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


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

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

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

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

Hyper-vigilance is a natural response to fear. It’s when you are highly alert to any movement or sound, perceiving it as a potential source of threat. In Dark Clown work, this replaces the 'complicité' style of eye-contact and responsiveness of the Red Nose Clown. In an enforced performance scenario, the player will give ‘a believable verisimilitude of hyper-vigilance’.
 
Extraordinary Physiological Response
With sufficient (imaginary, of course) pressure, logical thought stalls, emotion short-circuits and the player can find themselves releasing into a panicked amygdala response, allowing the audience the possibility to witness a  spontaneously-released extraordinary physiological response (a pulsing brow vein, an involuntary twitch or flinch ... ). This is one of the compelling features of the Dark Clown work. 
The EPR is in fact a motif. This is something you can see in Clown, comedy and Commedia work where the performer creates motifs (succinct, repeatable gestures, often combining sound and movement, and aimed to charm the audience or be a laughter nudge for the audience.) The EPR is a motif of a different flavour, but still designed to create laughter, or prime the laughing gear for future potential laughter.
 
As part of Comedy Craft, I emphasise that laughter is a physiological phenomenon – I speak of priming** (priming as you prime a  motor – see below) the ‘laughing gear’. Laughing gear is a colloquial Australian phrase for the mouth, but I use it to mean the lungs, heart, diaphragm (eyes and mouth/jaw are also important).
 
Carlo Boso Commedia dell’Arte Teacher - TAG Teatro di Venezia: ‘It’s easy to make people laugh, all you need to do is to control people’s breathing and their heart rate.’ (nowadays I prefer to say ‘affect’ rather than ‘control’).
 
The Cost
In a Red Nose Clown exercise, we love to see the Clown thinking and reacting - for example, when another clown in the scene/exercise is being praised. We love the micro expressions, the tiny momentary reactions or 'Tells'*** of humanity which the ‘Sad Normals’ (see below) take considerable pains to mask or suppress. In Dark Clown I call this the Cost. The psychological Cost, the visible processing of thoughts and emotions of humanity in extremis.
 
Cost / Palpable cost
I may use the phrase ‘we want to see the cost’ (as in : what does it cost them emotionally?). With the Red Nose Clowns, we love to see their humanity, their emotions. We specially enjoy seeing this in the eyes: the micro-expressions of pride, affront, surprise, confusion, disappointment or other thought processes. Also in tiny head turns or spontaneous micro gestures, or the breath. (In Dark Clown work, the audience gets to see how the Dark Clown player responds to a command or predicament where they must make a terrible choice, how they look when they are wrestling with themselves in the moment before they must jettison they dignity, or betray a fellow ‘prisoner’, and how they look when they must live with what they just did for the rest of their lives.)
 
Dark Side Play
Once players (i.e. course participants) are clear on the aims of the work – and then on the predicament, context and stakes, the play can begin. At this point we are looking for physical and verbal motifs, as well as the player being strategic (with regard to the audience’s state or reactions) with rhythms and vocal timbre / breath, space (where possible). Dark Side Play works the Comedy Craft together with the Marginalised Emotions.
 
High Stakes Predicament – course participants are invited to imagine ghastly or highly constrained / oppressive circumstances in certain exercises and scenarios in order to help fuel release into Marginalised Emotions, using Dark Side Play (comedy craft) in a way that hopefully produces laughter-provoking text or sounds and motifs (including Extraordinary Physiological Responses). (See below for explanation of Stakes) – aka Desperate Predicament aka Pressurised Predicament (see also Impossible Choices below)
 
Humanity in Extremis
Dark Clown is in extremis or trying to survive. It is a more existential look at the human condition (yes some other kinds of Clown can go there too, but usually via moments of pathos).
The Dark Clown work I teach resonates with life-long personal questions: Come torture or duress, what choices would I make?  When given appalling choices, how does one feel as one continues to exist after whatever ghastly choice was made? When oppression is so great that courage is punished by death (or worse) - what are the options? When exactly does one succumb to force? What does the word 'force' really mean? 
 
Implicating the Audience
I use the term Implicating the Audience to refer to the Dark Clown practice where the performer or ensemble manage to create the conditions whereby the audience feel that they are somehow 'on the hook'/at cause/somehow responsible/or that they just feel guilty watching/or that their comfort is in stark contrast to the player onstage portraying the suffering. Although all audiences know that they paid for their ticket and walked in to watch a composed performance, they can, via the ‘suspension of disbelief’****, feel conflicted or shamed in their witnessing and even to a degree, culpable. While no one may actually think: 'Oh my, I must rush on stage and help these people', they feel compelled and conflicted that 'It is not me over there suffering.' 
Allied to this is the Dark Clown concept of Troubled Laughter (see above) whereby the audience laughs and at some level feels troubled or shamed or conflicted in their laughter.
 
Impossible choices
As with Enforced Performance, or inside an Enforced Performance scenario, the player/prisoner may have to make a choice. We will see the Cost and we will witness Marginalised Emotions, possibly some Extraordinary Physiological responses (see above).
 
Red Nose Clown – as mentioned above there are a number of Clown lineages and types of clown – as a convenience I use the term Red Nose Clown to make a distinction between Dark Clown and most other types of Clown.
 
Ridiculous (a judicious use if the ridiculous)
Adding a skilful touch of the ridiculous to a ghastly situation is a useful technique to surprise the audience into Troubled Laughter. For example, in the Buzzer exercise, players employ clocks and beats and express the appropriate Marginalised Emotions (strategically, using comedy craft and with audience awareness). It’s helpful/an extra level of skill to add something ridiculous - e.g.: a feigned electric shock, presented believably, yet which causes the Dark Clown player to spin in a circle like a wind-up toy. Another example: in the setup for The Somali Pirates scenario, I give the players a back story where there is a small past niggle between the two hostages. They are instructed not to play this niggle, but to allow it to bleed into their reactions to the other within the larger predicament. This layering can produce compelling results – a portrayal of a genuine predicament of suffering, inflected with little micro-beats of flawed humanity – which, once released, can in turn release a further micro-beat of Marginalised Emotion- i.e. ‘Oh no, I was just selfish, in such an awful situation! I feel shame at my own behaviour.
 
‘Sad Normals’ a playful teaching phrase to encourage the compassion of the Red Nose Clown performer for the audience – The ‘Sad Normal’ is us in our normal life (in the supermarket, travelling to work having all our petty emotions etc). I say: ‘It is the Clown’s job to have all the emotions and thoughts the Sad Normals prefer to suppress or hide.
 
NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

Nigerian writer Elnathan John , when asked ‘You have a reputation as a political satirist. Has your writing ever landed you in hot water?' said: ‘The sexy answer would be to say, ”Yes, it is dangerous.’ The real answer is ‘No.’ The tragedy is that people are so numb. Satire depends upon people’s ability to feel or respond to shame. We live in a post-shame world. There is no political shame. The president can say whatever comes into his head and walk away. There is no shame to make people act here. When you write satire, the worst that can happen is that people laugh it off.’
In The New Review The Observer 03.04.16 Q&A 
 
I wish satire could bite hard enough to affect those high up in power, give them a new perspective, to awaken their hearts towards justice, to point them away from inflicting suffering on others or denying or dismissing the suffering of others.

Satire can be elegant. A bold concept, clever keen language, well-articulated reversals. A single satirical cartoon can awaken awareness of an issue. Or even be a channel for emotions. I am thinking of a number of cartoons involving a weeping or violated Statue of Liberty some few years back.

From time to time people ask about the difference between Bouffon and Dark Clown. I was electrified when I first saw Philippe Gaulier leading a class on Bouffon. He walked amongst the course participants, their bodies made strange with hoods and stuffed clothing belted into place and huddled in to a choric clump. Philippe stood there tickling the tops of their heads to help them relax their surface tension and find the requisite sweetness which would allow them to thrust metaphorical daggers into the 'beautiful people' watching them.

I realise in retrospect my character, Muriel from 1984 show 'Hiroshima Mon Amour'* had aspects of the Bouffon about her, but she was mainly too kind-hearted to skewer her audience. The statements she made at the end of the piece were a kind of tough love - she had an ardent message to impart, a wake-up call rather than a shaming. 
 
This site nicely articulates Bouffon, quoting Lecoq: “The difference between the clown and the bouffon is that while the clown is alone, the bouffon is part of a gang; while we make fun of the clown, the bouffon makes fun of us. At the heart of the bouffon is mockery pushed to the point of parody. Bouffons amuse themselves by reproducing the life of man in their own way, through games and pranks. The parody isn’t directly offensive with regard to the public; there is no deliberate intention to mock—the relation is of a different order. Bouffons come from elsewhere.”
Jacques Lecoq  – “Theatre of Movement and Gesture” 2006 (Trans. David Bradbury)

The site's writer then goes on to say that what Gaulier taught was a 'stripped back, purified version of Lecoq’s Bouffon style'. From the class notes of Aqueous Humour's Artistic Director Tom Hogan: “making the beautiful people laugh is the weapon and its aim is to kill by asphyxiation in the laughter or by turning the joke so that they realise that they are laughing at themselves and in the horror of their reflected image they have a heart attack and die”.

Tom Hogan goes on to say: “We came to the understanding that the Bouffon represents the outcast, the one who fails to uphold the social etiquette expected from an integrated and fully functional member of society. They speak for the excluded, the shunned, and untouchable: those that we ignore because of our embarrassment and guilt. We realise that our position in society is upheld by those we consider to be lesser or greater than ourselves. Bouffons challenge our position in society through parody and satire, holding up a mirror to moralising, judgmental, social airs and graces.”

Though admiring Bouffon, I felt my attention called to not just the outcast but the oppressed. I was inspired (as frequent visitors to this blog will know), in 1980, by a scene in Pip Simmonds' unforgettable and disturbing production 'An die Musik'. Later a scene in Lumiere and Son's Circus Lumiere added extra resonance to the feeling of 'implication'.  The work I do under the title of Dark Clown has other, non-clown inspirations including George Orwell's 1984 and Sydney Pollack's 1969 film 'They Shoot Horses Don't They?' - works which portray humanity in extremis.

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, how does one feel as one continues to exist after whatever ghastly choice was made? When oppression is so great that courage is punished by death (or worse) - what are the options? When exactly does one succumb to force? What does the word 'force' really mean? 

The work I do under the title of Dark Clown provides a way to witness humanity in extremity. For the Dark Clown, playing satire is an impossible luxury.

Although compelled in many ways by Bouffon work; as a theatre maker in the 1980's, touring small scale venues, I could not, personally, see my way to being too scathing towards the people in the audience who had actually made their way out to a small Arts Centre to watch an evening of niche, fringe, physical theatre. 

Dark Clown (especially in the Enforced Performance scenarios) provides opportunities to witness. The Dark Clown as a prisoner in an Enforced Performance scenario allows an audience to see the cost of making an impossible choice under duress and the self-reflective horror and shame and indignity of carrying on existence after such a moment. 

Historically, the Bouffon had a day of the year to enter the church 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.

Over time, scenarios not dependent on an Enforced Performance predicament have emerged. The Seal or Eco-horror scenario must be played with a sweetness of approach, similar to the Bouffon but the player cannot follow it up with a spit or the puncture of an insult. The Seal dies slowly, and apologetically in front of the audience. Dramaturgically, taken as a whole - performance and presented predicament - the piece serves as critique, similar to the function of satire, but in the playing of it, satire or mockery must not be employed.

I am interested in giving the performer the experience of embodying Marginalised Emotions and allowing the audience to witness them. 

I celebrate those doing Bouffon work. Audiences get a tremendous amount from the form. And I salute satire. This post is dedicated to making a distinction between the forms.
 
One Clown & Dark Clown Course Participant wrote this, which captures the distinction nicely:
 
‘Regarding Bouffon - I saw a few similarities with the Dark Clown in the seeing humour through pain ... from what I understand, the Bouffon was created as a survival method almost, where people with disabilities and deformities would have normally been persecuted, so to escape that persecution they created characters to make their persecutors laugh, and made them laugh by cleverly parodying their persecutors. The Dark Clown is more desperate and seems to come from a more life & death situation. The main difference I see is that where the Bouffon parodies, the Dark Clown implicates.'

This person went on to say: 'The Bouffon makes you laugh without realising you may be laughing at yourself. Whereas the Dark Clown makes you laugh knowing that you really shouldn't.' 

I would like to finesse that final statement - done correctly, in Dark Clown work, the audience laughs but can still see the horror of the predicament. They get to witnessing themselves laughing in the presence of a dire predicament. The Troubled Laughter the work aims at is not the snigger of transgression, it is a sound-making while witnessing. A sound which is surprised out of the audience by adept rhythm-work and comedy craft (and sound dramaturgy). When laughter happens, the Dark Clown performer swivels their face to clock the laugh, and responds (from within the reality of the portrayed situation) with an added level of shock / fear / alarm / horror / disbelief - done correctly, this allows the audience to experience a feeling of being Implicated (due to the phenomenon of 'suspension of disbelief' they feel at cause, they feel an agency in the suffering of the Dark Clown. 

Going back to Elnathan John's quote at the start on this post ... regrettably, It seems that we have many in power at the moment who are immune to feeling shame.

However, there are many of us who daily witness or contemplate suffering, and find it troubling, but who often find ourselves with no time or dedicated outlet to do anything with it except put it to one side as we get on with our day.** Today, at the end of a Level 2 Dark Clown Course, a practitioner who works in the field of Social Services mentioned their gratitude for the work. In the course of their work, the trauma of a badly treated child is kept 'at arms length' and for professionals in the field, the risk is that 'empathy is blunted'. Having opportunity to embody the Marginalised Emotions, provides a kind of grounding, they said, an experience less fatiguing than keeping the emotions at bay.

Most of us want to keep the feeling of shame at arms length, it's a natural impulse. One of the character-forming and ego-reducing effects of clown training is to jettison resistance to the emotions surrounding failure. The day I realised: 'Ok, being in the 'bide'*** is somewhere I have been before', it left me free to carry on. It gave me courage without bravado, dignity in being ok with having no dignity.

I doubt many world leaders would ever enrol on a clown course - but in the meantime for those of us living with the inequities they create and sustain, perhaps Dark Clown might provide us with a bespoke moment to honour the uncomfortable emotions.

* No relation to Alain Resnais' film - screenplay by Marguerite Duras.
​** Of course there is tireless petition-signing and donating and of course many courageously devote themselves to activism.
*** Gaulier's word for failure, flop.

There are two parts to this post. Trigger warnings: race, prostitution, colonialism and eek, yes a bit of a gentle feminist viewpoint.

First, an acknowledgement that, as a white educated woman, I aim to interrogate myself for the ways I may be perpetuating and benefiting from racist systems. Also to say that I aim to hold the Dark Clown work in general as ethically as I can, always being ready to learn and address new awarenesses and other perspectives as they come to my attention. The edginess of the work keeps me vigilant and I aim to hold the notions of exploitation and profiteering in mind as I write.

Part 1: A desperate response
Back in 2016, one woman responded to the reports of a disproportionate number of Police shootings of black citizens, and to the racist White Lives Matter moment which arose in response to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. According to the TYT coverage (see below) of the video, her name is Tashala Dangel Geyer.

This amazing woman posted a piece of performance art or activism online (to my knowledge, she herself did not define it in any way*). If you google 'woman paints herself white', you'll find clips of people watching the footage and wondering 'is she crazy?' (while at the same time saying she is 'serious' and also judging her as if she were proposing this as a serious 'answer'). One vlogger felt it was unhelpful to the issues at stake.

​The video and images from it are often taken down because of the small amount of nudity involved (the paint largely obscures any anatomical detail although occasionally, she turns around and we see her body without the coverage of paint). 

'If you wanna survive'
I admire what Dangel Geyer has done.
She begins with: 'This the best shit I ever could have thought of. This is saving my life! 
​... You know what, the Lord woke me up - and sent me this sign (slapping the brush to paint her inner thighs, profile view)  so I went on ahead to Home Depot and got this paint.
(Standing facing us) 'Cos white lives matter. Guess what? White lives matter. White Lives. (painting her right leg again).  Just white. White. White. White white white white.  (Exhales)
That’s the argu – never – if you wanna survive ... I’mma keep sayin’  (right palm up) go white!
Jus' go white ... Baby, I don’t want nothing brown on me.'
She continues with her message to 'Black families' and keeps interrupting herself by spotting bits of her body that she has missed. It's a classic clown predicament of solution-problem-solution-problem. She is working with repetition, interruption and rhythm. She engages her audience, too, asking the viewer to 'Hep me out' ... so that she misses no patches that would give her away. ... 'Bring in the white! Hoo, gonna be a’right' (painting left armpit) ... (waves left hand in front of her face, to indicate) 'Ronald MacDonald, man! You won’t get shot.'

Troubled Laughter 
I first watched the footage with compulsion. Her focus and commitment are palpable. I am also surprised into uneasy laughter by this woman's lively rhythms and wit, combined with the horror of the situation i.e. I am afraid for my life because of the way I look / because of the way I am -  it's not a comfortable laugh. 
In this video document, a woman demonstrates vulnerability by appearing naked live online.**
​At the same time she makes a very direct address to the audience. This piece has many elements of Dark Clown work: Troubled Laughter, Palpable Cost, direct appeal to the audience - we witness her and those of us with caucasian privilege experience Implication. Also, Dangel Geyer has the courage to allow us to witness (and experience) Marginalised Emotion - plus she possesses good comedy craft.

Distance 
Dark Clown, similar to Comedy, equals 'Tragedy plus time'. Dark Clown work (as I work with it in teaching and in dramaturgy) needs sufficient distance from the actual real life predicament / subject. Often by being abstractified into a non-specific Absurd realm (see the posts on The Maids and this review of Hamlet or Die) and / or by a distance of time.
Dangel Geyer's piece / statement / performance is very close to the bone. It is temporally immediate, dealing with ongoing race issues and pointing at the entrenched impasse between those trying to raise awareness of inequality and of conscious (and unconscious) bias and those who somehow manage to interpret #BlackLivesMatter as a threat to their own rights and validity. Racist behaviour and inequality have, in the UK have been exacerbated by Government policies of austerity and by the xenophobic media campaign in advance of Br*xit. 

... a 'sidebar' musing on spatial distance and intimacy
Dangel Geyer's piece / statement / performance exists online - the internet being a medium which can often create positive connection but which is also well known for knee-jerk, divisive reaction. It is a courageous choice of platform. There is no time here to  contrast and compare the internet with the more dream-like, contemplative space of a theatre where life can be seen simultaneously intimately, but also at a remove, except perhaps to ponder whether we can say that, as theatre offers a physiological experience of shared space in the auditorium, it may possibly contribute more to cohesion as opposed to division between watchers.

Controversy
TYT coverage of the phenomenon is in this clip together with a discussion (from a mainly white) panel. One panellist manages to make sexualised comments about the footage, even while conceding / recognising that the woman's intent was not sexual. But that is a side note to the thrust of this blog post.
​
When some vloggers who review / watch this video call her crazy, they fail to  consider that the author of the footage, Tashala Dangel Geyer may be, like Hamlet, only mad 'north-north-west'.*** She knows what she is doing, she is doing what she is doing for a purpose, for effect. Hamlet uses a smokescreen of craziness to a purpose (we are never quite sure whether it's to buy time, to be discounted, thereby making spying on Claudius more easy allow himself more licensee to say the unsayable?). We can say that Dangel Geyer  in fact is braver than Hamlet as she is saying the unsayable and taking the absurdity of a situation to a logical conclusion.
I find her piece / statement / performance bitingly apposite, witty, disturbing and also moving.

The medium (housepaint, not social media) and the message
A couple of the male viewers express concern about the paint on her skin. Rightly so  - it's housepaint. Yes, uncomfortable, unhealthy and must have been difficult to remove. She is being bold and reckless for a purpose. Using some nice pan-stick make-up would have sent a completely different message. Makeup coverage would have risked being too light and cosmetic an effect. It may have been a contributing factor that paint was more affordable than makeup. 
Paint is also a protection for wood, whereas make-up is more aesthetic, designed to create an illusion, an enhancement or possibly an enticement.
House paint is a rough and ready solution, and an accessible one. This woman is communicating immediacy and pragmatism as well as communicate desperation. She addresses her audience with urgency. Go, go now to Home Depot - a different message to: google your nearest Kryolan outlet.

Dangel Geyer is not to my knowledge a theatre maker, she is a human being responding to a desperate predicament. What we see in this remarkable creative document is a human being in extremis, demonstrating the absurdity of her situation by pretending she has discovered and is sharing an absurd 'solution'. 

Part 2: A strong challenge
The Dark Clown work provides a way to address tragic and troubling issues. The subtitle of the Dark Clown documentary is 'taking Laughter to the Limits.' Yes even the Troubled Laughter has limits - for example, it does not include Evil Laughter. More than once I have been asked if it were possible to portray the issue of violence towards women using Dark Clown. I find that a very strong challenge indeed.

On one of my Take It Further courses, a talented Asian performer  came with a will to look at the Indian equivalent of the Korean Comfort Women. She was researching women doing sex work during the days of the Raj who were kept in dreadful conditions. Wikipedia tells us: 'Although the governments of many Indian princely dates had regulated prostitution prior to the 1860s, such regulation in British India was first ushered in by the Cantonment Act of 1864. The Cantonment Acts regulated and structured prostitution in the British military bases. ... The structuring features of the Cantonment Acts provided for about twelve to fifteen Indian women for each regiment of British soldiers.'  (I can't find the specific number of men in a British regiment in the days of the Raj but I found this more recent source: 'A regiment normally contains of around 650 soldiers depending on its role.')
The performer had researched and found that women were kept in the dark in cockroach-ridden 'accommodation', and forced to service a large number of men each day - this figure of sex acts per woman per day was not given I'm the above Wiki entry; however, 650 divided by the upper number of 15 women is 43.3333 recurring).

I once read of a woman trafficked forcibly into prostitution who had, one Christmas day, been forced to service 80 men. Sorry for the downer. It depressed me too, when I read it. I was reading the article on my phone on the tube, and the number would not make itself real to me. I decided to count men I saw, innocent commuters, on my journey home, just to appreciate that number: 80.

An existential exercise
​Now that I come to write about this, I think that what made this instance work for me, this Dark Clown treatment of this particular subject was not only some historical distance, but also the fact that this improvisation was achieved in service of this course participant trying to come to terms with events that were part of the oppression of her race, her forefathers/foremothers' nation and her biological sex.

The absurd - and finding a workable metaphor
​After telling me/us (the assembled course participants) about the cockroaches and the dark and about the large number of men in a single day, I said, 'Ok. Can you think of some boring action or movement that you can repeat. And after each repetition, you will count: 'one', then 'two', then 'three', and keep going.

I was impressed at her commitment and her level of physical fitness that she chose burpees! And off she went. This performer is a very funny woman with experience in stand-up and improv. She did those burpees: down out, squat, up 'one.' Down out, squat, up 'two'. We could see and sense the cost almost immediately. Down out, squat, up 'three.' She had also come dressed in a saree ... unhappily. In the pre-course interview, she told me that she had enrolled on a course with Philippe Gaulier and that he had suggested that she come back dressed as 'Mrs Ghandi'.  She reported that she was cross with herself for not having challenged the brief, and also for the way she responded to the brief because she felt her ability to play was hampered because she found the costume was so physically restrictive. 'I cannot flee the scene!', she quipped in an earlier part of her Take It Further session, while wearing the saree.

Down out, squat, up 'four.' Due to the exertion, she started, quite naturally, to make noises ... pants and grunts. This performer had done my Clown & Dark Clown workshop, so knew how to release and work with the sounds - they were compelling and rhythmic and varied.  She kept on; with burpee five, six seven, eight.  The sounds started to include a noise like a cow moaning (appalling and hilarious simultaneously). Incrementally, she introduced sounds from other barnyard animals: lambs, goats, chickens and pigs, all with the ongoing burpees keeping the base-line, inexorable rhythm going  - Down out, squat, up 'fifteen.' Down out, squat, up 'sixteen.' ...

Comedy Craft plus the cathartic value of Witnessing
Perfect Dark Clowning. We were laughing at the ridiculousness of the counting, and our physiology was affected by the vigour of the movement. The animal noises were absurd and ridiculous, however her desperation and commitment had an earnest quality - in her willingness to engage with the task, we could also imagine the women's choicelessness or obligation to fulfil their daily quota of men.  

The underlying rhythm of the burpees affected our physiology (our 'laughing gear'), the moment to moment surprises (contrast) of the chaotic sounding but wonderfully varied and contrapuntal animal noises added laughter nudges, and a sense of the Ridiculous (while at another level making a comment on the poor sex-workers' de-humanisation). So laughter was created, but Troubled Laughter - because the improvisation clearly conveyed the horror of what was being demonstrated  / presented for us to witness.

* I celebrate the uncategorisable.

** Her nakedness is not sexual in intent - although some viewers respond to it through a sexualised lens.

*** of course there are some who think Hamlet has actually been driven crazy - and it would be totally understandable if that were the case for Dangel Geyer - there is ample cause for mental pressure.