That was just fun for me, meeting Antoschka in a clownworkshop

For the last week of July I invited Jon Davison over to my hometown Brussels to come give a workshop in the wonderful ‘Open Space’ of Kevin Brooking. ( I’ve written about both Jon and Kevin elsewhere on this blog). During this week we had the great honour of having the famous Russian clown Antoschka with us. Jon and she know each other from back in the day, when they used to work together, for both of them an amazing experience, they told me. You could tell that they know each other from the way she would stand her ground when she didn’t agree with his judgement about how she was doing an exercise. Like, for example in an exercise where you have to catch the ball and just listen and look at the reactions of the others and then say: It was / it was not funny. She would catch it in some kind of elaborate way and then state happily: ‘It was funny!’ On which Jon would say that she got that wrong. Her surpise couldn’t be bigger: ‘But why?!’, she’d say, describing what happened for her with the ball and how funny that was to her. ‘Yes but for now let’s define funny by other people in the circle laughing’, he’d say. By that time, of course, we were laughing.

Antoschka currently lives and works in Germany with a lot of projects going on and dreams ahead of her. She’s not intending to stop until her body can’t do it anymore and doesn’t feel different from when she was 20 years old, she said, ‘then I worked, now I work, nothing has changed’. She has had a phantastic clown carreer running already now for 45 years, has been clown in the Russian state circus and has worked with Oleg Popov. In this video you see her in the duo ‘Anton and Antoschka’ in 1981, in fact that’s where her name comes from. She introduced herself Antoschka during the workshop and we always called her like that. It wasn’t until her husband, who joined us for a drink on Friday evening, called her Catharina that we found out her real name. But, as she said, ‘there are five Catharina’s in each German Circus, and only one Antoschka.’ I agree, her invented name does more justice to a personality like hers. I’m not making her happy with my choice of video because, understandably, she finds it frustrating that everyone keeps asking her about a thing she did 35 years ago, although she is doing plenty of interesting stuff now. Antoschka, I feel you, but this video is just amazing, sorry. Just check out the other stuff she is doing people who read this. Her company is called Klunni, because, as she and her husband explained to me, it is in this Islandic word (meaning clumbsy) that our modern word ‘clown’ finds its roots.

Antoschka told me how it strikes her how many women there were in this clown workshop (I think there were 3 men participating and 12 women) and how different it was when she started studying at Circus’s Studio at Kemerovo. I said: ‘True, and still, the workshop is one thing, but in the professional world out there, there are still a lot more men than women clowns.’ She agreed with me on that one and said she thinks the reason for that is that it’s such a tough job to be a clown. ‘I always work. It’s very difficult to be a mother and a clown. I have a son, he hates the circus because he feels like he didn’t have a mother because of it.’

At the end of the week she said to me ‘holiday is over for me now’. I was suprised she called an intensive clownworkshop holiday. She said ‘ofcourse, I didn’t do anything, I just observed, that was just fun for me.’

She explained to me how her own way of running a workshop is fairly different from Jons’ way, ‘not to say one is better than the other, just different.’ In her 3 to 5 days during workshops she likes to teach students things they can immediately use, like pantomime or magic skills. At the end of the workshop she always organizes a show. ‘And the people who come to watch are always amazed.’