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CLOWNS EX MACHINA: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GENDER AND CLOWN by KIMBERLY A. BATES A THESIS Presented to the Department of Theater Arts and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts June 2012 THESIS APPROVAL PAGE Student: Kimberly A. Bates Title: Clowns Ex Machina: An Investigation of the Relationship Between Gender and Clown This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in the Department of Theater Arts by: John Schmor Chair La Donna Forsgren Member and Kimberly Andrew Espy Vice President for Research & Innovation/Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2012 ii © 2012 Kimberly A. Bates iii THESIS ABSTRACT Kimberly A. Bates Master of Arts Department of Theater Arts June 2012 Title: Clowns Ex Machina: An Investigation of the Relationship Between Gender and Clown Historically, women have been largely discounted from the public comedic arena, typically serving as the butt of the joke or other various comedic fodder. As a female comedian, I became interested in how gender played into the performance of comedy, particularly in clown work. This case study follows an all female clown troupe called Clowns Ex Machina, based in New York, and investigates the impact of generating clown work in an all-female environment by all-female performers. The work that they do not only validates female participation in clown, but it also shows that the female experience is a human experience, and that gender lines do not have to prevent empathic identification. iv CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Kimberly A. Bates GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION: University of Oregon, Eugene DEGREES AWARDED: Master of Arts, Theater Arts, 2012, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, Theater Arts, 2008, University of Oregon AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Physical Comedy and Movement Technique Improvisation for Actors Clown Women and Gender Studies PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Instructor (GTF), University of Oregon, Eugene, 2011-2012 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: New York Research Award, Miller Research Foundation, 2011 - 2012 Academic Grant, Mark’s Family Foundation, 2011 - 2012 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to Professors Schmor and Forsgren for their assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Ms. Kendall Cornell and the women of Clowns Ex Machina who offered their experience and strength as women comedians, freely and willingly, for the content of this investigation. The research for this project was made possible in part by the Miller Research Foundation. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 II. THE TROUPE .............................................................................................................. 11 III. THE CLOWN OUT OF THE MACHINE ............................................................. 36 IV. THE BODY ................................................................................................................... 49 V. CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 66 APENDICES A. INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS .................................................................................. 74 B. NOTES ............................................................................................................................ 142 C. EMAILS .......................................................................................................................... 145 REFERENCES CITED ....................................................................................................... 153 vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In The Essential Crazy Wisdom, Wes Nisker remarks that, “the clown falls over for us, and stands up for us, too” (Nisker, 33). This clown is an “everyman” figure, always falling and failing, reminding us that, “we plan our days only to find that the days have other plans” (32). The clown, along with the jester, the trickster, and the fool, work together to introduce what Nisker terms “crazy wisdom” into the social consciousness. As the name implies, crazy wisdom works against conventional wisdom, which is “just the commonly agreed-upon lies of any given era” (Nisker, 12). Conventional wisdom is the unexamined life, and crazy wisdom is meant to challenge that: If crazy wisdom knows anything, it is that we don’t know. We don’t know who we are, where we are, or what this life and universe are about. … In order to hear crazy wisdom, we need to somehow shut off or turn down the grinding noise of the rational, analytic gears. Crazy wisdom requires that we get at least a little bit out of our minds. (19) It is the anti-wisdom, the constant turning upside-down and inside out of engrained beliefs, roles, and systems of power. These characters are related to one another, from the same “family tree”, if you will, and they are often conflated. Their differences lie in the way that they have historically functioned within a society. Jesters are the ultimate social critics, leveraging wit and wordplay to dissemble lies (34). They expose the fallacy of the status quo, the falsehoods told by powerful establishments, and have a keen irreverence for the contemporary social scene. Jesters are directly connected to current events, drawing our attention not 1 only to timeless truths but also to what is happening in our world today. They “get away with dangerous revelations by making them funny” (35), and for this reason, the jesters in the courts of Kings and Queens were often the only ones who could speak candidly to royalty and escape with their heads intact. The jester’s weapons are her words. Her skewering revelations are delivered with wit, a “quick inventiveness of language… taking pleasurable liberties with meanings” (Stott, 55). We have found pleasure in wit for centuries, enjoying the comedic banter of Oscar Wilde and the poetic prowess of Shakespeare’s fools. During the Restoration, playing with social and linguistic artifice was the coveted quality of a learned man (or woman), the mark of high social status (56). Not only does the jester use words to reveal truth in a way that is pleasurable, but she also uses wordplay to reveal the double meaning of words themselves. Jesters are the purveyors of puns, confounding the listener’s expectations by re-contextualizing both social assumptions and language itself. Like the rest of the characters, jesters live somewhere between the material and the divine. Typically low on the material social ladder, the jester is paradoxically “above” her contemporaries, using her wit to elevate and distance herself from the minutia of human existence. This distance creates perspective, and this perspective is the jester’s crazy wisdom. Today, we can see the jester in stand- up comedy, in shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report that deal strictly with current events and use sarcasm and word-play to slash through entrenched value systems. The social function of the jester is to keep assumptions up in the air 2 and injustices out in the light. “In the worldly realm of relative truths, jesters are the champions of crazy wisdom” (Nisker, 41). The trickster is harder to spot these days, and show up primarily in cultural mythology. In folklore, tricksters are sometimes cast as the creators of all material being, the source of all our troubles (41); other times they are simply the creators of mischief and mayhem. Quite simply, the job of the trickster is to break the rules, and she “violates the most sacred of prohibitions” at every opportunity (Stott, 51). Tricksters are not confined by – or simply do not care about – boundaries: social, conceptual, or physical. For this reason, tricksters are able to cross the lines between life and death, and, like her sister the jester, the lines between the material and the divine. The crazy wisdom of the trickster is a marriage between divine wisdom and the basest of human desires. Often driven by the desire to fill physical cravings – for food or sex – the trickster’s escapades turn into cautionary tales for her victims. We delight in the trickster because she can break all the rules we wish we could break. We fear the trickster because she is hard to spot, and her lessons are delivered with veracity and cunning. It is no coincidence that many tricksters take the form of an animal – Coyote in southwestern Native American cultures, cartoon anarchists Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in the Warner Brothers cartoons, and Puck in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to name a few. The function of the trickster is to remind us that we are not so civilized that we are free from our “animal” nature, and that “just beyond the boundaries of our civilized encampment, 3 the trickster howls at night to remind us of the chaos that lives all around” (Nisker, 47). Somewhat less abrasive than the trickster, the fool is no less “tricky” when it comes to confounding assumptions and expectations. While the trickster hunts incessantly to satiate her cravings, the fool operates from a place of innocence, the antithesis of worldliness and hedonism. The fool appears as “a symbol of contradictions and quandaries” (Stott, 46). Foolishness is often confused with idiocy or stupidity. It is, instead, the expression