When I arrive at the core clowning class at the Clown Conservatory, the students are sprawled out on the gym floor, wearing an idiosyncratic, appropriately comical array of workout garb. They are giving their weekly book reports. Academic work is included in the curriculum here; over the course of the year, the clowns-in-training read four texts and endless magazine articles about the art and history of clowning.
The Clown Conservatory is the only yearlong professional training program for clowns in North America. It is a program of the Circus Center, founded in 1993, and located, not accidentally, in San Fran-cisco, where the seminal Pickle Family Circus originated 30 years ago. From that highly regarded nouveau cirque emerged such renowned jesters as Larry Pisoni, Geoff Hoyle, and Bill Irwin. The renamed Pickle Circus operates under the auspices of the Circus Center. Clown Conservatory director and performer Jeff Raz, and other teachers at the center, are Pickle vets. Now in its fifth year of operation, the Clown Conservatory will have graduated a total of 60 circus-ready students by June.
This group of 15–20 first-year men and women, ranging in age from 20 to 41, is in the middle of its second semester and has clearly bonded; I see the members giving one another backrubs and neck massages. There's an easy, joshing physicality here that you don't see in a scene-study class. (A much smaller, second-year program focuses on individual coaching.) They hail from Texas, Atlanta, France, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, the Bay Area, and elsewhere, with varied backgrounds: dance, acting, improvisation, and physical theatre training at Dell'Arte (the Circus Center's big-sister school in rural Northern California).
Classes take up 15 hours a week: Alexander technique, mime, dance, Chinese acrobatics, improv, commedia, circus skills, physical theatre, and this core clowning class, taught by Raz, which covers French entrées, masks, and other elements of developing routines. Once a month, there's a 12-hour weekend workshop. This semester the students are also volunteering at San Francisco General Hospital, where they simultaneously gather material for gags; the conservatory emphasizes community clowning, a growing field. Outside of class they also read, rehearse, work on research projects, and keep journals.
Today the class launches into a series of exercises. First the students run back and forth across the gym at full speed and crash into the wall or stacked crash pads. Ouch. Some stumble or fall, others bounce off the wall looking dazed. The idea is to shake out the excess energy and get grounded.
Raz guides them in a neutral walk, and then tells them to think about a personal trait, physical or psychological, that they'd like to change about themselves, and to incorporate that nasty trait into their bodies. "Make it grow bigger; become your worst self physically," he says. Students wring their hands, flop around, slither and crouch, hug themselves tightly, look nervous or lazy or uptight. Then they choose a trait they like, and exaggerate that. They begin to interact nonverbally with one another, allowing the encounter to change them. "Go fast, engage your fingertips, the tip of your nose!" shouts Raz. Finally, he instructs them to think of themselves as saints, then as whores. The saints waft, beaming; the whores shimmy and strut. "Don't play at it!" Raz cautions. "Don't parody it. Take it seriously!"
The emphasis at the Clown Conservatory is on starting from your very simplest, most honest self. Says the conservatory's theatre instructor, professional actor and clown Joan Mankin, finding the truth of themselves onstage can be difficult for beginning students. "What's hard is learning not to be afraid of being just who you are out there," she says. "But that's where you have to start. Then you take it to the nth extreme. When I really see them, not some thing they're putting on, that's when I know they're progressing."
Mankin works with the students on Shakespeare monologues and text by Samuel Beckett, helping them understand how to clown with words and to find the deeper aspects of their characters.
Raz's focus is on what he calls "playwriting": creating structures, or sketches with beginning, middle, and end, within which the students' individual, innate clown personas will organically emerge, to be honed over time. He agrees with Mankin that "knowing yourself comes first." He quotes his colleague, legendary French circus historian and former clown Dominique Jando: "A good clown will make the most vulnerable choice naturally." If you impose a lot of external frou-frou on your persona, that only gets in your way. In the end, you need a good character and a good routine. The hardest thing to learn, adds Raz, is simplicity. In clowning, simplicity is all.
It is also hard for students to grasp the importance of the relationship with the audience. Raz describes a classroom exercise in which you just stand onstage like a lump and look at the audience and say, "My name is Jeff," and do absolutely nothing. You have to get just that comfortable with the crowd.
At the end of today's class, the students break up into twosomes and improvise physically and verbally using the saint and whore figures they've created. Raz cautions them to find the good within the whore, as any actor must. Accentuate the part of your body that you're leading with, he reminds them. Finally they set their improvs within an imaginary circus ring. "We're finding the clown timing now," exhorts Raz.
By the end of the first year, students must be able to ride a unicycle, walk on a rolling globe, balance on a rolla bolla (a board over a cylinder), juggle, and do certain basic partner acrobatics. After 15 weeks they choose two solo and two ensemble skills to focus on as they head toward a professional level. Says Raz, "In the reality of the circus world, if you are a fabulous clown, you'll get work. If you are anything less than brilliant, you need other skills. Small circuses can't afford to hire somebody who doesn't have other skills."
Two days later, Jando is a guest teacher to work on "French entrées." Stock French entrées comprise a European-derived repertory of about 150 simple, goofy comic sketches—with names such as "Little Bee, Little Bee" or "Pea Soup"—which, explains Jando, "come alive through the personality of the clown."
Today the students are reprising French entrées they've developed previously. They follow a given, structured storyline but create their own movement and dialogue. Some incorporate juggling or tumbling, etc. Some speak in their native tongues (German, French). There's nothing funnier than butchering a foreign language, notes Raz, breaking into a cascade of snooty-sounding fractured French. The classmates laugh delightedly at one another's efforts, but most of the entrées are in the early development stage. Jando and Raz critique them: "Engage the audience: Make initial contact with them!" Always looking at and appealing directly to the audience is one of the most important lessons a clown can learn.
Also important: "Don't make general movements: Be clear and crisp." "If the audience laughs, go deeper. If they don't, go backstage and work on it." Jando says it takes about 10 public performances to know where you are with a routine, and it's always a work in progress.
Also: "Change your adjustment." "Pick up the tempo"—this is a frequent reminder. "Be broad, be enormous." "When you're hitting the punch line, don't move." "You're off rhythm." "Don't forget the rule of three." "Don't fake it! Believe in what you're doing!"
Raz reminds the class that technique and comedy aren't two separate entities: "Technique can give you your comedy." Adds Jando, "Don't mistake energy for form. When it's not clean, it's energy instead of form."
Later, Mankin tells me what she learned from clown work. "It was very rigorous, very taxing. It demands everything from your body. In the circus, every time, there are [other performers] who are actually risking their lives. People are always getting injured. You have to take that seriously. As a clown, you feel you don't belong there unless you too are living up to that level of risk every time. For me that translated as, you die for a laugh. There's nothing you won't do for a laugh." She says she's eternally grateful for that experience, for knowing what it's like to play with such high stakes.
These days, good careers are available in clowning: in the boutique circuses such as Canada's Cirque Eloize and the newer 7 Doigts de la Main; in German circus cabarets such as San Francisco and Seattle's Teatro ZinZanni; in troupes that tour to hospitals; in small "mud" shows (one-ring tents); in big commercial ventures such as the traditional Ringling Bros. or nouveau Cirque du Soleil. There's even a black circus, Universoul. Oddly there are no clown schools save this one; Ringling had one that closed. "There's this mystique that clowning is not teachable," says Raz. "But it is. Not every clown is a Bill Irwin or an Avner the Eccentric, just as not every cello student will become Yo-Yo Ma. But there's a lot they can do." The Clown Conservatory's goals: that students leave with an act they can plug into any circus, and that they are equipped to work in an ensemble show and in the community. BSW
The Circus Center will hold auditions May 22 and June 11 for the 2005–06 school year. www.circuscenter.org.
