play and pleasure. Thrush is an award-winning actress and activist, well known for her work in Canadian television and film. Clowning first appeared in her life in response to troubling issues she was witnessing in her community. Thrush’s first clown Majica arrived in a vision and she rushed to draw the images with her daughter’s crayons. “[I]t was like she was hitting me over the head … give me life. Give me life” (Thrush 3). Once Majica the clown had fully materialized, Thrush assembled her costume from thrift store finds, a beautiful dress with a crinoline made with the colours of the four directions (i.e. red, yellow, green and blue), striped socks, moccasins, two thick black braids made of yarn and “a beautiful vintage old beaded belt” (4). 13 Thrush began to tour Majica to schools and community organizations, using her to talk with young children about experiences of violence, alcoholism and abuse. She also created a show for adults with Majica, Right Next Door, aimed at drawing awareness to patterns of generational trauma. Her experience working with clown in a therapeutic healing context for over thirty years informed the next show she created, Find Your Own Inner Elder. Find Your Own Inner Elder features Thrush’s other clown, Kookum, whose name comes from the Cree word for grandmother. Kookum first emerged in the early 1990s, but it wasn’t until Thrush was living off the grid in a cabin in British Columbia with her daughters in 2010 that she began to write a show for Kookum. Find Your Own Inner Elder explores the

13 Majica’s name is a combination of Thrush’s two daughter’s names: Imajyn and Indica.

74 transformative potential of imagination and toured to junior high and high schools until 2017 when Thrush was invited to develop the piece for Calgary’s annual High Performance Rodeo. She seized the opportunity to delve into some heavier subject matter, re-writing the script to directly tackle “anti-Indigenous racism and stereotypes, residential schools and land claims” and hiring Karen Hines to direct the piece (Grant). Reworked and retitled as Inner Elder, “the big show” as Thrush refers to it, added theatrical elements, a set and lighting design, and premiered at the 2018 High Performance Rodeo, “with 17 performances and 17 standing ovations in a row” (14). It subsequently toured to Toronto, a co-production between Native Earth Theatre and Nightwood Theatre, and Uno Fest in Victoria where it continued to astound audiences. Inner Elder is a story of survivance that uses clown strategies to disrupt the colonial gaze, and a “hilarious, joyful and highly playful” celebration of the transformative power of humour (Hobson). The modern concept of survivance originates with Anishinaabe scholar and writer Gerald Vizenor who differentiates survivance from mere survival, defining it as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy” (Manifest Manners vii). This active presence is felt throughout Inner Elder as Thrush uses both direct-address storytelling and clown to establish a present relationship with her audience. The play begins with Thrush confiding her feelings that she didn’t belong as a child, looking up to the sky and waiting for aliens to teleport her back to the mothership. Utilizing humour to parody racial stereotypes, when she speaks about her parents’ battle with the disease of alcoholism, she says “it must have been the white in them” that led them to drink (10:58). As a young girl, searching for strong Indigenous role models, Thrush explains how, “When I couldn’t find it in the real world, I would search for it on television. Someone that looked like me, that I could look up to. If I couldn’t find that, then maybe I could look like them” (15:32). As the theme song from the 1970s television series Little House on the Prairie plays, Thrush physicalizes running through the prairies, imagining herself as Laura Ingalls Wilder, with Ma and Pa at her side. Realizing that she doesn’t quite fit in that world either, she continues to flip through the channels, seeking someone who looks like her. After a futile search, she puts on a long black

75 wig, satirizing the white actress in bad wigs that typically portrayed Indigenous women in film and television at the time. Many Indigenous Canadian playwrights are adept at “representing cultural stereotypes in a humorous, ironic fashion, revealing not only their ideological underpinnings but also how historical misconceptions have hindered cross-cultural understanding and interaction” (Hirch 7). Thrush’s interaction with cultural stereotypes in Inner Elder probes at the harmful, destructive effects of these portrayals, conveying the struggle to see herself represented in the media and ways this absence renders Indigenous women invisible in society at large. In The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, Thomas King writes that “North America has had a long association with Native people, but despite the history that the two groups have shared, North America no longer sees Indians” (53). This failure to see King attributes to the desire of white settlers to only acknowledge a comfortable image, a stereotype, the Dead Indian. “Dead Indians are dignified, noble, silent, suitably garbed. And dead. Live Indians are invisible, unruly, disappointing. And breathing. One is a romantic reminder of a heroic but fictional past. The other is simply an unpleasant, contemporary surprise” (King 66). Wearing the long black wig of the “Dead Indian” Thrush embodies the absurdity of this stereotype. Underscored by the sound of a gimmicky drumbeat, she re-enacts a classic scene from Western films of the 1960s, running into the arms of a white saviour and uttering the lines “me good Indian, please save me, and what was that other one? UGH” (10:05). Demonstrating both the absence of authentic Indigenous role models and the racist representations she must navigate, she concludes, “It takes a great imagination to survive growing up around white people” (10:30). The power of Thrush’s childhood imagination to create strategies of survivance supports Vizenor’s argument that “Native imagination, experience, and remembrance are the real landscapes of liberty in the literature of this continent” (Native Liberty 7). Thrush continues to practice these imaginative powers when she is called up to the front of the class to spell ‘arithmetic’ in middle school. When she stumbles, her teacher demonstrates the correct way to spell the word, by writing the letters on the blackboard as she recites “ARITHMETIC. A Red Indian Thought He Might Eat Tobacco In Church. And that, little girl, is how you spell arithmetic” (16:50). As Thrush returns to her seat the teacher adds, “consider yourself lucky that our people came across and taught your people how to read and write. Or else you might still be savages living in the wood” (16:54). Confronted with this horrific racist

76 attitude, Thrush imagines in that moment her grandmother, wearing a superhero cape, bursts into the classroom carrying two loaves of bannock which she chops into 24 equal pieces. Super Kookum then proceeds to school Thrush’s teacher on the accurate history of Canada, declaring, “If it wasn’t for our people teaching your people how to live off the land, your white asses would have starved!” (16:58). The adult Thrush acknowledges that while this wild fantasy didn’t happen in real life, her kookum did make bannock for her to take to school and share with her class, urging her to be proud of her Cree heritage. Equating her kookum’s graceful response to racism with the powers of a super-hero further develops Thrush’s central thesis, that “[i]t takes a great imagination to survive the public-school system” (17:43). A review of Inner Elder in 2018 responds to the stories of racism in the show by stating that “the only way to stomach it is to keep telling yourself it was the uninformed, bigoted 1970s that allowed it to happen without repercussion” (Hobson). This response reflects the discomfort that Thrush’s stories generate for white settler audiences. Another review from 2019 notes how “[o]ne sucks air hearing about it” (Slotkin). In her discussion of the role that the white gaze plays in how settler audiences experience Indigenous theatre, Yvette Nolan observes that “[t]he biggest cultural difference is our history of oppression versus their history as oppressors. And an unwillingness or inability to grasp that concept may make it difficult to truly understand the play. There are other things, of course, cultural differences around humour and structure, but none of these are as insurmountable as a history shared from opposite sides” (qtd in Hirch 9). For white settler audience members that are trying to grapple with our history as oppressors, Thrush’s performance evokes a tension between laughter and discomfort. Thrush rides the wave of this tension throughout the show, using humour to relieve the tension slightly, only to create another surge by telling the truth. This dance of laughter and discomfort reaches a new level of amplification in the second half of the show, when Thrush transforms into her clown Kookum. At the mid-point of Inner Elder, Thrush begins to use clown strategies to resist against the colonial gaze and insist that her audience see Indigenous women in the present. Thrush flashes forward to a moment in her adult life when she was working on the television series Blackstone, playing chronic alcoholic Gail Stoney, an Indigenous character struggling with generations of trauma (28:51). Thrush, about to film a particularly difficult scene, calls on her grandmothers for support as she walks from the trailer to the set. She recalls in that moment how “every single woman from my family steps out and pushes me forward” (29:20). Thrush then

77 utilizes the tools of bouffon (i.e. parody, charm, affliction and point of attack) to create a harrowing moment where she stumbles and falls as Gail Stoney, embodying a “Live Indian,” while the song Colours of the Wind, from Disney’s 1995 animated film Pocahontas, plays:

You think I'm an ignorant savage And you've been so many places I guess it must be so But still I cannot see If the savage one is me How can there be so much that you don't know You don't know You think you own whatever land you land on The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim But I know every rock and tree and creature Has a life, has a spirit, has a name (Menken and Schwartz).

As Thrush collapses to the ground, moaning and crying out, embodying the affliction of drunkenness in a stylized manner, she parodies a pop culture personification of the “Dead Indian,” her point of attack the aversion and discomfort of settler eyes. Director Karen Hines collaborated with Thrush to create “control in the performance so that there would be charm” (Hines personal interview 18). Together, they choreographed the moment of “the hand reaching up and reaching its high point at the same moment the music does and then the fall, going with a certain word that will give it resonance” (Hines personal interview 18). This unsettling image is followed by “pin-drop silence … [which] doesn’t let the audience off the hook in terms of confronting the truth” (Grant). The use of bouffon in this scene creates the darkest point of the play, as Thrush uses the juxtaposition of these stereotypes to hold up a mirror to her audience, asking them to consider what images of Indigenous people they are able and willing to see. This grim moment of reckoning is interrupted by the voices of Thrush’s grandmothers who speak to her as she picks herself up off the ground, assuring her of their constant presence. As Thrush opens a suitcase and lays out the clothes of her clown Kookum in a ritualistic manner, a recording of her winning the Gemini award for her portrayal of Gail Stoney in 2011 plays. She places her hand over the heart of Kookum’s shirt, affirming, “[w]e are never alone. We carry this ancient knowledge that is so deep inside of us and so finely tuned that it allows us to remember who we are” (35:58). Thrush then transforms into her clown Kookum, applying make-up wrinkles, whitening her hair and pulling on her costume as she speaks about the possibilities for

78 healing that being in touch with her ancestors has offered. In this transformation, Thrush begins to reanimate the spirits of her ancestors, accessing wisdom on a cellular level, and revealing how “[t]he act of remembering in theatre is active” (Nolan “A Hopeful Present” 34). “It takes a great imagination to be able to change the ending,” Thrush declares, speaking of the serious work of healing generational trauma in her story of survivance (38:22). And then Thrush changes the ending of her play in the most surprising, joyful way imaginable. Suddenly Kookum is present, shaking her head in mirth and announcing, “[s]ometimes you just gotta laugh at it all” (39:23). This energetic shift is delightfully destabilizing. It subverts the audience’s expectations that the play will end gently, with affirmations and catharsis. Rather, with a feisty, irreverent energy Kookum begins to parody the traditional, and often superficial, land acknowledgement, “I’d like to acknowledge that we are here on 8th avenue,” mock her GPS saying, “I don’t need no white woman telling me where to go,” and chide the white people in the audience for taking everything so seriously (40:35; 42:20).

Figure 24. Michelle Thrush in Inner Elder. Photo by Benjamin Laird. 2019.

79 A review of the show in Toronto in 2019 contends that Thrush undercuts the significance of her story with her use of clowning. “Something bizarre happens. The quiet spoken but sprightly Michelle Thrush is ‘taken over’ by a stooped, challenging, in your face character,” writes Lynn Slotkin. Slotkin admits to being confused by this tonal shift, arguing that Kookum is misplaced because she is “twisting up the audience.” Kookum does twist up her audience, but she does so intentionally, using her clown to blur the lines between serious and comic, light and heavy, us and them. “Either she’s chiding the audience for being ‘white’ or she’s praising them for being diverse and inclusive. Which is it?,” Slotkin asks. What she fails to consider is that the answer may be both. Not that Thrush is blaming her audience for being white, but rather inviting them to question their white gaze. As Kookum dances around this liminal space she exemplifies the role of the clown to “debunk mythic ideas of the sacred” by inviting audience members to join her on stage to perform “an old Indian song” (Acoose and Beeds 60; 45:42). As Kookum brings three audience members up to learn “some old Indian moves … you can’t say no to an elder,” she dons a red sparkly cape with the words Super Kookum emblazoned on the back, transforming herself into the strong Indigenous role model that she has been searching for all along, an embodiment of the wise fool, her inner elder (46:23). Michelle Olson considers how the colonial gaze is shaped by the frame of the proscenium stage, how “[t]he rules of power are deeply embedded in its structure and informed by the historical context it was birthed from” (273). Olson argues that the physical architecture of the proscenium stage perpetuates the power structures of European courts of the 17th century where: [t]he audience sits in opposition to the performer in a place of power and in a place of judgement. … This is something we can all unconsciously slip into today, because the space reverberates from its origins in the palace. Out of this complete inequity in this audience/performer relationship in the palace a gaze arises. The gaze of the oppressor. The gaze of the one in power. And all they want to see is their own supremacy. (274) Thrush uses the liminality of her clown to destabilize this gaze. As Kookum steps towards the audience, she blurs the boundary of observer and observed. Weaving in and out of the audience’s space, asking them questions and giving advice, Kookum breaks the rules of power inherent in the theatre’s architecture. Using the rules of clown – breathing, listening to self and the audience, letting yourself be affected by the audience – Thrush creates a heightened sense of presence, the central component of stories of survivance. As she transforms into Kookum, the

80 conversation between Thrush and her audience transforms as well. The dialogue becomes about seeing and being seen. Every time Kookum jokes about white people needing to take themselves less seriously, Thrush is playfully reversing the gaze. Her subtext: I see you shifting uncomfortably in your seat. Inviting members of the audience up onstage to perform the “old Indian moves” of backup dancers, Thrush further blurs the boundaries of the performative space, creating a new space of joyful, community celebration. Inviting the audience volunteers to accompany her as she performs a fierce lip sync of that “old Indian song,” “Respect,” sung by Aretha Franklin in 1967, Thrush conjures a liminal space of community. This use of clown presence to create community is often used in therapeutic healing clown contexts, and points to the influence of Thrush’s substantial experience in this field. R. de Grann identifies mutuality and dialogic performance “as end points of the clown performativity of presence, at which point the separation between self and audience is dissolved, and co-emergence (a sense of oneness or wholeness) results” (qtd. in Kontos et al. 49). Using the lyrics of “Respect” to define the expectations of this joyful space of community, Kookum breaks out some groovin’ dance moves, shaking her shoulders and gyrating her hips to great comic effect: R-E-S-P-E-C-T Find out what it means to me R-E-S-P-E-C-T Take care, TCB … A little respect (just a little bit) I get tired (just a little bit) Keep on tryin' (just a little bit) You're runnin' out of fools (just a little bit) And I ain't lyin' (just a little bit). (Redding)

This climatic moment catalyzes the immediacy of Thrush’s story, creating the possibility of healing through celebration, a reminder that “[r]esistance is the secret to joy” (Alice Walker qtd. in Nolan Medicine Shows 23). Hines recalls how, during the run at Lunchbox Theatre for the High Performance Rodeo, the Kookum section would change show to show, as Thrush responded to things that audience members said. “It would get super edgy sometimes. But she was just a master because it’s her world. She knows the humour. She knows what she can say. She knows exactly how to get away

81 with it” (Hines personal interview 19). Through this playful exchange, Thrush strategically uses her clown to speak truth. Kookum talks about being in Canadian Tire and being stopped by a sales associate who asks her what she is doing with several bags of soil in her cart. “I am buying my land back, one bag at a time,” Kookum replies (Inner Elder 45:42). And when she pulls out the red Super Kookum cape, she jokes that this is a “old traditional cree outfit. I had to get back from the museum” (46:23). Thrush can get away with this pointed commentary on acts of colonial violence, riding the tension between discomfort and laughter, because her clown Kookum is innocent and charming, chuckling off each piercing joke with a “I’m just kidding ya”. The show also changes dramatically depending on who is in the audience. Thrush notes the marked difference in performing the show for a predominately white settler audience versus performing for a mainly Indigenous audience. She recalls one show at Lunchbox Theatre where the audience was primarily Indigenous, and the show went on for seven extra minutes. “The laughter is much, much more,” says Thrush, “there is a very unique humor that Indigenous people have … And there’s a lot of jokes that non-Native people just don’t get” (15). Drew Hayden Taylor suggests that this unique quality of Native humour: springs from a sense of survival. Frequently, it’s a reaction against the world. And anything born of survival will have barbs and sharp teeth attached, to provide protection and refuge. Humour can also take the bruises and scars of depression, oppression and suppression and act as a salve or tonic to take the pain away. It often works as an antidote, even. As I once heard an elder from the Blood Reserve say, ‘Humour is the WD-40 of healing.’ (46) The healing potential of humour in Inner Elder is felt most profoundly through the deep love for the audience that lurks underneath Kookum’s teasing. “When I look at you, I see love. I see people coming together to learn about each other, listen to each other … I want you to go spend time with your old ones,” urges Kookum as she packs her suitcase up, preparing to leave the stage (55:33). “Well what are you looking at? Go find your own Inner Elder,” she concludes (55:42). For Thrush, this message is about the ongoing search for self, a reminder that “we’re all elders in training …what I consider my inner elder is when you trust. That is to me, decolonizing. When you are able to trust the flow of life and the flow of energy” (18). When Thrush ends her piece with the mischievous admonishment to her audience “Go find your own

82 Inner Elder,” she is inviting them to not only rediscover an ancient wisdom within themselves, but also, perhaps, to recognize that the work of dismantling oppression begins with self- reflection (55:42). The three plays discussed in this chapter reveal the transformative potential of pleasure in clown performance. Strategically, clowns “are not preaching to the audience. We are having a party” (Pochinko and Wallace qtd. in Wellsman 150). Annis, Lee, Roberts and Thrush radically reconfigure the strategies of traditional clowns, subverting them towards the aims of an intersectional feminist clown practice, a practice rooted in pleasure and possibility. They use the vulnerability of their clowns to investigate difficult content, exploring the serious issues of their lived experiences through the imaginative worlds of their clowns. This serious approach to pleasure is a reminder of bell hooks’ observation that “our desire for radial social change is linked to our desire to experience pleasure, erotic fulfillment and a host of other passions” (qtd. in Aston and Harris Good Night Out 15). This use of the seriousness of pleasure became a point of inspiration for my practice as research experiment discussed in the next chapter.

83 Chapter Four: Breaking the Rules: The Feminist Clown as Creator

After my examination of contemporary Canadian clown shows and the strategies these practitioners are using, I returned to my own clown practice. Inspired by the case studies of Karen Hines, Heather Marie Annis, Amy Lee, Candice Roberts and Michelle Thrush utilizing the pleasures of clown to explore serious, political content, I undertook a Practice as Research experiment, Allergic to Water, that investigated the gendered issue of chronic illness through clown. In this chapter, I focus on my experience of the feminist clown as a creator. I reflect on the challenges I encountered trying to create a feminist working methodology for my research and what these obstacles revealed to me about the nature of feminist clown work. Through my research, I identify and critically examine the rules of the traditional theatre production model, and the successes and failures of my efforts to strategically break them.14 The patriarchal bias in medical science has far-reaching implications for women’s health, given that, although “70 per cent of sufferers of all chronic pain conditions are women, 80 per cent of pain studies are conducted on men or male mice” (West-Knights 2). My personal experiences with chronic illness over the past five years made me curious to explore the feminist implications of my lived experience and unpack the ways in which archaic beliefs about women’s bodies have “persisted in western medical culture” (Jackson 1). I was also interested in discovering how clown might be used to avoid “an aesthetic of injury, a tendency in socially motived theatre to focus on pain at the expense of agency and to reduce stories to a cast of victims, heroes and helpless witnesses” (Salverson 34). How could I, as a clown, develop creative strategies to deconstruct the myth that “pain is the unending glue and prerequisite of female consciousness” (Jamieson 3)? I wished to explore how, as Julie Salverson suggests, “[c]lown offers a theatrical convention that can unpin our expectations about what it means to hear tragic stories and thus, perhaps, allow us to listen differently” (38). My original concept for this investigation began with the desire to integrate a clown creation process with documentary theatre techniques. I designed a project where I would invite a group of female-identifying multidisciplinary artists with chronic illnesses into a collaborative

14 By traditional theatre model, I mean the standard way that theatre is rehearsed and performed in most contemporary mainstream theatres. The term suggests a hierarchal decision-making process, a passive audience and the implied fourth wall of the prototypical proscenium arch, which are all antithetical to feminist clown creation and performance.

84 sourcing process that utilized Pochinko clown creation methods and documentary theatre techniques, interviewing the participants about their lived experiences. In the second phase of creation, I proposed to take the sourced material and shape it into a clown show, allowing a character and a world to emerge out of the sourced material. However, the ethical considerations of this project were identified as complex, and ultimately, I determined that I lacked the time and resources to successfully navigate the ethics review process required by the university to approve the project. So, as is often required in an artistic process, I modified the scope of my research, turning to my own lived experience with chronic illness as my primary source material. I began working on the project in the summer of 2019, using my clown ways of knowing to generate clusters and god poems, which I began to shape into a skeletal script in the fall of 2019 within the context of a playwriting class at the University of Calgary. In January of 2020 I began collaborating with a small team of artists: a musician/composer, a director/designer and a stage manager. The research project culminated in two workshop performances in February 2020. Clown shows often appear to be pure pandemonium, messy and chaotic. But this pleasurable chaos can only be achieved through exquisite structure. Chaos through structure keeps the audience safe, which is a clown rule: “[t]he audience must have confidence in the clown performer. The performer must make the audience feel comfortable. … Good clowning demands control” (Pochinko qtd. in Wellsman 151). Thus, rehearsing a clown show becomes a delicate balance between carefully crafting a structure and finding the playful chaos within that structure. I was keen to work with collaborators to help me develop this structure. My desire to work with other artists was informed by my unsuccessful experiences in the past of trying to create clown in a vacuum. There is currently no word that properly encompasses the role of the director/dramaturg/outside eye of a clown show. Director is incorrect because it contains an implication of creative authority imbued by traditional models of theatre creation. Outside eye lacks the suggestion of creative authority, but it offers a vague indication of the actual role. The most constructive expression of the role lives somewhere between provocateur, side-coach and dramaturg, working “to question habit, to complicate unreflective expediency, and to dig beneath the surface of unearned presumption” in a creation process, while honoring the creative authority of the clown (Barton). In the creation of a clown show without a director/dramaturg/outside eye, there is no one to play the role of the audience in the conversation and to offer feedback about

85 what is being communicated. “Outside eyes are the only eyes that can really truly see” says Fleysher (“Devising Demystified”). My desire to work with a designer stemmed from a goal to more fully realize the images of my imaginative worlds than my own skill set would allow. I hoped that the support of a production team would also offer me the freedom to easily switch between wearing my performer hat, my creator hat and my researcher hat. I planned to employ an iterative process to creation. Using my skeletal script as a point of inspiration, I would improvise content, videotape these improvisations, watch later and transcribe useful content. The director/designer I chose to collaborate with had a minimal amount of clown knowledge, but I knew that we shared similar feminist sensibilities in our art making and assumed that we would have a compatible approach. What I did not anticipate were the challenges that my own internalization of the rules of the traditional theatre production model would pose to my creative autonomy as a feminist clown. In the creation of feminist theatre Lizbeth Goodman discerns, “[t]he politics are not just applied to the ‘ready-made’ art; rather feminism informs the making of the theatre – the choice of working method, topic, form and style” (19). During the creation process of Allergic to Water, working within a traditional theatre production model and collaborating with a director/designer, finding a feminist working method was a struggle. I often felt torn between the role of the “good actor”, obedient, ready to take direction and focused on solving problems, with being a “rebellious clown”, impulsive, creatively autonomous and focused on creating interesting problems. This desire to be a “good actor” and a “good collaborator” was motivated partially by the fact that neither the director/designer nor the musician/composer were being financially compensated for their time and energies, and thus I wanted to be expedient and efficient. But, more significantly, this model of working was internalized by years of conditioning: my training in a classical theatre program that instilled a deferential work ethic and my time working in a theatre model that maintains a hierarchal relationship between director and actor. It was also shaped by the expediency of an institutionalized theatre model where, due to the constraints of resources, creative decisions must be made quickly and, once made, are difficult to undo. This model works in opposition to a clown methodology, where the rebellious clown has freedom to change her mind constantly, even in the middle of a performance. It wasn’t until the second night of the workshop performances that I finally allowed myself to fully embrace the energy of the rebellious clown. Retrospectively, I now view these two shows as the night I was a “good actor”

86 (February 21, 2020) and the night I finally allowed myself to be a “rebellious clown” (February 22, 2020). I refer to these performances as such for the rest of the chapter. In Allergic to Water I was curious to explore the mermaid archetype as a metaphor for chronic illness; I was seeking an imaginative world that could provide critical distance from the harsh realities of chronic illness and amplify the story into the exaggerated realm of clown. In the Hans Christen Andersen story, the price the little mermaid must pay for having a human experience is to be in constant pain and voiceless. The loss of her voice is already a pointed allegory for what must be sacrificed to be an “acceptable” woman but, viewed though a chronic illness lens, her inability to articulate her pain becomes even more distressing. In choosing a mermaid as the protagonist of my piece, I found myself in conversation with many mythologies, both ancient and contemporary. In the 1990 Disney film, Ariel (the little mermaid) ends up saving Prince Eric, killing the Sea Witch Ursula, and marrying the prince as the sun sets. The film, despite its attempts to give Ariel agency, ultimately falls prey to “heteronormativity, post- feminist sensibility and neo-liberal fetishization of consumption” (Frasl 346). Written in 1836, the original Hans Christen Andersen story is darker. The little mermaid in this story must find a human to fall in love with her in order to gain an immortal soul, something mermaids do not possess. There has been significant analysis of the story through a queer lens, considering it an allegory for Andersen’s inability to “tell the world of his own homosexual love” (Norton qtd. in Probyn 113). This queer reading is interesting to consider within the context of the archetype of the mermaid as a queer figure “since she transgresses many, supposedly impenetrable borders and subverts binaric orders” (Tseelon qtd. in Frasl 348). But despite this inherent subversive quality, Andersen condemns his protagonist to a purely patriarchal ending. After she fails to win the love of the prince, the little mermaid is offered the chance to return to her family by plunging a knife into the prince’s heart. She rejects this chance at escape and instead jumps into the sea, where she turns into foam and gets another chance at winning an immortal soul by performing 300 years of good deeds. This dissatisfying ending “ensures a thoroughly female fate of serving others, of doing and being good” (Probyn 103). Beatrice Frasl notes how Andersen has fashioned a “symbolic myth about the condition of Woman in patriarchy”, and that the little mermaid has become a contemporary coming-of-age story paralleling the ways that patriarchy mutilates the bodies and silences the voices of young women (350). This myth was rich with feminist imagery and metaphor, and I was curious how I might use it to illuminate a story of chronic illness.

87 In my research, I proposed to uncover how I, as a clown, might engage in the work of feminist analysis, by re-visioning the narratives of both these little mermaid myths and deconstructing “images of the feminine to reveal how,” rather than being timeless or universal, they “are reflections of the symbolic order though which cultures are produced” (Babbage 22). I planned to engage with the iconic elements of both the Disney and Andersen stories in order to “know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (Rich 35). I brought the text of the Andersen story into our creation process as source material. However, rather than finding ways to re-vision these myths, I found myself simply recreating them. Amidst a set design full of delicate props I was terrified I would break, I struggled to access my rebellious clown energy. The “good actor” in me was focused on being cautious of how I sat in the hammock, and careful of the floor I was warned not to get too wet. Without my clown to resist and parody, certain mythic archetypes began to overshadow the story, confusing the chronic illness narrative. For example, the prince began to pop up everywhere. At one point in rehearsal, I improvised a monologue about not wanting to engage with the prince because he felt unnecessary. I couldn’t figure out where the prince archetype fit within the context of a chronic illness story. Eventually, I equated him with the character of the CEO of Seacura Insurance. I rationalized that it was a way to explore the post-feminist sensibilities of the Disney film: a symbol of how the “dream” of being saved by an individual man has been replaced by the capitalist dream that a corporation will care enough about us to save us. But this choice didn’t really satisfy. Enmeshed in too many layers of structure, plot and metaphor, I had become a very timid collaborator. Unsurprisingly, my clown stopped showing up to play. Ironically, I had lost my artistic voice, like the mermaid character I was playing. My clown encountered another obstacle to her creative autonomy when negotiating a costume choice. The purpose of costume in contemporary clown performance diverges greatly from the traditional theatre model. My approach to costume is informed by the belief that “the only reason for a costume is to show your nakedness, your vulnerability” (Pochinko qtd. in Wellsman 148). As an autonomous clown creator, my methodology in the past has been to go into a thrift store at the very beginning of a process, put on my nose and let my clown choose the costume. However, this approach is very different to the traditional theatre model where, as a performer, you are assigned a costume and you are lucky if you get your costume a week before

88 opening night. Intuitively, I knew wanted to wear pyjamas, a long grey wig and rubber boots with my feet wrapped in bloody bandages. The bandages were inspired by the image in the Hans Christen Andersen story, where every step the little mermaid takes feels “like sharp knives in her fine small feet” (Andersen 10). It appealed to me because it had a bouffon feeling, grotesque and unsettling. It was a form of affliction that I could physicalize, an experiment in applying a bouffon lens to the story. The director talked me out of it, saying that it was a confusing image. As the “good actor” I acquiesced. In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon argues that part of the pleasure of adaptation “comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise” (4). During our ongoing dialogue about my costume, the designer suggested elements of classical mermaid iconography (e.g. seashells, scale patterns, ocean colors) to do the work of quick visual storytelling. She also proposed that the structure of the costume, a white peasant shirt, black bodice and flowing skirt, be a replication of Ariel’s costume in the Disney movie. We compromised on the grey wig, but I still felt dissatisfied. It wasn’t grotesque enough to disrupt the replication. There was no variation, thus, according to Hutcheon’s theory, no pleasure in the adaptation. I found myself trapped in the clothing of a myth I was trying to re-vision. I was trying to clown, to be zany and impulsive, while wearing a corset that restricted my breath. In her essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” Leslie Jamieson asks “[h]ow do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative?” (19). Inhabiting the costume of Ariel, a symbol of fetishized pain, only reinforced “the ‘inspiration porn’ of the brave, defiant sick woman” (West-Knights 6). I wanted to tell a story where my clown was free to be ugly and scared, and I required my costume to externalize those qualities, grounded in the clown principle that “costumes should allow you to be more naked. They should show your inner self rather than cover self-up” (Wallace qtd. in Wellsman 148). As previously mentioned throughout this thesis, an ongoing conversation with the audience is extremely important for effective clowning. In a clown show, “there is never any moment when you are not in contact with the audience” (Pochinko qtd. in Wellsman 151) which necessitates that the house lights be on through the entire show to allow for this conversation. This stratagem transgresses against traditional theatrical practices that prefer, for the most part, to leave the audience in the dark. Or, if a play includes “audience interaction,” the house lights

89 will be raised during that bit and then lowered once it’s over, to indicate that everyone can relax their sphincters and go back to enjoying the show in the anonymity of darkness. But clown shows ask something different of their audience: an invitation to play and engage throughout the entire show, (consensually, of course).15 My experience as a clown has consistently proven the effectiveness of lights on the audience for the deep listening required in a clown show. In order to listen to the audience and keep the conversation going (both clown rules), the clown needs access to the huge amount of information that is communicated non-verbally by an audience. Facial expressions and body language are an essential part of the conversation. However, the house lights being up the entire show dilutes the lighting design, particularly in a small theatre space. Negotiating how to maintain the integrity of the lighting design with my need to see and hear the audience, we eventually compromised, with increasing dissatisfaction on both our parts, to having a low level of light on the audience at all times and bumping the level up for the “audience bits”. During the “good actor” performance on the first night, I could feel the energetic drop in the conversation every time the lights on the audience dimmed. One of the requests I made for the “rebellious clown” performance on the second night was to increase the levels and leave them on the entire time. The difference was profound. All of a sudden, I could hear the audience, not just with my ears but with my entire body.

15 Keep the audience safe is a clown rule. If a clown forces the audience to participate in ways that feel unsafe, they are not maintaining a respectful relationship with their audience. Conversations about what consensual audience interaction looks like are ongoing in the clowning community. The #metoo movement has greatly influenced this conversation.

Figure 25. Jacqueline Russell and Jeremy Gignoux in Allergic to Water. 2020.

In February, two weeks prior to our workshop performance, the director indicated that the creative team needed some structure in order to offer their best work to the process. We moved into a rehearsal phase, solidifying choices and setting cues. I rebelled against this structure by re- writing my own lines as long as they weren’t connected to a cue. I found this part of the process extremely dissatisfying. I was nervous, I did not feel ready to share the piece with an audience, but also understood that, because huge portions of the script were left blank for the conversation with the audience, I would know nothing about the show until it had an audience. But what I was most dissatisfied with was the ending. “Endings are hard”. I wrote this line at the end of my play, because it was the only honest thing I could think of to say. Being honest is a clown rule. I had written several different endings: one where the jury deliberates and declares a verdict, one where Meri performs a long

91 monologue about chronic illness. None of them were satisfying, and I felt a deep yearning to create an ending that felt satisfactory. The director kept telling me that it was okay not to have a proper ending, this was just a workshop performance, but that felt even more unsatisfying. Reflecting on this conundrum now, I recognize that the reason I was struggling was because I was trapped in the binary of a happy Disney ending or a tragic Andersen ending, trying desperately to conceive of another way. What would have happened to the little mermaid had she stabbed the knife into the heart of the prince and returned to her home? In attempting to enact this seemingly utopian outcome I discovered that this version of the ending did not satisfy either. What then had the whole journey been for, to end up exactly where she started? The idea of the mermaid being forced to return to the sea and reside there eternally felt as dreadful as Disney’s version where she successfully enters the “heteronormative economy” of the human world (Frasl 350). The feminist ending had to offer her the chance to live in both worlds, or an entirely new world made of earth and sea. And what about chronic illness? How could the ending address the fact that there is often no end in sight for those with a chronic condition? About a week before the performance, I stumbled across an article in Canadian Theatre Review that answered this dilemma. In “The Theatre Feminist: A Manifesto”, Darrah Teitel warns against satisfaction, writing that it “will most often diffuse, demobilize, and distract from the anger, discomfort, and sadness that lead to revolutionary actions. Feminist [sic] must refuse to let the audience feel satisfied” (40). This resonated for me. I breathed “be honest” deep into my crotch, heart and eyes, and improvised a dissatisfying ending. I removed my wig, which freed me of the beautiful, tragic mermaid archetype I had trapped myself in. I allowed my clown to solve the problems that my character Meri and the brain of Jacqueline could not. I followed the impulse to bury both the prince and the old story book inside a chest, recognizing that neither could help me find my ending. Then I confessed to the audience my desires for the ending, to have the jury (audience) issue a verdict and, hopefully, an indication of their belief in her story. Speaking this desire led me to the realization that “I’m not sure that I even care if you believe me.” I was honest about my desires for an ending with “an incredible magical transformation into a mermaid, my body draped in glittering Canada Council Grant funding.” I admitted my struggles with how to create a feminist ending. And then I realized that I wanted Melusine, the sea witch, to have the final word.

92 Melusine had been the one element of the show where I had no trouble accessing rebellious clown energy. Personified as a hand puppet that spoke gibberish, she was the most fun to play. Famously known as the Starbucks mermaid, Melusine is a grotesque capitalist symbol of the ways in which wild women have been tamed and commercialized. But her original myth, the Legend of Melusine (Bacchilega and Brown), in which she turns into a dragon and burns down the castle, is a mythological antidote to Andersen and Disney. As I improvised my way through creating the show, it became increasingly clear to me that, as the witch, Melusine offered the opportunity for transformation. She became a way to have conversations with myself, to access the playing of multiple levels, to allow Meri, the character, to be in dialogue with my clown. Giving voice to Melusine became the key to figuring out a dissatisfying ending. She reminded me to not take it all so seriously. She gave me radical permission to stand amidst the wreckage and not yet have all the answers as the lights went to black. The revelation of this ending surprised and delighted me. I finally felt “rebellious clown” energy at work in my show. I was beginning to discover a way to resist against the plot I had trapped myself in. Another ongoing dilemma I had throughout the Allergic to Water process involved my relationship to my clown nose. A pivotal question the contemporary feminist clown must ask herself is whether or not to wear a red nose. Considered the tiniest mask in the world, the red clown nose is used in Pochinko clown training to encompass all the masks of the clown, infinite points on the sphere of self. However, there are political implications of red clown nose that cannot be ignored. The appropriation of the image of the red nosed clown by popular culture has saturated the symbol with misconceptions and illogical fears. In order to avoid these prejudices – which have financial implications – many clowns chose to remove the nose. Beyond the legitimization of the art form, the red clown nose contains other implications for feminist clowns. Delphine Cézard observes how, “in Brazil red noses are worn with no hesitation, in France, a clowne must ask herself whether or not to use one in her career. This is because the political dimension prevails – in Brazil the symbol is marshalled to re-vindicate the status of women and their right to work as clownes, while in France, the symbol is questioned as part of an effort to legitimize an art form in trouble” (42). For feminist clown and scholar Margaret J. Irving, the red nose signifies the traditionally male-dominated practice of clown and performing without a nose has freed her from “failing to be a male type of clown” (166). Laurel Butler argues that the red nose is “the actual signifier of critical consciousness” for the clown, that it

93 “gives the wearer permission to depart from conventional modes of prescribed behaviour, and to reflect on the ways we are located within those structures of convention and prescription” (66). For Heather Marie Annis and Amy Lee, who always perform in nose, “the clown’s red nose [is] a barometer driving choices and the capacity for engagement” (Lane Impossibility Aside 49). They believe that wearing their red noses gives permission for their audience to laugh, it is a symbol of “the space where it feels safe … to be exploring issues that might be too emotional or deep or vulnerable. If it’s too real, then it’s not funny anymore” (Annis 15). There have been drawbacks to this choice for Annis and Lee: funders, artistic directors and other gatekeepers have been deterred by the nose, “people have literally said to us that if we took off our noses, we’d be a lot more popular” (Annis 15). Deanna Fleysher, who I have studied with, considers red noses as training wheels: useful for learning the art form, but to be abandoned eventually. Speaking to the possibilities of performance that cannot be easily defined, Fleysher says, “the less you outwardly align yourself with any specific theatrical or comedic tradition, the more dangerous you are” (“Why No Nose Clown?”).

Figure 26. Jacqueline Russell, clown headshot. 2018.

94 For the past ten years I have performed with a red clown nose. However, as I have become more deeply immersed in the debate of these various approaches and rationales, I have begun to question my choice to wear a nose. In my approach to both of my Practice as Research projects, Bridge of Jests and Allergic to Water, I chose to perform without a red nose, experimenting with the possibilities its absence could offer. I was curious to discover how I could give myself and the audience permission to engage in a clown conversation without the nose as a signifier. The challenge I encountered in Allergic to Water was that, without the nose, it became harder to identify where I was on the acting/clowning continuum. As mentioned in Chapter One, the clown is “more aware of the fact that he or she is part of the theatrical illusion than the other characters” and has “a peculiar status both inside and outside of the dramatic fiction” (McManus 12). Thus, in Allergic to Water, there is Meri, the character that my clown is playing, my clown, who can step outside the action of the play to comment on its construct, and Jacqueline, the creator of the piece; the character, the creator and the clown. All three of these entities exist on stage together when clowning. During the first performance, the “good actor” night, I was offered an incredible gift from the gods. When I asked if anyone in the audience was familiar with the complete works of Hans Christen Andersen, a member of my thesis examination committee, who I know has a PhD in English Literature, looked as though she might respond affirmatively. Her husband, sitting beside her, gave her a little nudge, but she said under her breath “well not the complete works.” Meanwhile a male undergraduate student in his early twenties put up his hand to indicate that he was most definitely qualified to be my expert witness. In that moment, my feminist clown had the impulse to engage further in the conversation, to question the young man’s qualifications in comparison to the woman with a PhD, to poke fun at the unbridled confidence of the “mediocre white man”. But because I was stuck being a good actor, not a rebellious clown, I ignored the impulse. A gift from the gods became a wasted opportunity. After the first “good actor” performance, I was haunted by my dissatisfaction. I knew I hadn’t been clowning and I worried it was because I hadn’t worn a nose. Usually, the presence of an audience kicks my clown instincts into gear. I spent the entire next day trying to figure out what was missing. I texted the director that I was going to wear a clown nose in the second performance. But when I showed up to the theatre the string on my clown nose snapped and I didn’t have any replacement string available. Sensing my distress, the musician/composer asked

95 what was wrong. After I told him my dilemma, this felt absence of clown energy in the play, he asked, “Are you having fun?” Oh, shit. Have fun. That’s a clown rule. Yes, let’s have fun tonight, I agreed. In the “rebellious clown” energy of the second night, the musician stopped being a good musician. He started the show by adding distortion, strumming the violin, and speaking directly to the audience, eliciting laughs and beginning the conversation. Filled with permission to have fun and go for the unknown, I immediately felt clown energy when I surprised myself – a clown rule – by improvising a greeting with the musician on stage, playing together in the space. I screamed in mock pain when an audience member removed my foam shackles. I physicalized my responses to certain words, like “doctor” or “insurance company,” amplifying the gestures through repetition. Through the playfulness of my clown, I was finally critically engaging with the performativity of pain. I followed my impulse to bring the tallest, most handsome man in the audience up on stage for the scene with the doctor. By simply having fun, I discovered that the pleasure of this scene lies in the playing of the multiple levels of clown. While the doctor character tried to end the scene as quickly as possible, my clown kept urging the audience member to ask all their questions. As I switched between playing the doctor and being the clown, the pleasure of the scene emerged from being honest about the fact that I was playing two opposing objectives. It was a perfect reminder that “[w]hat makes the clown funny is [her] honesty and belief in what [she] is doing. The most important things about clowning are: the reality of the situation, your belief in the situation and your belief in what you are doing” (Wallace qtd. in Wellsman 147). By finding pleasure in performance, I was finally able to believe and see where that belief might take me. Let the audience affect you is another clown rule. On the second night, there were two young children sitting in the front row. I approached one of them to ask if he would lend me the $10,000 dollars I needed for medical tests. The eight-year-old boy’s response was so generous, explaining that he had a lot of money, that he would happily lend me, but it was at home. His tender words affected me acutely. All of a sudden, I surprised myself – a clown rule – by feeling the cavernous sadness of the story. I followed my impulse to let my clown comment on the moment, blurting out, “This is kind of intense. Is everyone doing okay?” When I got to the climax, stabbing the CEO, popping balloons filled with water and air (be visceral – a clown rule) I surprised myself again. The emotion welling up inside of me was not just anger, but also joy.

96 An embodiment of how “[t]he clown lives in the place of laughing and crying at the same time” (Henderson). The ultimate surprise was that I had found rebellious clown energy without wearing a nose.

Figure 27. Jacqueline Russell in Allergic to Water. 2020.

In a case study on the political engagement of female clowns in Brazil conducted during the “Esse Monte De Muler Palhaca” festival in Rio de Janerio in 2018, Delphine Cézard notes how “[b]ecoming autonomous in their occupation – from production to performance – has been essential for [female clowns’] survival” (33). This research process has helped me to clarify my need for an autonomous feminist clown working methodology where the clown is regarded as the creative authority. It has also identified the importance of dissatisfaction and failure in feminist clown creation. Dissatisfaction has become a signal for me, a warning light that I am not having fun and thus not using my clown as a critical tool. Through this research process, I was able to redefine my relationship with failure and see it as intimately connected with success. Had

97 I not failed to clown during that first performance, I might not have discovered an acute difference of feeling in the second performance. Working within the constraints of a traditional theatre production model, navigating the creative tensions of the traditionally hierarchical director-actor relationship and losing the creative autonomy of my clown had felt like failure, but it actually offered me previously hidden insights into my own creative process. Reflecting on the relationship of the clown to failure Lane writes: [s]uccess and failure are conceived differently by the clown than they are in everyday contexts. In their common usage, success and failure are understood to be opposing concepts, meaning that one can be defined by the absence of the other: we succeed when we do not fail, and we fail when we do not succeed. The clown, however, plays by different rules. For the clown, success and failure are understood to be intimately and even cyclically connected to one another. (Impossibility Aside 118) Irving suggests that failure can be an effective strategy for the feminist clown, using it as “a stratagem for challenging truths” (166). In the process of creating and performing Allergic to Water, failure became a strategy that allowed me to challenge my own beliefs, habits and assumptions about the act of feminist clown creation. In reflecting on this process, I was reminded of the proto-feminist clown ancestors I discovered in Chapter One, of their efforts to become “autonomous creative beings” through the strategies of their clowns. The ways in which Cha-u-ka-o and Evetta Matthews broke the rules of their time, echoed my own efforts to figure out how to break the rules. In my Pochinko clown training, I learned that in order to successfully break the rules, you must first understand the rules. This Practice as Research experiment revealed my own need to identify and then critically examine the rules of the traditional theatre production model in order to strategically break them. The magic of clown rule breaking is that “the presence of the clown rules throughout the training does not result so much from learning the rules but, instead, from unlearning the obstacles that exist to us accessing or remembering the rules within ourselves” (Lane Impossibility Aside 31). Allergic to Water was a process that allowed me to continue unlearning a traditional model of theatre creation in order to remember what I already knew. My first clown teacher, Jan Henderson, used to say to us, “The clown breaks every rule but its own.” Twenty years later, I am beginning to understand the truth of this statement.

98 Conclusion

In her book Women and Laughter, published in 1994, Frances Gray discusses the dynamics of women and comedy in various genres: television sitcoms, stand-up and theatre. In the epilogue she writes: I am walking by the Thames with a clown. It has taken a great deal of effort to find her. Having turned up at the clown Mecca, the annual Clown Convention at Bognor Regis, I find very few women behind the red noses. Finally, with the help of the Tourist Board, I track down a bare half-dozen, several of whom work as ‘straights’ to a male clown. Fizzie Lizzie, however, is the real thing, and can make my son laugh even today when she’s in mufti. Lizzie is knowledgeable about her trade, she’s writing a thesis. The knowledge seems to ground her: despite the over-poweringly male presence in the clown world, she has tapped in to a piece of women’s history lost to most of us. She describes female clowns in pictures by Toulouse-Lautrec. I look them up, afterwards, and find figures at once grotesque and wrapped in a disturbing haze of sexual ambivalence. Lizzie sees her own clown as a mischief-maker, an anarchist, and the possessor of skills … I would like to see what happens if female clowns begin networking. I would have liked to find a movement strong enough for a whole chapter. (182) I discovered this passage during the final stages of my research. I was struck by the similarities between Lizzie and myself. The common struggle for visibility in the traditionally male- dominated world of clown, and our shared impulse to look to the proto-feminist clowns of the past for inspiration. It was also a reminder of what has changed. Over twenty-five years later, the movement has strengthened considerably. The present moment offers many exciting developments at the intersection of feminism and clown, especially in terms of networking and the building of community. Internationally, women’s clown festivals like the Red Pearl Womxn Clown festival in Helsinki, the Clownin festival in Vienna, and the Esse Monte de Mulher Palhaça festival in Rio de Janerio have raised the profile of women in clowning and begun to create a network that fosters the work of feminist clowning. These festivals, according to Cézard, “besides offering visibility and legitimacy at an institutional level to clowning as an artform … offer the same to the women who practice it. By promoting such a platform, the dimensions and definition of a woman’s image and place within clowning and in society at large are redefined”

99 (34). Other clown festivals are creating spaces for dialogue and action. At the 2018 New York Clown Festival, a panel discussion titled “Clowning while female,” centralized the experiences and challenges of female clowns, while the same year the Montreal Clown Festival hosted a panel conversation about gender and representation in clown performance. In addition, over the past decade, numerous female/non-binary clown collectives have emerged, creating spaces where both audiences and performers can “rediscover their relationship to what’s funny” (Cornell qtd. in Dembosky). Clowns ex Machina, an all-female clown troupe in New York City founded by Kendal Cornell, aims to “transform the taboo into the funny, the sexual into the silly,” and longs to create a “world where dropping your drawers mean[s] comedy, not [just] promiscuity!” (Cornell qtd. in Dembosky). The Assembly, a collective of womxn and non-binary clowns in Vancouver, play “together in an organic and flexible feminist mode,” drawing on the diversity of skills and approaches in the group for their creation methodology (“About”). Both Clowns ex Machina and The Assembly regularly produce shows that feature large groups of female and non-binary clowns on stage together (see Figure 28). What was once a lonely pursuit, the feminist clown working solo at her trade, has become an experience of community. The antidote to the individualism of post-feminist forces, this return to collective action can be felt in the larger ethos of fourth-wave feminist activism. Large numbers of rebellious, transgressive clowns careening around the stage arouses a visceral sense of ownership, a claiming of space that is, and always was, ours. This abundance of non-traditional clown bodies on stage argues against the cliché that funny women are an anomaly and makes essential the connection between the need and ability to laugh with experiences of autonomy and equality. Collectively exploring fluid expressions of gender and embodying the freedom found through unbridled pleasure, these clowns evoke Jill Dolan’s concept of utopia in performance, the ways in which “live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world” (Utopia in Performance 2). The current realities of the world appear increasingly bleak: a report from March 2020 found that ninety percent of people still hold some sort of bias against females, and the intersections of class, race, sexuality, and ability only compound these biases (see Ford). Despite, or perhaps because of, this grim reality, these artists use the imaginative possibilities of clowning to create a rebellious, transformative clown presence that “lets audiences imagine utopia not as some idea of

100 future perfection that might never arrive, but as brief enactments of the possibilities of a process that starts now, in this moment” (Dolan Utopia in Performance 17). They are, as the women of Clowns Ex Machina proclaim, sui generis.16

Figure 28. The Assembly. Photo by Tom Gould. 2018.

As I have worked to construct this thesis, I have begun to think of it as a way of documenting a living history, a process of capturing the pleasures and possibilities of feminist clowns, myself included, for future clowns and scholars. I hope that my research will be a contribution towards a future filled with conversation, analysis and documentation about feminist clowning, a future where those interested in reading about feminist clowning will no longer have to scour the footnotes. At the current moment, there are only a small number of clown practitioners and scholars engaged in the work of reckoning with the intersection of feminism and clown. Returning to Gray’s suggestion that “[i]f feminism is to change all that needs to be changed” by clarifying our relationship to laughter, then there is still much work to be done (33).

16 of its/his/her/their own kind, in a class by itself.

101 Feminist clown scholars must do the work of articulating a nuanced understanding of feminist clown practice, by viewing it alongside the development of feminist theory. This thesis is my contribution to the work, an investigation into the power of laughter to “challenge social and symbolic systems that would keep women in their place” (Rowe 3). This research has allowed me to identify the strategies of innovative historical and contemporary female clowns and to examine and refine my own strategies and methodologies. By using the body as a source of knowledge, I was able to listen to myself, a clown rule, to identify the pleasures and possibilities of my own clowning practice. In many ways, my process has mirrored that of feminist clown/scholar Margaret J. Irving’s investigations, undertaking “[a] journey from identifying a female clown practice to positing a feminist clowning strategy” (165). Through my analysis of the case-studies of contemporary clowns, I was able to identify the ways that clown practice and feminist theory can illuminate and amplify each other in order to increase the visibility of a feminist clowning practice. My exploration has revealed how vast and under- researched the intersection of clown practice and feminist theory is, how much more there is to consider. I emerge from this process situated in a lineage of “autonomous creative beings,” bridged to a feminist clown ancestry that continues to teach me how to break the rules and to remind me of my clown’s “limitless ability to invent new rules” (Haxell 748; McManus 15). Like Lizzie from Gray’s epilogue, “I want not so much to make people laugh” as to have the creative authority “to change the situation, to cause laughter to happen” (182). It has been suggested that a subversive use of humour may be one of the defining characteristics of fourth-wave feminism. That while feminists “should never have to be funny or flippant about endemic sexism … many argue convincingly for it as a ‘gateway drug’ to get young women involved, a vehicle for political ideas and campaigning, as well as for rage. As demonstrated through centuries of political satire, humour can sometimes illuminate anger more effectively than any other approach” (Cochrane). Laughter is often the only sane response to the absurdities of a patriarchal world. Looking towards feminist futures, Aston and Harris write, “[e]ssential to any sort of feminist politics has always been the idea that the ‘future’ is a question, is in question: is not necessarily determined by the past or the present. Rather, then, our desire is for a feminism to move forward with, or to keep us moving forward” (Feminist Futures 3). The clown’s ability to go for the unknown, to use imagination as a way of planning and rehearsing for revolution, offers a strategic approach towards creating feminist futures. bell hooks declares that

102 “[f]eminist politics aims to end domination to free us to be who we are — to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace” (Feminism is for Everybody 118). Those who clown share a similar desire to free and liberate, understanding that the practice of clown can help us to unlearn those rules that prevent us from being who we truly are. This politic of transformation is the central axis of the intersection of clown and feminism, a space full of limitless pleasures and possibilities.

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