Breaking My Fast and Singing for My Supper
Issue No. 6
Dear Reader,
I want to acknowledge the large gap in my dispatches. Quite candidly, I needed to take a break - a break from the clown scene (it is a scene at the end of the day) and a break from performing as a clown.
To be a clown is to commit yourself to vulnerability, to put yourself in front of an audience over and over and to give them the power to guide what you do on stage. It’s very difficult work, and I was losing the joy in it.
Deciding to take a break was hardly a simple, pain free process. As a performer, stage time is my breakfast lunch and dinner, so feeling a resistance to performing felt completely alien. I had to eat didn’t I? At first I tried to reason my way out of it - I need more reps. When that inevitably didn’t work, I wagered,
“I need to work on devising! If I have material instead of grasping in the empty space of total improv chaos, I’ll enjoy performing again!”
Instead, all this mental gymnastics was inadvertently putting even more pressure on my performances.
I remember a particularly horrible show I had. Leading up to it, I felt this huge pit in my stomach that never lifted. It just grew intolerably large, until the day of the show arrived, I got onstage, blacked out, got offstage and started balling. I was not present. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t play, I didn’t discover anything, and I had zero fun. I crept away from the theater in shame, leaving before anyone had a chance to make eye contact and say anything to me.
If you’re not yourself a clown, or familiar with the work, it’s worth mentioning that performing as a clown isn’t the same as performing ballet or Shakespeare. In other theatrical performances, there's a sort of womb like void in stepping into the dark theater, imagining a big mass of an audience appreciating you. You can choose to imagine they love you, they’re entranced, or you can just tune into your scene partner, your text and immerse yourself in the fictitious world you’re on stage to enact. With clown, the audience’s judgment, good bad and ugly is a primary driver of what you the clown listens to when you’re on stage. You see every face, every frown and every flash of delight. A clown is after all the ultimate people pleaser and I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent thousands of dollars in therapy at this point to undo my people pleasing tendencies.
The thing about working so closely with vulnerability is you have to have built up some good solid foundations in yourself and your support system to recharge after you give it all up on stage. We clowns step out from behind the curtain, desperate to be loved, doing everything in our faculties to win the audience over. And sometimes, we don’t succeed. We aren’t loved. At the end of these kinds of performances, the real person, who shared their real self and actually tried really hard? That person goes home devastated (me).
Going home devastated over and over again became too difficult. I was tender, I was tired of being so vulnerable. My support system had crumbled around me. I was working with teachers who refused to direct me, and many of the friends I had counted on and developed really strong bonds with at the start of my clown journey were not there for me anymore. I didn’t feel seen and affirmed in my normal everyday life and putting myself on stage to be unseen and unaffirmed anew wasn’t it!
I am back in the mix though dear reader! A little time off to rebuild my support systems and to reassert competence in areas of my life outside of performance, helped me lower the stakes when my idiot clown didn’t get the love she so desperately wanted.
As for what I’ve been up to, thanks to a couple incredible workshops, I’m experimenting with new characters - Claire Woolner’s Sholo Show helped me find some building blocks for Svetlana and Sophia Cleary’s The Rehearsal helped me to refine her into something more coherent. Being directed by strong women/femme clowns also feels like a very welcome change of perspective. With their guidance I’ve been able to access my own power, finding ways to harness it rather than to make myself small or palatable. I also got completely rocked by Deanna Fleysher’s Drag King Workshop which has even further reinforced my desire to take up more space. In the span of two days, I discovered the many men inside of me. From the first day, we were encouraged to change our physicality to embody men - our mouths hung open slack, our hands held more space, our legs splayed open, we grunted. While I’ve always known on an intellectual level that gender is a construct we grow into, over the past two days, I lived this reality. I watched the participants in the class become men in the span of a couple hours - not through costumes but through pure physicality. My “brothers” and I walked through space differently (laboriously), held our bodies during break differently (big, hulking), and generally stopped minimizing ourselves (I recall only one person apologizing during the workshop). Being a man to me meant giving myself permission and being permitted by others to do what I wanted. The workshop ended in a competition show at the Lyric. I didn’t win the challenge and of course both me and my character, a British bloke named Tony Flair, were gutted. But I did have fun. I didn’t feel dread. I did feel resourced, supported, seen and directed.
Ironically, the one piece of constructive feedback I got after the show was that I didn’t leave space for the other participants. That I was too much of an attention seeker. Not surprisingly, it also came from a man. Still dressed as Tony, I explained, it wasn’t my goal to be paying attention to the other contestants and whether or not they had enough stage time - Tony was there to win, to connect with the audience, and to make big bold choices.
So here's to giving myself permission to take up space, even when the wig and the eyeliner beard is gone, and my jaw closes back up again into an approachable little smile.
In the spirit of this, I’m going to continue to take these characters out on the town in front of different types of audiences. It would mean a whole lot if you’d like to come support me! Until next time, stay stupid!
Clown About Town
Your Guide To clown events. To submit an event, please email me.
Here are my recommendations for show’s this week:
A Shtar is Born April 3 (Sarah Shtern)
Maam April 9 (Nikki Hartung)
Quality Time April 6 (Isabella Kulkarni)
Bad, Wrong & Up To No Good (Alex Derderian and friends)
WORKSHOPS:
Language of Nonsense w/ Chad Damiani May 5-7
Pandemonium w/ Christopher Bayes May 5-10, 12-17
BIT BUILDERS
Clown Storm (April 7), ticket link
OPEN MICS:
Brain Rot Thursdays at 5:30-7 pm w/ Sarah Shtern
Gee whiz…clowning sounds painful!