This workshop initiates participants into the world of the clown via games and exercises that exploit breaks, cracks, and slippages in our sense of normality, rationality, and reality. In learning to accept, embrace and even delight in these “mistakes”, in that which makes us ridiculous, we discover for ourselves the clown’s transformative potential.
When we think of clowns we often think of the buffoon, the lowest member of society, someone who we take pleasure in looking down on. Yet we know instinctively that there is some hidden power residing with the clown figure, whether that shows up in us as love, empathy, laughter, sorrow, awe, fear, discomfort, or contempt. Clowns are radical because they do the things we dare not, stepping beyond the boundaries of normal behaviour, and exposing all the human flaws we spend so much effort concealing. We are all experts in playing roles and presenting masks that work to maintain the illusion of a stable and continuous identity. Clowns disrupt that continuity and let us glimpse the writhing chaos that hides beneath. In the circus, however, and even in ritual clowning, the glimpse is often brief, salutary and preventative. It reminds us of what would happen if we ever let go of our role-playing.
Traditionally, clowns have based routines around gags, choreographed slips, pratfalls, comical mistakes and misunderstandings, with the primary aim of getting laughs. Their positioning in the pauses between the high drama and virtuosic skills of conventional acts such as tight-rope walking, flying trapeze, juggling, and lion taming, reveals how they have often provided the structural “in-between” moments, a break in the drama, a breath, a release of tension that has built up. They provide the balance, contrast, relief and perspective, necessary for good entertainment. Without the foolish clowns getting it wrong, we would not appreciate the difficulty and danger of the “serious” acts. This function shares a structural resemblance with the way that ritual clowning has been theorized by anthropologists. Offering moments of temporary liminal escapism, clowning permits a radical self-reflexivity, but contained within safe ritual contexts.
This workshop starts from the perspective that clowning involves facing all directions of ourselves at the same time and laughing at the beauty of our own ridiculousness. Here, our flaws and our mistakes are our most valuable resources. And a “mistake” does not just mean a pratfall, but refers to a broader notion of inappropriateness, excess, tactlessness, self-exposure, serial non-conformism, played out in the dialogical, liminal, “betwixt and between” space between performer and audience. The dysfunctionality and failure of clowns is radical, not in the pratfalls (these are merely metaphorical) but in the act of seeing and being seen, of letting go of control of what will happen next, of re-inventing identity on the hop, of refusing to conform to convention. By witnessing this, as audience, we may be transported temporarily into a world of slippage and misfiring. By doing it, as performer, we must embrace a different modus operandi, one that presupposes nothing and which shuns finality. It is in the “authentic” discovery of our unique and universal failure that the transformative gesture of the clown is first apprehended. This requires a sense of abandonment, willingness to stand in one’s own “shit” and to engage in truly dialogical relationship with the audience.
The suggestion is that clown training can be personally and politically transformative for anybody willing to step into the chaos. Through phenomenological and experiential insight, fresh understandings of clowning as a dialogical and transformative process can be acquired.
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Nathaniel J. Harris has many years experience as a performing clown, making his first serious stage debut as one half of the extremely adult Zos & Kia- Khaos Klowns in 1994 at 10 Days That Shook the World- Anarchist Festival, to a full house at The Hackney Empire, London, where he was pleased to be sharing a dressing room with Steve Ignorant and Penny Rimbaud of C.R.A.S.S. Zos & Kia went on to perform stages in Paris and Munich. Nathaniel also received encouragement at this time from Tony Allen, a performer often attributed to having invented ‘alternative comedy’ alongside the slightly less uncompromising Alexi Sale.
His oppositional creation ‘Nathan Satan’ appeared many times in London during the later 90s, including being the only unscripted performer in the earliest productions of John Constable’s The Goose is Loose, a Mystery play commissioned by Southwark Cathedral. There were a few occasional appearances at underground events between 2000-2010. Examples from the vocal aspect of these performances were included on a recording made available in America from Original New Falcon, which has been selling consistently for over five years.
Nathaniel has also appeared as a guest performer with The Foolish People, a highly innovative and influential immersive theatre company based in London. There are plans for future collaborations later in 2011.
More recently Nathaniel’s creation Grobbly Gribbly, his first ‘child friendly’ clown, debuted at St. Paul’s Carnival, appeared as walkabout at CarniVille’s ‘The Last Resort’, at Hackney Wicked Festival, and at Shamballah, and various (often spontanious) appearances around London and Bristol. His viral internet videos have attracted the attention of Blight Productions of New York, with whom he is currently conspiring on the Viral Sockpuppetsproject. Actively involved in protest, Grobbly was recently promoted to the office of General Ridiculousness in the contemporary Clown Army.
Nathaniel has also fulfilled highly disciplined ‘spiritual clowning’ roles for many years- in the world’s largest order of Chaos Magicians (to whom laughter is ‘sacred’), and also fulfilling the office of ‘Fool’ (called also ‘Lord of Misrule’) in a hereditary witchcraft coven. As such he also has much direct experience with ‘shamanic’ techniques of consciousness shifting, including the possession performance-rituals of Voudon, as well as various techniques of quiescent meditation. He is a published author, with many years experience as an esoteric teacher, ritual leader, and public speaker. He has advised researchers on various occasions, as well as appearing in a short documentary commissioned by National Geographic.
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