Trigger warning: genocide

Recently, after I posted a new instalment of this blog, a Clown & Dark Clown 'graduate' wrote to me.

She said: 
'I’m extremely excited about the Dark Clown book you are writing. Your workshop is still as vivid as ever in my mind and that was 10 years ago. Since then I’ve been deeply involved in teaching storytelling/theatre-making for social justice, a journey that has led me to Rwanda five times. I took an intensive course, the “Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma” (HPRT) through Harvard’s medical school. The course - which deals with trauma and recovery - had direct ties to storytelling and I needed to know more. 

So much of what I’ve felt, stories I’ve heard - the absurdity behind fear, hatred and violence - has been processed into numerous dark clown scenes in my head ... I found it was useful to do that, just to process the insanity and learn to walk with it. Right now I am working on a Master in Education and I’ve been making loads of connections between teaching and red nose clown work, also. Thank you for your work, it’s left a lasting impression on me and became a tool in my everyday life.' - Ongoing-Learning Educator And Theatre-Maker Who Focuses On Social Justice Education And Kinesthetic Learning

The Course Participant has asked to remain anonymous – I am going to call her Sandra. The course she attended was set up by a host (Lyndi Smith) and took place in Coventry. 10am – 5pm Monday 12th to 16th April 2010.  Just a side note as I look at my files, I see that this was back in the days when I promoted Dark Clown with this description: ‘ A chance to play with a darker kind of humour … an experiment with the edges of laughter…a way to create clown characters and performing ensembles with more edge and relevance … a way to update the sweet and poetic image of the clown … a way to make a more exciting and demanding rapport with audiences ...’

After hearing - in a FB DM exchange - that 'Sandra' found the Dark Clown work helpful to  ‘process the insanity’, I was compelled to contact her and we set up a Zoom chat.

When we connected on Zoom, Sandra first spoke about the Clown part of the week-long course. With a photographic memory (or perfect note-taking and subsequent application)* she recalled techniques she learned on the course and now uses regularly, although not under the name of ‘Clown’: e.g. dancing with different parts of your body and the point-and-name exercise which I learned via the wonderful Niall Ashdown. She appreciated the benefits of the work, saying that for her these exercises ‘slowed down time’, enabling greater ability to appreciate how your body is sharing your story and how you are connecting with your audience. She mentioned, too, how memorable the work was – ‘you can’t forget about it and go back to the old ways’.  
 
Sandra said that the Clown & Dark Clown course provided her with ‘a way to look with an innocent eye'** even when in unsettling situations such as looking at the bones of victims in what was Nyamata Church and now is the Nyamata Genocide Memorial Centre.' (Remains are now being stored out of sight).

The Clown's curiosity was helpful too - Sandra found that ‘curiousity diminishes fear’ and felt that this allowed her to simply ’be’ with the Horrific.  She said: ‘I was asking myself – how does one respond in order to be with this? And I realised I had prepped for this. Clown work heightens the senses and slows things down and that made it endurable ... listening to the stories people recounted of rape, of being made to dig their own graves. Through the Dark Clown work, I had had the opportunity of experiencing in a safe learning space - a way to imagine and embody humiliation, despair and shame and fear.'
 
Like me, Sandra appreciates that the response of anger and outrage is the ‘tip of the iceberg’ and that underneath are the Marginalised Emotions such as self-loathing and mistrust. These are not emotions anyone would logically choose to experience, but they can remain life-sappingly trapped if one is unwilling to look at them, or, to use Sandra's expression 'walk with them'. 
 
'Through the lens of the Dark Clown work I was able to see the component parts of the situations, examine what I was hearing. The fact that I walked the Dark Clown scenarios helped me stay settled and grounded in the face of absolute darkness and look at my emotions in a curious way. I could see things, too, from a variety of perspectives, see it as theatre and imagine: what would be like as a performer to perform this? What would the victim do in response to the perpetrator’s actions, what would the bystander/onlooker do? And my training at Harvard supported this.’***
 
I was gratified to hear this, reinforcing my own instincts that being able to Witness the detail in the desperate Predicaments of the Dark Clown work had a benefit and validity. The aim with the Dark Clown work is that the player is able to pretend well enough so that we in the audience experience the Palpable Cost of contemplating a horrific choice - for example: someone playing in the line-up exercise is given the instruction to decide who in the group will be punished. **** In the playing of the exercise, the aim is that the audience see: how the prisoner/player looks being given the alarming instruction, their panic/conflict/desperation while considering making the Impossible Choice and then how they look afterwards - experiencing shame and horror that they complied. 

We get to see and feel these moments clearly, broken down -  as contrasted with, say, a horrific situation being delivered in an opaque chunk (e.g. as one might read or hear the fact that people were forced to select who died and survived). When presented with a ghastly fact / event / news / story, it is natural that the nervous system shies away, retreats. There is aversion and a level of numbness. (We might even feel that it might be morbid to take time to imagine such a thing.)
 
And as a side note – the audience of the Dark Clown is (via the comedy craft) is encouraged to make a sound – a laugh (albeit a Troubled Laugh) which provides the opportunity for some release as opposed to the hushed reaction ’don’t look’; an alternative to silence, shutdown and holding in. 
 
Sandra further values the contribution of the Red Nose Clown and its 'pulse of empathy'. She mentioned Rwanda's emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation and that she had encountered perpetrators who had confessed, experienced a process of contrition and who are in the process of making reparations. She found herself in situations with these people and she found that she was able to just be with these people, to humanise not demonise them - to imagine them in the darkest and scariest moments, making the regrettable choices that they made. Sandra said that ‘curiosity and the pulse of empathy had helped me connect to the darkness and joy in another, and learn that in spite of the Horrors, there is common ground: these folks were parents, grandparents, farmers, enjoyed jokes and dancing.’

Sandra also said that Clown & Dark Clown work has also played a part in her own healing (including therapy) from vicarious trauma, accrued over the years (by being able to use the Red Nose Clown’s ability to access joy, to find relief and provide a thinking and feeling space via curiousity). Sandra again mentioned the value of Red Nose Clown providing ways for her to ‘refill’ on compassion (many care workers experience empathy burnout).

Back in the context of my open workshops for theatre practitioners, I shared with her a new practice I have installed on the Clown & Dark Clown course (when I sense it is needed or might be about to become needed). I invite participants to enter Red Nose state and to find a piece of wall or furniture and to comfort it e.g. 'it will be ok, you're doing really well. Yes it's scary but there are still donkeys ...' etc.
 
Sandra again expressed her good fortune that fate had led her to the work ten years ago: ‘When else do we get the chance to encounter the Marginalised Emotions except when it happens to us?' In the workshop we have space and are encouraged to have flexibility and are called to employ a shifting viewpoint, and shifting modalities of awareness. She said she felt that the Dark Clown work was ‘bigger than a performance practice – it is a practice for life, giving guidance, a kind of map to navigate the Horrors.’ 

I currently do not and would not offer the Dark Clown work as anything other than a theatre arts practice although a couple of course participants who were therapists have commented on the value they felt the work offered and mused on its further potential. (It is not a goal I am aiming towards, but perhaps, at some point in the future, the Dark Clown work might find a place as a component contained within a larger training programme led by a care-worker programme or some kind of well-supported teaching  or psychological training programme.)

Like me, Sandra saw that this is not work for the already traumatised. They have had the encounter with Horror, they need different help to recover. But it may be possible that for future care-workers, the Dark Clown work may offer valuable benefits.

Meanwhile, there are those of us who, although we have not been as close to experiences of large conflict, are still being remotely affected by world events - in the news, on our Facebook feed and as we walk the streets witnessing people living in destitution. At a daily level, we are not given time to deal with any feelings we might have about dreadful events in this world that we know ourselves to be a part of. ****** 
​Many participants report gratitude for the side benefits of the work:

'I have learned to better recognise how and where these emotions sit in my physical body, to better label and understand their influence on my being. Once labelled and located, they are better explored with the opportunity for release or conscious use to transform. I now have a process allowing me to hold on to what is useful, work through and release what is not.' - Course Participant

I aim to hold the Dark Clown work as ethically as I can. Please do see the helpful FAQ's for the work. The work walks an edge. But, like many theatre practitioners, I have an interest in inner and outer humanity and I feel it is an edge better looked at than ignored. Hence my being gratified that this particular course graduate's felt similarly and articulated her thoughts so generously and well.

For clarity's sake, let me repeat: I do not and have no plans to offer the Dark Clown work as anything other than a theatre arts practice. 
 
*I took copious notes on my first workshop with Philippe Gaulier and Monika Pagneaux – I was magnetised by the enlivening, mysterious, de-mystifying work these masters were offering and that influence has been enduring, even as I mixed it with other theatre forms and bodies of knowledge.

​** one could also say ‘beginners mind’

*** Having had some access to Holocaust training, I avoid any role play focusing on Perpetrator / Victim scenarios. Where there is a player representing a guard, I limit their participation strictly. I say: In this work we are not interested in the Perpetrator, we are interested in the person being given the opportunity to release via the Predicaments into the Marginalised Emotions and to believably but strategically play there in order to affect the audience. If the person representing the guard needs extra clarification, I invite them to imagine that they need to ‘do their job’- they need to vigiliantly watch the audience and the prisoner otherwise they could easily be in the prisoner’s place. I read in that Maria Alyokhina (Pussy Riot Member) in her book Riot Days  describes how the guards had found it very effective to delegate certain prisoners to police the others (in order to gain back privileges - 'privileges'- which had been inhumanly denied them).  

**** Line-up exercise – see the post on vulnerability

***** Hannah Arendt’s concept of the ‘Banality of Evil’ articulates people doing beyond dreadful things in the name of doing their job.

****** In her excellent book, The War Hotel, author Arlene Audergon points out that the world has a tendency to want to separate off and see countries where ghastly conflict has taken place as ‘tribal’ or ‘civil’ war, rather than being situations where people were manipulated and divided by politics towards unthinkable ends.

What happens when Red Nose Clown and Dark Clown meet?

A good number of years ago I was teaching at Central School. The Acting Collaborative and Devised Theatre students were approaching King Lear and I was hired to teach Clown & Dark Clown.
One student asked 'What happens when Red Nose Clown* and Dark Clown meet?' I said 'Let's find out'.
I setup a 'world cafe' where a group hold a conversation by circulating round a circuit of small ‘table’ groups with one person at each ‘table’ staying in place to hold the previous conversations. A group feedback revealed a few main options with some ideas as subsets of those main options. I then asked for people to volunteer as the holders of a particular idea and we held a marketplace where those people 'sold' their idea (again with rotating groups), then at the end, the individuals self-selected into groups to explore each idea.

An Enforced King Lear
I am only going to describe what happened in one of the groups here. Leaning on the idea of Hamlet or Die, and using the concept of the line-up exercise, with someone in place as Controller, one group decided upon the idea of a group of Dark Clowns being forced to perform King Lear, with the unfortunate twist that, as for Hamlet or Die, the deaths and injuries stipulated in the play would be enacted and would be actually painful or - erm - fatal.

'Curtain up'
They began with a line-up of prisoners all with their backs to the audience. Slowly they turned around. They were all terrified, but two of them exhibited a particular fresh breed of alarm. After a few feints and beats, the person in between them revealed themselves. In stark contrast to the others, whose clocks and eye flicks were snatched more nervously, this 'idiot'** was thrilled to be there, delighted to be in company of others and, uniquely … wearing a red nose. For the others in the line-up, the situation was already frightening. Now they see they will have to deal ongoingly with this added unpredictability - a Red Nose Clown who is excited about the games to come – their fear is ramped up, and somewhat coloured with the horror of the uncanny.

Everything we love about the Red Nose Clown - their playfulness, their spontaneity, their good-heartedness, their desire to connect, their mistakes, their delightful capacity to misunderstand, their inability to learn - each quality presents a threat to the poor, hypervigilant Dark Clown players. (Imagine being on a mountain climbing expedition with a prankster.) In the absurd torture realm of an Enforced Performance scenario, The Red Nose Clown’s positive expectations, curiosity and relative invulnerability to pain – bring a terrifying cocktail of uncontrollability, compounding the stressful uncertainty of the line-up Predicament.

As part of the set-up of the line-up exercise, I say - 'The rules in this regime are unknowable, unpredictable. Sometimes they want to punish someone and they shoot your neighbour by mistake. Or sometimes they decide that in order to punish you, they will shoot the person next to you deliberately.' For a fuller explanation of this exercise and the careful set-up for it look at the post on vulnerability. More info in this footnote from the same post.***

The Dark Clown player in a line-up is trying not to attract attention, not to make a mistake, all the while keeping an eye on their neighbours because a wrong step can cost dearly. (Side note: for the Dark Clown, this hyper-vigilance replaces the 'complicité' of the Red Nose Clown. Interestingly, I have often seen that people who have found it hard to notice the other in Red Nose mode, gain a marked improvement in their ability to respond to their fellow players in the Line-up exercise.)

Different rules
Think about Roger Rabbit in the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where live actors and animated creatures co-exist. The poor, grieving human Eddie Valiant (played by Bob Hoskins) is wary of Toons. Toons operate by different rules:

Eddie Valiant : You crazy rabbit! I'm out there risking my neck for you, and what are you doing? Singing and dancing! 

Roger Rabbit : But I'm a Toon. Toons are supposed to make people laugh. 

...

Roger Rabbit : What could have possibly happened to you to turn you into such a sourpuss? 

Eddie Valiant : You really want to know? I'll tell you. A Toon killed my brother. 

‘Funny Games’
Coming back to the Red-Nose-meets-Dark-Clown improvisation - I can't remember exactly the beats of this prepared improvisation but I can see the many possibilities - e.g.:
The Controller announces: ‘Act 3, Scene 7! Give out the spoons!’
The Red Nose Clown might rush forward to collect the spoons that are being given out and enthusiastically play them - perhaps urging others to sing 'Old Macdonald had a farm! ... come on everyone, dance!' The poor prisoners, though appalled by Red Nose’s exhortations to dance, comply either out of a nervous reflex or perhaps as a desperate urge to buy time, thereby causing themselves to experience the shame of voluntarily jettisoning one's own dignity. 

The Controller could then call a halt to this: 'Get on with it!' - and there could be a poignant (for the audience) tussle as the prisoners who are being forced to step forward to play Cornwall and his servant find themselves in the desperate and ridiculous predicament of having to get the spoons off the Red Nose, who'd either be petulantly protecting his toys or gleefully enjoying the 'no it's mine' tussle. Even though the Dark Clown players would not be relishing what they were being called to do next, they would feel compelled to take possession of the spoons. Maybe Bozo might raise the spoons above ‘Gloucester’ play-acting dramatically and maniacally laughing, this horror would redouble the efforts of the others to claim the spoons. Once successful, a series of takes and clocks would register their satisfaction at prising the spoons off the infuriating Bozo and then continue to map their dawning horror that they have fought, only to find themselves brought abruptly to their ghastly appointed task.

During the preceding tussle, the prisoner awaiting his role as Gloucester would have no choice but to watch in horror. A special horror to have hurt imminent, and to have the threat of hurt prolonged – then on top of that, to have the preparations for the ghastly event of being blinded happen in an atmosphere of child-like chaos and squabbling. 

Perhaps, once spoons have been ‘won’ and that painful beat clocked, 'Gloucester' might make a break for it. Red Nose would love this new game of chasey and wrestle the poor Gloucester to the ground, giggling. Maybe Bozo might even tickle poor Gloucester who might then have the humiliation of giggling in response, and segue on to repeatedly call 'stop! stop! stop!' Only to be faced with the inexplicable horror of his command being heeded - and being bundled by all assembled (‘the show must go on’) to be tied to a chair. Before using the rope, Red Nose might do some skipping with it, even pop it into Gloucester's mouth like reins for a quick game of horsey ...

Perhaps with a prompt from the Controller, the ghastly deed is done, at a devastating cost to ‘Cornwall’ and his ‘servant’. They in turn face their deaths. 

Each plot event brings games for the Red Nose Clown and that brings ghastly,  absurd and exquisitely (painfully) layered predicaments for the Dark Clown players. Bozo misinterprets bodies that fall to the ground or are dragged off - he applauds the dying and wounded, thinking they are play-acting and that he is being a wonderful co-player. Some deaths are seen as a game: "Ashes, ashes, all fall down", he might join in with a falling down lazzi. 

So while, in most contexts, the Red Nose Clown provides a ‘pulse of empathy’, in this context, and seen in the light of ‘normal’ reality, Clown antics can be horrific. Roger Rabbit - handcuffed to Bob Hoskins - has preternatural speed and agility and very effectively escapes from danger with his human attached. Bob/Eddie Valiant is slammed into walls and at one stage is dragged down stairs, with his head hitting every step. Only when they are settled and making a plan, does Roger, slip his wrist easily from the cuffs.

Eddie Valiant : You mean you could've taken your hand out of that cuff at any time? 

Roger Rabbit : No, not at any time, only when it was funny.
 
A judicious use if the ridiculous
Adding a skilful touch of the ridiculous to a ghastly situation is a useful technique to release the Troubled Laughter. For example, in the Buzzer exercise, players employ clocks and beats and express the appropriate Marginalised Emotions (strategically, using comedy craft and with audience awareness). It’s helpful/an extra level of skill to add something ridiculous - e.g.: a feigned electric shock, presented believably****, yet which causes the Dark Clown player to spin in a circle like a wind-up toy. Another example: in the setup for The Somali Pirates scenario, I give the players a back story where there is a small past niggle between the two hostages. They are instructed not to play this niggle, but to allow it to bleed into their reactions to the other within the larger predicament. This layering can produce compelling results – a portrayal of a genuine predicament of suffering***** inflected with little micro-beats of flawed humanity – which, once released, can in turn release a further micro-beat of Marginalised Emotion- i.e. ‘Oh no, I was just selfish, in such an awful situation! I feel shame at my own behaviour.’
 
Before we continue to the end – a bit of a side note here on how ‘nice’ the Red Nose Clown is (actually a bigger conversation than this post can deal with)
The great clown Joey Grimaldi performed for adult audiences, but in the years that followed, Andrew McConnell Stott, author of The Pantomime Life Of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comediannoted, Clowns increasingly became more deemed as a children's entertainment. Following the wonderful re-invigorating of physical theatre styles by Jacques Lecoq, the practice of Clowning has had a renaissance, finding again adult audiences. Sometimes a legacy of the innocence and sweetness of ‘the clown’ remains in people's thinking and/or is debated. Fear of clowns started to become palpable (due to the film It and also to the crimes of John Wayne Gacey. The situation was worsened in 2014 by the ‘creepy clown’ pranking in UK and USA and the regrettable incidents of thugs disguised as scary clowns in France in 2014. I was tracking articles on this rising wave of Coulraphobia as I prepared to make the adult Clown drama The Death of Fun in Hong Kong in 2017. 
 
With more recent events, the whole conversation about Clown is even more complex. Dr Justin Thomas, associate professor at Zayed University in this article  takes Jung’s lead and mentions the Clown’s link to the Trickster archetype, saying: 'The positive attributes of the trickster include being wise, funny and intelligent. However, the more negative aspects include being a malicious rule breaker, a cunning thief and a cruel prankster. A psychiatrist might consider such a person a psychopath, diagnosing antisocial personality disorder.' Sadly a couple of notable politicians display a less-than-statesperson-like style which many have described as Clown-like, in early efforts to mock them. Ineptitude may indeed be laughable, but the laughter dies when ineptitude plus power = harm. ******
 
Another side note - Dramaturgical thinking
If, in the scenario being described here, the Red Nose Clown was portrayed as vulnerable and tender-hearted, it would evoke too much pathos. One of the basic rules of comedy is Contrast – in this Enforced Performance Line-up scenario, any hurt to the Red Nose would eclipse the suffering of the Dark Clowns or bring us to tears and take us (the audience) off the hook. Once in the voice of the Controller, I commanded a Line-up participant to sing. He sang too beautifully. It was exquisite. So exquisite, I had to call the exercise to a halt. We all transcended and felt sorrow (not one of the Marginalised Emotions). It made a moment too poetic for this particular Dark Clown exercise, where compassion is forbidden because it is too humanising. The predicament of the line-up scenario in particular is designed to create conflict (and awful choices), which helps the players release the Marginalised Emotions and which helps to provoke the conflicted Troubled Laughter in the audience. The above scenario works well because the predicament is awful – a playful Red Nose Clown is making it worse for the Dark Clowns.
 
‘And my poor fool is hanged’ … 
Just as the Marx Brothers films need the breathing space of the lover’s plots, Dark Clown dramaturgies are allowed strategic moments of pathos and poetry. (In the context of teaching, I discourage moments of pathos and poetry because it deprives the student of learning the less-familiar Dark Clown craft. But when organising a dramaturgy for the audience, or in a longer duration improvisation with an audience in mind, we can certainly go there. Wonderful if the pathos still keeps the audience on the hook, though – take a look at the dramaturgy for The Maids - i.e. the moment towards the end where one sister is reading the lines of her dying poisoned sister while the audience looks on.) 
 
Finally, only the Red Nose Clown was left on stage. A noose was thrown on stage. Disobeying the chronology of events (do leaders of such a ghastly regime care if the script pages are all present or in order?), we are at the death of Cordelia. Red Nose gleefully put the noose around his neck. Everything is still a game.
 
I side-coached this excellent young acting student to arrange that the Clown discover by increments that he can actually feel pain after all. Delightfully, he enjoyed playing the fun of wearing the noose like a fashion scarf, the problems, failures and triumphs of stepping up on the chair, then the great feat of standing on the chair! Next the repeated upward throwing of the rope but finding no place to support it. Not to be bested, the resourceful Red Nose tightens the noose, expressing surprise that it in fact pinches a bit - ouchy! - but he laughs and repeats, then whoopsy, losing balance; best sit for safety; oh look it’s a neck tie, I’m a business man; musn’t get sidetracked, the business in hand! etc. He reprises the game of pain and release, sharing all his thinking and emotions with us. New game! A lazzi of suffocation. He really makes the lack of breath look painful, but manages still to telegraph to the audience: ‘What fun!’ A game of pressure and release, game of puffed-out cheeks etc. He keeps delivering all sorts of beats of perplexment, curiousity, pain, the fun of the new, surprise, and fear. Next, a game of how hard it is to keep up the pressure on the rope – he mimes: ‘Phewph, hard work!’, shakes his arm out, tries again. With clown optimism and determination, he redoubles his efforts. Lots of funny little sounds, good rhythm play plus delivering ‘believable’ levels of pain and sharing all the micro-emotions with us, then … the inevitable. 
The actor / clown went limp and flowed headfirst onto the floor from his seated position like one of Salvador Dali’s timepieces. A final frozen thumbs up holds, then drops.
 
‘Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither.’
 

* For the sake of simplicity, whenever I refer to Clown or Red Nose Clown in these posts, I refer to my own understanding and conception of the form, informed by Clown work as I experienced it with Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier. There is no one style of clowning. Just to add too, that for me (and some others), actually wearing the little mask of the red nose is not absolutely essential to clowning. I mostly teach without it – especially on short courses.

** A word I use with love and respect in context of the clown!

*** To be specific, if people are not looking like they are really responding to / investing in  / embodying the imaginative situation, they are 'shot'. There is an ethical procedure for this - I address the course participant inside the Dark Clown exercise player and say - I am going to shoot you in your hand (or elbow) - do you, the player agree? Do not come out of the situation,  just nod so I know you understand ... thank you. I will say "bang" and you will make the appropriate noise.’ The group will have already practiced specific sound-making for a 'believable verisimilitude of pain' in the 'Torture over Ten feet' exercise.
 
**** Always with the help of the suspension of disbelief.
 
***** As for *** above - ‘a believable verisimilitude of pain and distress’.
 
****** ‘Clown’ in common usage, serves as an insult. Clowning as a conscious practice shows a generosity and courage – a practice whereby dignity (at least for the moments spent on stage) is voluntarily jettisoned in the interest of others i.e. in the hope that the ‘sad normals’ may feel, even for a moment, relief: (‘I’m not that stupid’ or ‘Thank heavens, I’m not the only one that stupid’ or ‘Oh how stupid we all are.’) Professional clowns can also can bring: wonder, a slowing of time, poetry, a critique of hierarchy. Someone in power and privilege, with a ‘winning formula’ of a ‘loveable’ clownishness – and who is behaving in ways that cause harm and difficulty to those in their care - is masquerading. They are charming but ultimately conniving.
 

implicate verb [T]   
UK   /ˈɪm.plɪ.keɪt/ US   /ˈɪm.plə.keɪt/
to show that someone is involved in a crime or partly responsible for something bad that has happened.

Implicating the Audience
I use the term Implicating the Audience to refer to the Dark Clown practice where the performer or ensemble manage to create the conditions whereby the audience feel that they are somehow 'on the hook'. Although all audiences know that they paid for their ticket and walked in to watch a composed portrayal, they can, via the suspension of disbelief, feel conflicted or shamed in their witnessing and even to a degree, culpable. While no one may actually think: 'Oh my, I must rush on stage and help these people', they feel compelled and conflicted that 'It is not me suffering over there.' 
Allied to this is the Dark Clown concept of Troubled Laughter whereby the audience laughs and at some level feels implicated by their laughter.

Inspiration for Implication
In 1980, the seminal Lumiere & Son Theatre Company created a show called Circus Lumiere.* It was performed in a custom-built five pole tent. The whole show was memorable and ground-breaking, but there was one particular scene which left a marked impression.

What follows is an account of how I remember the scene ran. 

Two clowns appear in the ring. A big one and a small one. The show so far has been action-packed so their stillness is intriguing. They wear rather traditional clown costumes. They are looking at us, the audience, and they exchange looks between themselves. The audience laugh because the clowns seem non-plussed; inert, nervous and indecisive. Aren't clowns meant to somersault and bound out into the ring?

Whenever we laugh they turn to us and back to each other again, with some alarm in their eyes. They are intent, alert. It is only in retrospect that we realise they are making a difficult decision.

The tall clown turns his head but he is not looking at the small clown. We now notice there is a trestle table onstage (in the ‘ring’ of the circus tent) and on it is a large rectangular item with gauges and dials. It looks to be a piece of electrical equipment. The little one is looking at it now, too.

The audience has been nicely set into a habit of laughter and each head turn is a laughter nudge. The big one walks slowly towards the machine and picks up something connected to the machine. He returns to his position beside the small clown. We realise the item is a cattle prod.

We laugh and think ’oh no!’ But we have laughed and that is clocked by the clowns. (Had we made any other sound or no laughter, they still would have clocked us - we are still sitting in our seats and they still would have been obliged to continue -  ‘the show must go on’).
 
The little clown receives an electric shock and jitters about in a startling but ridiculous way. He composes himself afterwards but it looks like it was not a pleasant experience. We laugh – out of surprise at what happened; as a release from the cleverly built up suspense; and in unconscious mirroring of the rhythm of the little clown's movements.
 
The big one looks at the little one, in some discomfort. The little one looks at the big one. We laugh again, nervously. The little one clocks this and the little one looks at the big one with an expression of some urgency. (‘If they liked it once, they should like it again’**) – the little one is now in the absurd predicament of using his eyebrows to actually encourage the big one, who looks a little traumatised. The big one hesitates but again applies the baton to the small one, who again receives the shock and jitters about. According to the rule of three, all this happens again. With repeated laughter from us in the audience.
 
The clowns look at the audience, calibrating. They look at each other. With some head turns their eyes don’t connect because the other clown is looking at the audience. The uncertainty is prolonged. Eventually they share a look. 
 
The big one walks again to the table. Will he put down the prod and do something else?
 
No, his hand reaches out and he touches a dial … Why did we not imagine this? ... and turns it up. And we laugh. We are 'on the hook': because of us, the small clown will suffer more. We did not bray for it ... but our laughter (and the clowns’ submission to their role) means the small clown must suffer because of us. Our 'guilt' and gut-punch groans of 'remorse' makes our laughter richer. We laugh through multiple shocks. It is truly hilarious. It is not a cruel laugh, it is a conflicted laugh - we know it's a piece of theatre but the clowns are played so well that we feel somehow guilty.***
 
Performing Pain 
Hilary Westlake, co-founder of Lumiere & Son Theatre Company (working closely with writer David Gale) was very astute at finding the essence of the thing she was exploring. With the Big and Little Clown segment they had asked 'What Are Circus Clowns?' and decided that, as traditional Circus Clowns perform a lot of slapstick (the giving and receiving of hits, slaps, pushes and falls) that their job could be in essence to  'hurt and be hurt for the audience's pleasure'. When Hilary directed a piece called 'Wounds' for Three Women Company (the theatre I co-founded in 1980 with Tessa Schneideman and Claudia Prietzel) she decided that what makes women different from men. That we bleed. We performed in white costumes and boxing boots and the stage action was punctuated by the appearance of blood. From a breast, from a mouth, from a crotch, finally raining down from inside an umbrella. 

*Director and company founder, Hilary Westlake has archived Lumiere & Son's work. You can see the programme for Circus Lumiere here.

** Philippe Gaulier, live London course circa 1984

*** Associated with Implication, is another key element of the Dark Clown work - Troubled Laughter which I first experienced while watching a specific scene in Pip Simmons' thrilling and devastating production An Die Musik. I mention it in a footnote to the recent Trigger post  and also in the Comedy of Terrors post. I think it was the same year I first saw Circus Lumiere.

In the image here below, recently forward to me by Hilary Westlake, I see a section of the piece I did not remember! Here the little clown shocks the tall clown, possibly by mistake (as he fiddles with the controls) . They are both armed with prods and battery packs.

 A learning experience 
On my open Clown & Dark Clown courses, which are for 'beginners as well as the more experienced idiot', I work with physical theatre performers, circus performers, theatre directors, designers, therapists, actors, improvisers, and people with no performing experience. It's a joyful thing. Often the newcomers bring a freshness of approach. Those with more experience inspire the newcomers by showing what is possible and occasionally those with more experience have habits to undo. Everyone is there to face the new, everyone is at a growing edge.

I salute the courage of all learners. All those who choose to come on a course are opening themselves up to new learning. And learning new skills has the risk of failure built in.

​Until you've done it you don't know what it is
I have a little social media post I sometimes use: 'Until you have done it, you don't know what it is.' I guess that statement could come across as a nice little marketing ploy, but, really it's a helpful piece of information. 

The post 'Comedy of Terrors' gives a snapshot of my Dark Clown work.* And there is extra information on recent posts such as the one describing an exercise called Selling Yourself out to your Enemy and the one on Consumer Guilt.

So what actually goes on in a Clown & Dark Clown course?**
I am in the process of writing a book on my definition of and approach to what I call Dark Clown. The other day  was aiming to succinctly sum up the learning journey on a Clown & Dark Clown course.
​
Here is what I got:

'The complete beginner will learn play state, how to play with the other, clown state, audience awareness and the beginnings of audience response and the 'more experienced idiot' reviews this early material. Building on from that, the group learns to develop an awareness of principles and techniques of comedy and then to develop an agility with these principles and techniques.
With this established, the student/performer of Dark Clown is trained to create and to release into believable and engaging representations of Marginalised Emotions – then to play and experiment with the representation of these Marginalised Emotions while simultaneously using comic principles and techniques.
Right from the start, in parallel with the above, awareness of and response to the audience in each present moment is also being trained.
Next, we move on to the exercises and scenarios of the High Stakes Predicaments and Dark Clown Scenarios – where the student/performer is tasked with putting all of this together in order to affect and hopefully Implicate the Audience, so that the audience get to experience Troubled Laughter i.e. to be surprised into laughter and to feel troubled by their laughter.'

It's a lot to get through. It's a tight curriculum for a two-day course. 

Preparing for the  learning experience
 At the start of the course, I remind course participants that any new skill comes with challenges and unknowns. I aim to (and have been told that) I 'teach with a good mix of encouragement and challenge.' I seek to empower, for example, by aiming to demystify the 'rules' of comedy. I expressly dedicate the course hours as a learning experience and also as a human experience.*** In both the Red Nose and the Dark Clown sections fo the work, I am transparent about occasionally stepping in to the role of the 'Grumpy Clown Professor' or using my voice to shout out commands as if from a darker authoritarian voice.
Once we have covered Clown State, I say, 'In this exercise, please do stay in Clown State. If you pop out of state, no shame, but the exercise may come to a halt and you can have another go later. You the course participant are allowed to leave the exercise if you choose but you will get the most benefit by dealing with the Grumpy Clown Professor's hectoring while remaining in Clown State.'

When we make the segue to the 'Dark Side' part of the work, I give a talk which outlines the aims and ethos of the work. I emphasise their will be no emotional recall - the work is not at all about people being  called on to search in their own inner darknesses. The talk also explains that we will progress through a series of tasks which develop various aspects needed for playing Dark Clown. I also give frequent explanations of the purpose of each exercise or task, and with some exercises check - 'Are you still willing to do the exercise?'

Always articulating the work 
Over the many years of teaching my definition of Dark Clown, I have incorporated extra steps and clarifications in order to keep the teaching space a clear arena for the aims and vision of the work as well as to create and maintain a worthwhile learning experience for practitioners.

When advertising my open courses, I aim to be clear about the outcomes on offer and to articulate both the fun and challenges of the course. I prefer people come to the work with an open mind (beginners mind), but over the years it has become necessary to include an extra level of clarification regarding the Dark Clown work.

I now include FAQ's about the work with the booking information. As I say in the post titled Resisting Vunerability, - ''Dark' describes the work rather well.'

Opening up and the possibility of upset
Over all the years, the vast majority of course participants have found and reported the work enlivening and many say, 'I have never laughed so much on a course'. But every so often, someone has an upset while on a course. 

Anyone who has taught acting or been an acting student knows that there may be confrontational moments for the student. The actor (and the performer) needs openness and when we open, when we let go of holding patterns - there can be stuff that has been contained which may leak out. Upset is not a required step in the process, but occasionally (comparatively rarely) it happens and so I have put in place a basic and practical methodology for dealing with upset. ​****

I worked at a Clown school in Europe and was articulating the 'Upset process' I use to the course booker. They suggested that I might work with people's upsets (they, in their own practice, had a methodology to do that - also a course time of much greater duration).

The Dark Clown work is dependent on the creation of laughter and it is crucial to maintain the conditions for laughter in the room. So while I encourage openness, unmasking and spontaneity, and while I deeply value personal growth, while teaching a Clown & Dark Clown course, my energies are pointed on the discipline and technique of the work rather than the inner journey of the participant.

While there may be an individual experiencing a confrontational moment, there will also be 15 - 17 other people on the course, who are ready and raring to move on to the 'Dark Side' and get a full introduction to Dark Clown work.

Who gets upset at what?
Over all the 30 years of teaching this course - the moment of upset and the precise cause of the upset is always totally unique and personal. 

Here is the amazing Jack Halberstam (author of the brilliant 'The Queer Art of Failure') speaking On Behalf of Failure at the Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics (organised by IPAK Center, held in Belgrade August 2014). 

I love Jack because he understands the function of humour and its role in presenting or crafting viewpoints that are not part of the reigning paradigm. he also speaks of his belief of the value of surprise as an element of pedagogy, but that's a side note here. 

At 20.41 in this talk he begins to speak about Trigger Warnings - while he applauds sensitivity he also asks whether we being 'careful in a way that is absolutely squashing our ability to also be creative and to communicate.' He then goes on to talk about the origin of the term Trigger Warnings, from its usage in the early online community, and how the term morphed as it segued into a new context. It is now something that (in the USA in particular) students request that professors put on their Syllabi.
Jack finds this problematic because:

1/ to be warned about content in an aesthetic context goes against his pedagogy of surprise (learning is an adventure). As I understand it he means that reveals can cause memorable paradigm shifts - real learning is an experience, not a list of facts.

2/ it's not easy to predict a Trigger - Trigger is usually buried content - and unpredictable, not obvious or linear, for example a random sound that accompanied a traumatic event. He gives the example that one would need to list unforseeable, incidental details e.g. 'a sound screeching tyres'. Jack says that to equate trauma and trigger is a gross simplification.

3/ JH teaches a class on the Holocaust over some several weeks. 'I can't warn you about content in the Holocaust - you should be disturbed by the content of the Holocaust'. The Holocaust was an event of uncountable and unrepresentable horrors.
JH recounts how there were complaints of lack of Trigger Warnings when he showed the film 'Night and Fog', but when he showed 'Triumph of The Will', which shows Fascism played out - there was, unnervingly, if you think about it, not a single complaint.
Jack quips that 'the seduction of Fascism should come with a warning' - and goes on to muse how modernism has represented symmetry as good and right - so, again unnervingly, the crisp formation of marching fascist armies contain an unconscious appeal because symmetry is embedded as an aesthetic form inside our consciousness.
JH quips that he would really like to see a Trigger Warning about 'the seduction of Fascism.'

Coming back to my own Dark Clown work, I wrote in Rehearsing for Darkness:
'I aim to hold the Dark Clown work as ethically as I can. Please do see the helpful FAQ's for the work. The work walks an edge. But, like many theatre practitioners, I have an interest in inner and outer humanity and I feel it is an edge better looked at than ignored.'
​

* My vision for Dark Clown has key inspirations - one scene in Pip Simmonds' breath-taking and courageous show An Die Musik in the early 1980's. The big and little clown scene in the seminal Lumiere and Son's Circus Lumiere, and the devastating film They Shoot Horses Don't They? (albeit the film is neither clown nor comedy). Often people think the work I do follows a lineage. It doesn't. It began with experiments and developed via teaching and a few theatre productions, for example this one, over the last thirty years. As there are many types of Clown, there can be many expressions of what people might  explore under the name of dark clown. 

** I have now standardised that my specific approach to Dark Clown work is taught in the first instance on a course called 'Clown & Dark Clown'. There are many reasons for this, and I now always bill the course this way, even when the participants all have a pre-existing Clown training. One basic reason for this is that there are no guarantees that everyone has the same Clown training. Another reason is that, while Clown practitioners can be well-trained, they are still unacquainted with many of the comedy craft techniques necessary to the Dark Clown work. Another reason is that any group needs to relax and develop the ability to play together first, and this works well in Red Nose Clown mode. A further reason is that the imparting of key comedy principles can be accomplished more efficiently in Red Clown mode also. Also, I find it helpful (I could even say essential) that the group establish a sense of ease, trust and fun in working with both teacher and other group members, before we move on to the Dark Side and I find that the Play State/Red Nose Clown exercises are efficient for this. 

*** I usually begin courses saying: 'for the next several hours you are in the safest place you can be ... bar floods or other natural disasters ... (I aim to read the room before making that little joke and I add clownish body-language and light and modulated voice and smile clearly making this a joke and also adding a gesture with palms forward that reassures and eyebrows and mouth corners that acknowledge 'oops, was that scary?') ... because Comedy is all about making mistakes. And Clowns are born under a big hot-pink-neon sign saying "Born. To. Fail" - so, if, at any moment you feel you might have done something you are unsure about then give yourself a big tick! You are on mission!'
I often also ask - 'Do we give each other permission to be different from our normal selves?' and wait for and acknowledge the mutual assent. 'We are all humans here and we are all learning and any new learning necessarily encompasses making mistakes.' (I refer to the steps in the unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence model).
I also say - 'If I mention anything any one of you has done, I thank you in advance for the teaching opportunity! I figure any one of us could have had that (miming quotes) success or (miming quotes) failure - but, it was a something that happened live in the space, and we all saw it, and we can learn from it, rather than only having theoretical examples.'

**** While the Clown & Dark Clown course is a lot of fun, it requires a level of resilience. The FAQ's on the Clown & Dark Clown workshop are aimed at helping people who may have underlying issues identify whether the course is right for them to undertake. Just as a side-note, There have also been, a few instances where a course participant experiences upset in the Red Nose part of the work (again, rarely). This is not particular to my teaching and it is not surprising in general. Red Nose Clown work de-masks the individual - some of the normal ways of presenting oneself are unnecessary and unhelpful to clown work and need to be released. When I studied with Gaulier in 1984 - there was always someone crying in the pub at the end of the day after class. (Another side-note: for those more experienced, the work on the self is ongoing. Red Nose Clown work, at its best, requires an opening of the heart, which can bring forward the need for self-examination.)

Once in an Enforced Performance exercise, a wonderful clown practitioner was rebelling, resisting the commands and behaving courageously. 'I am a big guy', he said later, 'and people always expect me to be brave.'

​I explained that I will aim to discourage a performer from rebelling. The reason for this is that I aim to arrange for every course participant to have the experience of tasting / practicing the Dark Side play with the Marginalised Emotions.*
​
In Enforced Performance we are imagining a nightmarish realm where direct disobedience will receive harsh punishment. In the line-up exercise, players in role will be punished for mistakes or failure to be intimidated by being 'shot' - please see below.** Like the shout of the Clown Professor for the Red Nose Clown, the 'shot' can serve to help the player access some compelling motif of sound and rhythm and lead to a 'success' for the player. If the player is not convincing in their release into a 'believable verisimilitude of pain and distress', they may risk being 'seriously wounded' - whereby they become a provoking and poignant obstacle for the other players who are being compelled to perform the stamping dance of the line-up exercise. 

'It's really dark, isn't it?'
Sometime people come to the work and are surprised that 'Dark' describes the work rather well. Some long to misbehave, be cynical, contrary, transgressive, naughty. Over the years I have developed a set of FAQ's about the work. But many are able to understand how the Dark Clown work can provide a way to release some congested energy around atrocity, oppression and misuse of power.

Impossible Choices
Once I have 'shot' someone in such a way that they are reduced to crawling, I will side-coach them to try and stay central (usually they try to crawl off to the side). The reason for this is to serve the other players by raising the stakes for them. Once there is an injured body in the way and 'prisoners' are still trying to fulfil their task / command to come forward and then run back to recommence the stamping dance, we get to see people making 'impossible choices' i.e. 'Do I risk my life by stopping? Do I risk my life by breaking the pattern and going around? Do I risk my life by standing out in any way? Do I risk my life by showing compassion? Can I execute a clean jump over the inert body? What kind of a human being am I if I do that? What kind of human being am I now that I have done that?'

A game aimed at producing Troubled Laughter
People who are able to engage with the game without having the game's purpose obscured by any feelings of any underlying upset*** can see clearly what is at play. The exercise is designed to provide the outcome for the participants (i.e. to find out how to safely express the Marginalised Emotions; to learn how to work timing and audience awareness so as to generate laughter (engage the audience and affect their 'laughing gear'); all the while investing in imaginary circumstances well enough to portray 'a believable verisimilitude of of pain and distress' in order to create for the watcher the experience of Troubled Laughter. (Phewph).

In the interested of writing a book on Dark Clown, I created, in 2019, a questionnaire.  Question #9 asks: 

What value did the Dark Clown workshop deliver to you - what competencies, benefits or concepts did you gain?
 
An Actor / Writer replies: 

'Some of the benefits are very practical. I learned the importance of breath to a performance. That simple concept can be totally transformative - just noting that breath is something I should be paying attention to changed the way I was working. The process of waking up various parts of the actor before getting into performance was a useful idea: getting the voice working, spending a little time making sure you’re aware of different parts of the body, and exploring how a fairly abstract heightened emotional state affects voice and body. Once you’ve explored that range - stretched out, in a way - I find it becomes much easier to perform freely.
 
One other idea I find extremely useful is that emotions like anger and resentment have the potential to be obstructive. In the workshops we were steered away from anger, self-pity, indignation etc. in favour of less defensive emotions like shame, sadness, despair. The concept that there is a line dividing what we already consider to be negative emotions is fascinating. Knowing that the territory of slightly more egotistical or aggressive emotions is liable to put up a barrier between the performer and the audience, to create antagonism, rather than letting vulnerability build pathos and evoke empathy, is invaluable.'

And question #10 asks:
How do you see the work contributing your practice?

'My acting work has already become much freer and more expressive and interesting due to this work. My writing work is also likely to change. I think the characters I am creating will be more deeply invested in their own predicaments. Of course, that seems like something that should already have been the case, but, with a lot of my work having some aspect of post-modern, ironic distance, perhaps that has become a habit. This may also be connected with the idea of performative distance and unreality that can be present in red nose clown. After these workshops I am really appreciating the value of commitment and verisimilitude, even within absurd circumstances.'
 

* The Marginalised Emotions include: hyper-vigilance, fear, distress, shame, anguish, regret, guilt, humiliation, indignity, disbelief, grief, shock, absurdity, desolation, despair, physical pain, horror, terror and existential dread. (Listed in no special order).

** To be specific, if people are not looking like they are really responding to / investing in  / embodying the imaginative situation, they are 'shot'. There is an ethical procedure for this - I address the course participant inside the Dark Clown exercise player and say - I am going to shoot you in your hand (or elbow) - do you, the player agree? Do not come out of the situation,  just nod so I know you understand ... thank you. I will say "bang" and you will make the appropriate noise. (The group have already practiced specific sound-making for a 'believable verisimilitude of pain'  in the 'Torture over Ten feet' exercise).
​
*** In the Introductory Talk I normalise the possibility of upset: 'Please know that should upset visit you, this is totally natural. It is natural because: 
1 sometimes ‘fear of the unknown’ (‘Where it this heading?’) may contribute some unhelpful extra tension.
2 the work requires an imaginative investment in some less-than-pleasant circumstances (chosen to create sufficiently high stakes for the performer to release into the impulses of Dark Clown state)
3 as with any acting class or other psychophysical performance practice, sometimes people have emotions arise when they find themselves doing iinhabitual vocal usage or physical movement (shaking something loose)
4 there may be a detail of performing or watching a scenario that may trigger a memory or emotion - (it is not easy to give trigger warnings for the work because in all my 30 years of teaching the work, each case of upset has had a particular personal origin)
5 sometimes fear arises from people’s concern that they might be making light of the terrible suffering of others – here, the most useful thing is to remember that:
It is not the intention of the work to laugh at suffering.
It is the intention of the work to provide the audience with the experience of being surprised into the Troubled Laughter.'
There is a procedure in the case of upset, I will write about that another time. 

Gotta love Shakespeare - The Comedy of Errors (a ... comedy) starts with a man being condemned to death. (Egeon, a merchant of Syracuse, is condemned to death in Ephesus for violating the ban against travel between the two rival cities). My dark imagination was engaged.

The great joy of directing a final year production at a Drama School means the Design Students can support the production. I decided on a bold premise. The whole play takes place on a television sound stage. Before the play proper begins, people with headsets and clipboards roam the set - at this moment just a large empty grey platform with a gentle rake.

​A giant clock face (whose hands turned throughout the play) is suspended at the back. At certain moments, the names of the various shows* is projected onto it e.g. (towards the end): 'The Abbess knows Best'.

A sofa is brought on and we hear a voice over: 'Ladies and Gentlemen it's time for 'Beat the Clock', with your host, Duuuuuke Solinus!' Canned applause and the production staff gee up the live audience applause too, using cue cards.

I don't have any images for the start of the play, but it's the bit I mainly intend to focus on for this blog post, as it involved a little bit of Dark Clown.

Duke Solinus greets the crowd like a beloved chat host, then his 'guest' is brought on. Egeon - in an orange prison uniform, handcuffed and hooded is frogmarched on. Egeon's mask is whipped off and the poor man is dazzled by the light.

He must tell his story: 'say in brief the cause
Why thou departed'st from thy native home
And for what cause thou camest to Ephesus.'
It is life and death (High Stakes) for Egeon and he begins to tell his tale earnestly. Egeon's tale is the opposite of brief. No sooner has he begun and employees of the reality challenge show 'Beat the Clock' come on with props to enact his story. (Imagine the humiliation of your heart-rending tale being delivered as prime time entertainment by smiling facilitators).  
When Egeon falters with stress, disorientation and emotion, the Duke says:
'Nay, forward, old man; do not break off so;
For we may pity, though not pardon thee.'
It's like those unscrupulous reporters who treat people's emotions like events in the Roman Coliseum and ask 'And how did it feel when (the disastrous thing) happened?'. Plus, the poor man is being forced to tell his tale, thereby prostituting his own tale of woe (you're still going to die, but let us have an emotional experience from your predicament nonetheless).
Solinus then shows his cheesy magnanimity (in this production) by posing the challenge:
'I'll limit thee this day
To seek thy life by beneficial help:
Try all the friends thou hast in Ephesus;
Beg thou, or borrow, to make up the sum,
And live; if no, then thou art doom'd to die.'

As in the plot of the film Run Lola Run, Egeon must raise a huge sum (in this case, a thousand marks) and he only has 24 hours to do so and if not, he must face his death.
Cue canned laughter, the upbeat 'Beat the Clock' musical sting and the audience applauds.

* Antipholus of Ephesus's house was played like Friends, with Adriana and Luciana discussing Adriana's problems over a tub of Hagen Daas. At the moments there were costumes and props for other shows passing through e.g. a war programme. Plus Teleevangelism (Pinch) and adverts for Angelo's jewellery business.

Don't read this post, it's too personal and soppy. 

I was teaching last year (2019) in Leamington Spa - a special in-house course for a dance theatre company. As part of teaching Clown State, I mention finding an image for your heart.

In a break, one of the participants came up to me and said what is in your clown heart? Ha! good call. I often work from the heart centre, put my energy and focus there, but had not stopped to actually visualise a personalised image for my heart in clown mode.

So I thanked the woman for her question and just dropped the question into my intuitive thinking - and then I remembered an image from a book I read in childhood.

​I did some research recently and found information about the author: Ivy Wallace. As a firm believer that accidents are 'manna from heaven', I was delighted to read how the illustrated story had come into being by accident: 'While working on a police switchboard, she doodled a picture of a fairy sitting on a toadstool with a little rabbit in front and by chance it appeared that the wings belonged to the rabbit. She then decided that fairies were "two a penny" so she erased the fairy and kept the little winged rabbit ... and wrote his story.” As well as working as a Police Officer, Ivy Wallace also founded her own book company!

Pookie - (I know, even as a child I found the name somewhat cutesy - but check this - Ivy Wallace's father was Scots and here is a Scots definition of the word pooky) - we meet Pookie living with his family. He has these two tiny useless wings and his siblings tease him because of this. He sleeps in a bed with all his brothers and sisters and that looks cosy except it's not because Pookie is an inconvenience because of his wings. Pookie's mother actually bandages them up at night. Omg - something as wondrous as wings must be tidied and bundled away. Like foot-binding! Something unique about you makes you both ridiculous and resented even in your own family - Pookie is an outsider and an underdog. 

As you see from the book cover illustration, he takes a classic bundle-on-a-stick and goes out to 'seek his fortune'. He is on a quest even though he does not know what he is looking for; and no one he meets, no matter how magical, can offer him any advice or guidance. Ah - the clown (and spiritual) practice of not-knowing.

At the end, having journeyed far, a snowstorm overtakes Pookie and he is swept by the wind onto the doorstep of a kind and lonely little girl. When she puts him by the fire to warm up, two little broken, frozen fragments, bright as rubies, fall out of his fur. The girl mends Pookie's heart and pops it back into his fur. Oh and his wings grow beautiful and big.

The under-valued Pookie's intrepidness in the face of uncertainty, his mended-broken-ruby-bright heart ... interesting ingredients to work with for the Clown.

There are two parts to this post. Trigger warnings: race, prostitution, colonialism and eek, yes a bit of a gentle feminist viewpoint.

First, an acknowledgement that, as a white educated woman, I aim to interrogate myself for the ways I may be perpetuating and benefiting from racist systems. Also to say that I aim to hold the Dark Clown work in general as ethically as I can, always being ready to learn and address new awarenesses and other perspectives as they come to my attention. The edginess of the work keeps me vigilant and I aim to hold the notions of exploitation and profiteering in mind as I write.

Part 1: A desperate response
Back in 2016, one woman responded to the reports of a disproportionate number of Police shootings of black citizens, and to the racist White Lives Matter moment which arose in response to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. According to the TYT coverage (see below) of the video, her name is Tashala Dangel Geyer.

This amazing woman posted a piece of performance art or activism online (to my knowledge, she herself did not define it in any way*). If you google 'woman paints herself white', you'll find clips of people watching the footage and wondering 'is she crazy?' (while at the same time saying she is 'serious' and also judging her as if she were proposing this as a serious 'answer'). One vlogger felt it was unhelpful to the issues at stake.

​The video and images from it are often taken down because of the small amount of nudity involved (the paint largely obscures any anatomical detail although occasionally, she turns around and we see her body without the coverage of paint). 

'If you wanna survive'
I admire what Dangel Geyer has done.
She begins with: 'This the best shit I ever could have thought of. This is saving my life! 
​... You know what, the Lord woke me up - and sent me this sign (slapping the brush to paint her inner thighs, profile view)  so I went on ahead to Home Depot and got this paint.
(Standing facing us) 'Cos white lives matter. Guess what? White lives matter. White Lives. (painting her right leg again).  Just white. White. White. White white white white.  (Exhales)
That’s the argu – never – if you wanna survive ... I’mma keep sayin’  (right palm up) go white!
Jus' go white ... Baby, I don’t want nothing brown on me.'
She continues with her message to 'Black families' and keeps interrupting herself by spotting bits of her body that she has missed. It's a classic clown predicament of solution-problem-solution-problem. She is working with repetition, interruption and rhythm. She engages her audience, too, asking the viewer to 'Hep me out' ... so that she misses no patches that would give her away. ... 'Bring in the white! Hoo, gonna be a’right' (painting left armpit) ... (waves left hand in front of her face, to indicate) 'Ronald MacDonald, man! You won’t get shot.'

Troubled Laughter 
I first watched the footage with compulsion. Her focus and commitment are palpable. I am also surprised into uneasy laughter by this woman's lively rhythms and wit, combined with the horror of the situation i.e. I am afraid for my life because of the way I look / because of the way I am -  it's not a comfortable laugh. 
In this video document, a woman demonstrates vulnerability by appearing naked live online.**
​At the same time she makes a very direct address to the audience. This piece has many elements of Dark Clown work: Troubled Laughter, Palpable Cost, direct appeal to the audience - we witness her and those of us with caucasian privilege experience Implication. Also, Dangel Geyer has the courage to allow us to witness (and experience) Marginalised Emotion - plus she possesses good comedy craft.

Distance 
Dark Clown, similar to Comedy, equals 'Tragedy plus time'. Dark Clown work (as I work with it in teaching and in dramaturgy) needs sufficient distance from the actual real life predicament / subject. Often by being abstractified into a non-specific Absurd realm (see the posts on The Maids and this review of Hamlet or Die) and / or by a distance of time.
Dangel Geyer's piece / statement / performance is very close to the bone. It is temporally immediate, dealing with ongoing race issues and pointing at the entrenched impasse between those trying to raise awareness of inequality and of conscious (and unconscious) bias and those who somehow manage to interpret #BlackLivesMatter as a threat to their own rights and validity. Racist behaviour and inequality have, in the UK have been exacerbated by Government policies of austerity and by the xenophobic media campaign in advance of Br*xit. 

... a 'sidebar' musing on spatial distance and intimacy
Dangel Geyer's piece / statement / performance exists online - the internet being a medium which can often create positive connection but which is also well known for knee-jerk, divisive reaction. It is a courageous choice of platform. There is no time here to  contrast and compare the internet with the more dream-like, contemplative space of a theatre where life can be seen simultaneously intimately, but also at a remove, except perhaps to ponder whether we can say that, as theatre offers a physiological experience of shared space in the auditorium, it may possibly contribute more to cohesion as opposed to division between watchers.

Controversy
TYT coverage of the phenomenon is in this clip together with a discussion (from a mainly white) panel. One panellist manages to make sexualised comments about the footage, even while conceding / recognising that the woman's intent was not sexual. But that is a side note to the thrust of this blog post.
​
When some vloggers who review / watch this video call her crazy, they fail to  consider that the author of the footage, Tashala Dangel Geyer may be, like Hamlet, only mad 'north-north-west'.*** She knows what she is doing, she is doing what she is doing for a purpose, for effect. Hamlet uses a smokescreen of craziness to a purpose (we are never quite sure whether it's to buy time, to be discounted, thereby making spying on Claudius more easy allow himself more licensee to say the unsayable?). We can say that Dangel Geyer  in fact is braver than Hamlet as she is saying the unsayable and taking the absurdity of a situation to a logical conclusion.
I find her piece / statement / performance bitingly apposite, witty, disturbing and also moving.

The medium (housepaint, not social media) and the message
A couple of the male viewers express concern about the paint on her skin. Rightly so  - it's housepaint. Yes, uncomfortable, unhealthy and must have been difficult to remove. She is being bold and reckless for a purpose. Using some nice pan-stick make-up would have sent a completely different message. Makeup coverage would have risked being too light and cosmetic an effect. It may have been a contributing factor that paint was more affordable than makeup. 
Paint is also a protection for wood, whereas make-up is more aesthetic, designed to create an illusion, an enhancement or possibly an enticement.
House paint is a rough and ready solution, and an accessible one. This woman is communicating immediacy and pragmatism as well as communicate desperation. She addresses her audience with urgency. Go, go now to Home Depot - a different message to: google your nearest Kryolan outlet.

Dangel Geyer is not to my knowledge a theatre maker, she is a human being responding to a desperate predicament. What we see in this remarkable creative document is a human being in extremis, demonstrating the absurdity of her situation by pretending she has discovered and is sharing an absurd 'solution'. 

Part 2: A strong challenge
The Dark Clown work provides a way to address tragic and troubling issues. The subtitle of the Dark Clown documentary is 'taking Laughter to the Limits.' Yes even the Troubled Laughter has limits - for example, it does not include Evil Laughter. More than once I have been asked if it were possible to portray the issue of violence towards women using Dark Clown. I find that a very strong challenge indeed.

On one of my Take It Further courses, a talented Asian performer  came with a will to look at the Indian equivalent of the Korean Comfort Women. She was researching women doing sex work during the days of the Raj who were kept in dreadful conditions. Wikipedia tells us: 'Although the governments of many Indian princely dates had regulated prostitution prior to the 1860s, such regulation in British India was first ushered in by the Cantonment Act of 1864. The Cantonment Acts regulated and structured prostitution in the British military bases. ... The structuring features of the Cantonment Acts provided for about twelve to fifteen Indian women for each regiment of British soldiers.'  (I can't find the specific number of men in a British regiment in the days of the Raj but I found this more recent source: 'A regiment normally contains of around 650 soldiers depending on its role.')
The performer had researched and found that women were kept in the dark in cockroach-ridden 'accommodation', and forced to service a large number of men each day - this figure of sex acts per woman per day was not given I'm the above Wiki entry; however, 650 divided by the upper number of 15 women is 43.3333 recurring).

I once read of a woman trafficked forcibly into prostitution who had, one Christmas day, been forced to service 80 men. Sorry for the downer. It depressed me too, when I read it. I was reading the article on my phone on the tube, and the number would not make itself real to me. I decided to count men I saw, innocent commuters, on my journey home, just to appreciate that number: 80.

An existential exercise
​Now that I come to write about this, I think that what made this instance work for me, this Dark Clown treatment of this particular subject was not only some historical distance, but also the fact that this improvisation was achieved in service of this course participant trying to come to terms with events that were part of the oppression of her race, her forefathers/foremothers' nation and her biological sex.

The absurd - and finding a workable metaphor
​After telling me/us (the assembled course participants) about the cockroaches and the dark and about the large number of men in a single day, I said, 'Ok. Can you think of some boring action or movement that you can repeat. And after each repetition, you will count: 'one', then 'two', then 'three', and keep going.

I was impressed at her commitment and her level of physical fitness that she chose burpees! And off she went. This performer is a very funny woman with experience in stand-up and improv. She did those burpees: down out, squat, up 'one.' Down out, squat, up 'two'. We could see and sense the cost almost immediately. Down out, squat, up 'three.' She had also come dressed in a saree ... unhappily. In the pre-course interview, she told me that she had enrolled on a course with Philippe Gaulier and that he had suggested that she come back dressed as 'Mrs Ghandi'.  She reported that she was cross with herself for not having challenged the brief, and also for the way she responded to the brief because she felt her ability to play was hampered because she found the costume was so physically restrictive. 'I cannot flee the scene!', she quipped in an earlier part of her Take It Further session, while wearing the saree.

Down out, squat, up 'four.' Due to the exertion, she started, quite naturally, to make noises ... pants and grunts. This performer had done my Clown & Dark Clown workshop, so knew how to release and work with the sounds - they were compelling and rhythmic and varied.  She kept on; with burpee five, six seven, eight.  The sounds started to include a noise like a cow moaning (appalling and hilarious simultaneously). Incrementally, she introduced sounds from other barnyard animals: lambs, goats, chickens and pigs, all with the ongoing burpees keeping the base-line, inexorable rhythm going  - Down out, squat, up 'fifteen.' Down out, squat, up 'sixteen.' ...

Comedy Craft plus the cathartic value of Witnessing
Perfect Dark Clowning. We were laughing at the ridiculousness of the counting, and our physiology was affected by the vigour of the movement. The animal noises were absurd and ridiculous, however her desperation and commitment had an earnest quality - in her willingness to engage with the task, we could also imagine the women's choicelessness or obligation to fulfil their daily quota of men.  

The underlying rhythm of the burpees affected our physiology (our 'laughing gear'), the moment to moment surprises (contrast) of the chaotic sounding but wonderfully varied and contrapuntal animal noises added laughter nudges, and a sense of the Ridiculous (while at another level making a comment on the poor sex-workers' de-humanisation). So laughter was created, but Troubled Laughter - because the improvisation clearly conveyed the horror of what was being demonstrated  / presented for us to witness.

* I celebrate the uncategorisable.

** Her nakedness is not sexual in intent - although some viewers respond to it through a sexualised lens.

*** of course there are some who think Hamlet has actually been driven crazy - and it would be totally understandable if that were the case for Dangel Geyer - there is ample cause for mental pressure.

The Only One Action exercise 
This an early Enforced Performance* exercise, to encourage application of releasing the Marginalised Emotions and using the comedy craft. The player does not need to exercise their imagination in terms of generating ideas for the scene, but the Only One Action exercise does benefit from strategic play (or can train strategic play). Strategic Play is born from an adept ability to accept the (imaginary) predicament, clock and accept the audience's reactions and to mine the predicament over time.

Possible pre-steps 
1/ The player is invited to focus on 'Exposure in the space' i.e. playing with the anxiety due to being alone on stage and looked at. Sensitivity to group members is required, however. Some people have issues surrounding being seen, so I often, on a short two-day course, omit directly exploring 'being looked at'. For players who are ready for it, it is fun. 'What? what? What do you want from me? Stop looking! Your eyes, your eyes! All of your eyes! Seeing. See-ing. Look look looking. Stop it!' cover eyes 'Are you still looking? are you? I can feel you looking! Aargh!' Riffing with basic concrete words is a useful thing to do for clown work. We all know how often our minds will worry that they need to present a clever idea. 2/ A useful exercise to develop trust in the power of keeping it simple and concrete and being unafraid to mention the obvious  would be the 'Here and Now' exercise which I learned about in Oliver Double's excellent book Getting the Joke. The student/course participant doing the exercise faces an audience and may only talk about things that are happening in the here and now: the decor, the thoughts and feelings passing through his or her head etc. It helps reduce the ever-present temptation to be 'interesting'.**

The premise
One Action, as an Enforced Performance exercise - is based on the absurd idea that you are a prisoner in a regime where you are forced onto a stage and given the task of 'entertaining' an assembled audience (are they your tormentors, their assembled family?***). Your well-being (or that of your loved ones) is at stake. 
 
The prisoner is only allowed one action. For example, walking. In my controller voice, I say: ‘The Prisoner will Walk!’

How to make this interesting? When you have ‘nothing’ what have you still got?

Nothing is not nothing
In terms of the human body, what have you got to work with? Rhythm, breath, expression, doing, pausing, clocking (both audience reactions and guard), thinking, reacting, allowing the emotion of the moment, (rinse repeat, no particular order – that is based on awareness) – plus, trajectory and position in space. Plus planes of space. As a side note, this exercise also shows the importance of being able to work the stage area strategically. More on that perhaps in another post.
 
Work the predicament
Keep it simple, go step by step. The techniques of Red Nose Clown – looking, noticing the reaction, using curiousity, repeating the action, possibly a further repetition (choosing the right moment to repeat).
Gaulier said that the clown is always asking questions (e.g. ‘Did they like that? Will they like it again?’). Here the Dark Clown notes – ‘They are laughing – is that a good thing? Or a bad thing? Now they are not laughing. Oh no, what does that mean? They laughed at my desperation. What kind of people are these? What will happen if this does not go well? Is the guard looking at me funny? When will this be over?’ interjected by little beats of emotion – e.g. startle response, panic breathing, stifled sob, weeping.
 
Other one action prompts could be: coughing, sniffing, vomiting, singing, hopping running, looking, not speaking (make us believe that you are not speaking; prove it to us),measuring, pointing, yawning.
 
I have yet to use the ‘not speaking one’ –  it appeals because it is an 'impossible' instruction.
 
Optional extra - The Guard
To help players feel the High Stakes, in some exercises e.g. this one, I ask for someone to embody a guard. I find a water bottle that is half full. Held by the neck, a plastic bottle**** makes a satisfying audible, rounded thud in the left hand. The guard stands over on stage right – only just in the stage picture. They stand three-quarters on to the audience, feet apart and vigilant, the bottle resting on the palm of the left hand. The bottle is in place of a baton.
 
Side note: I am careful always to discourage people from over-investing in the role of the guard. The real work and point of interest, I remind people, is the person in suffering mode, the person standing in for the guard is serving the student who is doing the Dark Clown work. I also give this context to help the guard to be vigilant (it’s the Dark Clown version of complicité!). The guard could easily find themselves in the position of the prisoner. The guard needs to be as interested in the state and reactions of the audience and the overall success of their task. The guard is using the same key skill we focus on in the Peekaboo exercise – ‘are the audience getting closer to or further away from laughter?’ plus – ‘how is the prisoner doing in achieving that?’ I instruct the Guard that they can make only one thud with their ‘baton’ during the piece, so they have to choose their moment well. If the baton thud is over-used, then then the performer in prisoner role can work a beat of panic, but each subsequent beat will not raise the stakes, because after two, without any follow through, it presents a hollow threat. Also, and importantly, if the baton thud is over-used, it deprives the ‘prisoner’/player of the psychological anguish of not knowing when enough is enough and also of the horror of culpability – they themselves are forced to take the risks and make the decisions. 

 
* Enforced Performance is a term I use for Dark Clown scenarios using a prison or captive scenario and in productions, such as The Maids. 

** Keith Johnstone famously recommends resisting being interesting. Avner the Eccentric says 'be interested, not interesting.'   

***  These are thoughts in the head of the performer who is tasked with imagining themselves in the predicament - the actual audience is never asked to play a role.
 
**** As most of us bring re-usable water bottles now, I keep one for this specific purpose.

Sobbing for the fun of it
To prepare for this exercise, there are two steps.
First in full group I give a short demonstration of me talking about a happy day, but while sobbing. ‘Choose a happy moment, a real one – no you don't have to choose a moment that is very precious, just a nice simple happy day.'
​ 
The group pair up and take it in turns to do this task.
 
After each turn there is usually a lot of laughter. Most people can remember an instance of crying in childhood and at some level enjoying the rhythms of one’s own demonstration of injustice. Not that the laughter is about any kind of insight, it is mostly just a response to a release of energy, or the fun to be had in being given permission for rhythmic vocal play.
 
List your possessions
Step two. Find a new pair partner. (I find it advantageous to keep the energy circulating in the room).

This time, the first one to try the exercise will list their possessions, just as they come to mind, actual possessions, starting with something small. Each thing named needs a small piece of mime or gesture and the object needs to be created and or placed somewhere specific in the air around the performer, i.e. to the or right or left, higher or lower. For example: a pencil could be held up vertically, or measured between two forefingers; hands could make four quick tiers for 'towels'; a pillow could be held in two curved hands and given a little shake. People can use pantomime blanche, where a rectangle drawn with forefingers can represent a TV. Or it can be quick mime i.e. typing fingers on a keyboard for laptop. Each time each object is mentioned, the accompanying gesture needs to be in the exact same place. 

Their partner’s role is to put pressure on them, hector them (to help create a sense of High Stakes), asking 'What else?', ''What else have you got?', and once there are a few things, the partner will shout 'LIST!" - and the do-er of the exercise must list in exact order each thing they mentioned complete with the exact gesture and location in space. Of course any mistakes are to be welcomed. If there is brain freeze, the perfomer can make a sound to voice their anxiety. Dark Clown work represents the Marginalised Emotions. Any dithering or tongue trip can be voiced. If they can't remember the list or get something out of order – great! The doer can feel the embarrassment or other emotion of the wrong gesture or wrong order and to express that with inflection of voice, breath and/or gesture. 

Swap - the other partner lists and the first do-er hectors.
 
The Consumer Guilt Scenario – basic setup 
Now – the Consumer Guilt Scenario. The group line up chairs ready to sit and watch as audience. This is a solo piece. I ask who is willing to be the first player and I add more information: 'Imagine that you are standing before some kind of Tribunal (think of ‘self-criticism’ in the Stalinist era, or a less violent version of a ‘struggle session’ during the Cultural Revolution in China).'
 
The player needs to invest in something at stake – even if it’s at a simple level of nervousness and uncertainty as usual in any panel interview: 'What will the outcome of this interview be? How many items must I list? Is my list long enough? Is my list too long?'

Remember, Dark Clown uses a High Stakes to release the impulses for Marginalised Emotions. I play my part in offering stimulus to raise the stakes.
 
Transparent teaching
I let the group know that when I raise my voice or speak harshly, that I am taking on the role of a power figure. The player of the moment is invited to pretend in the proposed predicament as well as they can, knowing that they also need to avail themselves of any moments of naturally arising impulses and to give them shape and sound. The work on the course leading up to this exercise lays a lot of ground work, so course participants know what the methodology is and why things are happening. They have also had a preparatory talk laying out the aims and ethos of the work.
 
When I give a sharp command, the aim is to startle the physiology – most people’s intonation will rise when given a sharp instruction, some people stutter (these form part of the rhythms and timbres we play with as 'Dark Side Play'). Those who have worked with Gaulier or a Gaulier-trainer Clown teacher, will know that the teacher's interventions in role as grumpy Clown Professor are there to give the (Red Nose) Clown a skip in their step, or to release an emotion (the Red Nose Clown’s unmasked humanity which we love to see), or to allow the Clown to release some élan, to ‘save the furniture’ (save the situation).
 
As stakes-raiser, I say, or shout ‘What have you got?’ And they are off.
I switch to my coaching voice to remind them to give clarity and simple precision to each item they mention. 
 
The mechanics of responding to the audience within the Predicament
From the start of the course, I have been encouraging the participant to look and see (‘when you look, remember to see’). The other way I phrase this is to emphasise ‘noticing’. Each audience reaction can feed the performance of the player.
 
The performer needs to work the audience as a comedy player needs to work / respond to an audience, while in their imagination, they see and respond to the audience as the panel.
If the audience laugh, it is useful to imagine that perhaps they did not understand, perhaps some of the ‘panel’* don’t speak your language - this gives the opportunity for the player to repeat it (exact timbre, rhythm, volume, using proprioception) you say it again (usually another laugh occurs) - the player can then allow this to unnerve them and therefore take the opportunity of a further repetition (as if due to nerves), and say the thing a third time (usually someone else in the row of watchers/class audience with laugh then  Rule of Three). Then the player can react with anxiety to the fact that they are being laughed at. This serves two purposes: a/ the logic of the predicament - 'is laughter a good or a bad thing?' serving the stakes and performed emotional state of the player and b/ the comedy craft - 'laughter an interruption that must be dealt with’ as Avner the Eccentric says.
What, in this moment, does the interruption do to the figure in the improvised predicament? Does it put them off their game, shame them?
Ongoingly, there is the pressure to keep more items coming, and of course to ramp up the rhythm by responding to the command: ‘LIST!!’
 
Raising the stakes again - the importance of imaginative investment
Ok – let’s go back to the set up for the exercise – because there are a couple more elements to it.
 
The name of the scenario is Consumer Guilt. I remind the player of the moment that they can begin the improvisation crying or they can work the items / list game first, then do the list citing or break out into sobbing as a counterpoint / contrast / escalation. I remind the player where necessary to avail themselves of different rhythms and timbres.**

Combined with this, I invite us all to reflect on our privileged lives and the obscenity of what we own in comparison with many in the world.
 
To activate this further - one more thing is set up. I mention the ghastly earthquake in Haiti, and invite the player to see, over to the left (metaphorically, In their minds eye) – a little grandma - to imagine a poor little aged woman who has lost everything … every thing … I say. She is there, naked, under a piece of plastic supported on sticks, next to running sewage.

'Ok now – what have you got?'
 
Every so often, if people are not allowing the emotions of guilt and shame to surface, I prompt them to look at Grandma.
 
And to say: ‘I’m sorry Grandma.’ And to say it: 'Again!'
If needed, I invite them: ‘can you sob a bit?’
'List!! What else have you got?! Look at Grandma, say: "Sorry Grandma."'
 
If people can segue into sobbing, a further level yet can be added where they look up, appalled at themselves and say ‘oh god!’ and play with what timbres and rhythms of that game - or use 'oh god' as punctuation / counterpoint / alternation with the game of listed objects interrupted by the apologies to Grandma.
 
Trouble shooting - noticing and sounding the arising emotions
People can, understandably enough, focus on coming up with the next item. There is zero need to come up with anything interesting, there banal the better. People tend to be task-oriented rather than being-oriented. What's key in clowning in general is noticing, accepting and including any passing emotion that may arise. While the list is necessary and important to get a rhythm going (as well as provide the content for the contrast, the obscenity of plenty and the picture of inequality), what we really enjoy are  the little flinches, the flecks of pain that read in the eyes of the player who is immersing into the pretended (but heck let’s face it fully grounded in reality) Predicament. Any anxiety about a delay in finding the next item, or fear of not being able to think, or nerves about standing in front of other - all these are impulses to be experienced. All Clown students would do well to allow themselves to express the micro-emotion of the moment in sound and movement. Wonderful, strange, little quirks can affect the face or the voice under even a modicum of stress.
 
Resistance and the accidental extraordinary physiological response
People sometimes resist looking at Grandma. (Thereby cheating themselves of the opportunity to escalate their playing energy).
Working in Holland in January***, despite several reminders ‘Look at her!!’, the player was resisting doing that.
‘Look at her!!!!’, I insisted, and she did start to turn her head ... but before her neck fully turned, it snapped back. It was this wonderful, compelling, unplanned flinch of aversion!

We laugh with delight or incredulity or just plain surprise when the Red Nose Clown does a spontaneous something that is quirky and fresh-minted from the impulse of the moment.
For me – that involuntary flinch was a similar gem - eliciting a gasp of Troubled Laughter.

These unbidden gestures (accidents of the moment and of physiology) are the nuggets of the joy / pain / catharsis of the Dark Clown. The wonderful performer who plays The Seal in the ‘Eco Horror’ scenario shown in the Dark Clown documentary (Hospital Clown Faith Tingle) has done the Clown & Dark Clown course three times. She surrenders her physiology to the imagination and the impulse of the moment. In Dark Clown the impulse can be an ongoing (pretended) stress situation. Once, doing the ‘Horror Is’ exercise, she invested magnificently in imagining her phobia/object of dread and her forehead veins bulged and danced in a compelling way. And because her rhythms were in place, laughter was released. A sound could be made in a moment of witnessing stress – cathartic nugget.

Let's go back to the player in Holland and that wonderful flinch! What we saw in that moment was a human who would not look. Her very body resisted the direct command. It was such a human response – we all know in ourselves that knee-jerk will, that aversion, that refusal to look at pain - those moments when we really do not want to look on hurt or ugliness, when we want to live our lives as we have arranged them, not accept responsibility for others, and not have our status quo threatened. Arrogance and fear mixed – how is that for a Marginalised Emotion! And I love it all the more because it is not coming from reason, it's coming from the body's primal instincts, the Amygdala response (if talking about the Amygdala in that way is still good science).
 
Shame - another memorable moment
In December 2019, there was a wonderful iteration of this exercise. The player of the moment was a talented actor and dancer. 
In his list of possessions, he mentioned shower gel and a loofah. Something about this, about the way he said it, had a quality that attracted my attention. He is an intelligent person and was no doubt alert to the particular combination of privilege to be able to afford the healthy natural and rather exotic product (the obscenity of owning items which invest us with a touch of smugness) and also the vanity of it too - like the Beckhams, we exfoliate.

I said, 'Ok you are going to take that loofah and that shower gel and have a shower, and apologise to Grandma while it is happening' (Just so you know - I have a rule that course participants can choose to break and leave an improvisation if they so wish at any moment of their choosing). He took the invitation / provocation and began to shower (fully clothed, just to be clear!) and he did something I did not expect. He remained in relationship with (aware of) Grandma as he started to come showering, and then there was this little instinctual shift of his body and he turned the front of his body away from her. We saw a human being ashamed to have the luxury Grandma did not, ashamed to affront Grandma with his nakedness, and also ashamed on his own account of being naked in front of Grandma. So poignant, so ghastly. I am no stranger to the emotion of shame and it is so – I don’t know the word … liberating, reassuring, the opposite of alienating? Validating? Healing? Thank heavens for Brené Brown doing her risk-taking work in the field of Shame. To be able to see these awful moments of life in a ‘safe’ setting in the ritual space of theatre or theatre making or theatre training.
 
*To be clear, the player looks at and is tasked with reading the audience as 'panel' (while attending to their laughter and other responses according to the techniques of comedy craft, as audience). The audience when watching exercises or scenario improv’s are instructed to be a normal audience. When I say panel – this is the reality of the predicament of the performer. The performer is playing someone standing before a panel. The performer responds to the laughter and silences of the audience from within the pretended predicament. Occasionally one needs to coach participants sitting in audience (either in Red Nose or in Dark Clown exercises) to avoid the impulse to coach fellow course members - i.e. to call things out to them that you think they should do. The work at hand is training how to work a normal audience. If people are calling out as peers/would be coaches, how is that helping their fellows train to work a normal audience?
 
**When we do a very early Red Nose Clown exercise ‘Moving Around the Room Like’, I land this point: ‘Clowning is not intellectual. It is often a shape, phrase, sound timbre rhythm that we like … so much that we’d be happy to see it again … and again (the Peekaboo exercise reinforces this, so does the example of playing with a baby ‘LookatthePanda ….’). We see how laughter can wane or fail if people have not built sufficient proprioception skill to accurately reproduce the thing that happened just before the laugh. If they do it softer volume it’s a disappointment and can remove the possibility of a rule of three; if they forget what they did, tumbleweeds may ensue.

***'Comedy can make people aware of what is going on in a way that is easier to digest than the news. It engages people more. I got what I came for and I a lot more fun, playfulness and laughter than I expected, given the subjects are ‘dark’. What surprised me though, was how very alive I felt after the weekend with the Dark Clown.' - Course Participant Jan 2020 Utrecht