Clowns and chairs

Why do clowns love to work with chairs? We'll try to find an answer on this question looking at Jon Davisons number of 2009 'the chair'.  The chair he uses is called 'chair number 14' and was designed by Michael Thonet in 1859 for the coffeehouses of Vienna. There is no chair in the world that is reproduced as often as this one, it was sold more than 50 million times already before 1930. It was the first chair to be produced industrial and the first chair the lower class could afford to have.

When we ask ourselves the question why chairs are such good tools for clowns we have to add that the chairs that work for clowns are usually quite simple chairs, functional, normal, unimpressive. Because the easiest answer on the question is that the chair is so normal, so simple, such an everyday kind of object that no one normally thinks about it and everyone knows how it is normally used. This makes it possible for clowns to be deconstructive and work with a chair in another possible way than the normative way of using a chair. Wrongness is easier understood when the correctness is known. In this number the wrongness is mainly the fact that this chair is disfunctional because it is falling apart. Jon Davison has manipulated the chair in such way that it becomes a prop. It looks at first glance normal, but then it falls apart so it's not normal. Also the way he relates to the chair is not normal, he leaves it standing there most of the time which gives us the impression he would be in a kind of relationship with it.

Clowns often use things everyone knows, can relate to and knows how they are usually used. There is endless possibilities to use those objects in (wrong) clown ways and to make performances from there. It's an important focus in the work of Jon Davison to make material for performances and build a bridge from the workshop space to actual performance. He does this in a number of ways, with his regular workshops and his Friday Flop show with his students in London, his touring workshops all over the world, his research, his own clown practice and his books.