Professionalism and clowning

As a member of the clowns without borders organization of Belgium, I find that 'professionals' and 'non professionals' are not cooperating in the most productive way thinkable. Why not? Well, there is a tendency, among the ones who consider themselves 'a professional' clown, to limit the people who are, in their opinion, 'unprofessional' clowns. Personally I think it's really easy to see that one person limiting another persons' possibilities by naming some kind of criteria is anything but professional.

Professionalism is not decided by whether you earn money with it, whether you did the right schooling, whether you have cool equipment, a lot of skills, or even a big mouth, it's an attitude. And actually, it's a humble attitude. Not only in clown, in any field.

Professionalism, I will define, by knowing your own bounderies and being able to see which part of them you have to accept and which part you can and want to push, and maybe even having an idea of how you want to do it.

Unprofesional behavior on the other hand is usually caused by taking oneself more important than the thing one choose to do, in this case: clowning.

There's a part where it's just work, and there's a part where it's letting go and being easy and relaxed about it.

Professionality is to see which is which.

No one is always professional in his/her behaviour and no one is always unprofessional, therefore I think we can only speak of professional behavior and not of a professional person.

Unprofessional behavior makes that the clowns without borders network of Belgium, despite all its very good work and beautiful intentions, has a member network of about 150 members who would very much WANT to engage themselves for the organization in some way or another and only about 20 members who really do something. The active ones are merely the ones who call themselves professional, but who, unfortunately don't succeed in including the others. A real professional attitude should be able to 'share'. What should it share? It's experience.

Because we can't say a person who gains money from clowning is better than someone who gains money with doing something different and who invests as much as free time in clowning as s/he possible can, but we can simply say that the first has more experience. Rather than using this difference in a way that excludes the latter from playing, though, it would be a professional way to go to let the latter play with the first, and to always be teaching and learning from each other at the same time. This is a method proven very productive by clown history and that makes sense. In clown, skill and non skill, virtue and non virtue, smart and stupid, are often the best pairs, resulting in the funniest and most recognisable situations, where the non skilled one finally steals the show because actually people tend to sympathise with the underdog.

The world needs more clowns and more clowning, the best would be when anyone, really anyone (whatever their other activities might be), would clown through life right? Not just a few chosen ones with the right education to be allowed to do so! Like other organizations campaign the importance of what they stand for, we campaign the importance of humour. We believe it's better to die laughing than to live a long life without laughter. That's why we go and bring clowning to dangerous places, isn't it? Laughter is what we stand for. We don't stand for one person feeling better than another and the other person feeling hurt because the first, etc. Please, no! The ones who really devote their lifes to clowning can inspire the ones who don't and the other way around as well. Change seperation for inspiration.

We are definitely missing chances to play with our potential when we're not bringing playfulness in this situation. Now it seems that a 'professional' solo artist going to a refugee centre is fine, whereas I feel it would be so much better when this person would go together with someone who doesn't have experience yet.

And why not? Because there's a higher risk that it fails? Since when is clowning about avoiding any risk?? Because it costs more effort? But it's also more fun! When we go to a refugee centre we don't want to show off what kind of good organization with very skilled people we are. We wan't to show them some humble clowns causing laughter through playfulness. Let's just please never forget that.