Normal behavior for a clown

                                           Les Rastelli clowns

Last summer I spoke with Jon Davison (London based clown, teacher, researcher, musician, .. ) about different clown matters, one of them being clown and improvisation. He said that clowns usually work with a script but even when they do improvisation they would have a kind of 'bag' of possible actions they could do, things people would expect from a clown. Behavior you could describe as 'normal behavior for a clown'. As a clown we should not want to be totally original because people would not recognize our actions as 'clown' actions, it rather would just be 'weird'. It might be helpful to look at what clowns were doing in clown history. When you're an arts student, you'd look at art history, when you do theatre, you'd study the classics, why should clown be different? Sentences like 'your clown is your inner child', might not be very helpful to everyone to find out what to actually do as a clown, at least it's not helpful to me. 

For clowns it's very normal to be carying chairs in and out the room, and to sit on the back of a chair when playing a trumpet. Or for two clowns to be playing their own music at the same time. For an august it's normal to give the audience the chance to see how his tablecloth trick actually worked. For a whiteface it's normal to be authoritarian in a playful way, to play with being authoritarian. For another august it might be normal to play on an instrument while his mate puts a burning piece of firework in it because the white face told him so. It's normal then, that the mate ends up with the top of the same instrument on his head. It's normal for a clown to have his hair circling around, like a helicopter before take off. Or to have his neck board, trousers and his big foot moving about, and for those movements to make odd sounds.

When we're trying to be contemporary clowns without looking into history, we might actually end up reinventing the wheel. There's some nice humbleness in realizing that we stand on the shoulders of giants and we owe them a hell of a lot, we can look at their work, and let it work for us. Even when we would not actually do the same things as these clowns were doing, still by looking at it we can grasp something of the logic of clowning, because clown behavior is maybe awkward, still it makes sense; it's normal behavior for a clown.