A step-by step approach helps the participant really engage audiences and to develop expertise in the important comedic use of rhythm and comedy craft.

We start in Clown mode to build the play and connection in the group, but also importantly in Clown mode we can cover physical, vocal and rhythmic techniques for creating, growing and building laughter. (In order to create the Troubled Laughter of the Dark Clown, we need to be able to create laughter relatively reliably).
​ 
We then move on to exercises promoting and supporting a portrayal of the Marginalised Emotions. Other exercises grow the particular flavour of audience awareness that supports the Dark Clown work (see Implicating the Audience below). Then we get to layer these elements together.

Don't worry about the terms used here - all is revealed and learned experientially step-by-step on the course! 

Then we turn to the Dark Clown Scenarios. There are a growing number of Scenarios including North Korean Competitive Crying, Consumer Guilt, Body Horror, Makeup Rabbits, Somalian Pirate Hostages, Eco-Horror, The Beloved, Kidrophobia and many more. 

There is a rich range of reactions possible when witnessing the compelling Dark Clown work. 

The work is carefully set up in an ethically held space - performers get a chance to invest imaginatively in High Stakes, where energy and expressivity is released. 

We are aiming for what I call 'Troubled Laughter' in the audience - laughter happens but it is not a laugh at. 'Troubled Laughter' does not trivialise or dismiss the suffering. The performers (course participants) -  aim to learn to implicate the audience. Done correctly, the audience laugh in a way that is either troubling or cathartic and often both at the same time.
Sometimes they veer between laughter and tears (and occasionally both at the same time).

The joy of connection is nurtured during the process.

Many return to repeat the course - describing it as 'challenging and rewarding in equal measure'.

Maybe also have a look here.

These images by Robert Piwko Photography - highly recommended.

A productive session last night - making the piece stronger with some excisions and elisions.

Remove that, tighten this. Insert squirty pistol there.

One of the cast wrote on Facebook describing this rehearsal period as 'a process of creation and destruction'.

I drive them mad with my stipulation for precision. I drive myself mad with my own predilection for detail, multi focus and creating moments of chaos.

But things are getting defined. The 'patient' is doing well.

Fingers crossed for opening night on Thursday.
 
See other posts on this production here.

Look at the show website with more on the backstory and inspiration for the piece here.

​Booker T and the M.G.’s had a song called Time is Tight. Music brings flow and releases stress (well except for music that is designed to make you anxious/tormented). I find the track on YouTube and play it. The track is actually mellow - and energizing to listen to. Music has charms to soothe the savage breast. (or ‘Musick’ as the originator of the phrase wrote it – see below*)
 
I dislike the phrase ‘crunch time’ but we are there.
 
It’s my own fault – I love shows happening in real time and in a contained space. I love an ensemble. Eight characters on stage on view every second.
A devised show is, in part ‘written’ with stage blocking. Eight characters on stage, how to focus the action so as to make the situation clear, the reactions clear, the sequence of actions clear. How to set up and show cause and effect.
 
Working with not native English speakers (and me, regretfully, not having more than 24 words of Cantonese), means a lot of time can tick by while explanations and translations are made and confusions are created and cleared up.
 
On first blocking of the start of here show there were so many questions and unknowns.
What is the play of these individuals / this group like? What characteristics unfold from each clown performer? Devising a show like this, the ‘casting’ can come during, rather than before rehearsal. Character is a function of plot. I had some hunches on day one but detailing of characters and plot have developed in stuttering fits and starts.
 
It is a pressurized time but - allowing myself to take the time here to reflect – it is a satisfying moment when conventions slowly clarify themselves.
 
One character, later in the show, becomes the one who carries the heart of the piece. (Um, quite literally in one scene). In the prologue she is simply cute. But in later scenes she is kind, compassionate, caring, and, further on, even speaks to the audience directly in the name of fairness: ‘He deserves the right to a fair trial.’ In true clown fashion she (the character) then regrets she ever said it because the other ‘idiots’ kick off a mad and heartless trial which, like the one in Duck Soup, is full of non-sequiteurs and driven not by justice but by rhythm. A syncopated timing which needs to be both nuanced and…tight.
 
Actually this scene is doing well, but overall, timing is not tight. Our (intended) 50 minute show was a sprawling one hour ten on our first (and only, so far) rough run-through.
 
Getting timing tight takes time. And time is tight.
 
But back to the satisfying moment – day before yesterday I went home and wrote on the computer. Samuel Beckett, presumably sat down to write Act Without Words. Yesterday we reworked the opening with the sweet clown being the conduit which allows the audience to be presented to each of the different characters one by one. The whole scene has gained focus – leading the audience like a red thread into the world on the play/piece. And proved a way to let the audience see the strangers-to-each-other clowns make their first meeting.
And it has made the moment they spot ‘Dead Bozo’ 100 percent more effective.
 
Onwards.
 
*The phrase was coined by William Congreve, in The Mourning Bride, 1697:
‘Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
I've read, that things inanimate have mov'd,
And, as with living Souls, have been inform'd,
By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.’

For all the posts so far on the creation of The Death of Fun click here.

There is a moment when you notice that the rough rope ladder* of your scenario has become a raft and find, in a beat** of relief, that it will float (mixed metaphor I know - I re-watched  the film Cast Away last night).

My cast are also prop makers, film makers, costume makers. FB messages and emails ping back and forward out of rehearsal hours with questions about size and colour and fabric and with solutions being offered to problems. Together we are weaving a cartoon web. 

On the second trawl through characters are gaining more detail. The cast has become a company -  understanding the physical language of the piece, taking the initiative and making offers, working as a physical chorus.

Below is an image of the company 'tired but happy', mid-way through putting together the - um - Duck sequence. Why a Duck? My good friend Wikipedia reminds me that Richard Anobile wrote book of that name (featuring a foreword by Groucho) which focused on the minutiae of the Marx Brothers' routines. Also, that: 'The duck is a recurring reference throughout the Marxes' and especially Groucho's career. His signature walk was called "the duck walk" and on Groucho's television program You Bet Your Life a stuffed duck made up to resemble Groucho would drop from the ceiling to give contestants money if they said the day's secret word. Ducks are the only animals that perform lines in the song "Everyone Says I Love You" in the Marx Brothers' fourth film, Horse Feathers. Their fifth film was called Duck Soup.

​I just rewatched the scene from the Marx Brothers' film The Cocoanuts where Chico persistently mishears viaduct as 'Why a Duck?' to which Groucho answers: 'I'm alright, how are you?' As Chico persists to ask the question, Groucho gives in, saying they are building a tunnel instead.

A viaduct is almost a rope bridge. We have a tunnel in the show. And, as it happens, we also have a life raft. As well as a number of ducks.

* Commedia dell'Arte Master Carlo Boso referred to the first draft of the scenario as a 'skeleton'. We have one of those in the show too.
** its a very brief beat as there is so much else to do to put the 'meat' (sorry) on that skeleton.

​See here for other posts on the making of The Death of Fun.
​
And see the show's website which Patricia Woo (in the pink wig) has been creating.

I have spent a whole morning listening to sound effects: Beeps, Boings, Klaxons, Alerts, Sirens and Honks.

I look at my notes: 'Gun that fires the word bang'. I make a new note to explore this in tonight's rehearsal. Is it a bad thing to create from props? I doubt it is something that David Mamet would recommend. But I am sure many a Clown act or even other Circus discipline or Cabaret act has been created from an object or prop. The list also reads: Birthday Cake?, Squirty flower? - we need to include classic clown tropes. Which ones will serve us? 



The Death of Fun is a Clown piece, for grown-ups - but it also needs to be a piece of Clown drama. Clown characters find themselves in a situation. A progression needs to be made - it needs to proceed beat by beat logically and end somewhere different from the start ... and feel satisfying - is that so hard?* I keep thinking of the lovely shows I saw by the wonderful Belgian clown company Okidok. They did it. Am I really caught between genres? Or is this a normal stage of writer/devisor process? The Okidok clowns exist in a clown world. I have Clowns in a prison (real world concept and location) - but we can cartoonify it. Or present it as if it exists in a Limbo parallel world as in 'Huis Clos'...

Having stepped of the cliff, this morning I feel like I am, like Wile E. Coyote,  walking on thin air.

*I am joking, of course - it is indeed hard to lead an audience into a world and a story and take them on a fulfilling journey.

See previous posts about the making of The Death of Fun. Also here. And here.

Currently in Hong Kong, a few days before rehearsal begins on The Death of Fun, the production I will be devising with The Fringe Mime and Movement Laboratory.

I am continuing to compile notes and organise my thoughts towards the coming production, which will be (despite the title of this blog post) in the style of Clown, Dark Clown and the Absurd. This show is going to be an experiment, in the same way that the production of Hamlet or Die (produced 2000 for Mime Lab) was. Hamlet or Die was an experiment in whether one could make a full length show in Dark Clown style. The challenge with The Death of Fun, is to make a Clown show about Clowning - or, more specifically addressing some of the recent threats to the art / profession of clowning. You can google 'scary clown' to throw up a number of online articles on this subject.
How much of a threat is posed to Clowning by the phenomenon of the Scary Clown (pranksters, thugs and horror films) and by the fact that Coulraphobia (fear of Clowns is on the rise, or has become , as they say, a 'thing' - despite the words Greek roots, it is a neologism, circa 1980's). I have been reading and collecting these articles - and was pleased to read this rather wonderfully comprehensive and thoughtful Smithsonian article on the subject today. 

This post is somewhat undisciplined (it has a split focus).

In part it may serve as the first of a series of posts making a rough log of the production process (we'll see whether time allows for both doing and reflection). 

It's also an informal wondering brought on by working here in Hong Kong.

I read some (not yet all) of J Crump's book Chinese Theater in Days of Kublai Khan (Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies. I wanted to be more informed about Chinese clown heritage (one of the characters in The Death of Fun will be inspired by a comic Chinese performer). It struck me, reading through the scenarios in Crump's book, that there are some similarities between the comic aspects of Chinese Opera and  Commedia dell' Arte. Both forms have a 'family' of well-defined / stock character types. Chinese Opera plots are more concerned with historical stories and myths, and seem more devoted to delivering a moral message than Commedia does. The Chou (likeable, foolish characters in Chinese Opera) are given some license to improvise and have comic exchanges using copious puns. I have seen a delicious video where a character meets his own double.* I think Barry Grantham gives, in one of his books, a script where Harlequin meets his twin.

Director William Sun creates works putting Chinese Opera and Commedia together
​I'd love to find someone who has done the due research and writing on all the similarities and differences between these two forms. Googling for books or articles on the subject, I found that a director, William Sun, worked with the Shangai Theatre Academy to create a fusion of Chinese Opera and Commedia. You can see a youtube clip where he speaks about it here.

Western Clown and Chinese Clown
And to continued to be undisciplined / split focus - while thinking of similarities and differences - it's interesting that while the Western clown is most usually signified by a red nose, the defining characteristic of the Chinese clown's makeup is a small patch of white around the nose. In Chinese culture, apparently this represents either a mean or secretive nature or a quick wit.
​
* the clip is 'The True and the Fake Wu Dalang' - first he gives a clever story with lots of rhythmic repetition, introduces himself, then at about 2.56 he meets his twin. Check the demanding skill to play the whole thing crouched! Thanks to my friend Yang Wei Wei for her translation.

 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. If you are in a course or workshop situation, 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. 

2025 Note - practical advice. Try breathing out. I tried this when watching the UK Last One Laughing series. soft jaw, open lips, slow exhale. Worth a try!

Additional thoughts added 25/12/2024

A great way to remain more securely in Clown State is to be on the Hara. It's a great way to lower your centre and make you more centered in general. It's also good to take energy out of your face. Another tip for quieting the face is to 'let gravity take your face' or imagine your face is made of heavy water.

Also, I share this piece of advice with you. This was posted by someone called Amber Amblas on a site called Clown Theory 5/4/2019 - it suggests finding a painful dilemma associated with the moment your clown are in.

'My first clown course, in Vienna, with Hubertus Zorell and Verena Vondrak was called:
‘Clowns haben nichts zu lachen’ – ‘Clowns have nothing to laugh about’.
In other words, for the clown it’s not a funny situation, he is in a painful situation. For example:
 
I try to read a poem that means a lot to me and that I have worked hard on to know by heart, but by bringing it for audience after the first part I forget my text. 
Or: I should play a piece of theatre with my partner and the audience is already there but my partner is not, so I go on stage and try to fill the time until my partner arrives. 
 
These are painful situations where we feel awkward, where everyone would feel awkward. Then, where other people would get frustrated and tension would grow, the clown role is to find an out of the box, clown like, silly, naive, solution for the problem and stay in the joy. If he does, people start laughing because the actually painful situation is now turned into a pleasurable, funny, situation and that’s why audiences like clowns for being so funny.'

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.'
​