‘I want to stay and I want to leave’
A clown is always torn between two opposite poles’, says the American-Belgium clown, street artist, teacher, coach and co-founder of ‘Clowns et magiciens sans Frontière’ Belgium: Kevin Brooking. This summer he celebrated his sixtieth birthday with us.’
We got to know each other last year as we were representing Clowns et Magiciens sans frontières at street theatre festival Theatre des Nomades. We invited people to have a seat in our green tent to watch some pictures of different missions our clowns went on, to places of war and distress. “There’s a clown of the Clowns without Borders organization of Sweden who says: clown disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed”, Kevin told me. The pictures we show people in the tent are quite impressive because of all those smiling faces in contrast with the harsh circumstances those people are living in. Since we are clowns we played that the tent was an airplane and we would go around the world in 80 seconds with our passengers. We told them that it was the pilot’s first flight and flapped the tent’s window sleeve calling it air-conditioning. The ‘stewardesses’ used the clown noses as oxygen masks pointing out how much the clown nose relaxes us. Kevin asked me during the interview whether I know why the clown has a red nose. I guessed because of the august who was always drunk. Kevin’s explanation of preference is this: “Because he has fallen so often on it.”
This year we celebrated his birthday together in the lovely home, garden and in the studio the ‘zirk theatre’ of Kevin and his life companion Rachel. I followed quite some of the workshops he organized there and this year we did theatre des nomades for the second time. As a birthday gift I wanted to give him an interview to celebrate his ’60 years of happy accidents’.
On the day of the interview I crossed Place Flagey to visit him at his place only to find myself back there a little bit later. This time it was together with Kevin searching for a place where we can have a coffee and do the interview. We stranded at Chez Leo, I put on the recorder, and all felt still a bit strange. “It’s better not to call it an interview”, Kevin said. I smiled because of his shyness. We started with his favorite theme, where he might even write a book about one day.
Play
“Play is so important in our life, look at the stories people tell at funerals about the dead person. Stories such as ‘he loved to go fishing so much’ are very interesting and then they start telling us ‘he had two children’ and suddenly it becomes very boring. What our play is, what we love to do, that is so important.” I ask Kevin about something I am trying to figure out in the creation of my first clown act: “Is it important in a clown’s play to find a solution?” “There has to be a development, I don’t know whether it has to be a solution.” But after thinking a bit about it we suppose that finding strange solutions might indeed be an important part of the game of clowns. Kevin tells me how much we can learn about problem solving when going on a mission. “In Malawi we met a drummer who had no drumsticks, he used ashes from trees as drumsticks, holy cow! That’s part of the clown’s universe, of survival, that’s where play comes in to the situation. Being playful is about solving problems, being creative. It’s fantastic to go to Malawi in that sense. In Malawi, when you have a cam, a pair of scissors and a mirror, you have a barbershop. O well, you’re gonna need a chair as well. So you’re gonna have to make a chair. It’s survival.”
The circus clown
We talk about the various schools he did. He started doing mime, which was his passion. After that he went to a classical theater school in Webster. “I was a disaster there, I couldn’t do text or realistic scenes. I always did too much or too little. That’s why I went to the circus afterwards. I got this job in a traditional circus in America with three rings.” I am impressed, I never quite understand how people who did this kind of thing always talk about it as if it’s something that could happen to anyone of us, because that’s how he talks about it. I ask him: “How do get in a circus with a theater education?” He shrugs. “Well, they just fired two of their clowns, maybe they were caught drunk or something, I don’t know. Anyway, they left. There are a lot of social problems in this kind of circus. Why they took me? I showed up! I had a wig and a costume from a second hand shop, like petit riens and I put it on to do my performance but the boss said ‘Stop! You’re not going out there dressed like this!” I had to learn a whole new kind of silhouette. But I cried, I thought I was ready to go! Then they helped me to find a costume and one year later I got my shoes. That was a big deal, very symbolic. Sometimes I take those shoes to a workshop and then I ask the students: ‘how do these shoes embody clown for you?’ The colors, the size, it has something animalistic, something of a duck. Clown starts in the feet, that’s interesting to think about.” We talk about the importance of the feet for a clown. Whereas for a mime the hands are most important, it’s the feet for a clown. “I was attending a workshop where we did nothing else than to feel our feet, for two whole days, before doing something else.”
We get back to the shoes; I had already seen them at his place, put on a kind of altar like a showpiece. I told him that I’d love to make a picture of them. “Those shoes were like a badge”, he tells me. “They weren’t given to me, I had to buy them. They used to be from an old clown who sold some of his stuff. They were filled with horsehair. That was important because we played in the urban space, on parking spots and places like that, any place you could build up a tent. We called it mud shows, because your feet would get wet. So you needed shoes that would dry out, otherwise they’d start to rot.” He acts like that’s quite normal but I think it’s quite shocking that it was apparently more important that your shoes would stay good than it was that your feet would stay dry. “But couldn’t you become ill of that?” I feel naïve and spoiled but it seems so awful to me to halve to be playing a whole show with wet feet. I believe he appreciated my empathy. “We worked so hard. That was a good school in a way. We played two shows a day, eight months long. On Saturday and Sunday three shows. No days off. “You had to work like animals basically.” I concluded. Kevin laughs and says I’m right. “That’s why, when people complain about animals in the circus I go like ‘wait a minute, we are animals!”
He worked for five years in various traditional circuses all over Europe; even earned a reward at Cirque de Demain in Paris where he once had to play after two accidents had happened. One of the accidents was a clown who had an act where he threw pies at himself; he broke his nose doing that, the blood mixed with the cream. The other was a trapeze artist who fell. “When there are accidents happening the solidarity among the artists is really strong, this ‘the show must go on’ feeling and taking care of an audience that has seen these accidents. That puts some pressure on you, when you have to go out after that. I remember how nervous I was at that time, sick nervous.” He played at Cirque de Demain during his years at the theater school of Lecoq. After that he got several offers from traditional circuses but didn’t feel like doing it anymore. He’d seen it. “The circus is actually a very conservative place, at the same time it’s always new, they always sell their shows like it’s something completely new, you’ve never seen before, the biggest, the smallest, etc. but actually it’s the same thing every year.” Still, there’s beauty in the circus ring as well. He especially loves Emmett Kelly and Otto Griebling. “They were melancholic tramp clowns, very human. They performed solo, could just walk in and out of the show, that’s a fantastic position, the freedom of the ring! Emmett, for example, would start making a garden in the big ring on the very outside of the circus, where the elephants could walk. He planted seeds and sat down next to them because he was hungry! He waited for them to grow! Then he went off, the elephant act came and it totally destroyed his garden and when he came back he would grieve over his garden. Like that, he was part of the whole show.”
For Kevin, the new clown starts in the vulnerability, in emotion. “Like with Buster Keaton. Often they’re very small, but not always. Jacques Tati was a tall man using his silhouette, wearing a coat and an umbrella. He, as well, was a very touching figure, confused, out of place. People often ask about the difference between a comedian and a clown. Stand up comedy is very successful, people like it, but there’s very little emotion. We are fascinated, those people are smart and they engage us in their exiting stories. Those stories very often take place in an airplane because there’s tension - you could die!” Maybe that’s why we play that our tent is an airplane as well, to make it more exciting… “The comedian shows us the failures from society, but they don’t play the failure. The clown embodies the failure.”
Failure
“I wanted to talk with you about failure”, I say. “I am exactly the right person to talk with when it’s about failure!” he says. I say that I think it can be difficult that a clown should fail on the one hand in order to be funny but on the other hand there’s also failure possible as clown when you’re not funny. “I think it’s important to enjoy it”, he says, “not only cope with it, but really enjoy it. And that’s hard work. A good clown teacher will get you there. When you cut your finger on stage you have to show it. When you hide your finger it’s dead, then you’re no longer there.” “Did that happen to you?” I ask, “Have you done things that didn’t work?” “All the time! You have to try things! When you always do the things that work it starts to be routine, when it’s routine it stops to be alive. I always try new things, that’s positive but it can also be a problem. It’s always a risk, always on the edge, always out of balance. Some clowns, like Grock, do the same act for twenty-five years and they keep polishing it to perfection and that’s brilliant!” He seems to feel a bit melancholy about not being able to do such a thing. I can understand that, the melancholic feeling, but also not being able to do that: the need for risk, the need for novelty and even the need to feel out of balance. “Grock was a very good actor”, he continues, “A good clown is also a good actor because, no matter how he feels personally, he has to be able to play with the situation.” I know what he means, that’s what I’m working on from the beginning of my clown adventure on: gaining this distance to your self. “Grock was like a huge child, he played with failure and success. He had interesting tricks that succeeded, but they succeeded by accident. Like, he would fall through his chair and then jump to the back of it, very elegant. Jumping from failure to success, but he didn’t think that out, it just happened.”
Complicité
The crucial thing about coping with failure, again, is play. It’s about letting go our normal way of thinking about who’s better and who’s worse and let our play be rooted in complicité. “That means moving more or less in the same direction. Being open and disponible, open and ready. But not like the ready, set, go of a match. In a match it’s all about winning, everyone has his own goal and does the same thing. You can play with wanting to win, like in a slow motion race, diving holes for each other and stuff like that, but you don’t really care. Clowns often do very different things but they have the same goal. You don’t have to agree with each other but you move more or less in the same direction. Listening is a very important part of complicité, that’s what children do when they play, they trade off, they listen, action, reaction. Complicité is a beautiful word; we need that, that capability, because we stopped playing. Often it is because we think things should be like this. Maybe that’s also the problem with failure, when you don’t think you have to succeed, you can’t fail. The clown is so innocent that he doesn’t know he’s a hero. He walks through a minefield to go get a babies dummy, but he doesn’t know it’s a minefield. That innocence.” Kevin says that a clown is always in between two opposing poles and that also counts for being funny. “Clowns are funny because it’s their nature to be funny but he’s not trying to be funny. There’s already a tension between those poles.” I say: “Yes, but it does have an effect on you, when people laugh about you…” and realize that it might be the point that this feeling is that good that you can start wanting it too badly. “Yes, as a person it has an effect on you, we love to make people laugh, it’s so nice, it’s the best feeling in the world! But does your clown know that people laugh about you? That’s the question. It depends on the situation… The point is to find your personal contradiction. In the middle, between those poles, there is your clown. When you are a shy show off for example. Avner, the Eccentric calls himself that, that’s perfect! Between your poles you’re stuck, you can’t move. It’s like ‘I want to stay and I want to leave’. That’s a super improvisation for a clown. You are torn, full of emotion. One of my favorite improvisations is the one where one clown asks the other to watch his apple for a minute; he’s just getting some water. And the clown is torn, he wants to eat the apple but he can’t eat it, that’s fantastic!” So, when I understand it right, this also counts for failure and success, the clown stands right between those poles, not on one side of them, and standing in between he puts both of them in perspective. We end the ‘interview we shouldn’t call an interview' and which he liked doing in retrospective by saying that the most important thing our society can learn from clown is not to be so important. “The greatest achievement of the clown is to make fun of himself and that’s what conquers our pride and every war starts with pride. Clown gives us perspective on who we are without pride. Who we are PUNTO”
When we cross place Flagey again he tells me how much he loves watching children playing with the water from the fountains there and how much he learns from it. He wonders why water is so fascinating to children. “Maybe because the water is alive”, he suggests. I have to think about what he said earlier, that clowns are like water because they can go everywhere.
We got to know each other last year as we were representing Clowns et Magiciens sans frontières at street theatre festival Theatre des Nomades. We invited people to have a seat in our green tent to watch some pictures of different missions our clowns went on, to places of war and distress. “There’s a clown of the Clowns without Borders organization of Sweden who says: clown disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed”, Kevin told me. The pictures we show people in the tent are quite impressive because of all those smiling faces in contrast with the harsh circumstances those people are living in. Since we are clowns we played that the tent was an airplane and we would go around the world in 80 seconds with our passengers. We told them that it was the pilot’s first flight and flapped the tent’s window sleeve calling it air-conditioning. The ‘stewardesses’ used the clown noses as oxygen masks pointing out how much the clown nose relaxes us. Kevin asked me during the interview whether I know why the clown has a red nose. I guessed because of the august who was always drunk. Kevin’s explanation of preference is this: “Because he has fallen so often on it.”
On the day of the interview I crossed Place Flagey to visit him at his place only to find myself back there a little bit later. This time it was together with Kevin searching for a place where we can have a coffee and do the interview. We stranded at Chez Leo, I put on the recorder, and all felt still a bit strange. “It’s better not to call it an interview”, Kevin said. I smiled because of his shyness. We started with his favorite theme, where he might even write a book about one day.
Play
“Play is so important in our life, look at the stories people tell at funerals about the dead person. Stories such as ‘he loved to go fishing so much’ are very interesting and then they start telling us ‘he had two children’ and suddenly it becomes very boring. What our play is, what we love to do, that is so important.” I ask Kevin about something I am trying to figure out in the creation of my first clown act: “Is it important in a clown’s play to find a solution?” “There has to be a development, I don’t know whether it has to be a solution.” But after thinking a bit about it we suppose that finding strange solutions might indeed be an important part of the game of clowns. Kevin tells me how much we can learn about problem solving when going on a mission. “In Malawi we met a drummer who had no drumsticks, he used ashes from trees as drumsticks, holy cow! That’s part of the clown’s universe, of survival, that’s where play comes in to the situation. Being playful is about solving problems, being creative. It’s fantastic to go to Malawi in that sense. In Malawi, when you have a cam, a pair of scissors and a mirror, you have a barbershop. O well, you’re gonna need a chair as well. So you’re gonna have to make a chair. It’s survival.”
The circus clown
We talk about the various schools he did. He started doing mime, which was his passion. After that he went to a classical theater school in Webster. “I was a disaster there, I couldn’t do text or realistic scenes. I always did too much or too little. That’s why I went to the circus afterwards. I got this job in a traditional circus in America with three rings.” I am impressed, I never quite understand how people who did this kind of thing always talk about it as if it’s something that could happen to anyone of us, because that’s how he talks about it. I ask him: “How do get in a circus with a theater education?” He shrugs. “Well, they just fired two of their clowns, maybe they were caught drunk or something, I don’t know. Anyway, they left. There are a lot of social problems in this kind of circus. Why they took me? I showed up! I had a wig and a costume from a second hand shop, like petit riens and I put it on to do my performance but the boss said ‘Stop! You’re not going out there dressed like this!” I had to learn a whole new kind of silhouette. But I cried, I thought I was ready to go! Then they helped me to find a costume and one year later I got my shoes. That was a big deal, very symbolic. Sometimes I take those shoes to a workshop and then I ask the students: ‘how do these shoes embody clown for you?’ The colors, the size, it has something animalistic, something of a duck. Clown starts in the feet, that’s interesting to think about.” We talk about the importance of the feet for a clown. Whereas for a mime the hands are most important, it’s the feet for a clown. “I was attending a workshop where we did nothing else than to feel our feet, for two whole days, before doing something else.”
He worked for five years in various traditional circuses all over Europe; even earned a reward at Cirque de Demain in Paris where he once had to play after two accidents had happened. One of the accidents was a clown who had an act where he threw pies at himself; he broke his nose doing that, the blood mixed with the cream. The other was a trapeze artist who fell. “When there are accidents happening the solidarity among the artists is really strong, this ‘the show must go on’ feeling and taking care of an audience that has seen these accidents. That puts some pressure on you, when you have to go out after that. I remember how nervous I was at that time, sick nervous.” He played at Cirque de Demain during his years at the theater school of Lecoq. After that he got several offers from traditional circuses but didn’t feel like doing it anymore. He’d seen it. “The circus is actually a very conservative place, at the same time it’s always new, they always sell their shows like it’s something completely new, you’ve never seen before, the biggest, the smallest, etc. but actually it’s the same thing every year.” Still, there’s beauty in the circus ring as well. He especially loves Emmett Kelly and Otto Griebling. “They were melancholic tramp clowns, very human. They performed solo, could just walk in and out of the show, that’s a fantastic position, the freedom of the ring! Emmett, for example, would start making a garden in the big ring on the very outside of the circus, where the elephants could walk. He planted seeds and sat down next to them because he was hungry! He waited for them to grow! Then he went off, the elephant act came and it totally destroyed his garden and when he came back he would grieve over his garden. Like that, he was part of the whole show.”
For Kevin, the new clown starts in the vulnerability, in emotion. “Like with Buster Keaton. Often they’re very small, but not always. Jacques Tati was a tall man using his silhouette, wearing a coat and an umbrella. He, as well, was a very touching figure, confused, out of place. People often ask about the difference between a comedian and a clown. Stand up comedy is very successful, people like it, but there’s very little emotion. We are fascinated, those people are smart and they engage us in their exiting stories. Those stories very often take place in an airplane because there’s tension - you could die!” Maybe that’s why we play that our tent is an airplane as well, to make it more exciting… “The comedian shows us the failures from society, but they don’t play the failure. The clown embodies the failure.”
Failure
“I wanted to talk with you about failure”, I say. “I am exactly the right person to talk with when it’s about failure!” he says. I say that I think it can be difficult that a clown should fail on the one hand in order to be funny but on the other hand there’s also failure possible as clown when you’re not funny. “I think it’s important to enjoy it”, he says, “not only cope with it, but really enjoy it. And that’s hard work. A good clown teacher will get you there. When you cut your finger on stage you have to show it. When you hide your finger it’s dead, then you’re no longer there.” “Did that happen to you?” I ask, “Have you done things that didn’t work?” “All the time! You have to try things! When you always do the things that work it starts to be routine, when it’s routine it stops to be alive. I always try new things, that’s positive but it can also be a problem. It’s always a risk, always on the edge, always out of balance. Some clowns, like Grock, do the same act for twenty-five years and they keep polishing it to perfection and that’s brilliant!” He seems to feel a bit melancholy about not being able to do such a thing. I can understand that, the melancholic feeling, but also not being able to do that: the need for risk, the need for novelty and even the need to feel out of balance. “Grock was a very good actor”, he continues, “A good clown is also a good actor because, no matter how he feels personally, he has to be able to play with the situation.” I know what he means, that’s what I’m working on from the beginning of my clown adventure on: gaining this distance to your self. “Grock was like a huge child, he played with failure and success. He had interesting tricks that succeeded, but they succeeded by accident. Like, he would fall through his chair and then jump to the back of it, very elegant. Jumping from failure to success, but he didn’t think that out, it just happened.”
Complicité
The crucial thing about coping with failure, again, is play. It’s about letting go our normal way of thinking about who’s better and who’s worse and let our play be rooted in complicité. “That means moving more or less in the same direction. Being open and disponible, open and ready. But not like the ready, set, go of a match. In a match it’s all about winning, everyone has his own goal and does the same thing. You can play with wanting to win, like in a slow motion race, diving holes for each other and stuff like that, but you don’t really care. Clowns often do very different things but they have the same goal. You don’t have to agree with each other but you move more or less in the same direction. Listening is a very important part of complicité, that’s what children do when they play, they trade off, they listen, action, reaction. Complicité is a beautiful word; we need that, that capability, because we stopped playing. Often it is because we think things should be like this. Maybe that’s also the problem with failure, when you don’t think you have to succeed, you can’t fail. The clown is so innocent that he doesn’t know he’s a hero. He walks through a minefield to go get a babies dummy, but he doesn’t know it’s a minefield. That innocence.” Kevin says that a clown is always in between two opposing poles and that also counts for being funny. “Clowns are funny because it’s their nature to be funny but he’s not trying to be funny. There’s already a tension between those poles.” I say: “Yes, but it does have an effect on you, when people laugh about you…” and realize that it might be the point that this feeling is that good that you can start wanting it too badly. “Yes, as a person it has an effect on you, we love to make people laugh, it’s so nice, it’s the best feeling in the world! But does your clown know that people laugh about you? That’s the question. It depends on the situation… The point is to find your personal contradiction. In the middle, between those poles, there is your clown. When you are a shy show off for example. Avner, the Eccentric calls himself that, that’s perfect! Between your poles you’re stuck, you can’t move. It’s like ‘I want to stay and I want to leave’. That’s a super improvisation for a clown. You are torn, full of emotion. One of my favorite improvisations is the one where one clown asks the other to watch his apple for a minute; he’s just getting some water. And the clown is torn, he wants to eat the apple but he can’t eat it, that’s fantastic!” So, when I understand it right, this also counts for failure and success, the clown stands right between those poles, not on one side of them, and standing in between he puts both of them in perspective. We end the ‘interview we shouldn’t call an interview' and which he liked doing in retrospective by saying that the most important thing our society can learn from clown is not to be so important. “The greatest achievement of the clown is to make fun of himself and that’s what conquers our pride and every war starts with pride. Clown gives us perspective on who we are without pride. Who we are PUNTO”
When we cross place Flagey again he tells me how much he loves watching children playing with the water from the fountains there and how much he learns from it. He wonders why water is so fascinating to children. “Maybe because the water is alive”, he suggests. I have to think about what he said earlier, that clowns are like water because they can go everywhere.
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