Lucy Amsden, University of GlasgowTaPRA 2013

Finding Ones Own Clown

This paper examines the exchanges and transmissions taking place between the teacher and students in the clown workshops of Philippe Gaulier. Simon Murray suggests that the clown mask allows students to come to terms with the more ridiculous and therefore vulnerable dimensions of our personality (2003, pp. 63). To come to terms with a dimension of the personality describes a process of self-reflection, and the understanding of this side as vulnerable evokes an emotional experience. I want to draw a distinction between the ridiculous and the vulnerable in Gauliers clown training, because I believe these traits are identified in different places in the classroom, and transmitted in different ways to the student. The word ridiculous, derived from the Latin ridiculus, meaning that which excites laughter. I draw on this term, which suggests an action that provokes an embodied reaction, in order to depart from the concept of vulnerability as central to clown, as described by Leabhart and Felner. I suggest that Gaulier teaches students to find what is ridiculous about their own body, or in other words, in what ways their body can be used to make other people laugh. The term ridiculous describes the response of the spectators, and thus this skill is developed through practice of listening to the oral communication of actual audiences, in the form of fellow students.

Listening to the Audience

On his clown courses, where success is measured by laughter, Gaulier can base his own feedback on the verbal and facial expression of the students around him. A laughing audience indicates that the audience found the performance funny, and a silent audience provides the feedback that Gaulier then puts into his famously acerbic words. Lynne Kendrick describes the centrality of games and play in Gauliers pedagogy, particularly drawing on the group games at the start of Gauliers workshops, which I know as Balthazar says and Mr Hit (2010; 2011). While Kendrick draws on the rules of these games for her analysis using play theory, I understand these games to begin the process of students watching, responding to and laughing at each other.[footnoteRef:1] As people are out of Mr Hit they sit and watch the game play out, laughing, groaning and cheering the final winner. I maintain that it is the feedback of the student audience that is prioritised in the classroom, even though Gauliers mode of transmitting feedback gains much attention. Students are told to listen for laughter in this workshop: [1: Kendrick focuses her attention on the performing students experience of play and pleasure, though she does acknowledge that for Gaulier, performing students must experience pleasure, but also communicate it within the realm of the game - to fellow players, and within the theatrical frame - to the spectator(2010, p. 121-122).]

How do you find your clown? By following this saying to the letter: When laughter breaks out, the clown isnt far away. When laughter dies down, the clown goes away (Gaulier 2007, p. 289)

Here the spectator knows better than the actor, and the student must always pay attention to their (directly transmitted) feedback. Spectators are present throughout the class and provide all the feedback, the judgement and the meaning to the students performance. The student on stage does not know whether he or she has done well unless she listens to her classmates and teacher, and takes their feedback seriously.

The language used by Gaulier and Lecoq has led some to understand clown as a normally hidden, pre-socialized part of the performers self. For example, One's 'clown' is inextricably related to one's essential weakness (Leabhart 1989, p. 99), or, The individuals clown is the repressed self, repressed because its expression would entail socially unacceptable behaviour (Felner 1985, p. 164). Here, then, there is assumed a process where the student is psychologically or behaviourally liberated by the red nose mask, and by extension, by the practice of clowning. Personal weakness is connected to emotional vulnerability and the sense that the clown performer is revealing something usually hidden by social masks. These writers understand social masks to be removed using the training tool of a physical mask the red nose.

Purcell Gates finds this understanding to be a logical extension of a twentieth century understanding of the location of the self. This shift in the language used to describe the archaeology of the self from underneath in Freuds unconscious to behind in Lecoq can likely be attributed to the mask work that forms the foundation of Lecoqs pedagogy: from Neutral Mask through Larval, Expressive and Character masks and finally the Red Nose, the strongest signifier of the performers identityher faceis located behind the mask, leading to a logical slippage that positions the presence of the performers true self behind the mask of the character she is performing. (Purcell Gates, 2011)

If the student has been present, but hidden, behind masks thus far in the course, it would follow that she is (almost completely) revealed by the clown mask, which only covers a small area of the face, leaving the eyes and mouth visible. As a result, the students revealed self is a major part of how the clown body is understood and discussed at Gaulier and Lecoqs schools. In her 2011 article, Purcell Gates understands the discussion of clown students revealing their authentic interiority to be the continued circulation of conflicting ideas of selfhood and authenticity from 20th century mime practice, re-affirmed and disrupted by Gaulier. Purcell Gates concludes, the performers body signified a self that caused the spectator to respond with laughter, even as the performer was unaware of this communication (2011, p. 241). The audience thus read the students body and partially covered face to be a signifier of authentic self, even when this self were not recognized by the performer - the signal was external and dependent on the other people in the room (Purcell Gates 2011, p. 239). Although the small mask has been understood as one that reveals, leaving the clown student distinct, idiosyncratic and personal, Purcell Gates findings demonstrate that the revealed self does not need to be authentic, or recognized as such by the performer; it merely needs to be greeted with laughter by the audience.

Post-Lecoq clowns and the Red Nose

Lecoqs pedagogy of clowns was developed around the idea of the red nose as a mask, a tool that has come to signify a quest for authenticity and revelation of self in contemporary clowning, despite its origin in counter-auguste, grotesque clown (Davison 2013, p. 197). For Murray, the red nose and neutral mask are tools that frame Lecoqs pedagogy. Leabhart illustrates the significance of the red nose as mask by pointing out the stage occupied by the clown workshop in the pedagogical journey the two year course concludes with, the experience considered by all to be the most difficult and rewarding in the Lecoq method, the search for 'one's own clown' (Leabhart 1989, p. 99). The red nose is the smallest, most difficult and final mask to be studied at Lecoqs school, it occupies a climactic place in the pedagogy which suggests that the previous mask work informs it. Davison dismisses the understanding of the nose being a mask, neatly slotting into Lecoqs series of masks (2013, p. 197). Davison, believing that one can clown without a red nose (ibid), aligns himself with the teacher Mosche Cohen, who blogs that the nose is superfluous and misleading to students, who may be tempted to rely on the nose to do the clowning for them (Cohen 2012, cited by Davison 2013a, p. 197). Despite this rejection of the red nose as mask, Davison uses the same plastic noses in some of his own workshops, as pictured in photography project Clown Phenomena' (2013b). Perhaps this teacher also finds that the red nose mask has a visual function.

Clown Students at Ecole Philippe Gaulier, Summer 2009

Gauliers students, like Lecoqs, wear plastic red noses, along with individual costumes. In Gauliers practice, the red nose seems intended for use in performance, as well as being a teaching tool. In the second year clown course, there is a public performance, in which students wear red noses and costumes in sketches they have prepared in small groups (Jarmuz, 8th December 2012). Further evidence of the red nose being used in performance can be found in images from Gauliers own performance work (Leabhart 1983, p. 43 and 69; Gaulier 2007, p. 296). Gaulier emphasises what is visible around the mask, when he echoes Lecoqs phrase, This nose, the smallest mask in the worldreveals the students face, their body, their dreams, their foolishness and their shyness (or arrogance) when they reached the age of seven. (Gaulier 2007, p. 293)Here, he suggests that the small mask, by drawing attention to the students physical face and body, can reveal the less tangible dreams and foolishness of the wearer. In the images above, the faces look different from one another, and Gaulier would say that the viewer could imagine the different ways in which the clown students may dream or be foolish. Felner offers an interpretation of Decrouxs neutral mask, which also applies to the way in which Gaulier uses red noses. She says it creates a degree of abstraction that removes mime from the literal realistic plane (Felner 1985, p. 61). If we consider this function with respect to the faces above, the small masks indicates a removal from the literal, realistic plane as we recognize the cultural symbol as a signifier of the intention to make us laugh. Simultaneously, the differences between the faces, reactions, and expressions of the students shown above are highly visible, but removed from realism the faces are abstracted, and made the site of fantasy. In the classroom, and in performance, students learn to play with this distortion that does not fully disguise. If the red nose is a mask, it does not have to suggest a magical revealing power that will do the clowning for the student, or make them suddenly visible in a different way. The mask serves not only as a signifier of the cultural knowledge attached to clowns, but also as a way of abstracting the face, distorting and reimagining the face as a fantastic, or ridiculous, object.

Weakness and Ridiculousness

I propose a reading of weakness, which prioritises the moment of performance. According to Lecoq, the students confrontation of their repressed self is an action that improves their performance for the audience:We are all clowns, we all think we are beautiful, clever and strong, whereas we all have our weaknesses, our ridiculous side, which can make people laugh when we allow it to express itself (Lecoq 2002, p. 154).Lecoq explains that this laughter is the reason to search for ones own clown. If Lecoqs statement is read alongside Purcell Gates understanding of an externally negotiated self in clown performance, we can understand the clown to be presented in order to be ridiculous, and so the students weaknesses are laughter-inducing actions identified with the help of transmitted responses from an audience. The weaknesses that Lecoq sees in a clown student can be understood as her ridiculous side or, that about her that makes people laugh. As a result, the personal weakness that is understood as Lecoqs most important ingredient for clown is focused outward, toward the audience, the observers and laughers. Lecoq describes a transformation of weakness (a personal problem) into ridiculousness (at which people laugh). It is the presence of laughing student peers that enables this transformation, and the transmission of amusement in laughter that indicates its success. It is the audiences laughter that identifies the students ridiculous side.[footnoteRef:2] Immediately following this observation, Lecoq provides an example of students finding their ridiculous side, located in the body. [2: The first line of this quote is also significant. Lecoq compares clowns to a universal human condition of being weak/ridiculous despite the belief to the contrary - we all think we are beautiful, clever and strong. This self-image, of strength disrupted by the emergence of weakness, is a component of the ridiculous, and a component of the comic according to humour theorist and philosopher Marteinson (2006).]

there were students with legs so thin that they hardly dared show them, but who found, in playing the clown, a way to exhibit their skinniness for the pleasure of the onlookers. At last they were free to be as they were, and to make people laugh (Lecoq 2002, p. 154)Here the thin-legged body, previously experienced as embarrassingly imperfect, becomes ridiculous when it is shown off, demonstrated to onlookers. Lecoq complicates this idea of the ridiculous body by adding the last sentence, which places making people laugh as being parallel to being as they were. This reapplies to the ridiculous body the concept of the authentic self, with the authenticity located in weakness. Nonetheless, perhaps Lecoqs aims were not to create an introspective, therapeutic action, in which students come to terms with an aspect of their body or personality, but merely to allow students to find the thing with which they can make an audience laugh. The externally negotiated self, or ridiculous side

Both Purcell Gates externally negotiated self and the ridiculous side described by the pedagogues and practitioners point to clown performance skills being negotiated and developed with an audience. Although a student might laugh at herself, Gauliers classroom prioritises the laughter of fellow students, and the student must pay attention to what it is about her that causes laughter in her peers. The word self, even when externally negotiated, indicates authenticity, and perpetuates a discourse of interiority and even weakness that could be unhelpful in deepening an understanding of the negotiations in the classroom. Furthermore, the term weakness is misleading, suggesting a personal revelation that would induce pity for the performer in their vulnerable state an emotion that would extinguish the desired response of laughter. For this reason, the term ridiculous side is more critically useful to an understanding of clown pedagogy than notions of authentic self or personal weakness. The value of the ridiculous side is decided, and communicated by the audience, and the student learns to follow and respond to the verbal cues of the audience. Despite Gauliers use of the phrase your clown, which continues to invoke ideas of personal vulnerability, he gives to the audience the responsibility for finding the ridiculous side to his clown students.

BibliographyDavison, Jon, 2013a, Clown, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. - 2013b, "Clown Phenomena", http://www.jondavison.net, Accessed 31/7/2013.

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