What happens when Red Nose Clown and Dark Clown meet?

A good number of years ago I was teaching at Central School. The Acting Collaborative and Devised Theatre students were approaching King Lear and I was hired to teach Clown & Dark Clown.
One student asked 'What happens when Red Nose Clown* and Dark Clown meet?' I said 'Let's find out'.
I setup a 'world cafe' where a group hold a conversation by circulating round a circuit of small ‘table’ groups with one person at each ‘table’ staying in place to hold the previous conversations. A group feedback revealed a few main options with some ideas as subsets of those main options. I then asked for people to volunteer as the holders of a particular idea and we held a marketplace where those people 'sold' their idea (again with rotating groups), then at the end, the individuals self-selected into groups to explore each idea.

An Enforced King Lear
I am only going to describe what happened in one of the groups here. Leaning on the idea of Hamlet or Die, and using the concept of the line-up exercise, with someone in place as Controller, one group decided upon the idea of a group of Dark Clowns being forced to perform King Lear, with the unfortunate twist that, as for Hamlet or Die, the deaths and injuries stipulated in the play would be enacted and would be actually painful or - erm - fatal.

'Curtain up'
They began with a line-up of prisoners all with their backs to the audience. Slowly they turned around. They were all terrified, but two of them exhibited a particular fresh breed of alarm. After a few feints and beats, the person in between them revealed themselves. In stark contrast to the others, whose clocks and eye flicks were snatched more nervously, this 'idiot'** was thrilled to be there, delighted to be in company of others and, uniquely … wearing a red nose. For the others in the line-up, the situation was already frightening. Now they see they will have to deal ongoingly with this added unpredictability - a Red Nose Clown who is excited about the games to come – their fear is ramped up, and somewhat coloured with the horror of the uncanny.

Everything we love about the Red Nose Clown - their playfulness, their spontaneity, their good-heartedness, their desire to connect, their mistakes, their delightful capacity to misunderstand, their inability to learn - each quality presents a threat to the poor, hypervigilant Dark Clown players. (Imagine being on a mountain climbing expedition with a prankster.) In the absurd torture realm of an Enforced Performance scenario, The Red Nose Clown’s positive expectations, curiosity and relative invulnerability to pain – bring a terrifying cocktail of uncontrollability, compounding the stressful uncertainty of the line-up Predicament.

As part of the set-up of the line-up exercise, I say - 'The rules in this regime are unknowable, unpredictable. Sometimes they want to punish someone and they shoot your neighbour by mistake. Or sometimes they decide that in order to punish you, they will shoot the person next to you deliberately.' For a fuller explanation of this exercise and the careful set-up for it look at the post on vulnerability. More info in this footnote from the same post.***

The Dark Clown player in a line-up is trying not to attract attention, not to make a mistake, all the while keeping an eye on their neighbours because a wrong step can cost dearly. (Side note: for the Dark Clown, this hyper-vigilance replaces the 'complicité' of the Red Nose Clown. Interestingly, I have often seen that people who have found it hard to notice the other in Red Nose mode, gain a marked improvement in their ability to respond to their fellow players in the Line-up exercise.)

Different rules
Think about Roger Rabbit in the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where live actors and animated creatures co-exist. The poor, grieving human Eddie Valiant (played by Bob Hoskins) is wary of Toons. Toons operate by different rules:

Eddie Valiant : You crazy rabbit! I'm out there risking my neck for you, and what are you doing? Singing and dancing! 

Roger Rabbit : But I'm a Toon. Toons are supposed to make people laugh. 

...

Roger Rabbit : What could have possibly happened to you to turn you into such a sourpuss? 

Eddie Valiant : You really want to know? I'll tell you. A Toon killed my brother. 

‘Funny Games’
Coming back to the Red-Nose-meets-Dark-Clown improvisation - I can't remember exactly the beats of this prepared improvisation but I can see the many possibilities - e.g.:
The Controller announces: ‘Act 3, Scene 7! Give out the spoons!’
The Red Nose Clown might rush forward to collect the spoons that are being given out and enthusiastically play them - perhaps urging others to sing 'Old Macdonald had a farm! ... come on everyone, dance!' The poor prisoners, though appalled by Red Nose’s exhortations to dance, comply either out of a nervous reflex or perhaps as a desperate urge to buy time, thereby causing themselves to experience the shame of voluntarily jettisoning one's own dignity. 

The Controller could then call a halt to this: 'Get on with it!' - and there could be a poignant (for the audience) tussle as the prisoners who are being forced to step forward to play Cornwall and his servant find themselves in the desperate and ridiculous predicament of having to get the spoons off the Red Nose, who'd either be petulantly protecting his toys or gleefully enjoying the 'no it's mine' tussle. Even though the Dark Clown players would not be relishing what they were being called to do next, they would feel compelled to take possession of the spoons. Maybe Bozo might raise the spoons above ‘Gloucester’ play-acting dramatically and maniacally laughing, this horror would redouble the efforts of the others to claim the spoons. Once successful, a series of takes and clocks would register their satisfaction at prising the spoons off the infuriating Bozo and then continue to map their dawning horror that they have fought, only to find themselves brought abruptly to their ghastly appointed task.

During the preceding tussle, the prisoner awaiting his role as Gloucester would have no choice but to watch in horror. A special horror to have hurt imminent, and to have the threat of hurt prolonged – then on top of that, to have the preparations for the ghastly event of being blinded happen in an atmosphere of child-like chaos and squabbling. 

Perhaps, once spoons have been ‘won’ and that painful beat clocked, 'Gloucester' might make a break for it. Red Nose would love this new game of chasey and wrestle the poor Gloucester to the ground, giggling. Maybe Bozo might even tickle poor Gloucester who might then have the humiliation of giggling in response, and segue on to repeatedly call 'stop! stop! stop!' Only to be faced with the inexplicable horror of his command being heeded - and being bundled by all assembled (‘the show must go on’) to be tied to a chair. Before using the rope, Red Nose might do some skipping with it, even pop it into Gloucester's mouth like reins for a quick game of horsey ...

Perhaps with a prompt from the Controller, the ghastly deed is done, at a devastating cost to ‘Cornwall’ and his ‘servant’. They in turn face their deaths. 

Each plot event brings games for the Red Nose Clown and that brings ghastly,  absurd and exquisitely (painfully) layered predicaments for the Dark Clown players. Bozo misinterprets bodies that fall to the ground or are dragged off - he applauds the dying and wounded, thinking they are play-acting and that he is being a wonderful co-player. Some deaths are seen as a game: "Ashes, ashes, all fall down", he might join in with a falling down lazzi. 

So while, in most contexts, the Red Nose Clown provides a ‘pulse of empathy’, in this context, and seen in the light of ‘normal’ reality, Clown antics can be horrific. Roger Rabbit - handcuffed to Bob Hoskins - has preternatural speed and agility and very effectively escapes from danger with his human attached. Bob/Eddie Valiant is slammed into walls and at one stage is dragged down stairs, with his head hitting every step. Only when they are settled and making a plan, does Roger, slip his wrist easily from the cuffs.

Eddie Valiant : You mean you could've taken your hand out of that cuff at any time? 

Roger Rabbit : No, not at any time, only when it was funny.
 
A judicious use if the ridiculous
Adding a skilful touch of the ridiculous to a ghastly situation is a useful technique to release the 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.’
 
Before we continue to the end – a bit of a side note here on how ‘nice’ the Red Nose Clown is (actually a bigger conversation than this post can deal with)
The great clown Joey Grimaldi performed for adult audiences, but in the years that followed, Andrew McConnell Stott, author of The Pantomime Life Of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comediannoted, Clowns increasingly became more deemed as a children's entertainment. Following the wonderful re-invigorating of physical theatre styles by Jacques Lecoq, the practice of Clowning has had a renaissance, finding again adult audiences. Sometimes a legacy of the innocence and sweetness of ‘the clown’ remains in people's thinking and/or is debated. Fear of clowns started to become palpable (due to the film It and also to the crimes of John Wayne Gacey. The situation was worsened in 2014 by the ‘creepy clown’ pranking in UK and USA and the regrettable incidents of thugs disguised as scary clowns in France in 2014. I was tracking articles on this rising wave of Coulraphobia as I prepared to make the adult Clown drama The Death of Fun in Hong Kong in 2017. 
 
With more recent events, the whole conversation about Clown is even more complex. Dr Justin Thomas, associate professor at Zayed University in this article  takes Jung’s lead and mentions the Clown’s link to the Trickster archetype, saying: 'The positive attributes of the trickster include being wise, funny and intelligent. However, the more negative aspects include being a malicious rule breaker, a cunning thief and a cruel prankster. A psychiatrist might consider such a person a psychopath, diagnosing antisocial personality disorder.' Sadly a couple of notable politicians display a less-than-statesperson-like style which many have described as Clown-like, in early efforts to mock them. Ineptitude may indeed be laughable, but the laughter dies when ineptitude plus power = harm. ******
 
Another side note - Dramaturgical thinking
If, in the scenario being described here, the Red Nose Clown was portrayed as vulnerable and tender-hearted, it would evoke too much pathos. One of the basic rules of comedy is Contrast – in this Enforced Performance Line-up scenario, any hurt to the Red Nose would eclipse the suffering of the Dark Clowns or bring us to tears and take us (the audience) off the hook. Once in the voice of the Controller, I commanded a Line-up participant to sing. He sang too beautifully. It was exquisite. So exquisite, I had to call the exercise to a halt. We all transcended and felt sorrow (not one of the Marginalised Emotions). It made a moment too poetic for this particular Dark Clown exercise, where compassion is forbidden because it is too humanising. The predicament of the line-up scenario in particular is designed to create conflict (and awful choices), which helps the players release the Marginalised Emotions and which helps to provoke the conflicted Troubled Laughter in the audience. The above scenario works well because the predicament is awful – a playful Red Nose Clown is making it worse for the Dark Clowns.
 
‘And my poor fool is hanged’ … 
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. Wonderful if the pathos still keeps the audience on the hook, though – take a look at 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.) 
 
Finally, only the Red Nose Clown was left on stage. A noose was thrown on stage. Disobeying the chronology of events (do leaders of such a ghastly regime care if the script pages are all present or in order?), we are at the death of Cordelia. Red Nose gleefully put the noose around his neck. Everything is still a game.
 
I side-coached this excellent young acting student to arrange that the Clown discover by increments that he can actually feel pain after all. Delightfully, he enjoyed playing the fun of wearing the noose like a fashion scarf, the problems, failures and triumphs of stepping up on the chair, then the great feat of standing on the chair! Next the repeated upward throwing of the rope but finding no place to support it. Not to be bested, the resourceful Red Nose tightens the noose, expressing surprise that it in fact pinches a bit - ouchy! - but he laughs and repeats, then whoopsy, losing balance; best sit for safety; oh look it’s a neck tie, I’m a business man; musn’t get sidetracked, the business in hand! etc. He reprises the game of pain and release, sharing all his thinking and emotions with us. New game! A lazzi of suffocation. He really makes the lack of breath look painful, but manages still to telegraph to the audience: ‘What fun!’ A game of pressure and release, game of puffed-out cheeks etc. He keeps delivering all sorts of beats of perplexment, curiousity, pain, the fun of the new, surprise, and fear. Next, a game of how hard it is to keep up the pressure on the rope – he mimes: ‘Phewph, hard work!’, shakes his arm out, tries again. With clown optimism and determination, he redoubles his efforts. Lots of funny little sounds, good rhythm play plus delivering ‘believable’ levels of pain and sharing all the micro-emotions with us, then … the inevitable. 
The actor / clown went limp and flowed headfirst onto the floor from his seated position like one of Salvador Dali’s timepieces. A final frozen thumbs up holds, then drops.
 
‘Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither.’
 

* For the sake of simplicity, whenever I refer to Clown or Red Nose Clown in these posts, I refer to my own understanding and conception of the form, informed by Clown work as I experienced it with Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier. There is no one style of clowning. Just to add too, that for me (and some others), actually wearing the little mask of the red nose is not absolutely essential to clowning. I mostly teach without it – especially on short courses.

** A word I use with love and respect in context of the clown!

*** 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 will have already practiced specific sound-making for a 'believable verisimilitude of pain' in the 'Torture over Ten feet' exercise.
 
**** Always with the help of the suspension of disbelief.
 
***** As for *** above - ‘a believable verisimilitude of pain and distress’.
 
****** ‘Clown’ in common usage, serves as an insult. Clowning as a conscious practice shows a generosity and courage – a practice whereby dignity (at least for the moments spent on stage) is voluntarily jettisoned in the interest of others i.e. in the hope that the ‘sad normals’ may feel, even for a moment, relief: (‘I’m not that stupid’ or ‘Thank heavens, I’m not the only one that stupid’ or ‘Oh how stupid we all are.’) Professional clowns can also can bring: wonder, a slowing of time, poetry, a critique of hierarchy. Someone in power and privilege, with a ‘winning formula’ of a ‘loveable’ clownishness – and who is behaving in ways that cause harm and difficulty to those in their care - is masquerading. They are charming but ultimately conniving.
 

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 interested 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 a useful idea: 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).
​
*** 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. 

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.

The first time I was told to 'Sing as if your life depended on it' - it was in a workshop situation, happily, not IRL - 
and I gave it my best shot.
But I remember, at the moment of hearing the instruction, feeling dumbstruck and demotivated.
For most of us in the Western world, our lives are blessed to the degree that having to actually sing for one's life is something difficult to imagine. 






​High Stakes Predicaments and Marginalised Emotions

You are standing in a hole you were forced to dig. It is wartime and it is clear this is going to be your grave. War films I saw as a child had heroic behaviour. The clown can be courageous but the clown is mainly there to show human failure. In Dark Clown terms, failure is less of a personal failing/flaw but a result of circumstances being so strong and oppressive that we are forced to jettison our own values and dignity. Later in this post I will describe an exercise I call 'Selling Yourself Out to the Enemy'.

With the Red Nose Clown, we enter Clown State and the spontaneous play follows (having greased the wheels with exercises enlivening the body and derailing the control brain, of course).

With the Dark Clown, I set up predicaments for people to imagine themselves in - Predicaments with High Stakes, so as to help people release imaginatively into the Marginalised Emotions. On a the Clown & Dark Clown workshop, before we approach the Predicaments we prime the body; visit the Emotional Zones with voice and breath; and open up awareness of patterns of rhythmic play. 

A Dark Clown Level Two Course Participant reflects

On an early Level Two Dark Clown course in Oldham 2012, I inaugurated a couple of what were at the time new exercises. One Course Participant from that course answered my recent* questionnaire* and wrote this:

'Dark Clown is an exhilarating opportunity to embody devastating emotions and to admit the inadmissible in a safe environment. Two experiences stand out for me – one I watched and one I performed. I wept with deep humiliation and guilt as I laughed, whilst watching an exercise where a workshop participant was being asked to recount what he was going to have for Christmas dinner to a child in famine-struck Ethiopia.

How could it be possible to experience two such contrasting experiences at once? How freeing it was to be able to admit to experiencing emotions that would be condemned by my upbringing?

The one I performed was the following: I was playing my cello in a concentration camp and not only my life depended on it, but so did that of all my fellow inmates. And a small detail - I did not have any instrument to play either. I relive this from time to time. I remember feeling authentic rage at the abuse of me, my instrument, my art and the co-sufferers for whom I was responsible. That experience shone a laser mirror into my soul - reflecting back a sheer and bitter bloodymindedness - of which I can now feel proud.’

Saving Private Ryan - the Steam Boat Willie Scene 

There is a scene in Saving Private Ryan - I sat and transcribed it from the film (you're welcome!)

A German prisoner with a shovel standing in a hole is handed a cigarette by his American captor. He inhales, looks at the cigarette appreciatively.

German Prisoner: American? I like America - Steamboat Willie. Toot toot!
 
Steamboat Willie’s American …
 
More soldiers come with their guns at the ready. He stops smoking the cigarette he was given.
 
Ich bin gar nichts fertig. Es muss noch mehr tiefer geworden. (trans: I'm not ready. It's got to be much deeper.)
 
US Soldier: That’s what you think.

One soldier grabs the Prisoner.
 
German Prisoner: Nein (it’s a sob)
 
He jumps back in the grave and starts to dig vigorously.

 ... noch nichts fertig ...
 
He looks at gun and begs:
 
Please…

Resumes energetically digging.

I like America! Fancy Shmancy, go fly a kite, Cat got your tongue, cool beans! Betty Boop, what a dish! 
Betty Gable, nice gams ... sings: "I say can you see, I say can you see, I say".
... Fuck Hitler ... FUCK HITLER!

'Selling Yourself Out to the Enemy' Scenario

Giving the example of this scene from Saving Private Ryan, I asked the group: can you think of  a person or group whose values are in opposition to yours?

The Course Participant I quoted earlier threw her hand up. 'The Taliban! I'd like to do the Taliban!'
So she did. The improvisation went something like this:

I love your approach to justice! I agree with you. Women should be covered up, women should not speak - not like me, now, speaking to you. Gah! Speaking to herself, shouting: SHUT UP! See?! And women, women should be covered, Yes, Silent. Silent! SHUT UP! 
And invisible! Yes!
She held her hands in front of her face, she desperately tried to hide her uncovered areas.
Speaking about herself: Gah! Disgusting! beating her own bare arms: Disgusting!
Western women are disgusting! Let me show you - Beyonce, yes? Skimpy leotard. Give me a machete, I'll show her! Take that, Beyonce!
She waved an imaginary blade about as if hacking at Beyonce. Gah! Take that! More hacking.
Singing: 'Single ladies' No! no singing. Death - death to western women ... Death to Beyonce!
She held her arms out pleadingly:
I can help you. Gahh, my arms sorry about my arms - I'll chop them off, look ... look ... look!
Death to women who speak! And think! Gah! Beyonce! Oprah, Mary Beard. More hacking. At the imaginary women, at her own arms.
​'Who runs the world?' You! You the Taliban. I'll ... I'll grow a beard, yes! Let me join you, please.  Please?
​Please!

See here the many comedy craft games involved to make this Dark Clown scene work (aiming to generate laughter even while generating a believable portrait of desperation and fear): physical games, the games of repetition (of words, of movement motifs), the game of solution/new problem and the breath and emotions all employed with variety and calibration i.e.responding to the audience (reacting hopefully or anxiously to laughter or other audience reactions as if responding to the reactions of the enemy). All with the aim of generating  the experience of Troubled Laughter for the workshop audience.

The talented comic performer Trixie Mattel said in an interview somewhere: 'Comedy is the intersection between specificity and exaggeration.'

The more vivid and specific the predicament is, the more the Dark Clown player can launch off into the Marginalised Emotions and flights of fancy caused - not by wonder (as for Red Nose Clown) - but through the imaginative investment in a high stakes predicament and the cathartic joy of employing and enjoying an agile vocal and physical play to depict extreme desperation, fear, alarm.

The Dark Clown performer needs a good predicament,  and then to be able to Mine the Predicament - choosing things to say that make logical, emotional, dramaturgical sense; things that will keep the audience on the hook. To Mine the Predicament, the Dark Clown performer also needs to find agile changes in rhythm, timbre and emotion in relation to the audience's reactions, or in reacting to the previous thing they themselves did. Things can be extraordinary (in extremis, we do not cry or flinch in socially inflected ways), but the suffering must be believable - there can be no sense of the clown enjoying shocking us by appearing to relish the pain or enjoy the exaggeration for its own sake. As soon as the Dark Clown performer comments on or adopts a self-indulgent grotesquerie, the audience is let off the hook, and the laughter is no longer a Troubled Laughter - i.e. a laughter born of / or containing conflict.

* The questionnaire is for 'graduates' of the Clown & Dark Clown course  and or the Level Two Dark Clown course. Any 'graduates' reading this I welcome your contributions! Write to me and I'll send you the questionnaire.

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

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

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

Carefully set up in an ethically held space - performers get a chance to invest imaginatively in high stakes, where energy and expressivity is released. 

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

The joy of connection is nurtured during the process.

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

These images by Robert Piwko Photography - highly recommended.

There often comes a point in a Clown & Dark Clown workshop when someone says: 'It's really dark, isn't it?'

Well, yes.

Once a participant on a workshop blurted: 'But this is Horror!!'

I replied: 'Yes, Horror - but Horror plus the skilful application of rhythm, contrast, timing, musicality and audience awareness in the service of creating, for the audience, the troubled laughter (which can potentially help them question the nature of humanity and which can help them experience a certain kind of catharsis).

When I say 'Horror' - I don't mean stabby-stabby- scariness but horror in the sense of an opportunity to see an depiction of humanity suffering under oppression (force); to see a human-being stripped of dignity and stripped of all but the most appalling choices. These, sadly, are things which have happened, and which, sadly, continue to happen daily in our strange and troubling world.

When I say catharsis...In Tragedy, the catharsis is delivered via the experience of pity and fear, or compassion and dread. Perhaps it goes like this?: pity and fear being experienced by the watcher - and embodied to a degree by this audience member whose breathing and heartbeat are affected by the visuals, music and action of a well-produced Tragedy - through this act of embodiment, might pity and fear move towards the higher vibration of compassion and dread?

Some describe catharsis as purification, but F.L. Lucas (so my friend Wikipedia tells me), believes 'purging' to be a better word. Purging is unpleasant but good (I think of a documentary I saw where monks were successfully treating drug addicts by, as a first stage, giving them a herbal concoction which caused a lot of vomiting). It seems to me that in therapy, the aim is not solely intellectual clarification, but a change for the whole being. Certainly Arnold Mindell and Dina Glouberman use physical movement in their practice, seeing it as being beneficial to bring stagnant or stuck energies into view and into flow. In my experience, the juddery laughter that we aim to create in the audience of Dark Clown work can provide a literal 'shaking up', a shifting of energy. Wikipedia quotes the scholar F.L. Lucas in Lucas, F. L. Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's Poetics, p. 23. Hogarth, 1928: "In real life," he explained, "men are sometimes too much addicted to pity or fear, sometimes too little; tragedy brings them back to a virtuous and happy mean."Tragedy is then a corrective; through watching tragedy, the audience learns how to feel these emotions at proper levels." Those last italics are mine - the 'proper levels', I like this. Is the fall of a tear the 'proper' response to horrific events? As I say in the soon-to-be-released Dark Clown Documentary 'Taking Laughter to the Limits', the absurd and obscene events of horrific torture regimes seem to be better matched* by the shocked 'bwah huh huh', the sob-like laugh which is the aim of the Dark Clown work.

It is natural that attending a workshop can bring some fear - and in the case of the Dark Clown work, some people may feel fear once they start to see the depiction of human suffering. Fear that they shouldn't be watching it? Fear that they might fall into it? Fear that they won't be able to bear it? Fear that a depiction of suffering is being associated with laughter? This last fear can arise quite naturally, at an instinctive level, prompted by human decency and compassion. That is why I take care to repeat a number of times that the intention the work is not to laugh at suffering or at those who have suffered, but to provide an opportunity to witness that suffering in a context where laughter is produced - and a specific kind of laughter - not the released scot-free laughter often prompted by the Red Nose Clown, but Troubled laughter. I believe (or hold the possibility**) that laughter (even the Troubled kind) can serve the flow of feelings. The Troubled laughter is not a 'laugh at' but a laugh springing from the helpless witness (we are usually surprised into laughter***) and containing a healthy experience of shame (I recently looked for a list of negative emotions and found this website, where Karla McLaren makes a helpful distinction between 'applied' or 'foreign shame' and 'appropriate' shame). 

The very nature of laughter is movement and breath. The experience of trauma has been linked to the experience of immobility (read Peter A Levin's books 'Waking the Tiger' and 'In an Unspoken Voice'). 

I have faith in the power of human expression (not acting out, but 'authentic' - this can be a difficult word - expression). I believe that theatre practice has the ability to help dedicated practitioners open to more of humanity in general and to their own humanity - in all its complexity.

Recently I have had two invitations to offer the Dark Clown work in a personal development context. Despite my interest in personal development and in the developmental aspects of Dark Clown work and theatre practice in general; that direction is not for me.  I am not a trained therapist and have no appetite to be one. I prefer to work with people who are on a trajectory which goes beyond but includes personal development. When we work within the discipline of and commitment to theatre practice, we realise, or are taught that opening the self is necessary, and that a healthy curiousity and courage to encounter the full breadth of humanity is part of the journey with the work. When leading a Clown & Dark Clown workshop****, I aim to hold the space for the Dark Clown work with hygiene, professional discipline, specificity, compassion, and the joy that comes from courageous play. Plus a healthy sense of humour. Humour for our human failings, for our ridiculous plight. I like this quote: “The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” - Mark Twain. And I have long admired writer Kurt Vonnegut, who had known personal loss and pain and who had also survived the horrific bombing of Dresden. He would describe terrible things then leave a line and then write: 'Heigh ho.'


*in the NLP sense of 'matching' 
** thank you Grayson Perry: 'Hold your beliefs lightly.'
*** is this a useful distinction with evil laughter? Is evil laughter a laughter, not of surprise, but of relish, of intent, of geeing the self on to unkind deeds?
**** Dark Clown work is taught at the first level in the Clown & Dark Clown Course – Clown work (openness, rhythm, rules of laughter, audience awareness & audience engagement plus the experience of a shared play atmosphere for the group) prepares the ground for the Dark.  Advanced Dark Clown Courses are in development and will be available to Clown & Dark Clown course graduates.