I recently inaugurated a new Dark Clown Scenario.

Like Fox and Maiden, it has a Fairytale inspiration. As a child, I was fascinated by the story of The Little Mermaid. 

Here’s an edited excerpt from the Wikipedia synopsis of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale: ‘The Little Mermaid, longing for the prince and an eternal soul, visits the Sea Witch who lives in a dangerous part of the ocean. The witch willingly helps her by selling her a potion that gives her legs in exchange for her tongue and beautiful voice, as the Little Mermaid has the most enchanting voice in the world. The witch warns the Little Mermaid that once she becomes a human, she will never be able to return to the sea. Consuming the potion will make her feel as if a sword is being passed through her body, yet when she recovers, she will have two human legs and will be able to dance like no human has ever danced before. However, she will constantly feel as if she is walking on sharp knives. 
​
(The Mermaid will obtain a soul only if she wins the love of the prince and marries him, for then a part of his soul will flow into her. Otherwise, at dawn on the first day after he marries someone else, the Little Mermaid will die with a broken heart and dissolve into sea foam upon the waves.)
She agrees, swims to the surface and drinks the potion. The liquid feels like a sword piercing through her body and she passes out. She is found by the prince, who is mesmerized by her beauty and grace, even though she is mute. Most of all, he likes to see her dance, and she dances for him despite suffering excruciating pain with every step.’
 
The Little Mermaid Scenario is a game for two players. It is based on the particular pain of not having one’s suffering understood … can you relate? Or is it only me? The scenario features the Prince gazing lovingly at the newly-legged Mer-girl  and paying her compliments. She is mute, but inside she is in agony. Two kinds of pain – physical pain and the psychological agony of not being seen. The Mermaid player will use their voice and body to communicate their agony while the Prince player is unmoved by it. Imagine you are watching a film where we see the ‘subtext’ or ‘inside a character’s head’, invisible to the outside world and other characters.
 
I aim to teach the Dark Clown work with maximum care and clarity and course participants learn to travel from the light (Red Nose Clown) to the Dark in a step-by-step process. For all the tragedies of the pandemic, the plus-side of teaching online is that it prompted a finessed breaking down of the craft involved in preparing for the Scenarios. I set specific tasks and people try them in break-out rooms, building a muscle memory for the skills involved.
 
First, the Prince player needs to work on delivering lines such as ‘You are so beautiful. Your face, your hair. And yet you are silent. Oh how I’d love to hear your voice. I can imagine it trilling and cascading, the way your hair cascades and coils. Ah, How sweet it would be to hear you sing.’ - all this must in a poetic, longing, legato way. As with the The Beloved scenario (I’ve not written about The Beloved scenario on the blog yet) - there must be no complaint, no sarcasm, no reproach, no cynicism, no blame, no emotional blackmail. The Prince is a support role – it is the Mermaid where the Dark Clown work proper happens.
To advance the game, The Prince can move on to: 'How it would please me if you would dance with me. Come, let's waltz! A fast and beautiful Waltz.'

Here is the preparatory step for the Mermaid player. The conceit of the exercise is that the Prince will not see or react to anything you are saying while you job is to express the agony you are feeling. ‘It hurts!!!! It burns. Knives driving through my feet!!! Oh God oh God. Even just standing here hurts. I. AM. IN. AGONY.’ Then, to raise the game: ‘Can’t you SEE? I can't speak but inside I am screaming. SCREAMING. Agony. Agony.’ Of course using all the Dark Play strategies of contrast, variety of timbre, managing the audience’s physiology (‘laughing gear’) etc … 'No don't make me dance! Please - aiiiiiighhhhh! But you can't hear me can you? Searing hot knives! '

The two players are then set to improvise / play the scene.
 
People on the course found it (pardon the pun) painfully funny (Troubled Laughter).
 
*Side note: This is my favourite fairy tale. Which somehow mystifies me. Was I inspired by her resolve? I felt very ineffectual and cowardly as a child (I feel fairly much the same now, actually). Was I inspired by her ability to withstand pain? To transcend pain to achieve her goals (walk like a human)? Or was there something I deeply related to regarding her muteness - that her colossal suffering would go unseen? As a very anxious child, it seemed that I was often out of step with the normal world, witnessing how others all seemed to be coping unperturbedly, while I was invisibly trapped in some ghastly alternate realm.

 

​Trigger warning: pain, torture and some rather pernickety explanation. 
 
One of my Dark Clown scenarios is called 'The Menu' (subtitle, or 'For Her' - think of Don Draper-era gentleman ordering for his date).
 
Before we begin, some elements are put in place* – see below – but for a better reading experience I’ll get straight into the setup now.
 
It’s for two players (any gender). 
Imaginary Circumstances: I invite the players to imagine they are two prisoners in an anonymous torture realm. They are put in the ghastly predicament of being forced to choose the day's torture for the other. 
A loud voice (me, in the role of Controller): ‘The first prisoner will choose for their comrade. NOW!’
Prisoner One pants or grizzles with anxiety** Choices flash before their eyes, each one more horrific and problematic than the other.
Prisoner Two has the predicament of high-stakes uncertainty (I instruct frequent clocking of the other player – the head-turn of the clock acts like a laughter nudge). 

Prisoner Two is aware that their fellow is in charge of their well-being (or rather, unwell being). 
Prisoner Two is also aware that under duress (humans do not think well or kindly under duress).
(Both prisoners are also aware that is something is chosen that is not sufficiently dreadful, then something even worse will await them.)
Hesitations, false starts, stutters can all be used rhythmically.
Prisoner One finally chooses something. 
Prisoner Two makes a yelp or other involuntary sound. Their job is to really imagine what that would feel like, and to make a sound of anticipating that pain (and indignity sometimes). I just did this on a recent workshop and the player whose partner announced ‘stoning’ – portrayed such shock. Her eyes widened ina compelling disbelief and something happened to her body almost as if she had just been stoned.
Two must then make a transition from this trauma, must somehow put this abomination aside because now they have something equally? more? dreadful to do. They must now choose a torture for ‘Prisoner One’. 
Two is so distressed they cannot think (but the performer inside is making rhythmic sounds of distress to work the audience's laughing gear). 
Perhaps they take too long (the delay is now excruciating for ‘Prisoner One’.
Perhaps the Controller yells: ‘Taking too long, Prisoner One, choose again!’
Problem for both of them. One’s reprieve is nothing in the face of having to again contemplate a torture choice for Two. 
A squeal from number Two. The tension is held or ramping (perhaps the prisoners play a call response rhythm of contrasting sounds), stretching out the suspense for the audience.
Depending on the sensing of the impulse and the moment, perhaps at this point One shouts something very horrific (some maiming may be involved).
Or, perhaps ….
Prisoner One (coping with the stress and regret at having already traumatised his fellow, continues to painfully dither).
Unable to deal with the stress of waiting any longer to hear their own torture (and secretly, attending to the need to adjust the audience’s breathing with a softer timbre), Two might, from the corner of their mouth, begin to urgently whisper: 'Choose, choose something ... Just choose!' They have been forced in to the ghastly and absurd predicament of urging the other to name their next harming.
 
About two minutes playing-time is plenty for this exercise.
 
‘Thank you!’ I will say. ‘Well done, well done. Step out of it, everybody have a shimmy. Good work.’
In an in-person situation, I will ask the audience (the watchers of the exercise) to hug the players***  I also prompt the players to hug each other. 
 
*Preparation for this exercise
Of course, there is the preliminary training leading up to this: bodies prepared, voices prepared, key comedy craft given, Dark Side Play on a number of the Marginalised Emotions, my talk on the aims, origin, inspirations and ethics of the work. The possibility (rare, but possible) of upset explained and normalised and Upset Procedure put in place. 
 
For Red Nose Clown I transparently let people know that I may be speaking to them in the role of grumpy Clown Professor. I explain the source of this (the Lecoq/Gaulier pedagogy) and explain some of the many reasons for this: to help them feel some of the useful alertness that is useful for the clown, to keep them I the present moment, to stop them going into their hears or the future and theyebylosing contact with their flexible, expanded physicality and contact with their audience etc, etc. In the Dark Clown work, I explain that I will play the role of a Controller. I remind the watchers that they are to be themselves (although the Dark Clown player will be looking at them as if they are an invited audience in the torture facility, and responding to them from within that reality). I also let people know that I speak in tow voices - the Controller, but also in a voice where I am offering side-coaching in my role as course leader or feeding in text.
 
I put a pre-step in place where people name some types of torture. Sadly there are many. Humanity, it seems, just loves to inventively hurt its fellows. I suggest a number of methods I have researched. 
 
I also check whether participants have any no go areas e.g. ‘You can do anything but don’t do anything to my teeth.’ Or ‘Anything, but nothing to do with fire.’ Consent is important and this step can take some stress off each player.
 
Always before beginning, and I put this in place when I work with Red Nose Clown too. I make it clear that a course participant is free to leave an exercise if they feel the wrong level of discomfort. 
 
** see the previous post on this blog the importance of the players’ use of audible breath (among other things) as a way of working rhythm and keeping the audiences’s laughing gear ready and flexible.
 
*** At the start of the Dark Clown section of the work, I give a recommendation for hugging, it helps to soothe the adrenal system. I also acknowledge that those who are hug-averse can offer a bow with hand gesture of thanks instead. I also lead the whole group periodically with an adrenal soothing exercise from Donna Eden’s Energy Medicine work.
 

An alphabetised list of Key Phrases for Dark Clown practice (as part of the 'Clown & Dark Clown Course' and the 'Level 2 Dark Clown Course').
 
Having chosen to arrange this list alphabetically makes this post a bit of a deconstructed Scavenger Hunt - 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 tasks and 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.
 
A believable verisimilitude of pain and distress
Verisimilitude means a likeness, or a portrayal.
If the clown player 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’ (using rhythm, timbre, energy and imagination; using a set of given imaginary circumstances).
 
​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).
 
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), spatial embroidery, micropauses etc) that can then be applied to generate laughter. In order to have Troubled Laughter, we need first to have the ability to reliably provoke/create laughter. Comedy Craft plus audience awareness (and calibration) is then applied to generate laughter in Dark contexts.
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’. 

Carlo Boso, Commedia dell’Arte Teacher and director of TAG Teatro di Venezia (in a London workshop circa 1990):
‘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).
 
Cost / Palpable 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.
In class I may well call out as an instruction: ‘we want to see the cost’. 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 (within the scene) they must live with what they just did for the rest of their lives.
 
Dark Clown as distinct from Philippe Gaulier’s Bouffon work 
Bouffon plays Satire – Dark Clown does not have the luxury to play satire.
Historically (it is said) the outcast had a 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.
 
Dark Side Play
Once players (course participants) are clear on the aims and parameters of the work – and then on the given predicament (for the exercise or scenario) – with its 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 rhythms and vocal timbre / breath, space (where possible). Dark Side Play works the Comedy Craft with the Marginalised Emotions in a Dark context.
 
Dramaturgy and implication
There isn’t time on a Clown & Dark Clown course to deal with the subject of Dark Clown Dramaturgy. it will be a course that requires Level Two Dark Clown - but here’s a brief note:
Just as the Marx Brothers films need the breathing space of the lover’s plots, Dark Clown dramaturgies are allowed strategic moments of pathos and poetry. (In the context of teaching, I discourage moments of pathos and poetry because it deprives the student of learning the less-familiar Dark Clown craft. But when organising a dramaturgy for the audience, or in a longer-duration improvisation with an audience in mind, we can certainly go there for a beat or so. Wonderful if the pathos still keeps the audience on the hook, though – take a look at the Seal scenario in the Dark Clown Documentary or consider the dramaturgy for The Maids - i.e. the moment towards the end where one sister is reading the lines of her dying poisoned 'sister' while the audience looks on.) 
 
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.
 
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 to 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.

Hyper-vigilance (one could say it's a physiological state, but I list it as one of the Marginalised Emotions)
Hyper-vigilance is a natural result of 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’.
 
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 a life-long personal questions: Come torture or duress, what choices would I make?  When given appalling choices (impossible choices), how does one feel as one continues to exist after whatever ghastly choice was made (under duress)? 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? 
 
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)
 
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 suffering over there.' 
Allied to this is the Dark Clown concept of Troubled Laughter 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 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.
 
Laughing Gear
An Australian expression meaning mouth – but I mean it to refer to the heart, lungs and diaphragm (eyes and mouth/jaw are also important). Key principle: Carlo Boso Commedia dell’Arte Teacher - TAG Teatro di Venezia said (workshop, London circa 1986): ‘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. 

Laughter Nudge 
We all show that moment when sitting next to your friend in the serious seminar when they nudge you in the arm or your ribs and they will probably do it again and again. Or substitute an eyebrow raise or mouth movement or just a head turn. And do remember, if your friend was funny, they'd do this at the perfect moments to keep you going or to bring back the game. In the context of Dark Clown work sound motifs or physical tics or surprising changes in breath can all be employed with the aim of keeping the audience laughing or keeping them ready to laugh. In my C-words blogpost I talk about Creating the Conditions for Comedy. When I am teaching I often say the phrase: Creating the Conditions for Laughter, and yes' it's related to 'Priming' see here below. 
 
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.
 
Priming the Laughing Gear
Enlivening your own agility with your own heart, lungs and diaphragm so as to be able to affect your audience’s Laughing Gear.
What does priming mean?  (I use it to mean getting the ‘laughing gear’: i.e. heart, lungs and diaphragm nice and flexible/available; but this following definition refers to its everyday meaning of readying 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 Preluber.
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.

 
*Raise the Stakes 
Definition of 'raise the stakes' from the Collins English Dictionary:
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. the Libyan allegations raised the stakes in the propaganda war between Libya and the United States.
 
Ridiculous (a judicious use of 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 (an image here), 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 (or sound/movement motif) 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’ 
This is a playful teaching phrase to encourage the compassion of the clown performer – this is us in our normal life (in the supermarket, travelling to work etc).
 
*Tell
‘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
 
Troubled Laughter
In the intro into the Dark Clown work proper, I usually tell the story of watching a scene in a show I saw in 1980 (mentioned here) where 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.”
 
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.

In the post Resisting Vulnerability, I quote a course participant:

'One other idea I find extremely useful is that emotions like anger and resentment have the potential to be obstructive. In the workshops we were steered away from anger, self-pity, indignation etc. in favour of less defensive emotions like shame, sadness, despair ... Knowing that the territory of slightly more egotistical or aggressive emotions is liable to put up a barrier between the performer and the audience, to create antagonism, rather than letting vulnerability build pathos and evoke empathy, is invaluable.'

I have been listening lately to Brené Brown's Podcast: Unlocking Us. In the episode I have just linked, Brené speaks about using awareness of Shame as a useful step for white folx to avoid any reactivity which may arise during discussions about racism. Brown mentions the value in being able to recognise the symptoms of shame - the hot cheeks and the tunnel vision and the sweating palms. And then Brown gives some handy mantras to reframe thoughts which otherwise risk to get channelled into reactivity, defensiveness, denial and blame.

Generally in life, we normally try to escape uncomfortable emotions. The Dark Clown work has an exercise where course participants do what I call Dark Side Play, where they do a kind of Lazy Susan exercise (an inner circle facing an outer circle). (The outer circle does the exercise and rotates to a fresh partner after each turn.) Those doing the exercise are all given a Marginalised Emotion* to portray (to pretend into). The 'do-ers' have three aims 1/ to create 'a believable verisimilitude of pain and distress' 2/ to employ as many of the comedy crafts as they can remember to employ in the service of 3/ making their partner access Troubled Laughter. Emotions worked include (among others) panic, dread, grief and shame.

When I reach Red Nose Clown, I mention proprioception. I may need a more precise word - science friends, please email me! What I mean is when a spontaneous moment of play has created a sound, gesture, timbre, rhythm, phrase-length that has caused laughter. I encourage students (course participants) to develop the hunger to grow the sense-ability to take an inner snapshot so that they can reproduce what they just did. Then it can be tried again, impartially, like a scientist. Possibly, they might employ the rule of three. No harm if they don't - they can practice the 'fail', accept their emotions of the moment, or just be the presence of that new moment (play the ball where it lies) breathe, await the incoming impulse, and do something else from there - it's all good for the Clown. 

This skill, or understanding of being able to feel what is manifest in your body and voice in the moment, this 'knack', once learned in Red Nose mode, can be employed in Dark Clown mode. To create Troubled Laughter, the Dark Clown performer must nurture the audience's responses and seek to stimulate and recreate laughter where possible (by recreating the physical/vocal/energetic moment which caused the laugh in the first place. It is important in Dark Clown that the duplicated sound appear to be reproduced 'involuntarily': 'The amygdala made me do it', as it were.** Why? Because, in order to keep the audience 'on the hook', the Dark Clown must sustain the 'truth' of the situation (by situation I meant the Imagined Predicament).

So there is this practice to emulate, to portray and to do this over some duration - to stay in the discomforting emotions. This is in pursuit of creating the Implication of the Audience and the Troubled Laughter. But it may just be that this exercise has, incidentally, a further (or bonus) value.

When I first encountered Clowning with Philippe Gaulier (alongside John Wright, John Lee, Phelim McDermot, Rick Kemp, and Annie Griffin) - many of us had a crunch moment. It was totally new, this being exposed, defences down, the 'bide', the 'fail', the 'shit in the pants'. The very thing that one normally wishes fervently to avoid. After Gaulier, sometime in the late 80's/early 90's I attended a workshop in Stand-up. Ivor Dembina stomped into the room where all the chairs were stacked and we, the participants were standing about. Ivor said, 'When you make me laugh, you can sit down.' Discomfort, pricking cheeks, a soupçon of fear. But I thought: 'Oh, this. This is ok. I have been here before.' And I was able to work, to try.

It is a strain, avoiding discomfort. One clamps down. Flow is compromised, or stopped completely. Life force is lost. I wonder if the visiting of the Marginalised Emotions - playing in them as one might play in mud*** - was the experience a recent Clown & Dark Clown course participant was indicating when they said: 
'What surprised me was how very alive I felt after the weekend with the Dark Clown.'

* A list of the Marginalised Emotions is given in this earlier blog post Rehearsing for Darkness.
** There is another tactic (should the moment be right and not too close to the start of the scene). A repeat of the sound could be done as if, from within the ghastly Predicament, The Dark Clown is 'testing' reality in hopeless hope of getting an answer to the unanswerable question: 'What kind of a world IS this? ... Where my pain is being discounted and even laughed at?!'
​*** playing with a portrayal  of the Marginalised Emotions I call Dark Side Play (it incorporates the foundational skills of Comedy Craft which are imparted and drilled in the early part of the Clown & Dark Clown course).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work on the book has begun - I will be writing the book throughout this year.