Clown training: a mental – or a physical affair?

A clown is someone who feels
confident while falling on his face,

and insecure while getting uo and
finding back his balance.
- Andre Riot-Sarcey - 

I started doing a slapstick course recently and since then, I can’t stop trying things out wherever I am. The street has in fact become one big playground – every threshold, every edge of a sidewalk is a chance to stumble and fall. Waiting at a traffic light, I chase my boredom away by practicing destabilisation – I lean over towards one direction and just before falling over I re-find balance while leaning over towards another one. Several people got very worried about me and asked if I am drunk already. Next time when I practice on the street, maybe I should put on a wig or something to give a clear signal that ‘something funny is about to happen’, so that the passers-by wouldn’t have to doubt or worry but have fun?

This slapstick course has its roots in acrobatics and thus attracts both clowns and acrobats. For the clown participants, the aspect of physical training is quite a challenge. For the acrobats, the physical part is easier than what they are used to, but I’ve heard them saying that they find their normal acrobatic courses less tiring because this one is mentally tricky and full of paradoxes. Like the fact that you need to surprise yourself and put your body at risk ‘for real’ and not ‘just pretend’ while the element of pretence is still there – you know that you are going to do it, you just learn to do it without hurting yourself.

Most clown workshops nowadays seem to focus on the training of mental clown skills, although the body may be used as a tool to produce clowning too while dancing, meditating, throwing a ball, making a silly move, rolling on the floor and so on. Nonetheless, the primary goal of these physical activities is never to learn to dance or to get better at throwing a ball (you might though) but to embrace and sell your very ridiculousness. Whether the workshop is rooted in the philosophical, ideological or spiritual ideas its purpose seems to be to rewire the brain or change our habitual behaviour and perception of the world. By the way, I am referring to the regular evening, weekend or one-off clown workshops that are open to everyone. In the full-time physical theatre or circus schools, clown training is different (if there’s one in the curriculum, of course).

To stumble, to trip, to fall, to destabilise yourself or others or do the tricks with ordinary objects – one could consider such actions as physical clown skills:

The Colombaioni’s training seems to have exclusively consisted of teaching clowning as a physical technique. Born into an Italian circus family, brothers Carlo and Alberto got ‘kicked out’ of it for giving away their family secrets to some hippies. Consequently, they devoted themselves to teaching street artists all the clown skills they had learnt. This video is from 1968 but journalist Gerard Jansen reports to have seen Carlo, who was in his late 80s at the time, teaching in that same ‘old-fashioned’ way in the masterclass in Cannes in 2007.

While hitting your head against the table might alter your brains quite literally, all that the Colombaioni brothers seem to care about is their students mastering the visual illusion. Like the side-effect of getting better at dancing or throwing a ball as part of the mental clown training, physical training might also change the way students perceive things but that’s not its objective. The focus is not on how the performer sees things but what the audience gets to see. Janssen writes that to him, the most fun was to see students practicing on the streets, bumping into the walls and streetlights, and the faces of the passers-by. One day, as Janssen recalls, the lamppost wasn’t attached to the ground well enough and when the student bumped into it, it fell right onto a very expensive car… That’s when clowning transforms from a physical to a very costly affair.

The remaining question though – how do students transmit these physical clown skills into praxis? It could be amusing to visit a workshop like the Colombaioni’s one and watch students practicing on the streets, but you would know that they are clown students. How to get ‘innocent’ passers-by from worrying about them to laughing at/with them? When does training, mental and/or physical become a full-fledged technique producing slapstick clowning outside of the classroom?

Learning something at first is very exciting, new and unexpected and the reaction hence is different from when you have done the same action thousands of times. Clown training lacks opportunities focusing on combining physical skills with the comic which may be related to the removal of the clown role in the modern circus. On the other hand, those who have the skill face the paradox of a performer-virtuoso. How to merge technique which is mechanical with the ways of expressing yourself in the here-and-now? And especially, if you are after laughter, how do you make a skilful falling funny instead of it being merely admired as an acrobatic stunt? To tackle this question, it might be helpful to have a look at the traditional circus routine which combines acrobatics with the rough-and-tumble slapstick:

Is it the fact that they are very well-trained acrobats alternating their acrobatic training with the skilful falling that makes it clear for the spectators that it’s just a game and they feel reassured that it’s just (for) fun? Or rather than the physical prowess or visual appearance maybe it’s the intention that matters most? One of my fellow course-mates told me that the other day with her friend she walked into a café (looking normally) and promptly said to her: ‘Wait, I’m going to do something funny!’ Walking towards the counter she tripped at some point causing a sudden outburst of laughter across the café. Maybe this thought, ‘I am going to do something funny’ turns the action into a kind of game which could work as a signal for people around you to know that what you do is ‘for fun’ and not ‘for real’? I think it’s fair to say that the pretence of the clown-acrobats is apparent and plays an important part. Their bodies may be put at real risk, but the manner they express themselves tells us that as real as it is, it’s just for fun. In this way they turn what would normally be a painful experience into a means of pleasure.

André Riot-Sarcey, ‘Le clown est l’avenir de femme’, Avant-Garde cirque! Les arts de la piste en revolution, 2001, pp. 99-115

Article by Gerard Jansen (2016) www.vn.nl/carlo.colombaioni-clowns/