peta LiLY
  • ABOUT
  • COURSES
  • Shows
  • BLOG: Dark Clown, Clown plus
  • Contact
  • FAQs for the Clown & Dark Clown course
  • Creative Mentor / Acting Coach / Director
  • ONLINE COURSE INFO
  • What people say about the Clown & Dark Clown course
  • What people say about the Alchemy of Archetypes course
  • What people say about the Barefaced Commedia dell'Arte course
  • PLAYS and POETRY
  • What people say about the Clown Course

on Tibetan Buddhism, Horror and Dark Clown

6/23/2015

3 Comments

 
Pictureone of the 'Lords of the Cemetery'


In my paper ‘The Comedy of Terrors, Dark Clown and Enforced Performance’, I suggest that ‘the Dark Clown is useful, because it provides an opportunity for audiences and performers to engage with some of the dark absurdities and obscenities of this world, when drama and sentiment can fall short of touching us. The Holocaust, Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, and more recent events are horrors of such magnitude and incomprehensibility that we are in danger of numbing out even as we try to contemplate them.’


When I introduce Dark Clown, I always describe to groups a particular scene of Pip Simmonds’ 1980’s production An die Musik, where a performer plays a man in a prison camp dancing for his life. He is humiliated, desperate to stay alive and horrified to see what he has been driven to.  Watching this scene, I had the privilege of being able to both squirm at the ghastly subtraction of his dignity, and also to vividly witness it. Simultaneously I was able to release the pent up energy of my own guilt through this vigorous form of laughter - which at a physiological level shares something with the act of sobbing.

 
Dark Clown is a performance style, not a spiritual practice. It is a challenging yet rewarding work to teach. Because of its dark content and unusual nature, sometimes people become upset and sometimes questions are raised. I have created an introduction to the work that explains that upset may possibly happen and how to proceed if it does. I have also found a way to give the right information and framework for the work, making it clear that the work is best experienced rather than described – we progress towards it step by step. Until all the work has been done, discussion is too hypothetical to be useful. Once the work has been done, most would-be questions been resolved.


It is natural that some people sometimes become upset. 1 the content is dark, 2 the work requires a certain extremity of physicality 3 the work requires an imaginative investment in circumstances chosen to create sufficiently high stakes for the performer to release into the rhythms and states of the Dark Clown 4 sometimes people have events in their lives that get triggered by a detail of the work. Usually a glass of water and a breath outside the room is enough for people to be able to return to the work.


Sometimes fear arises from people’s horror that they might be making light of the terrible suffering of others. And that fear can be manifested in a question or a resistant statement. I always clarify, with emphasis, when teaching Dark Clown, that my intention is not to make fun of suffering or to make fun of those who have suffered. It is my intention to give audiences the experience of finding themselves laughing and at the same time - or a beat later - to feel terrible that they have laughed.

 
But occasionally, a course participant’s emotions surge, and despite the information in introduction – they verbalise a reaction along the lines of: 'but this work is wrong!’ or 'you / I cannot laugh at this’.

 
In these moments the conversation has to become wider still. And last year it occurred to me to mention to a troubled course participant the possibility of a resonance with Tantric contemplation of horror. I found this blog entry on 'Disgust, horror, and Western Buddhism’ – edited here by me (with apologies and credit and thanks to the author - please see the link to the full blog below). There's a preamble then it mentions 'tantric transformation':

 
‘There are two fundamental approaches in Buddhism. One is renunciation…you lessen the defiled emotions …by avoiding the things that provoke them. Then you use meditation to cut off the remainder.

There is a clear Buddhist logic to this; you can understand how renunciation ends suffering by extinguishing negative emotions.

The other approach is tantric transformation. Externally, you avoid nothing. Internally, you don’t try to get rid of negative emotions; you might even deliberately intensify them. Instead, you transform your relationship with them, so that they cease to be problems.….

Again, there is a clear Buddhist logic. If you enjoy everything, there is no suffering.

…Horror (is) as important in Tantra as in renunciate Buddhism.

The key is the realization of emptiness—the fact that things have no inherent nature. Nothing is disgusting on its own account. Disgust is just your emotional response to it. With practice, you can break your habitual perception-emotion linkage.

The most commonly-known tantric corpse practice is chöd. Ideally chöd should be practiced in a charnel ground. There you visualize your own violent death, as horrifying as possible. Then you serve your dead body as a feast for all beings, who find it utterly delicious. Chöd transforms horror into fearlessness, and transforms revulsion for death and corpses into generosity.

Chöd is just the tip of the iceberg. The tantric scriptures are full of horrifying stories and images. Tantric Buddhist art often depicts corpses or parts of corpses. Human bones are used in most tantric rituals.

....Death was taboo in the West during the formative years for leading Western Buddhist teachers. You were supposed to pretend it didn’t exist. The traditional rituals that had made dying a community event were abandoned. Death became a private, hidden, shameful matter....

Resistance to corpse practice is a Western cultural thing. Corpse practice is directly aligned with the essential principles of Buddhism. It is a powerful tool for either renunciation or tantric transformation.’

see the full blog post here:
http://meaningness.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/disgust-horror-western-buddhism/

There is an other spiritual practice that is worth mentioning here, for people who become distressed, or fear becoming distressed doing Dark Clown work.

I came across the practice of Tonglen in a book I read by Pema Chödrön, ‘When things fall apart’. She mentioned that when we suffer, we often make it more persistent and painful by resistance and / or efforting to escape. I was shocked when she advised to breathe in the mental or physical pain – ‘won’t that be harmful to my body?’ I worried. Then I tried it. Chödrön advised to breathe it in on behalf of others who are suffering something similar and to breathe out relief for them.

In this video she advises you can go straight to the suffering of others – breathe it in and then breathe out the appropriate relief for them.

 People report the Dark Clown work is compelling and liberating to play – and often report that it is cathartic to witness.

In the terrible regimes mentioned in the first paragraph, psychological torture goes hand in hand with physical torture and deprivation.
People have been called to make  terrible choices, or reduced to the point where under pressure and shock they act out of self interest – we can only imagine their suffering. But rather than numbing out because the horror is so great we can at least see these events, these terrible moments of humanity, the beats of shame and guilt and horror that happened to people whose stories may have been lost or never seen. We can, albeit long after the fact, dignify this suffering by being a witness to its verisimilitude. And just maybe that counts for something. As Rust Cohle said in Series One of True Detective - 'and I will not look away’.


...I know I've mentioned this quote before - it's too good not to repeat.

3 Comments

    SEARCH by Category - scroll below

    This blog covers my Clown, Dark Clown, Comedy, and Theatre Making practices.

    ​Buy me a Ko-fi?
    I am writing a book on Dark Clown. If you enjoy the posts here, I'd love your support on my Ko-fi page. Your donation - even a small one - will help pay for time, editors, proof readers, books to inform context etc.
    ​ Thank you!
     

     https://ko-fi.com/petalily 

    30 years of practical research has created a new genre: Dark Clown. The Comedy of Terrors - Dark Clown & Enforced Performance was delivered at Bath Spa University. The work is cited in Clown (readings in theatre practice) by Jon Davison.
    ​

    Images above: Tiff Wear, Robert Piwko, Douglas Robertson, PL and Graham Fudger. Illustration by
    Charlotte Biszewski. Mask: Alexander McPherson.

    Categories

    All
    Absurd
    Absurdity
    Absurd Theatre
    Acceptance
    Accept Everything
    Acting
    Actioning
    Actions
    Adaptation
    Adversity
    Aesthetic
    All Over Lovely
    Amygdala
    Anais NIn
    An Die Musik
    Archetypes
    Aristotle's Poetics
    Arnold Mindell
    Audience
    Autobiographical Theatre
    Avner The Eccentric
    Awareness
    Backstory
    Bafflement
    Beats
    Believable Verisimilitude Of Pain And Distress
    Benefits To The Actor
    Big And Small
    Bim Mason
    Body Mask
    Bouffon
    Breath
    Breathing
    Brene Brown
    Buster Keaton
    Buzzer Exercise
    Calibration
    Call And Response
    Carlo Boso
    Carthasis Of Laughter
    Casting The Net
    Catharsis
    Chaplin
    Character
    Chastity Belt
    Chinese Clown
    Circo-therapy
    Circus
    Circus Lumiere
    Claire Dowie
    Clown
    Clown & Dark Clown
    Clown & Dark Clown Course
    Clown Doctors
    Clown Dramaturgy
    Clown Egg Register
    Clown Genius
    Clown Jokes
    Clown Logic
    Clown Poem
    #clown #poem #clownpoem #dignity #transform
    Clown Power Symposium
    Clown Professor
    Clowns
    Clown State
    Clown State Process
    Coat-of-arms
    Colin Watkeys
    Comedy
    Comedy Craft
    Compassion
    Conditions For Comedy
    Confessional Theatre
    Conflict And Pain
    Consent
    Consumer Guilt
    Content Awareness
    Contrast
    Controller
    Corpsing
    Costume
    Costume Design
    Costume Embodiment
    Coulraphobia
    Courage
    Covid
    Creativity
    Crying
    Crystal Lil
    Curiousity
    Curriculum
    C-words
    Dark Clown
    Dark Clown Documentary
    Dark Clown Dramaturgy
    Dark Clown Scenario
    Dark Clown Scenarios
    Dark Side Play
    Dave Pickering
    Deadpan
    Declan Donnellan
    Design
    Devising
    Dignity
    Dina Glouberman
    Discomfort
    Distance
    Documentary
    Dramaturgy
    Electro-pop
    Embodied Performance
    Embodiment
    Emotions
    Empathy
    Enforced Performance
    Ensemble
    Ethos
    Evil Laughter
    Exaggeration
    Extraordinary Physiological Response
    Facilitation
    Failure
    Failure As Success
    Fairytale
    Feminist Clown
    Flow
    Fool
    Fox And Maiden
    Gaulier
    Gender
    Genres
    Getting Your Message Across
    Half-Masks
    Hamlet Or Die
    Happenstance
    Hara
    Heart
    High Stakes
    High Stakes Predicament
    High Stakes Predicaments
    Honesty
    Horror
    Humanity
    Humanity In Extremis
    Hybrid Clown
    Hyper-vigilance
    I Am A Timebomb
    Imagework
    Imaginary Circumstances
    Immersion
    Implicate The Audience
    Implication
    Impossible Choices
    Impro. Clown. Clown State
    Impulse
    Impulses
    Inner Critic
    Innocence
    Inspirations
    Intention Of The Dark Clown Work
    Interview
    Interviews & Auditions
    In The Now
    Intuition
    Invocation
    It
    Jean Genet
    John Towsen
    Journals
    Jung
    Keith Johnstone
    King Lear
    Laugh At
    Laughing Gear
    Laughter
    Laughter Nudge
    Laughter To Implicate
    Learning
    Learning Lines
    Le Bide
    Line Up Exercise
    Line-up Exercise
    Lisa Wolpe
    Lumiere & Son
    Mamet
    Marginalised Emotions
    Marx Brothers
    Mask
    Mask State
    Methodology
    Mime
    Monika Pagneaux
    Motif
    Motifs
    Name Game
    Negative Emotions
    NLP
    Normal Audience
    Not Being Seen
    'not Doing'
    Okidok
    One Action
    Pain
    Pantomime
    Pema Chodron
    Pennywise
    Performance
    Perseverance
    Perspectives
    Peter A Levin
    Philippe Gaulier
    Pip Simmonds
    Play
    Play-possibilities
    Plot And Character
    Poetry
    Pop
    Power
    Predicament
    Predicaments
    Preparation
    Process
    Production
    Proprioception
    Props
    Red Nose Clown
    Rehearsal
    Repetition
    Resonances
    Reviews
    Rhythm
    Ridiculous
    Roger Rabbit
    Rough Puppetry
    Rule Of Three
    Rumi
    'sad Normals'
    Sad Normals
    Satire
    Sedona Method
    See The Cost
    Self Compassion
    Shakespeare
    Shame
    Shows
    Sobbing
    Solo
    Solo Theatre
    Stakes
    Stand Up Theatre
    Stand-up Theatre
    Storytelling
    Strange Forces
    Strategic Play
    Sufferring
    Take It Further
    Taking Laughter To The Limits
    Tarot
    Teaching
    Teaching Hygeine
    Techniques
    TED Talk
    Theatremaking
    The 'bide'
    'The Circus'
    The Comedy Of Errors
    The Cost
    The Death Of Fun
    The Fool
    The Guard
    The Little Mermaid
    The Maids
    The Menu
    The Revenger's Tragedy
    Three Women
    Tibetan Buddhism
    Timing
    Tips
    Tips For Learning Lines
    'Tis Pity She's A Horse
    'Tis Pity She's A Whore
    Tonglen
    Topless
    Torture Over Ten Feet
    Tragedy
    Transparent Teaching
    Trauma
    Trickster
    Trigger Warmings
    Trilogy
    Troubled Laughter
    Truth & Fiction
    Truth & Lies
    Truth + Pain
    Upset
    Upset Procedure
    Useful Principles
    Use Your Senses
    Viola Spolin
    Vulnerability
    Warmup
    Wendy Darling
    'what If'
    Witness
    Women And Clowning
    Women Clowns
    Workout
    Writing
    Yoshi Oida
    Zen

    Archives

    October 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    February 2022
    September 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    March 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    September 2016
    July 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015

    RSS Feed

workshops & shows 


Join Peta Lily Theatre Workshops on Facebook

Like Peta Lily Shows on Facebook

Follow @peta_lily on Twitter

Follow @petalily on Instagram

Curious about Dark Clown? get your FREE ebooklet when you sign up to the mailing list - see the form to the right!

Something else? If you are looking for a director / creative mentor / workshop leader for a bespoke workshop for your company or organisation or any other matter - go here.

* By signing up to the mailing list you agree to receive mailings about workshops, shows, publications and very occasionally other news, usually only about a half dozen mailouts a year. You can always choose to unsubscribe at any time – there is an unsubscribe link to click on in each email I send. Your information will not be shared with any third party.

Picture

    JOIN THE MAILING LIST & GET YOUR FREE ebooklet - 2020 extended version

    * By signing up to the mailing list you agree to receive mailings about workshops, shows, publications and very occasionally other news. Your information will not be shared with any third party.
    iCloud email addresses don't always work with the mailing system - and, IMPORTANT -please double check you input your email address correctly - if there's a typo I cannot contact you.
    iCloud email addresses don't always work with the mailing system - and IMPORTANT please be sure not to make a typo when inputting your email address.
Submit