Zen and the Art of Clown Maintenance

Picture: Matus Kika

I have been thinking a lot recently about how much I enjoy the process of learning and discovering, and not so much the output bit of art. I have felt bad about not making a show (especially in the run up to the behemoth of the Arts that is Edinburgh Fringe), a thing is a tangible piece of theatre that I can reproduce for an audience as evidence that I am worthy of the label ‘artist’. Yet, as an artist, currently, I feel the most engaged than I have for a long time being part of different workshops and labs. l am enjoying being part of new research and discoveries (and making my own), working with different groups of people, often all female or non-binary. At the moment, this feels so much more enriching than being in a space by myself trying to produce something appreciably ‘a thing’.

In ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and its sequel ‘Lila’, the protagonist Phaedra and the writer Robert Pirsig, is obsessed with the idea of Quality. What is it that makes something ‘good’? I can’t distil an author’s lifelong lifelong thinking, but very broadly, he suggests that it is something to do with process; that ‘between the subject and the object lies the value’. In other words, a large part of art is to do with the way it is made.

Picture: Kitty Winters, on her recent lab exploring clown/dance or dance/clown

On a more personal and prosaic level, I’ve been thinking about clown training, and often any serious or conservatoire theatre training, e.g. dance. I’ve been watching Amanda Abbington speaking out about her experience in the rehearsal room (to the very real detriment of her TV career) and how when making the output for Strictly Come Dancing, she experienced abuse. Aside from this potentially being about a single person’s bullying tactics (still to be legally proved or disproved — don’t sue me). There is something that remains in this kind of training that the process is a painful thing we put ourselves (or others) through in order to create a beautiful object. (For the clowns out there, yes, I’m talking about Phillipe Gaulier.)

In her interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Amanda talks about the beauty of her current rehearsal room, the joy of working in a safe environment, of being able to fail…and I think again about all those spaces where comedy is supposed to come from the failure, the flop, and yet ironically, the fear of failing paralyses the instinct to play, because according to teachers like Gaulier truth can only come from crisis, which naturally we resist. He says:

‘By dint of teaching one knows that the crises are necessary, and, even when once a class didn’t undergo a crisis, I created one artificially…if you don’t want to play you shouldn’t join the game, and the game is hard; but unlike a sporting activity, everyone is on the same side. The moment on stage is the moment of truth, and not the time for therapy.’ (Jon Wright quoting Phillipe Gaulier, writing in Total Theatre, 1990)

My feeling is that I know what it feels like to have a crisis, to experience a breakdown, and I don’t need to have one in front of a class of people to be able to find my authentic or playful self. I find myself wondering what it might feel like to be told I can’t do something because I refuse to be complicit in this. I find myself wondering about all the spaces where I’ve trained with female clowns, and if the humour is somehow different. Maybe it is, but often it has been men in a male-dominated space who have determined, finally, and without question, the Quality (in all senses of the word) of humour.

Gender is a huge part of this discussion, and I find myself angry and resistant because of that; I don’t want it to be true, I want to argue that the men I love and play with aren’t like that. But denying it doesn’t change the reality, it doesn’t undo the systemic effect of patriarchy on me, my character, and how I behave. It is a different experience for a woman training with a man, it is a different experience, when a man pushes a woman to get angry, to let down their smiley defences, or to just keep doing something they are finding hard. It is different for so many reasons — and yet, that is the currently perceived norm in training, push the person (woman) past their ego, their defences, and that’s where the true humanity will be found. Do that, and leave them to the dirty work of self-care afterwards because you, the guru, have done your bit.

Women have been taught to be ‘good girls’, to please the figure of authority, we get very good at it, it is why we often end up with very good grades in school, but often don’t end up being tech disrupters. When women challenge patriarchal norms, we are labelled ‘feminist killjoys’, rather than that change being seen as beneficial for everyone. It is also very much a defence mechanism, learned and instinctively deployed in response to our ‘creep alarm’, the knowledge that unless we smile and play nice, in many situations, we might get hurt. To tell the guy at the bar what we really think, which is all too often ‘get fucked’ will enrage him and possibly end badly for us.

So, we can find it harder to express real and genuine anger, to be open in that way and lay ourselves bear — that defensive front (especially in front of a man with high status) can be hard to shrug off. The frustrating thing is not so much the ask, but that often we aren’t allowed to talk about the gender thing. In a mixed class with a male teacher, we can’t ask these questions because, ‘that’s not what we’re here for’; we can’t have the conversation about why we have to do things like this, and if there might be another way.

Photo: Matus Kika

What if, as we did in a recent all-female bouffon class (with Jaime Mears), we took it as read that women always have this mask, and that underneath there is something else, a non-compliant, uncompliant, mischievous woman, and what if we played with it? A bouffon will charm their audience, lure them in with laughter, be a bit naughty and then apologise profusely for crossing the line, charming them even more with their sincerity. This mask, the appeasing, disarming, sincere bouffon feels very much like how a woman needs to operate in a potentially dangerous situation. So, what if a female bouffon then turns and twists the knife? What if in this guise, this role, they get to then get you to question what that was? To hold a mirror up to you and say, what is this all about? That to me, feels like a potentially very rich performance seam to mine.

Can we can take something from Robert Pirsig’s (or Phaedra’s) thoughts about what lies ‘between the subject and the object’, and think about the maintenance of the motorcycle, rather than just using it as a machine to travel? What if the ability to take each person as they come, to have the difficult conversations, and to reflect on how we train and treat each other, and remember that the experience of learning while learning, is the actually where our experience of art begins. And that good art is art made well.