​
'Point fixe!', Philippe Gaulier would call out to a room full of theatre practitioners hungry to open their mind to the expertise of a European Master and to the art of clowning and play.
He would be asking for the moment to be held - or rather, sustained.
 
What is Fixed Point?
This post is about Fixed Point as I learned it from Gaulier and Monika Pagneux in a church hall just north of the Talgarth Road many years ago.
Fixed Point is the capturing of the body/being in a physical attitude in space and the sustaining of that enlivened shape for theatrical and comedic impact.
 
Exercise
The Fixed Point is arrived at by getting the player engaged in full-bodied physical movement and then calling ‘stop’ or ‘halt’ at a random moment. The player is instructed to avoid responding to the ‘stop’ instruction by completely dropping what they were doing and assuming a standing position. The idea is rather to arrest the movement of the player, like a single frame in a piece of film.
 
Even better than just running in the space, it’s good to get the players engaged in a game, so they are released into lively, engaged, strategic movement, suffused with the joy of play but also fleeting states of shifting micro emotions (perhaps: aspiration, hope, frustration, determination, victory …).
The command ‘Fixed Point!’ is intended to capture a physical attitude and a moment in time. It involves the whole body. Most rewardingly, the torso will be inflected - arms and legs are more functional and gestural, while an inflected torso conveys more emotional quality. I’ll write a blog post about that one day.
 
On first trial, the exercise may mostly be a challenge to equilibrium. There may also be a tendency to create a ‘freeze’; by clamping with the muscles in a generalised way; so that an idea of shape supplants nuance of expression. It’s important that, on the stop, the player develop the ability to sustain the way their body is configured in this moment – fully, exactly, specifically, with all the various inner dynamics intact.
 
To remedy any generalised ‘freezing’ that might happen,  students can be invited to appreciate and sustain a living moment.
Move. Stop. Fixed Point.
Direct your attention to relish and ‘taste’ the energy in your body-being. Do a scan - you may have 65% tension in the muscle above your left knee, and 35% tension in your right wrist. Your chest should be informed by your position and so your breathing will be affected in a specific way. There should be a sense of possibility – of something just having happened and simultaneously, something just about to happen.
 
Troubleshoot
Avoid a tendency to sag. Fixed Point is a great way to train the stamina to sustain – to  keep the dynamics alive and to avoid drooping in shape or energy. Fixed Point is not about perfunctorily holding a shape - it is about feeling and relishing the life  in that captured moment.
 
Go again, stop again – new Fixed Point.
The student can hopefully notice how the body and being are engaged in a new, granularly specific configuration achieved by accident.
 
And if they don’t experience a different flavour in their next shape? This is part of the beauty and usefulness of the Fixed Point exercise – it shows up limitation caused by habitual tension or habitual body usage. A body in flow (agile and resourceful), together with a lively readiness to respond to the ‘stop’ command, can generate endless new postures/shapes – each with their own ‘character’ or ‘attitude’ or psychophysical flavour.
 
Keeping balance on a single leg may be a benefit of sustained practice, but it is not the immediate end aim of the exercise. If you are focused on keeping a leg off the floor, direct your attention to the torso. What is going on there? Is your chest inclined, pushed forward? rotated? Inclined? A combination of all these? If balance threatens a player who is caught on one leg, then instruct them to lightly place the foot down on the ground – but do that without changing the configuration of the torso, or its height off the floor.  Here is another benefit of the exercise – the ability to arrange for ease and poise within the sustain, and to know that a softness in the hip and knee can be available while other muscles are engaged in other parts of the body. Chi Gung and Tai Chi are great training for soft, available wrists, elbows, ankles knees and hip joints.
 
Fixed Point and Clown
We love to see the clown-player arrested in an in-between moment, keenly engaged but also off-guard. It is the clown’s job to present the human condition unguarded. In the context of a clown class, Fixed Point can help the clown student to appear as if ‘caught out’ (think of the Grandmother’s Footsteps game).
 
Fixed Point training is a great way to appreciate the richness of a body/being invested vividly in a moment. And also to calibrate the distribution of tension throughout the body.
 
Also, with practice, it’s a great way to encourage awareness even while engaged in demanding movement. The clown audience relationship needs this kind of awareness.
Did they laugh? Are they seeing something in that specific moment that amuses them?
 
Fixed Point and laughter generation
Clown work can have a wide range of flavours including solitary, sad clown and poetic clown - but many audiences appreciate the ability of the clown to reliably generate laughter.
What a generous gift - to risk in that endeavour: to give the audience that release from tension. To take the audience on the life-emulating journey of tension, release; tension, release; tension, release, with the benefit of engaging an audience’s breath and gifting them with the energetic release of laughter.  The license of laughter.
 
‘When you hear the audience laugh, chances are that just before the laugh you did something funny.’*
Stop. Fixed point. Check (clock), calibrate, connect. Then, working with the body-awareness that the FP can bring, you can replicate the physical and or vocal timbre of the moment before the laugh.
‘If the audience laughs, they should laugh again.’ – said Gaulier. (‘should’ meaning, if something made them laugh once, chances are that it will make them laugh again).
If you can re-deliver the moment, shape, rhythm and timber of the moment, there should be a laugh. If not, check (clock), calibrate, show your humanity (the emotion of the moment e.g. interest, confusion, inconvenience …) and re-connect (cast the net**).
 
Put another way - you hear the laugh - you stop at the exact moment (and in the exact shape – the audience is reading your shape and if you change it, it dissolves the previous moment, or comments on it – the audience has seen/experienced something in that moment – the clown’s eagerness, clumsiness, frustration, whatever expressed through their body, or the shape the clown and the angle of the prop they are using makes, perhaps. You stop, holding the FP and you can isolate the neck to clock the audience to a) notice b) connect c) maybe gain some information.
 
Why is it useful?
By training the ability to capture a Fixed Point, you avail yourself of an energetic attitude, a moment of what Monika Pagneaux called ‘life-full-ness’.
Working the Fixed Point has many benefits for the performer/actor: it trains integration of being and body; it grows charisma; it nourishes élan (French word for elastic, ready energy); it grows your ability to sense, capture and present a moment in performance.
 
We come to the theatre to see human expression. The human form moving with intention is compelling. Fixed Point is a beautiful thing. It is about capturing an energetic moment of body and being. It can add suspense to a moment of drama, or, in clown work, allow the audience to clearly see or relish a comedic moment.
 
Knowing how much there is in each second can inspire the performer to enjoy being infused by inner shifting dynamics, to develop a taste for radiating the different emotions or energy states of each successive moment.
 
Theatre is composed of moments of being, moments of movement, including both fleeting motion and suspended stillness. Audience's hearts can be moved by movement with its rhythm, phrasing, 'music' and timbre and spatial context constructed well with intentionality (dramaturgy) on stage.
 
As a student of laughter, I am fascinated by audience responses. At QEH in 2001, I saw Robert Lepage perform his solo show ‘The Far Side of the Moon’ I have been in many audiences where the audience laughs in unison at moments designed by the performer. Watching ‘TFSOTM’, I experienced an audience so engaged as to be moved to respond vocally in unison, in shared timbres, to moment after moment in the show: a short 'oh' of surprise; a nodding kind of 'ahhh!'; a gasp of surprise; a soft knowing laugh. Lepage’s performance (his script, stagecraft, physicality and dramaturgy) generated unison response after response after response – the entire audience innocently matching each other in both timing and timbre.
 
Kinestheology and Theatre
Studies on Kinestheology show how audiences can respond to the expressions of the bodies of the performers. Yves Marc of the iconic Corporeal  Mime company Théâtre du Movement now performs a show where he invites the audience to explore their own state of being. Are they in a psychophysical state of readiness? Or in a condition of stasis: apartness, sluggishness, resisting of affect.
 
Over the years, in stealth and slowly, our hearts have been wounded and hardened by many factors. Might we ever risk to lose the enlivening communion of live theatre? Risk to lose our ability to offer ourselves up to the feelings in the stories and dances taking place before us, and in that availability, to have our beings re-enlivened, widened and deepened by exposure to a wide spectrum of feeling, to enlarge our empathy by witnessing and (via kinestheology) to feel and embody the predicaments of others, to lose our normal boundaries, in the specially dedicated, dark (or otherwise designed) space of the theatre.

* I say this teaching clown. I think it's my words but it maybe one of my teachers.
** I learned this from Alison Skilbeck and refer to it in the blog post on 1/31 2015.

A list of Key Concepts (or frequently used phrases) for Dark Clown practice (as part of the 'Clown & Dark Clown Course' and the 'Level 2 Dark Clown Course').
 


It's a good-sized list and might feel like a lot but it all flows together in the room - the Clown & Dark Clown course progresses in a way that is fun and enlivening – there are practical exercises for each principle and we get there step by step.
These principles and techniques become understood and assimilated experientially. The Level 2 Dark Clown Course builds on ground gained and gives more opportunity to play with the Dark Clown Scenarios e.g. this one.
 

 
​Clown/ Red Nose Clown 
There are many different types of Clown, for the purposes of teaching on the Clown & Dark Clown course, I use ‘Red Nose Clown’ as a handy distinction from Dark Clown. (I use Red Nose to refer mostly to the Lecoq-lineage of clown regardless of whether a player uses a painted or rubber nose or different coloured nose or no nose at all in their clowning).

Troubled Laughter
In the introduction I give into the Dark Clown work proper (on a course), I usually tell the story of how, watching a scene in a show I saw in 1980, I first experienced what I later came to call Troubled Laughter. From my book-in-progress: “I laughed, while at the same time thinking 'I shouldn’t be laughing at this’. I laughed with a particular sensation in my ribs and lungs. I laughed with hot cheeks. That ‘shouldn’t’ wasn’t simply the transgression of naughtiness, it was something else. I felt awful and I was somehow glad to feel awful because what I was witnessing was a depiction of an appalling predicament. As much as it was ghastly, it was somehow a relief to sit there and make a noise, to find a noise being released out of me; to give expression to a conflicted response via this rhymical release of the breath, to physically and vocally resonate with the stage action.”
 
Marginalised Emotions
Imagine human expression were expressed as a line or continuum. Say that on one side we have the expression we might most often see in the Red Nose Clown, e.g. joy, silliness, loveliness, pride, bashfulness … near the centre of the line there may be grumpiness, crossness, even anger. But what about the other half of the line? Here we are heading for the expressions of the Dark Clown and what I call the Marginalised Emotions – such as: hyper-vigilance, fear, distress, shame, anguish, regret, guilt, humiliation, indignity, disbelief, grief, shock, absurdity, desolation, dread, despair, physical pain, horror, terror and existential dread. (Listed in no special or incremental order).

N.B.: No emotional recall is used in Dark Clown work.  (Emotional recall is a technique used by some Stanislavsky teachers whereby the performer deliberately recalls an upsetting moments from their own life in order to summon emotion – we do not do this).  The Dark Clown work relies on the natural human ability to pretend in a set of imaginary circumstances.
 
A believable verisimilitude of pain and distress
Verisimilitude means a likeness or a portrayal of – if the clown looks like they are enjoying their pain, the audience cannot experience the Troubled Laughter which is one of the defining characteristics of the Dark Clown. In order to Implicate the Audience (see below), the Dark Clown player needs to create / present ‘a believable verisimilitude of pain and distress’ by using rhythm, timbre, energy and imagination, using a set of given circumstances. (It is ‘believable’ because the Dark Clown player pretends well enough and the audience, when they enter a theatre space, are usually ready to become engaged in the world and are ready to ‘suspend disbelief’.)
 
Dark Clown as distinct from Philippe Gaulier’s Bouffon work 
I try not to mention Bouffon in the workshop because if people don’t already know what it is, it takes extra time to explain it and it may confuse people – but if someone asks, I make the distinction this way.
Bouffon plays Satire – Dark Clown does not have the luxury to play satire.
(The historical roots of Bouffon - it is said – are based on a tradition that the outcast had one day of the year to enter the church or village and mock those who had privilege. The Dark Clown does not have the luxury to mock. The Dark Clown is concerned with how to survive the next 30 seconds.)
 
Comedy Craft 
This is a collection of principles and techniques (rhythm, phrasing, musicality, timbre, clocks, beats, contrast, repetition, call backs, nudges, alternation, acceleration/deceleration, escalation (snowballing), micropauses, spatial embroidery etc) that can then be applied to generate laughter in Dark contexts.
 
Clocks/ Clocking
A part of comedy craft - Clocking is when an actor (or player) looks straight at the audience giving them a chance to understand (or simply notice) what the character is (or might be) thinking. A player can also ‘clock’ an object or another performer. Comes from English usage of a clock face.
 
Enforced Performance: 
For some exercises we imagine a prison scenario – the purpose of this is to Raise the Stakes* to help the release into the Marginalised Emotions. I may also mention Life or Death Stakes.

Hyper-vigilance is a natural response to fear. It’s when you are highly alert to any movement or sound, perceiving it as a potential source of threat. In Dark Clown work, this replaces the 'complicité' style of eye-contact and responsiveness of the Red Nose Clown. In an enforced performance scenario, the player will give ‘a believable verisimilitude of hyper-vigilance’.
 
Extraordinary Physiological Response
With sufficient (imaginary, of course) pressure, logical thought stalls, emotion short-circuits and the player can find themselves releasing into a panicked amygdala response, allowing the audience the possibility to witness a  spontaneously-released extraordinary physiological response (a pulsing brow vein, an involuntary twitch or flinch ... ). This is one of the compelling features of the Dark Clown work. 
The EPR is in fact a motif. This is something you can see in Clown, comedy and Commedia work where the performer creates motifs (succinct, repeatable gestures, often combining sound and movement, and aimed to charm the audience or be a laughter nudge for the audience.) The EPR is a motif of a different flavour, but still designed to create laughter, or prime the laughing gear for future potential laughter.
 
As part of Comedy Craft, I emphasise that laughter is a physiological phenomenon – I speak of priming** (priming as you prime a  motor – see below) the ‘laughing gear’. Laughing gear is a colloquial Australian phrase for the mouth, but I use it to mean the lungs, heart, diaphragm (eyes and mouth/jaw are also important).
 
Carlo Boso Commedia dell’Arte Teacher - TAG Teatro di Venezia: ‘It’s easy to make people laugh, all you need to do is to control people’s breathing and their heart rate.’ (nowadays I prefer to say ‘affect’ rather than ‘control’).
 
The Cost
In a Red Nose Clown exercise, we love to see the Clown thinking and reacting - for example, when another clown in the scene/exercise is being praised. We love the micro expressions, the tiny momentary reactions or 'Tells'*** of humanity which the ‘Sad Normals’ (see below) take considerable pains to mask or suppress. In Dark Clown I call this the Cost. The psychological Cost, the visible processing of thoughts and emotions of humanity in extremis.
 
Cost / Palpable cost
I may use the phrase ‘we want to see the cost’ (as in : what does it cost them emotionally?). With the Red Nose Clowns, we love to see their humanity, their emotions. We specially enjoy seeing this in the eyes: the micro-expressions of pride, affront, surprise, confusion, disappointment or other thought processes. Also in tiny head turns or spontaneous micro gestures, or the breath. (In Dark Clown work, the audience gets to see how the Dark Clown player responds to a command or predicament where they must make a terrible choice, how they look when they are wrestling with themselves in the moment before they must jettison they dignity, or betray a fellow ‘prisoner’, and how they look when they must live with what they just did for the rest of their lives.)
 
Dark Side Play
Once players (i.e. course participants) are clear on the aims of the work – and then on the predicament, context and stakes, the play can begin. At this point we are looking for physical and verbal motifs, as well as the player being strategic (with regard to the audience’s state or reactions) with rhythms and vocal timbre / breath, space (where possible). Dark Side Play works the Comedy Craft together with the Marginalised Emotions.
 
High Stakes Predicament – course participants are invited to imagine ghastly or highly constrained / oppressive circumstances in certain exercises and scenarios in order to help fuel release into Marginalised Emotions, using Dark Side Play (comedy craft) in a way that hopefully produces laughter-provoking text or sounds and motifs (including Extraordinary Physiological Responses). (See below for explanation of Stakes) – aka Desperate Predicament (see also Impossible Choices below)
 
Humanity in Extremis
Dark Clown is in extremis or trying to survive. It is a more existential look at the human condition (yes some other kinds of Clown can go there too, but usually via moments of pathos).
The Dark Clown work I teach resonates with life-long personal questions: Come torture or duress, what choices would I make?  When given appalling choices, how does one feel as one continues to exist after whatever ghastly choice was made? When oppression is so great that courage is punished by death (or worse) - what are the options? When exactly does one succumb to force? What does the word 'force' really mean? 
 
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'/at cause/somehow responsible/or that they just feel guilty watching/or that their comfort is in stark contrast to the player onstage portraying the suffering. Although all audiences know that they paid for their ticket and walked in to watch a composed performance, 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 over there suffering.' 
Allied to this is the Dark Clown concept of Troubled Laughter (see above) whereby the audience laughs and at some level feels troubled or shamed or conflicted in their laughter.
 
Impossible choices
As with Enforced Performance, or inside an Enforced Performance scenario, the player/prisoner may have to make a choice. We will see the Cost and we will witness Marginalised Emotions, possibly some Extraordinary Physiological responses (see above).
 
Red Nose Clown – as mentioned above there are a number of Clown lineages and types of clown – as a convenience I use the term Red Nose Clown to make a distinction between Dark Clown and most other types of Clown.
 
Ridiculous (a judicious use if the ridiculous)
Adding a skilful touch of the ridiculous to a ghastly situation is a useful technique to surprise the audience into 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.
 
‘Sad Normals’ a playful teaching phrase to encourage the compassion of the Red Nose Clown performer for the audience – The ‘Sad Normal’ is us in our normal life (in the supermarket, travelling to work having all our petty emotions etc). I say: ‘It is the Clown’s job to have all the emotions and thoughts the Sad Normals prefer to suppress or hide.
 
NOTES

*Raise the Stakes - Definition of 'raise the stakes'
a. to increase the amount of money or valuables hazarded in a gambling game. b. to increase the costs, risks, or considerations involved in taking an action or reaching a conclusion e.g. ‘The Libyan allegations raised the stakes in the propaganda war between Libya and the United States.’ – Collins English Dictionary
 
**Priming 
(I use it to mean getting the ‘laughing gear’: i.e. heart, lungs and diaphragm nice and flexible/available, but this is the everyday meaning of priming an engine.)

1. Fill the oil pan with a quality Break-In Oil.
2. Prime the system by turning the oil pump with a power drill and Priming Tool, or with an external Engine Pre-luber.
3. Rotate the crankshaft by hand, while priming the system. This ensures that oil gets around all the bearings and into all the internal oil passages.

From the web: https://help.summitracing.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/116/~/how-do-i-prime-my-engine-before-the-first-start-up%3F
 
***Tell – An involuntary micro piece of body language. ‘A tell in the card game poker is a change in a player's behaviour or demeanour that is claimed by some to give clues to that player's assessment of their hand. A player gains an advantage if they observe and understand the meaning of another player's tell, particularly if the tell is unconscious and reliable. Sometimes a player may fake a tell, hoping to induce their opponents to make poor judgments in response to the false tell. More often, people try to avoid giving out a tell, by maintaining a ‘poker face’ regardless of how strong or weak their hand is.’ – Wikipedia
 
**** ‘Suspension of disbelief’ – ‘Suspension of disbelief, sometimes called willing suspension of disbelief, is the intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something unreal or impossible in reality, such as a work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoyment. Aristotle first explored the idea of the concept in its relation to the principles of theatre; the audience ignores the unreality of fiction in order to experience catharsis.’ – Wikipedia 
PL – I think we could say involuntary suspension of critical thinking – due to the audience’s change in physiological state when seated altogether and watching well-crafted theatre. The growing field of Neuroscience suggests mirror neurones and kinesthetic responses are at play with a theatre audience.

If this document raises questions about the way the work unfolds on the course – go here.

If you'd like to support the writing on the book, please go here.

If you have done one of my Clown or Comedy Toolbox courses, you will probably have seen me hold my hand over my head in a cupped 'C' shape as I refer to certain helpful principles. It's a bit of silliness - but serves to make concepts more Concrete in support of my mission to share the craft of comedy). There's a satisfying Cluster of useful principles that begin with 'C'.

This lighthearted list is a work in progress. These principles are in no way intended as a complete approach. A number of them will make more sense for people who have taken part in a workshop already and know my thoughts on the importance of rhythm in Clown and comedy work:


A key principle at the very start:
Create the Conditions for Comedy  – think about how circuses would always play music with the tempo of a happy heartbeat as the crowd entered the tent


Charm  – ‘Where does a laugh start? In the eyes.’ (Philippe Gaulier). Before they laugh, you need to be watchable, and charm their both their attention and their breathing

 
Create Communion – Casting the net helps (this makes sense when you have done a workshop with me but you can also look at the post on 31 January) other teaching phrases I play with are 'sniff the beast' and  'sense the field'. A student recently said: 'Allow yourself to be received', which I love.



Clarity  –  was your gag / idea / execution / voice Clear enough? (If they didn't see/hear it, it didn't happen)


Clear the head– find a good teacher or book on Chi Gung (I recommend Master' Lam Kam Chuen: The Way of Energy') and learn how to get on your Hara! It creates more mental space and more opinionless-ness so you are ready to respond more Creatively (i.e. download something direct from the Imaginal realm which is all around us - take that for your own testing, but honestly, where else do spontaneous ideas come from?) 


Contrast – one of the most basic building bricks of Comedy - things were one way and now they are another way, surprise!

 
Contact – with audience, with Co-performers – light, flexible, agile, open-minded Contact keeps you Connected (see Complicité also - many articles have been written about or include reference to  Complicité like this one )


Commune – an aspect of Contact and Community. Remember that the Clown also likes to Commune with inanimate objects

 
Complicité – a useful Concept well known by Philippe Gaulier graduates

 
Cumulative – laughter is cumulative – I discovered that if I missed a laugh in a building gag in performance, the laughter at the final punch was not as high as it usually was (see my earlier post on Laughter)

 
Cap the gag - do you have a few actions you found in improvising? make sure the one with the biggest laugh is at the end or you risk to create a dying fall


Compassion for self – are you bracing with fear? Calm and Comfort yourself (Gaulier used to say 'sing yourself a lullaby')


Calm – using the Hara helps the aspiring Clown (or any performer) be more flexibly alert, agile and opinionless, more 'zen' 


Compassion for your audience – are they not laughing? Well, then, rather than bracing against them - think: 'how interesting, they aren't laughing yet'. It's the Clown's job to lift the heart of the 'sad normals'. Love them. Interest yourself in how to lift their hearts.


Choices – you’ve done it 3 times – do you do the 4thwith a variation? Do you expand, accelerate? Do you elaborate? If you a revisited by a successful reaction motif then do you alternate the original motif with the reaction motif, do you, alternate with a call back to a previous thing? Do you abandon hat game (with the option of revisiting it later?) 
 

Carry on – after a failure, do something else – a big soft burst of elastic energy can be helpful (even if you’ve no idea what you are going to do on the other side of it!)


synCopation – the bass line is the rhythm of a happy heartbeat – on top – think jazz, think tiCkle rhythm, think unprediCtable


Calibrate - ABC – Always Be Calibrating (in the play Glengarry Glennross the salesmen are taught to Always Be Closing. Ok you don't need to do it ALWAYS. But it does provide a useful way to stay present (and build awareness). Practice Calibration (measuring) – 'How were they before they laughed? how are they now? How much did they laugh? Did all of them laugh or only three? Was I expecting more or less reaction? How does that make me feel? What if I do it again – calibrate the response – is it satisfyingly the same or less? Or better? How do i feel about that? What is happening with the audience now?' (all this is done by the performer within the clown - or as Gaulier described...the scientist (see further below).

 
Check - check the audience's reaction, their breathing, the look into their eyes (see above) - Check in with yourself - the audience loves to watch the clown think and feel ... don't slide over your inner emotional beats. Separate checking from doing. Do, check, re-do, check. 

​
Clock - when you hear a laugh, look - or even better to say 'deliver your face to the audience. Clocking is turning your (clock) face to the audience, in the direction of laughter. You are not looking for approval, simply aCknowledging the laugh - as Avner the Eccentric says: 'Laughter is an interruption that must be dealt with'. Clocking is a comedic term for delivering the face to the audience. It's a notiCing, but it's also a sharing. It gives a chance to Connect - to remind the audience there is no fourth wall.


Count – dare for the rule of three – if something goes wrong you probably either lost Contact, lost your joy, ignored a reaction from the audience, ignored an impulse inside yourself etc. Embrace the opportunity to aCknowledge the failure (it's the Clown's job to show its Humanity) and move on

 
aCknowledge the laugh – if a tiny seedling appeared in your garden would it be wise to ignore it, let it die?
also
​notice and aCknowledge silences ... 'Failure' is, for the Clown, an opportunity to show humanity, and to Connect with the audience


Courage - hang in there and try to Care less - cultivate Curiousity


Curiousity - as Avner the Eccentric says: 'Don't try to be interesting, be interested.' Interested in everything - the environment, the objects in it, the audience, in what you are doing...

 
Charisma –  Casting the net and the Lighthouse exercise help with this. You can also practice imagining a little spark about seven centimetres above your crown


Comfort and Calm – if you make an abrasive noise you may need to Comfort and Calm your audience


inClude – things your partner is doing, responses from the audience (unless you have a troublesome audience member who needs to be Calmed and Controlled – advanced stuff but sometimes you need to take Charge).

 
Consistency - Gaulier said: 'If it made them laugh once, it should make them laugh again' - he described the Clown as working with interest, like a scientist...'hm, that's interesting, what if I repeat the experiment?'. Develop and finesse the skill of proprioception (body feeling) where were you, what position were you in , what vocal timbre and volume were you using, just before the laugh? Is it possible to deliver exactly that again? Think of Tommy Cooper: 'just like that'


inCorporate – bring back something successful from before (known in standup as a ‘Call back’)


Confusion – can be good

 
Concision – Writing a Comedy sCript? Hone it! – excess words (unless they are building rhythm or creating  suspense) can stop the yuks. In terms of comedic movement, make your laughter 'nudge'** clear and succinct  (**note to self: I need to write a post on nudges)


Circulation – ok this is a stretch but it's a C word way to introduce another key concept. It is useful to think of people's hearts and their heart rate! Carlo Boso once said: 'It's easy to make an audience laugh, all you need to do is to control their breathing and their heart rate.' People who have done my workshops will have experienced me guiding people to discover how that might be done (the importance of rhythm).
 

Curves – movement works better using curves, and secret curves (including eye muscles) - come to a workshop to learn more

 
musiCality – useful generally and especially necessary in Dark Clown work

 
no hypoCrisy  – another piece of Gaulier's wisdom, a funnier and crisper way of saying 'be authentic'. It also helps you stay in step (create Community) with your audience. It is important to notiCe and aCCept the audience’s reaction - do not assume it. 

 
Now of course, annoyingly, some other handy Concepts do not contain C words – for example:

 

fixed point, joy, élan…

 

sigh, it’s not a perfect world

 

which is exactly why we need

the

Clown