How can I stop laughing, they ask me …

Of course a clown can provoke feelings of sadness, pity and wonder, but, as Philippe Gaulier once said: 'A clown is someone who is paid to make the audience laugh.'

When it comes to comedy in general many professional funny men and women succumb to laughter* during film and television takes - usually (but not always) due to something a fellow performer has done. Blooper reels provide ample evidence of this and I remember watching vaudeville as a child and seeing my parents delight in seeing performers taken by something unexpected in the moment. 

But the clown is different to a comedian. The clown is um, different in general.
​Clowns  operate by alternate rules. They inhabit a different state of mind and spirit.
Whether or not they wear the red nose they are a mask, no?
Even hybrid clown / comedians like Jim Carey or Steve Martin stay in state - if they laugh or smile it's at something happening within the reality of the character /clown they have created - see this Steve Martin video.

Occasionally students ask how they can stop laughing at their fellow 'trainee idiots'. Or at the reaction the audience is giving.
It strikes me that a better question is: 'how can I stay more securely in clown state?'. How can I not 'pop' out of clown state?

One answer: practice.
Spend longer in clown state. Immerse. Feel it in your body. Inhabit it.
Feel the differentness to normality and savour that state more.
Enjoy otherness.
Develop a taste for non-plussment. 

An investigative / trouble-shooter answer:
We are always surprised into laughter - so, once you are back in your chair after the exercise, ask yourself what surprised you ...
Then - see if you can interest yourself in making your wonder greater than your surprise.

Another version of the 'practice' answer might be: stick with training and have a few substantial failures, then you will have gained some more gravitas. It's natural for energy to run high when you are in a playful group and enjoying your first experience of learning clown.

Another tactic - learn to interest yourself in the audience's experience more than you own. If factors conspire adversely, or if skill is lacking, laughter can evaporate from an audience as quickly as moisture in a desert. Practice humility. Keep your stakes high. When doing an exercise - aim to see the class audience as a real audience, not your classmates on the course. 

As the wonderful Avner the Eccentric says in his 15th principle: Be interested not interesting.
Be more interested in what's happening.
Be interested in any audience laughter, not not infected by it.

Be more often in a  state of curiousity.
Use the Buddhist story I mentioned in my previous post - adopt the mental attitude of 'I don't know if that's good or bad'.

Other thoughts:
Which bit of your ego can you release?
The wonderful Jeremy Stockwell says that 'nerves' are vanity. 
Is excitement at having fun something that you can notice, and release?

Cultivate the joy of not-knowing.
Buster Keaton looks other-worldly in this image. Impossible to read his expression as either despair or hope. It's like a face in a Giotto fresco. A divine mystery. Sublime. That's how it can affect an audience.

But as practitioners, we need to be practical, so let's demystify:
Master Cabaret performer, Compère and teacher Paul L. Martin uses this as his clown mantra: expect nothing, accept everything.
I love it - so Buddhist. Contact your inner existential 'one-flavour'.

If the clown is to be a true mirror for humanity, then they should be as well acquainted with despair and desolation as they are with mirth...
Jeremy Stockwell invites his students to think of the yin yang symbol - there is a seed of tragedy in comedy and vice versa.

Clowns have their own thought process, they are sincere at seeking solutions, but ultimately ready to see all possibility. Circumstances can change on a dime.

Hm what about the Clown in  Trickster  mode - well, might it be that they are sincere in wreaking chaos, curious to see the results of their actions...? Tricksters exist liminal-ly - also refusing polarised opinions with their mantra 'maybe...maybe not'. 

About Buster Keaton's deadpan. His parents had a variety act. they played a couple who fought. They told their son to sit at the edge of the stage, expressionlessly. Water would be spilled amongst all the onstage roughhousing. Keaton's father would pick him up by his braces, and use the boy to mop the floor, then dump him back on his seat.

*It's called 'corpsing' in the theatre.

I came across these words below by writer Pamela Wilson. Clown Master Philippe Gaulier spoke about how emotions pass easily through the clown. There is a lovely tie-in with The Sedona Method (which I believe Pamela Wilson has studied too). In the Sedona Method, emotions are held lightly (think of a pen rolling in the palm as opposed to gripped in a fist), so they can be welcomed or released or allowed to shift of their own accord. The magical aspect of a well-played clown happens when the audience's minds and hearts are expanded. As Clown practitioner Dave Spathaky recently said in a Clown Power post; where words are absent or few, we are more likely to enter an unbounded realm where ideas and emotions are unfixed and unconfined by labels.
I feel Pamela Wilson's words also saw something about Clown genius as well...
​
'Sorrow when uncontained is compassion.
Desire, when uncontained, is satisfaction.
Anger, when liberated, is big strength.
Fatigue, when dived into, is deep peace.
Judgement, when honoured, is discernment.
Unworthiness, when met, is humility.
Fear, when soothed, is natural courage.
Frustration is the invitation to return to the unlimited.
Pride, when met, is dignity.
Seriousness is your gravitas.
Naiveté unveils itself as innocence,
Which unveils itself as majesty.
Not knowing - even confusion - when met, reveals itself as wisdom in its potentiality: pure intelligence.'
​

I was fortunate enough to meet Dave Pickering at a Devoted & Disgruntled event on the topic of Gender last year.

After developing my show Chastity Belt (2011-2013 and still touring), my thoughts were stimulated by wider questions of gender and associated issues. I got an opportunity to see Dave's show Mansplaining Masculinity which I found thrilling, informative and thought provoking. 

Dave interviewed me the other week for his Getting Better Acquainted podcast and it's fresh up today.
He is such a warm, informed  and generous interviewer and runs his podcasts like a conversation.

On twitter today, Dave (his twitter handle is @goosefat101) summed up what we covered as we spoke : 
In @GBApodcast 288 @peta_lily talks movement, memory, memoir, dark clown, solo shows, bereavement and so much more.

​And here now is the link to all of that on soundcloud.

Designer Andie Scott recently interviewed me about how I collaborated with her on the design elements of various shows.
​We also mention work created with designer Nadia Malik.

Andie = AS
My responses = PL

AS: In your direction for the linking pieces for Strange Forces at the National Centre for Circus Arts the rehearsal notes call for additional props each day. In what way do these props help you devise the performance?
 
PL: The props help define the world and they also help actions be more specific. For comedy, specificity is good – one of the prime comedic principles is clarity: when we know what is going on then we all can get the joke.
 
They are also the product of play or a playful state of mind. With the ensemble element of Strange Forces we were creating a fantasy world: Slave Clowns having to stage-manage the main acts of the show. It is a joy as a comedy practitioner to have polished, specifically made or chosen articles. In one scene a prop piece creates the illusion of a tiny man who is to be tortured by tickling. We needed a small red tickling brush. A longish handle as it is an implement for the normal-sized tormentor, and then a tiny tuft of red feathers at the end, to target the little man’s vulnerable spots.

The props in Strange Forces added concreteness and detail to the world. An audience member can have great pleasure looking at a well-made and well-envisaged prop. I believe that comedy should provide ‘entertainment per square inch’. The more moments of joy or energy there are, the more the audience’s imagination, physiology and breath are kept in a good laugh-ready state. I call it ‘priming the laughing gear’ (i.e. the eyes, breath/lungs, mouth corners, skin resistance) the more charmed and primed an audience, the greater the pay-off come the key laughter points.
 
If a talented performer is given a prop they might invent a further bit of business with it. This could be an extension of the original idea or simply an entertaining flourish. Good collaboration can expand possibilities, too. I wanted Pussy Riot masks in the show. The soundscape artist, when asked to source a Pussy Riot song said: ‘They can free the slaves!’ And so we created that scene of the liberation of the slave clowns.
 
AS: Often these props become costume elements and personify the characters. How do you visualise this to enable you to be specific about the props / costume required?
 
PL: In Strange Forces, again I think about the ‘little man’. The audience really identified and connected with this character.  Here, I was using a prop piece used in vaudeville (a screen with a hole for a face and then and a manipulatable puppet body underneath), I’d also used this idea a few years back in a show about Brecht in Portugal, where we adapted the The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent.
 
The safety goggles for the unicorn tamer were pragmatic in that they are given to NCCA students to wear when training with whips. This prop/costume piece reinforced the world the piece was set in (the pragmatic functionary garb worn by the ‘slave clowns’ - which in the main was white paper painting-and-decorating suits (which also summoned up chem-hazard resonances). In terms of the performer/character wearing the goggles, they reinforced both her lack of mastery and her vulnerability - the piece was about people being forced to do things that were dangerous. She looked simultaneously more vulnerable and more dangerous.

In Hong Kong in 2000 I created a Dark Clown show – called Hamlet or Die. The prisoners in this piece wore striped outfits and had numbers on them – this must have stuck in my head from seeing footage of the dance marathons in America in the 1930’s. In Hong Kong there was an extra amplification to this prop/costume element. In Cantonese, numbers are puns and slang. One prisoner was ironically ‘lucky’ 8. Another character was 888 – even more unfortunate!
The numbers of the two characters playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were puns for ‘spies’. The Hong Kong cast chose witty numbers for each character.
 
A lot of things I visualize come to me straight from the intuition. Other things I think – how can the idea be clarified here? What do the audience need to feel and understand? I talk and think this through with my collaborators.
 
There is a moment when two clown slaves shock each other using a prop which is basically a red emergency button. Andie made clown wigs out of coloured scourer pads. The jolly traditional clown look allowed audience to laugh more freely at their fear and reaction to the electric shocks.
 
One scene change in Strange Forces meant that the floor had to be wiped – to build the reality of the cringing clown slaves, I had them feverishly scrub the stage. A tussle over the wiping cloth ensued and one clown was reduced to using her own body as a dust cloth. Andie brought this idea to a fuller realisation by creating a ‘dress’ out of a length of dishcloth tube which that performer wore in this scene.
 
At the top of the show we created a drab and desperate little circus parade – we had our safety-goggle wearing lion tamer so one performer was ‘forced’ (in the reality of the slave clown world) to play the lion. This needed to be in the spirit of the ‘make-do’ and utilitarian look of the clowns and Andie created a mane for the lion using perhaps a dish mop sewn into an easy-to-put-on-and-take-off bonnet. Good costume construction means there can be more variety and changes in a piece.
 
Andie Scott also worked for me on a circus hybrid show Rhythm Town. The diversly skilled performers needed a world to marry their different performance styles and skills together. The company became a ‘travelling troupe’ in a retro-themed world (train travel rather than jet), employing suitcases and a steamer trunk with vintage travel labels. A basket ball was being used for percussive juggling and I requested it be painted like a globe. This both served the theme of the piece and harmonized with the world music used in the show. It turned a banal prop into something clever, that reinforced the detail and magic of the world. One section in the original show was an extended piece of music with a train rhythm – we introduced a bit more magic by changing the scale - introducing a toy train to travel across the tap table and performer’s bodies.
 
The props and costumes in this show allowed the show define a world alive so the performers could concentrate on their skills rather working as actors might to create the detail of the world of a play.
 
AS: In Strange Forces for NCCA we worked with very simple costume of white 'slave clown' attire using the cheapest possible materials: paper plates for ruffs, disposable overalls for clown suits, disposable shoe covers for hats and wigs... These costumes made the characters appear vulnerable and fragile. How do you convey these intentions to the performers during rehearsals?
 
PL: I inducted the performers to the Dark Clown genre I have been developing over the last 30 years. This work extends Red Nose Clown work into a darker palette, a darker spectrum of human existence and expression. The Red Nose Clown fails and suffers indignities and so does the Dark Clown – but on the darker side, the portrayal of suffering is cleverly designed to have an implicating effect on the audience. It aims at laughter flavoured with a cringe of culpability.
 
There was a strong start to the show where one clown drags on all the rest tied together in an aerial rope. One clown passes out before they are funny across the stage. This set up the game very clearly for both performers and audience – these slave clowns are being worked almost to the point of death. Carrying on regardless is imperative. (One of the inspirations for my Dark Clown work was Jane Fonda’s character in the film They Shoot Horses Don’t They? – set in the Great Depression where she continues to dance with her dead partner rather than lose her chance to stay in the Dance Marathon (even if she didn’t win, being in the competition ensured the character regular food as opposed to starvation).
 
The students learned the style and were supported in their portrayals as a troupe of slaves by the largely monochrome yet individual looks Andie developed for each of them in the show.
 
AS: In Chastity Belt and InVocation props become part of the costume, to be added to the body and removed according to the story. When the body is not present in those objects you use them as part of scenography. In what way do these objects change once they have been part of the narrative?

​In InVocation, the armour breast plate is used at first hidden, then worn, then taken off, then used to represent an ‘armoured’ male business coach character. This piece was all about me wrestling against the win/lose mentality in partiarchy’s vision of success.
 
In Chastity Belt I use a hand-made prop (creating work on no funding): lemons on a piece of ribbon. These are at first a hag’s dugs, then become ersatz testicles, then Wonder Woman’s cape and lariat. My director Di Sherlock is very good at saying ‘use the such and such again in this moment’. It makes things more concrete and visually engaging and appealing for the audience.
 
The yellow marigold gloves are only used in the Lysistrata piece but are one of the splashes of yellow about the spare stage ‘set’. The lemon garland dresses the chair, then is worn in different ways to represent two different characters. When a piece is removed and discarded, it helps underline or highlight a transition point.
 
At a certain point the piece required a Kali necklace and I commissioned Andie to fabricate it – I would never have been able to make it. Andie ensured it was durable and good looking and that it resonated with the props I had already.

AS: Your performances offer insight and identity with the relationship between fragility and a masculine world yet allows many men access to it and to empathise. You achieve this through the humour of the dark clown - a genre which you are synonymous with - How do you identify your work within a historical context of male clowns such as Grimaldi, Chaplin and the Marx brothers?
 
I suppose every western clown follows in that lineage. As women perhaps the journey is less straightforward. It is quite possible that some female clowns have been swallowed by history – performers like mime/dancer Trudi Schoop. There seem to be no female clown archetypes like the Auguste and the circus White Clown. The lineage is patchy. When I studied Commedia dell’ Arte, the main exploration was understandably with the mask work and little guidance was given for the female characters of Columbina and Harlequina. I seens to be that female performers such as like Lucille Ball and Phyliss Diller used a kind of clown in sit-com and standup formats.

Interesting to observe that some female clown performers often dress in male attire: Angela de Castro, Nola Rae, Guiletta Masina in Fellini’s La Strada. When I started the company Three Women together with Claudia Prietzel and Tessa Schneideman in 1980, I was inspired to create a style of mime that was not presenting the archetypal ‘everyman’ but which instead showed the pain and ridiculousness of aspects of being female. We had a piece about putting on makeup, a piece about women and their handbags and what was inside them, and we created a clown-like circus using solely household items e.g. an old-fashioned handle-operated eggbeater became a unicycle, a rolling pin was weight-lifted by a strong(wo)man and an old fashioned hairdryer with hood was used as a mask to create an elephant and so on.
​
I started to teach clown decades ago because a female theatre company begged me to teach them. They said they wanted to know how women could become clowns. I remember at this time, people actually had conversations about whether or not women could be funny.
 
I teach and direct in the Dark Clown genre but have not performed in this style – yet. I hope one day to create a piece where I do that. Someone once described Chastity Belt to me as ‘dark’ clowning but for me it is not in the style that I teach and direct as Dark Clown. There are serious points made in the show (moments of bite but with the humour going on around it)  – and perhaps that is what that person meant.
 
When I created my show Topless – about breast cancer, lost love and ‘getting things off your chest’ I thought it would only appeal to female audiences, but in the creation of each beat, I had my eye on what would be entertaining, and a strong instinct to avoid sentimentality or self-indulgence. I wanted the show to be funny and entertaining. I knew it needed to capture the attention at the beginning, have a sense of suspense about the outcome and a good finish. When I was small my parents went frequently to vaudeville and the pleasure of those early experiences of silliness and sexiness and a little bit of scariness and skill all performed live must have left a deep impression.
 
AS: Within these themes of loving, fragility and the survivor how does the costume identify your stage personas in Chastity Belt and InVocation for example?
 
PL: From 2002- 2008 I did not perform at all. I made InVocation between 2008 and 2010 and with Chastity Belt it was all still quite new.
 
In the early days when my work was funded I had an aesthetic to have as few props and costumes as possible. Then when I was returning to the field, I was creating work unfunded.
 
As in the early days, a new project always needs to have a photographic image to promote it – often created before the funding is secured. I asked a designer friend if she might be able to loan me a corset for a photo shoot. I thought I would wear a corset and wear boxing gloves. My friend (designer Nadia Malik) could provide no corset but there were two tutus. A red one and a white one and they served very well. It was only on the last outing of the piece that I realized these colours served the passion that was being farewell-ed and the pristine alternative (the silvery autonomous Goddess Diana) that was being embraced.
 
I always thought the tutus were glamorous. My director Di pointed out to me one day that they were clown-like! So there you go – as a mature performer, if you can’t afford glamour, then the clown will serve you well. A bit of tat = the equivalent of Chaplin’s tramp costume?
 
InVocation as a piece had a long gestation. In the creation of the piece I was healing the difficulties of events of the non-performing years…it turned out one of the themes was that of identity. The same theme that pervaded Topless I discovered, only towards the end of creating the piece and realized in fact through the creation of the piece: how do I live now I am divorced, now that I am older? With InVocation I wore rehearsal gear, yoga gear and a business suit (and of course, the breast plate). Nadia Malik had ghostly see-through plastic torsos hanging as part of the set.
 
In the recent remount of InVocation, Andie realized certain new elements to the set and costumes. In the end I strip out of the business suit and what in heck was I going to wear? It was a struggle bravely faced and satisfactorily solved by Andie. What undergarments will suit the older body, not be too revealing, not too unitard-like, not be too sexy, not too unsexy, not too sad-sack looking, not too period-specific. At the end I needed to don the breast plate again - Di wanted me to perform a speech from my play The Porter’s Daughter to highlight my decision to leave business coaching and return to theatre.
 
AS: In your performance of Crystal Lil (costume conceived, designed and made by Nadia Malik; piece directed Anton Mirto as part of the LCF MA Costume and Performance degree course show produced by Donatella Barbieri), the costume becomes an inhabited sculpture. Can you describe how this performance differs from your own work, for example did you feel restricted working within someone else's direction or was this liberating?
 
It was a great process. Director Anton Mirto made a wonderful piece and got a very different performance out of me. She also accepted my moments of collaboration during the process. And both Anton and I were both serving to realize Nadia’s concept and the story she had chosen. The costume needed to be managed well to make the most out of each moment for the character and to clarify what the character was doing. In my 1988 show Wendy Darling I had a plethora of props and before each performance would rehearse carefully each moment of prop manipulation. It’s a skill and a discipline to make your props look magical.

It's the Clown's job and privilege to say yes to failure.

In Clown practice it can be helpful to check your inner metaphor for failure - what does it look like? A trap? A pit with slippery walls? A death sentence?

Play with the idea that you can change this metaphor to one that’s more helpful

(after all, all language is a lie ‘the pointing finger and not the moon’ - so pick yourself a useful fiction).

Think of failure as a trampoline - a place you temporarily land on which will soon provide your next exhilarating up.

Failure provides an opportunity for the Clown student to 1/ reconnect with the audience (always be ready to ‘press refresh’ with your audiences) 2/ share its humanity with the audience and 3/ have a creative response.

An adverse reaction to failure can seem like an existential crisis – when really it’s a simple energetic problem.

The default human reaction to shame is to clench. To go in and pull down. So in your warm ups it’s valuable to practice the ability to transform your energy from tight to expanded, from down-and-in to flowering out. (Whatever performance mode I am teaching, performing or directing, I always remind people to jettison the belief that you end at the limits of your skin).

Physically practice movements that take you from a clench to an expanded attitude. Then do the same thing without moving. ‘Believe’ that you can expand the spaces between your molecules. Take the body feeling from tight and monochrome to something billowing and pink. Or a nice soft orange colour, if you are averse to pinkness.

Side note – have an instantaneous way to access clown state. Check that the shame of failure hasn’t pulled you out of clown state – step out of the cave of shame or the coffin of normalcy or wherever you have gone and choose to step into the fresh illogical realm of the clown state.  
 
Oh, did I freak anyone out with the mention of ‘a creative response’ earlier? Once you are in Clown state (and if you are not a slave to your own energy) then you can do something ‘surefire’ from earlier.
Or - something which brings you joy in the moment: might that be the joy of expressing your angst, perhaps? At the simplest, just burst into a flexible expansive energy and make a sound and see where that takes you.

It’s the ‘sad normals’ who have to hide from indignity. Getting things wrong, being in the wrong is where the funny lies. That’s the stuff of clown scenarios - being unprotected and at the mercy of misfires. Or being blatantly venal if you are a clown in smart-ass mode. Not hiding. Have you ever heard this expression? ‘Vulnerability is the perfect protection’.

Right so what drew me to clown?

A thousand possible answers. Being taken to vaudeville as a child, listening to comedy records including the superb Victor Borge, having a less than rosy childhood so being grateful for laughter, watching Danny Kaye and Red Skelton, cartoons, Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers on TV as a kid.

Because of all those early moments when I felt misfit, wrong, stupid. And also because I was also meant to be clever…and trying to figure that out brings a hunger for hidden truth (‘comedy = truth + pain'). 

Maybe because of that day in the car when my brother’s friend laughed at what I said and told my (silent) brother that he thought I was funny.

Once I was in the UK and earning my living performing with Three Women Mime, we made pieces using the ‘language’ I had learned from watching Warner Brothers cartoons (see above), as well as the mime we had just learnt. We made a kind of clown piece with no clown training whatsoever – a piece called ‘Circus’ where three housewives bring a whole circus to life with an eggbeater unicycle, an old-fashioned hairdryer cap-and-hose as an elephant, a jaffle iron, oven gloves and tea strainer-goggles for a daredevil motorcyclist, a magic act involving a colander, a teddy and skewers etc.

A few years on I was performing a solo show: ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, a 45 minute piece of Black comedy, when I did Gaulier’s first ever course in London and learnt that there were simple actions and principles that could be followed with laughter would be the result. Thrilling. Useful.

But maybe your question is:  ‘how did I come to be teaching clown?’ Then the quick answer to that would be: by accident.

I had only recently done Philippe Gaulier’s Clown course when I received a call from someone: ‘We are an all women theatre group and we need a woman to teach clown.’ I was so respectful and grateful to the Master that I said, ‘I can’t possibly. Can’t you find someone else?’ They said, ‘No, it has to be you’.

I taught what I had learned, I included what I had learned from Monika Pagneaux, and adapted and added my mime skills into the mix. It went well. As well as teaching open physical theatre courses, I began to regularly teach clown courses. I continued to finesse an inclusive and enabling (yet still rigorous) teaching process.   At a certain point (more than 10 years ago) I was invited to teach clown at Central school. Over the years my curiosity about comedy grew. I watched a lot of sitcoms: ‘Taxi’, ‘Frasier’ and ‘Friends’. I watched and rewound to see what had just happened and why it had worked.

I worked with Claire Dowie in 1997 and employed her ‘Stand-up Theatre’ style to create solo show ‘Topless’ in 1999. I noticed night after night when I got or missed a laugh, figured out why and fixed it. I enjoyed demystifying comedy, teaching comedy craft. And, of course, giving people permission to open up and be spontaneous.

You might have said I am more interested in laughter than I am in clown. Although a few years back, I started to think more deeply about what Clown really is about. I've attempted to get it into the form of a poem and it's a complete work in progress. This is its latest incarnation (updated 4/4/2019.

 
The Clown

Roll the drums and raise the curtain

chaos is glory and uncertainty, certain.

The facts are all useless,

speak nonsense instead -

because down is up when you stand on your head.

How delightful it is to be defective -

a kick in the pants brings a fresh perspective:

serious is stupid, dignity overrated -
 
the fairground mirrors are all silver-plated.

Deliberately misread the riot act -

know that smart is never as clever as the cracked. 

Step up, step inside, 

make failure your friend -

bake a cake with sawdust

make despair wag its rear end.


Let identity slip

balloon, string, fingertip

transform:

artichoke, angel, bookcase, fish.

Let loose your grip, tumble,   

stub your toe, trip

and blow your nose with a victory trumpet.

Dance badly, cry buckets.

let us see you survive, 

then hang out your unholy laundry to dry - 

for chaos is glory 

and clumsiness divine

and the buddah 

is always known by his smile