From Bozo to Bill Irwin, clowns perform in the ring, on the stage, on the street, and in the community. Adding clown skills to an actor's palette could open up new job possibilities, enrich a life in art, and allow an actor to exploit all of his or her peripheral skills, such as playing an instrument or tap-dancing. Indeed actors and clowns are siblings under the—er, red rubber nose.
I ask Geoff Hoyle, one of the country's greatest longtime actor/clowns, "At what points do clowning and psychologically based acting as we know it intersect, and at what point do they diverge?"
"They intersect all the time," he replies promptly. "When I'm acting, I'm not always clowning, but when I'm clowning, I'm always acting." Hoyle trained as a mime with Etienne Decroux in Paris and has since appeared in circus nouveau, created a number of solo shows, and performed onstage—including in the original Broadway production of The Lion King. He says it's vital that clowns work with an inner life: "You portray absolutely believable reactions to things. The clown usually mislearns the rational program, which is necessary to move on to the next obstacle. He doesn't make the usually expected adjustments to solve problems. He shows a different, nonsensical view—nonsense in the full sense of the word: non-sense. The unexpected. The clown points us toward a different reality." Believability, Hoyle insists, is what makes clowns empathetic, even tragic.
"Clowns are very childlike but not childish," he continues. "They don't play by any rules. They have no sense of decorum. The clown would like to have the same status as the rest of us, but the world—and his lack of ability to deal with the situation, the feeling, and the objects that surround him—deny him that status."
What personal characteristics indicate clown potential? Hoyle thinks an actor who is extremely sensitive to situations, people, and relationships, and who also has an absurd and comic worldview, might make a good clown. "In that sense," he says, "it's not something you can teach or acquire through a class. It's about who you are as much as it is about acquiring skills to do comedy. A world picture is not something you can learn overnight. It comes from where you were raised, your relationships growing up, the necessity you feel to lighten the burden of existence. It's a way of surviving." As a working-class lad in postwar England, Hoyle won friends in school by mimicking the teachers. Little and not particularly athletic—but witty—he realized that his MO could be an advantage when he saw comedians making it big on TV and in radio.
"The nature of the clown is to be very unique and individual," agrees Judy Finelli, a veteran of early experimental circuses such as New York's Electric Circus in the 1960s. She points out that many clowns, like Hoyle, took a solitary path rather than going to clown school per se. "When you have a group of people [studying clowning together], they can fall into the trap of trying to be funny. And I think there's something very unfunny about that," she remarks. She also agrees with Hoyle that the main thing an actor needs to succeed as a clown is a distinctive view of the human condition. To that, she adds the following requirements: a love of humanity, spontaneity or the appearance of spontaneity, a musicality or sense of rhythm, and a physical base upon which to build one's act. For Bill Irwin the base is dance; for Hoyle, mime; for the late Russian clown Yengibarov, sports.
At San Francisco's Circus Center, which offers the only two-year clown conservatory in the country, program director Peggy Ford notes that among the clown students, trained actors are ahead of the game. "Actors come in with an understanding of characters, timing, and relationship with the audience," she says. "They also have improv and mimicry skills. As a clown, you have to respond in the moment. Something always goes wrong. Clowns can adjust and change in the moment, and actors know how to do this." Actors also bring a knowledge of how to connect the internal and the external.
What do they lack? "An awareness of their physical limits." Actors habitually say yes to every question asked in an audition, such as, "Can you do cartwheels?" That's a wonderfully positive attitude, but it can get an actor into trouble if he or she plans to be in the trade for the long haul.
And that's the great thing about clowning—performers can work at it when they're 90. (Film star Billie Burke once said, "Age only matters if you're a cheese.")
"Actors can process a lot of information in performance," observes Ford, "but they don't necessarily use their whole bodies." That is, actors know how to work in an ensemble, but not necessarily in a physically intimate way—dancers have the edge there—whereas non-actor trainees and wannabes may have no clue about how to share the stage.
Actors, continues Ford, "find out it's not about playing a role. You're discovering and accentuating the funny components of yourself." Furthermore, she says, "Actors tend to live in their heads. As a clown, you have to live in your body. [An actor must] find that subtle, authentic, funny movement style" that's his or her very own. Students at the Circus Center's clown conservatory are on a deep search for their personal funny bones. Ford believes that that's more difficult than playing roles; it's a discovery of what's really them.
Longtime actor/clown and Circus Center teacher Jeff Raz elaborates on the relationship between clown and audience, putting it this way: Actors are beholden to the story; clowns are beholden to the audience. "The partnership with the audience is primary and genuine," he says. "The actor tells a story; the clown entertains."
Notes Hoyle, "Clowns react to the audience in real time. The clown is almost shamanistic. He takes the audience to a different place as a group. When the audience first comes in, they're a bunch of different people. Clowns make that group into a community."
By now I was wondering how I might find my inner clown. Ford says it takes students at least a year of training even to begin to get an idea of their authentic clown selves. So I asked Raz how he would teach me to dig out my clown persona.
To my disappointment, Raz insists that finding one's clown self is only part of what clown training is about. He started at age 19 as a juggler, chafing a bit at the rigidity of the craft and wondering when the originality would kick in.
Now, though, he sees that a clown persona—an idiosyncratic, vulnerable essence—emerges most authentically when it evolves from within the tight structure of physical training. So he gives his students classic clown structures to work within—such as tit-for-tat, a physical version of two-person one-upmanship—and tells them, "Just be yourself, don't put on a character, and do the exercise." To be yourself is the hardest thing, he says.
But out of that—out of getting in touch with oneself as an artist in the world—a performer develops his or her true inner clown. His students can spend as long as a year creating a three- to five-minute number. "This is seemingly antithetical to a lot of clown teachings that say action comes out of character," Raz points out. "The way I teach, character comes out of action. It's the parallel to the inside-out/outside-in acting argument."
The great and scary thing about clowning, he adds, is that there is no character in between audience and performer. Clowns may look as if they have more stuff—makeup, costumes, goofy props—but all of that merely amplifies their simple, vulnerable selves.
I wondered whether clowns have to be physical. Raz says that a clown can be very still, but clearly physicality is crucial. "Acrobatics can be so eloquent because they're so metaphoric," he says. "You can physically do human relationships—'Hey, get off my back!' 'I feel like I'm flying.' 'I've got the weight of the world on my shoulders.' The relationships are real: If someone's standing on my shoulders, they're standing on my shoulders—no pretending."
Today's clowns can find work in circuses (old-fashioned Ringling Bros. affairs as well as the modern, animal-free, Cirque du Soleil types and small, one-ring ensembles such as Montreal's 7 Doigts de la Main and San Francisco's New Pickle Circus), community programs (clown therapy, Clowns Without Borders, Wavy Gravy's Camp Winnarainbow, and so on), and the legitimate stage.
Hoyle waxes philosophical: The clown, he says, points to the unconquerable nature of death. "The clown makes peace with death by laughing at it, by reminding us we are all on the same train and we'll all die. That's what the films of Keaton are all about. That's what Samuel Beckett is also about: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'" BSW
Auditions for the Circus Center's Clown Conservatory start in April. Go to www.circuscenter.org.