<![CDATA[CLOWNDANCE.CO.UK

<![CDATA[CLOWNDANCE.CO.UK - Blog]]>Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:57:59 +0000Weebly<![CDATA[Big sister and The Capitalist Self-Care Club]]>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 13:50:38 GMThttp://clowndance.co.uk/blog/big-sister-and-the-capitalist-self-care-clubIn autumn 2022, I worked with the MA Performance Practices students at DMU to create short a piece of devised theatre, which I directed and they performed. The project culminated in a public performance of The Capitalist Self Care Club, performed in a studio space at DMU’s PACE building in December 2022.

This was a small cohort of four students in their early twenties, three women and one non-binary person, with three coming from performing arts, drama and creative writing BAs at DMU and one from an external musical theatre BA.[1] This meant that although all four had performance and movement experience, none had extensive training in contemporary dance. The students took on all the production, design and company management roles. In my role as lead artist, I sought to introduce the students to some of the principles of Clowndance that I have been developing, in particular around play, joy and vulnerability. While the approach we took was broadly based on my existing process, the content was entirely led by the students. I wanted to centralise and amplify their voices, their ideas and their agendas.

In the first session of the project, I pitched a theme to the students, based on some of my research around clowning, play, joy and feminism. The theme was radical joy- the idea that seeking out and prioritising joy and pleasure is a radical act when placed in the context of late-stage capitalism; a system designed to sell us dissatisfaction and misery.

“It is the longing for happiness that is potentially radical, while the morality of sacrifice is an age-old weapon of rulers.” (Ellen Willis in Judith Levine, 2015)

They brainstormed these ideas as mind-maps on the theme of radical joy and anger (see images below), and we played with the idea of what ‘self-care’ might mean, set against the backdrop of patriarchal poly-crisis.

After these first sessions, I reflected on working with this new group- I thought about their responses to material that I had shared, the difference in how they had taken on games that I had previously trialled with dancers, and also about how I was working with them. In my journal I wrote:

They surprised me today! Great commitment…
huge vulnerability and deep thinking
Who was I? Woman - Comrade! - Older sister

Journal extract 26/10/22

It was the last of these identities that intrigued me the most. I have articulated my rejection of the patriarchal ‘boss clown’ persona in a previous blog, in which I ponder the possibility of working from a matriarchal standpoint instead. I wondered there if I could take Franki Anderson’s lead and lean into my identity as a mother to create a ‘mama clown’ teaching and directing persona. As I worked with this group of students, I began to feel that the parent/child relationship wasn’t the most productive metaphor for how I wanted to relate to them.

My goal was not to impose my own ideas on these younger artists as a boss clown, or to nurture and protect them, as a mama clown. I wanted our relationship to be as equals, while acknowledging that we had different life experiences and therefore different perspectives and roles to play. I saw my role as being to introduce them to new experiences, to en-courage and push them, while making sure they didn’t get into too much trouble. Alongside devising the work, we talked about politics, art and relationships. I preached to them all about the importance of joining a union, and they included me in frank and intimate conversations around sex, gender identity and mental health.

It felt to me that I was inhabiting the role of a big sister, who could listen to her younger siblings’ ideas and support their agenda by drawing on her greater experience, with no major difference in status. As I positioned myself more clearly not as a teacher in either of the quasi-parental forms of boss or mama clown, but as a big sister who is just an older, more experienced version of them, I saw that the students felt able to push back and challenge my ideas, and also to bring more of their unedited selves into the work.

We initially planned to build the show around the theme of Ikea; a slightly odd metaphor for customising your life to seek joy within a consumer society, inspired by Björk’s story about getting thrown out of a branch of the homeware store for hosting an impromptu cooking demo in the kitchen section. While I merrily went off to plan scenes around meatballs and Abba, the students had a re-think. They sent me an email expressing their concerns that the theme would be too limiting, and suggesting an alternative; what evolved into The Capitalist Self-Care Club.

Sitting within the broader theme of self-care was an unexpected (for me) but thoroughly joyful interest in sexual pleasure, specifically as experienced by people with vaginas.

Kitty: I didn’t intend the direction we’ve taken. I was all like, ‘hey, radical joy…’

Missy: … and we went ‘we’re horny!’

Journal entry from group discussion 09/11/22

The students devised a game that could act as a running gag, an interruption and a transition from one set piece to the next: ‘Sex Charades’. Their game rule was deliciously silly and clownlike in its illogic- if someone is clearly miming something sexual, everyone must offer completely non-sexual guesses as to what they are doing, whereas if someone is miming an everyday activity, only obscene guesses are allowed. They refined this game over the course of a few sessions until they could all play it completely straight faced. I love the combination of elements that this game embodies- silliness, taboo, enactments of pleasure, and the raising of a middle-finger to patriarchal ideas that lust is a masculine trait.

Next, we developed a range of scenes, games and moments, and had to work out how to structure them into a short but coherent piece of theatre. While the students were tending to look for narrative- ‘this moment leads to this moment because it makes sense’ I introduced them to a more choreographic, compositional way of working- ‘this moment is followed by this moment because it provides a contrast, or offers the audience something they need’. Explaining how I organise material in a devising process made me stop and think about it in a way I don’t usually have time to do- it made me wonder if clowndance could describe a process as well as a genre, regardless of the performance outcome (see Clowndance as Process blog)

Journeys from one moment to another, not a linear path. No narrative means thinking more about structure- wants and needs. (it’s) compositional- illogical/emotional logic.

Journal extract 02/11/22

The first (and only) performance of The Capitalist Self-Care Club was at 7pm on 7th December 2022, at DMU’s PACE building. The audience mostly consisted of friends of the cast and DMU faculty members, who responded to the work with warmth and enthusiasm.

Each performer had a ‘spotlight’ moment where they held the main focus. These moments played on their individual performance skills, tastes and interests, and I loved seeing how the sections gave a glimpse of the artist and human behind them.

Missy created a short dance sequence to Hosier’s From Eden, playing with the idea of knowing a happy secret. She performed it wearing a single sock with a compliment written on it.

Björk wrote and performed a spoken word piece Customise Everything, riffing on the theme of how Ikea can upgrade everything from your boobs to your knowledge of Star Wars. They performed it in a style somewhere between a shopping channel advert and an evangelist preacher, while the other three accompanied the text with semi-improvised go-go dancing.

Imelda played a game of will-she-won’t-she with the audience, which we named ‘Ukulele Edging’ (the term for repeatedly approaching but delaying an orgasm) then sang and played the Dresden Dolls’ Coin Operated Boy on the ukulele.

Eve turned the act of putting on her makeup into a meditative piece of live art. She used individual audience members like mirrors, looking into their eyes as she applied each product.

As the audience entered at the start of the show, the cast were onstage, dressed in white, in a warm, colourful lighting state, with a soundtrack of female-led pop songs playing. The cast greeted audience members, and once they had found a seat and settled, brought them a white cotton sock and a marker pen, and asked them to write a compliment on the sock, perhaps directed at another audience member.

One the compliment was written, the cast took the socks and hung them on a clothes airer. At the end of the show the audience were encouraged to take one of these socks from a laundry basket, held by a cast member at the exit door- to literally take a compliment.

Show preset: a clothes rack of socks with compliments written on them

At the start of the show, in between greeting the audience and carrying out the business with socks, the cast simply grooved gently, on their own or with each other, to the songs that were playing. It felt to me like a new iteration of the Dance Like Everyone’s Watching game; they were making their own choices about how and when to move, and who to approach.

I was struck by how watchable these student performers were in this state - they looked alert but at ease, they interacted with the audience in a way that felt mutually agreed in the moment, and the interactions were warm, with a sense of intimacy. They looked genuinely happy to be there, on stage, sharing the experience with the audience.

Watching them, I felt pride in what we had made together, admiration for their bravery and the beauty of their work, fierce affection for all four of them, and a tiny twinge of regret not to be up in the bright light alongside them. I realised again that this was a familiar set of emotions- I was feeling like their big sister.

Kitty with the cast, in costume, just before the house opened

[1] I am using the same convention of pseudonyms for these students as for research participants- they chose the names Björk, Imelda, Missy and Eve, based on female recording artists whose music we used. They have all given their consent to be included in this research.

Bibliography

Amsden, L. (2016) ‘When they laugh your clown is coming: Learning to be ridiculous in the pedagogy of Philippe Gaulier’s pedagogy of spectatorship’, Dance, Theatre and Performance Training, 7(1), pp. 4–16.

In Conversation with Franki Anderson and Holly Stoppit [YouTube] (2021). (The Why Not Institute Presents). Available at: https://youtu.be/s7DAGDG65pE.

Levine, J. (2015) ‘The Passion of Ellen Willis “She didn’t believe in God. But she believed. Optimism was her faith.”’, Boston Review, 8 September. Available at: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/judith-levine-ellen-willis/ (Accessed: 19 October 2022).

]]><![CDATA[Miss Piggy and Brechtian feminism]]>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttp://clowndance.co.uk/blog/miss-piggy-and-brechtian-feminismAlongside this research project, financial necessity has meant that I have continued my professional theatre practice as a director and movement director. There have been some useful threads of thought to gather from bringing more disciplined noticing into my professional practice. I had planned to reflect on some of this work within my thesis, but in the end chose not to- a choice led partly by a desire to keep my focus on the processual act of teaching, but also because I ran out of time and words!

I wrote much of the following in my more formal academic voice, intending it for the thesis. While it didn't quite make the cut, there are some interesting ideas that I felt were worth sharing, not least because they allow me to pay homage to a most iconic Muppet...

In my first year of research I directed two productions for young audiences, that I have reflected on in other blogs:

Little Red Riding Hood by Sarah Middleton – a family Christmas show for Nottingham Playhouse, running in their Neville Studio and then touring to primary schools (see ‘Ha ha, you’re an idiot’ and ‘Stepping in as Wulfrick’)
Mark and the Marked, originally conceived by Kimberly Sykes, with text by Michael Wicherek – a clown theatre piece for Box Clever Theatre, touring to primary schools (see Bonding, Needs and Boss Clowns)

At the end of my first year of research, as I unpicked some gendered assumptions in traditional clown pedagogy, I began to wonder how feminist thinking and politics may have almost subconsciously influenced my performance-making practice and tastes. As I explored further in my reading around feminism in performance, in pedagogy and in discourse on social justice, what I felt was recognition. I was finding ideas to guide my practice more knowingly, but also theory to explain and identify approaches and tastes already long established within my theatrical work.

Some key realisations were:

A tendency within my work towards using heightened performance personas, developed with the performer, rather than naturalistic characters.

I always include the audience, but try to do so on their terms, without shaming them or demanding that they take on the role of performers. This is particularly true in my work for children, as I have explored in an earlier blog.

My work takes the form of ‘honest lying’- there is no requirement for the audience to suspend their disbelief, and the performers are always playing a game, rather than playing a role. Where I use masks or puppets, I make no attempt to hide the performer or puppeteer, but invite the audience to join in the game of the character’s aliveness.

These are all, in many ways, clownlike attributes. However, they also speak to a desire not to simply recreate reality onstage, when the reality we live in is so profoundly flawed, particularly when it comes to the objectification of women and female-presenting people. The beginning of this understanding of my work in this light came from my exploration of the work of unfairly overlooked comedy pracademic Athene Seyler (see Bubbling with Pleasure).

Figure One: The cast of Mark and the Marked in rehearsals. Photo by Pip Thurlow

One of Athene Seyler’s key assertions is that in order to play comedy successfully, the performer needs to stand slightly outside the role, to ‘create a delicate thread of understanding of the character you are portraying between yourself and your spectator, so that, in a way, you jointly throw light upon it’ (Seyler and Haggard, 2013, p. 4). She goes on to apologise for this unfashionable opinion, writing, as she was, when Stanislavskian naturalism was at its height in British mainstream theatre, but looking from a contemporary perspective her ideas seem ahead of their time.

There two resonant principles here; the idea of the performer not being fully immersed in the character, and the breaking of the fourth wall in order to acknowledge the role of the audience as co-creators of meaning. Both of these are ideas referred to by Kim Solga in her brief history of feminist performance criticism (Solga, 2016). She writes about the hothouse of early feminist theatre criticism, and singles out an essay by Elin Diamond as a watershed moment. Diamond’s essay makes the case that ‘feminist theatre and Brechtian theatre need to be read intertextually’ (Diamond, 1988, p. 82) to explore their shared territory of conscious representation and the critique of social structures. Solga picks up this thread and discusses how many twentieth century feminist theatre scholars embraced Brecht’s ‘socially activist dramaturgy’ (Solga, 2016, p. 34), and how dramatists like Caryl Churchill worked with a female body viewed non-literally, non mimetically, to deflect and critique the patriarchal gaze of naturalistic theatre that reinforces female archetypes through repetition. This is what Judith Butler’s central argument for gender performativity rests on; the idea that gender is socially constructed by being performed, both onstage and in daily life (Butler, 1999).

Fetishization of the female body by a male-coded gaze is part of the language of meaning-making that Western performance dance has inherited from ballet, ‘a legacy of sex and gender images in which heterosexual chivalrous relationships create a romantic illusion that validates, idealizes, and veils male dominance’ (Hanna, 1988, p. 179). Contemporary dance has moved away from ballet’s tradition of performers playing authored roles, in favour of something much closer to the idea of a constructed performance persona. Jennifer Roche terms this the ‘moving identity’ (Roche, 2015, p. 16) which crystalises for each work in the interaction between a dancer’s training and movement heritage and the choreographer’s specific movement vocabulary. Nevertheless, Western performance dance is still underpinned by dancers training in ballet, a highly gender performative technique. Time and again this has surfaced in Clowndance workshops; the frustration of dancers who feel that their movement identity contains elements of gendered social codes that they find repressive. It has been the invitation to play, and explore comedy in their bodies, that has unlocked some of this unconscious bodily patterning.

Writing specifically on women in comedy, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn goes further on the Brechtian concept of the female performer’s body as a non-mimetic representation, where the performer is ‘returning the male gaze’ (Rowe Karlyn, 1995, p. 12). The two major case studies in her 1995 book Unruly Women sit at either end of a scale of distancing; one is the onscreen persona of the comedian Roseanne Barr, an exaggerated version of the performer’s own identity, using her own name. The other is a puppet; The Muppets’ Miss Piggy. She says of the latter ‘for her, femininity is a masquerade, a costume like any other, which she can relish- or wallow in, if you will- but discard in an instant’ (Rowe Karlyn, 1995, p. 30). The power of the puppet lies in her mockery of the performance of femininity, rather than mockery of actual women (as she is not portrayed by a human performer), and her comic appeal lies in her violence and excess. I love how seriously Rowe Karlyn discusses Miss Piggy; she invites the reader to share in the game of Piggy as an autonomous being, without mentioning the performer behind the persona (originally the wonderful Frank Oz).

Figure Two- Miss Piggy (puppet designed by Jim Henson and built by Bonnie Erickson).

This reminded me of my realisation in an earlier blog about the enjoyable sensation I find in clowning or dancing when it feels as if I am puppeteering my own body. For dancers, there is perhaps always this slight dislocation between private self and dancing body. Dance academia tends to refer to ‘the body’ as if it is something apart from the self (as in Helen Thomas's The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory (2003), Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (1997) by Ann Cooper Albright, and a host of other well-known titles). Viewing this convention through a feminist Brechtian lens allows me to make peace with the separation between dancing body and felt self, if that distance gives the performer a place from which to return the male gaze. And if through clowning, dancers can feel that puppeteering our bodies is a game that we are choosing to play, not something done out of emotional self-preservation, then that can bring a sense of empowerment and pleasure.

Reflecting on my theatre making practice has been a welcome parallel process to the pedagogic explorations of this research project. In my next blog, I will explore how I took the feminist threads that lay submerged in my work and brought them to the fore in another performance making project, The Capitalist Self-Care Club.

Figure One: The cast of Mark and the Marked in rehearsals. Photo by Pip Thurlow, 2022
Figure Two: Miss Piggy puppet, National Museum of American History, photograph by Jaclyn Nash. From https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_1884379

Bibliography
Butler, J. (1999) Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Cooper Albright, A. (1997) Choreographing difference: The body and identity in contemporary dance. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press.
Diamond, E. (1988) ‘Brechtian Theory/ Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism’, TDR (1988-), 32(1), p. 82. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/1145871.
Hanna, J.L. (1988) Dance, sex and gender: signs of identity, dominance, defiance, and desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Roche, J. (2015) Multiplicity, Embodiment and The Contemporary Dancer: Moving Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rowe Karlyn, K. (1995) The unruly woman: gender and the genres of laughter. 1st ed. Austin, Tex: University of Texas Press.
Seyler, A. and Haggard, S. (2013) The Craft of Comedy. 21st Century Edition. Edited by R. Barton. London, New York: Routledge.
Solga, K. (2016) Theatre & feminism. London ; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan (Theatre &).
Thomas, H. (2003) The body, dance and cultural theory. London: Bloomsbury

]]><![CDATA[Clowndance for Clowns (and everyone else)]]>Wed, 12 Jun 2024 10:39:00 GMThttp://clowndance.co.uk/blog/clowndance-for-clowns-and-everyone-else

I'm running a FREE three day Clowndance workshop intensive in Leicester in July, and I'm looking for participants to join me...

The course will introduce key ideas and approaches drawn from my research and professional practice, which exists at the meeting points of contemporary dance and theatrical clowning. We’ll explore the state of playfulness in our bodies, find complicity and make mischief with each other and the audience, mess about with the non-verbal and the abstract, and discover practical techniques for building choreography into comedy, and comedy into choreography.

The course is suitable for performers and practitioners working in clown, comedy, theatre and dance, and is also open to students (age 18+). The workshop is accessible and inclusive of all bodies and brains. If you are interested in interdisciplinary performance, want to bring playful fully-embodied physicality into your practice, or just feel the need for a few days of joyful silliness, then this is for you!

I really enjoyed this workshop... The solo performances were the product of a freeing process, they were a peep hole into the joy of play.

I always felt engaged and really happy and curious about what was next.
(participants' feedback on previous Clowndance workshops)

Dates and Times:
Tuesday 2nd - Thursday 4th July, 10:00 - 16:00

Location:
PACE Building, De Montfort University, Richmond Street, Leicester, LE2 7BQ
The building is equipped with accessible, professional-standard studios: click here for venue details

Booking:
The course is FREE, but places are limited and booking is essential
Email me for more details and to book your place.

The course is free to attend as it forms part of my ongoing doctoral research. I will ask for your consent for the sessions, including your contributions, to be written up here on my research website and in my PhD thesis. This may include photos, videos and written reflection. All student participants will be anonymised using pseudonyms, and you can withdraw your consent at any time. Full ethics information sheets and consent forms will be given to all participants. Participants must be over 18.

]]><![CDATA[Derby Clowndance workshop]]>Tue, 07 May 2024 11:09:49 GMThttp://clowndance.co.uk/blog/derby-clowndance-workshop

I will be leading a two-day Clowndance workshop, hosted by the University of Derby's wonderful MA in dance and choreography, but open to all East Midlands Dance Artists' Network members and friends. If you're in the East Mids, and you include dance or movement in your professional or personal practice or studies, then this is for you!

These two workshop days will introduce key ideas and approaches drawn from my research and professional practice, which exists at the meeting points of contemporary dance and theatrical clowning. We’ll explore the state of playfulness in our bodies, find complicity and make mischief with each other and the audience, enrich improvisation by following collective pleasure, and discover practical techniques for building comedy into choreography.

Dates and Times:
Mon 20th and Tuesday 21st 10:00 – 14:00

Location:
Déda, Chapel St, Derby DE1 3GU
The workshops and location are accessible and inclusive, click here for venue details

Email me for more information or if you have any questions.

The workshops are free to attend as they form part of my ongoing doctoral research. I will ask for your consent for the sessions, including your contributions, to be written up here on my research website and in my PhD thesis. This may include photos, videos and written reflection. All student participants will be anonymised using pseudonyms, and you can withdraw your consent at any time. Full ethics information sheets and consent forms will be given to all participants. Participants must be over 18.

]]><![CDATA[Clowndance- process or genre?]]>Thu, 12 Oct 2023 23:00:00 GMThttp://clowndance.co.uk/blog/clowndance-process-or-genreAlmost all of my process comes from either dance or clown, not from traditional drama.
Is clowndance a process, not a genre?
Journal entry, 06/12/22

The first full devising process in which I tested out the performance-making possibilities of the Clowndance techniques I have been developing was neither with dancers nor clowns, but rather with acting-based performance students at DMU. Working with them gave rise to some reflection about the difference between a genre and a process, and made me question which I was attempting to create or describe.

I think initially, I was aiming to coin the term ‘Clowndance’ to describe a genre; to stake a claim for a particular corner of the physical performance landscape where dance and clown intersect. Increasingly though, I’m questioning the purpose and value of genre descriptions. This came up in my interview with with Frankie Thompson, and she poured scorn on the whole system of categorising performances by genre, particularly when those labels are externally imposed and come loaded with expectations:

I was very resistant to being put in comedy, because (of the) pressure of the award system, the money and the almost quantifiable sort of aspect that there is, like: am I laughing every minute? I just feel like that is like capitalism in its most extreme applied to art, like: if I'm not laughing every minute, this is not worth my time, because it's a comedy show.

…sometimes when you're put in a frame, it's quite useful because you're breaking things, and then sometimes it brings completely the wrong audience and it's really harmful. And then sometimes it's just about money. And that sort of lie just makes me feel like the whole system is just ridiculous, really.
(Thompson, 2023)

I don’t think she’s alone in feeling that way, and it’s certainly a continual frustration I faced when making work for my company; having it oversimplified or misrepresented by venues for marketing purposes. Performances, like people, are more complex than the label by which we seek to define them. Perhaps by continuing to subdivide and claim areas of performance practice, even in research contexts, we’re merely reinforcing a transactional, capitalist way of thinking about art.

Practice as Research sometimes seeks to pinpoint genres more accurately, as artists' voices are more centred in academic discourse, but perhaps the whole question needs to be thrown out. Is it possible to find a language that describes performance work without pigeonholing it in a reductive way? Is there any point, when we're faced with the reality that under our current system, art must be sold to ticket-buying audiences? Socialist Feminist writer Lynne Segal suggests that ‘a more utopian spirit may actually be... essential for us to resist mere accommodation to the known harms of the present’ (Segal, 2018, p. 22). Frankie went on to describe a night that she co-curates, that perhaps offers a glimpse of some post-genre-pigeonholing utopian thinking:

…the idea of Miss Ellaneous is that it's not quite drag, not quite comedy, not quite clown, so that you don't have to come on and feel like you're going to be judged as comedy. Or we ask people, would you like people to expect to laugh or expect to not laugh? And it's interesting because the most common... People really don't want the audience to be controlled in the main way. They want to come on and assess what the vibe is just of the work alone, which is so interesting.

We've created a space where we're asking, what do you need when you come on stage? And most people go like, no, I'd rather work it out, which is just so exciting and free.
(Thompson, 2023)

Image from 'Miss Elleneous and the Lavender Menace Bath Bomb' at The Puppet Theatre Barge, October 2023

Alissa Clarke, when I discussed this idea of genre versus process briefly with her, suggested that my resistance to the fixed-point task of defining Clowndance as a genre perhaps ties into a strand of feminist thinking that runs through all of my work and research. She reminded me of Hélène Cixous’s concept of ‘l’écriture feminine’ (Cixous, 1975 in Clarke, 2017, p. 258), where the writer follows her own pleasure, revelling in the process, rather than the phallo-centric climactic endpoint. In a contemporary article discussing Cixous’s play L’Indiade ou l'Inde de leurs rêves (written, perhaps not surprisingly, for a clown-based company; Ariane Mnoushkine’s Le Théâtre du Soleil), Judith Miller says ‘Cixous… portrays feminine being as an unending, continuous, and transformative development.’ (Miller, 1989, p. 136). So for Cixous, process is feminine.

As I planned this research project, I felt strongly that I did not want my practical outcome to be a final performance. As a director and choreographer the breadth of my work isn’t necessarily visible in what the audience sees, it’s in every stage of the journey to get to that performance. I didn’t want to create a ‘masterpiece’ that attempted to encapsulate what clowndance is. It’s many things, made by many people; what right do I have to claim unique ownership? So I am not attempting to coin the term clowndance as a genre, as that feels bound up in patriarchal, capitalist thinking. I am instead working towards a definition or description of a process, which my clowndance syllabus will attempt to teach.

Kitty in rehearsals for 'The Capitalist Self-Care Club'

Via a somewhat circuitous journey (Hélène Cixous might approve), this brings me now to share a train of thought that I recorded in my journal towards the end of the Capitalist Self Care Club devising process, where I reflected on and set out some defining features of clowndance as a process, rather than a genre. The approach to creating, structuring and performing material is informed by clowning and dance, whether or not the final performance outcome looks like either (in the case of this production, it didn’t!) This was written partly for my own clarity, but also for the MA students I was working with, to help crystallise the process that we had been undertaking together. I wrote:

As a director, I’m provocateur and editor, keeper of the dream and representative of the audience.

Performers in this process need to be present, open, playful, responsive. To do this they need to feel safe, that they can make offers that may or may not be right, but that will be honoured, not mocked.
Everyone needs to have a secure enough structure to trust that the show is going somewhere, even if that journey isn’t narrative, or always clear. Think: what do we want, or need, next?

Responses to provocations (often games) could be improvised, scripted, conceptualised, choreographed or designed. They might form sections- blocks of material equivalent to a scene
OR transitions
OR themes

I’ll sometimes add elements to create more through-line- a sense for the audience of something progressing, repeating, developing and completing. As such, this process for making performance (theatre, clown, dance, clowndance…) is compositional, not dramaturgical. More like choreography than devising narrative.

In performance, everything serves the idea in the moment.

We always include and acknowledge the audience.

All the material is treated as ‘text’ be it spoken text, movement, dance, interaction with objects, something visual or aural, song…

We must always be clear where the focus should be. It might be in more than one place at a time.
Journal entry, 06/12/22

I'll come back to the multitude of ways in which I now see feminist thought running through the clowndance project in another blog. For now, I'm thinking about how to systematise the processual in a way that allows for continual change, as I map out material for my next clowndance intensive.

Bibliography

Clarke, A. (2017) ‘The Pleasures of Writing about the Pleasures of the Practice: Documenting Psychophysical Performer Trainings.’, in Documenting Performance: The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, pp. 253–270.

Miller, J.G. (1989) ‘Medusa and the Mother/Bear: The Performance Text of Hélène Cixous’s Llndiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Fall 1989, pp. 135–142.

Segal, L. (2018) Radical happiness: moments of collective joy. Brooklyn: Verso Books.

Thompson, F. (2023) ‘Clowndance interview: Frankie Thompson’.

]]><![CDATA[Bodies (Re)Searching Bodies]]>Wed, 19 Apr 2023 10:36:40 GMThttp://clowndance.co.uk/blog/bodies-researching-bodies

I'm collaborating with two fellow PhD students, Francisco Sani and Satkirti Sinha, on a short series of workshops exploring power, affirmative action and co-creation in practice based research.

My workshop, The Disruptive Power of Joy, is on Thursday 11th May at DMU in Leicester, drop me a line if you'd like to join! Here's the blurb:

Who are we when we dance like nobody’s watching?

This workshop plays with the embodied states of vulnerability, pleasure and community, using a toolkit of games and movement provocations drawn from theatrical clowning and contemporary dance. It asks how we could explore the Socialist Feminist idea of Radical Happiness (see Lynne Segal (2018) Radical Happiness: moments of collective joy. Brooklyn: Verso Books) to enrich our practice research, performance making, and pedagogic approaches to physical performance.

Who could we be when we dance like everybody’s watching?

For more details on the full workshop series click here.

]]><![CDATA[3 Minute Thesis 2023]]>Fri, 03 Mar 2023 12:56:46 GMThttp://clowndance.co.uk/blog/3-minute-thesis-2023Here's a video of my presentation for De Montfort's 2023 3 Minute Thesis event, where PhD students explain their research, logically enough, in three minutes or less. My title is Clowndance: Disrupting Perfectionism

Access note: This video is captioned, click the captions icon to see them.

]]><![CDATA[Bubbling with Pleasure: Part 2]]>Tue, 16 Aug 2022 23:00:00 GMThttp://clowndance.co.uk/blog/bubbling-with-pleasure-part-2In my last post, I talked about finding the state of play, communication with the audience and readiness for laughter that Athene Seyler in her iconic book The Craft of Comedy calls ‘bubbling with pleasure’ (Seyler and Haggard, 2013, p. 55).

In my 2022 summer Clowndance course we found a way into this state with a game I called Dance Like Everybody’s Watching (see TUESDAY). It's perhaps logical that dancers should derive pleasure from dancing, but what we watched felt like more than simply some nice movement to music. We need to go back to clown to think a little deeper about what the state was that we were conjuring.

Louise Peacock (another fan of Athene Seyler) pulls together several strands of thinking on the state of flow, and clowning’s particular version of the same, which she defines as ‘the pleasure to be in the moment’ (Peacock, 2009, p. 11). We definitely saw that here. The biggest Boss Clown of them all, Phillippe Gaulier, talks about the need for a sense of pleasure to make a performer watchable; ‘No pleasure?’ he declares, ‘You are boring’ (Gaulier in Hendricksen, no date). Again, we were neither boring nor bored.

However none of the clowning-based games we’d played up to this point, enjoyable and funny as they had been, had had quite the same effect as this ridiculously simple one. Other games followed that had that same quality of pleasure and flow; the Save the Show Game (Davison, 2015, p. 84) (see WEDNESDAY) and the Instant Song Stories (Simon, 2012, p. 54) (see THURSDAY) stand out to me, and both involved dancing with music. Dancing, in this context, had released the bubbles of pleasure more effectively than any amount of flopping, bafflement, or putting each other in the shit. So again I ask myself, what was going on?

Sarah Butler and Samantha Bosworth attempt to put each other in the shit

We started to pull at a thread of thinking on the latter two days of the course: Clowning seeks to reveal hidden part of ourselves- it’s often phrased as finding our inner idiot or fool. It seeks to reveal the parts of ourselves that we feel ashamed of, in search of something vulnerable and laughter-inducing, and the assumption is often that that hidden something will be our stupidity. In a workshop I took with Mick Barnfather, I remember he encouraged us to ‘only be as stupid as we really are’ (Barnfather, 2012), John Wright says that ‘clowning turns idiocy into an art form’ (Wright, 2006, p. 180), while De Castro’s now legendary introductory clowning course is called ‘How to be a Stupid’ (De Castro, 2022).

Participant post-it note reflection, 20/07/22

Your clown version is a way to explore and laugh (in a healing way) at the personality traits that you want to hide.

I think it’s quite telling that the dancer who write the note didn’t specifically mention idiocy, foolishness or weakness. She just mentioned something she normally wants to hide. I wonder how much of the accepted thinking around clown revolves around masculine shame and fear of weakness and foolishness. Perhaps the parts of women that we seek to conceal are not so much about our weakness but rather our power; our noise, our anger, our desire to take up space. On the final day, the three of us left standing talked this idea through. I summed up our thinking like this:

Journal extract from group discussion, 21/07/22

We’re been releasing- un-squashing- the parts of ourselves that we usually (unconsciously) squash, repress.

That’s slightly different to revealing the part of yourself that you usually conceal because you are embarrassed by it- your idiot self.

Women squash themselves to be less threatening.

Boss Clown says: reveal the part of yourself you’re not proud of

Dancing Clown says: reveal the part of yourself you are secretly proud of

One of the dancers, Samantha Bosworth, wrote to me a little while after the course ended, having had time to reflect. She’s a drama therapist by day and had some wonderful insights to offer on the emotional work we were uncovering throughout the research process, for which I am immensely grateful. She said:

As a dancer and importantly as a woman (cis), the games, tasks and exercises allowed me to explore the parts that can feel ugly, or society deems less desirable qualities. I enjoyed being in my body with emotion. Pissed off, angry, silly, goofy, child-like and curious.

Perhaps to bubble with pleasure, we had to dismantle some of the armour of beauty, lightness and control forged by dance technique as well as by society’s expectations of women. As well as creating the safe, nurturing space that I identified after making Mark and the Marked (See Bonding, Needs and Boss Clowns), there was a sense from this group that what they wanted and needed from me was permission to un-squash.

Samantha’s parting shot was this gem:

You invited us to own our gravity and take up space. Yes and yes, this echoes in my bones every day. I also felt an undertone of not giving a f**k.

I’m proud and fucking joyful; bubbling with pleasure; to have enabled some of that.

Lucy Wordsworth, Kitty Winter and Samantha Bosworth bubble with pleasure. In hats.

Bibliography

Barnfather, M. (2012) ‘Clown workshop for Wriggle Dance Theatre’. The Core at Corby Cube.

Davison, J. (2015) Clown training: a practical guide. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

De Castro, A. (2022) How to be a Stupid, The Why Not Institute. Available at: https://thewhynotinstitute.com/when-are-the-courses/.

Hendricksen, C. (no date) ‘Part 3: No Pleasure? You Are Boring’. Available at: https://shows.acast.com/an-interview-with-philippe-gaulier/episodes/part-3-no-pleasure-you-are-boring (Accessed: 24 March 2022).

Peacock, L. (2009) Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance. Bristol: Intellect Books.

Seyler, A. and Haggard, S. (2013) The Craft of Comedy. 21st Century Edition. Edited by R. Barton. London, New York: Routledge. Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/dmu/reader.action?docID=1128307&ppg=3.

Simon, E. (2012) The Art of Clowning: More Paths to Your Inner Clown. second edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wright, J. (2006) Why is that so funny? a practical exploration of physical comedy. London: Nick Hern Books.

]]><![CDATA[Bubbling with Pleasure: Part 1]]>Tue, 16 Aug 2022 23:00:00 GMThttp://clowndance.co.uk/blog/bubbling-with-pleasure-part-1‘Comedy, shall I say, is the sparkle on the water, not the depths beneath… But note, the waters must run deep underneath.’

- Athene Seyler

(Seyler and Haggard, 2013, p. 26)

On the first day of my Clowndance summer course in July 2022, I introduced the dancers to Athene Seyler’s extraordinary book The Craft of Comedy (Seyler and Haggard, 2013). First published in 1943, it takes the form of a series of letters between Seyler, an experienced and highly regarded comic actor, and Stephen Haggard, a younger, more serious actor, keen to learn. The concepts and language Seyler uses are so fresh and contemporary feeling, and so close to how I approach comic theatre, that I’m almost outraged that I didn’t encounter her book sooner.

Figure 1: Athene Seyler, from RADA's archives

Seyler suggests to her reader that in order to play comedy successfully, the performer needs to be in an appropriate state, which she variously describes as comic spirit (2013, p. 25), ‘tingling with knowledge of the joke to come’ (2013, p. 51) or ‘Bubbling with Pleasure’ (2013, p. 55). It was this last phrase that stuck with me, as a beautiful description of a physical state in which we could explore a new physical comic form. Not just feeling pleasure as an emotional experience, but our bodies bubbling with it. How though, could we generate this state?

We first attempted an exercise taken straight from Seyler, who suggests that her pupil try to recapture ‘the excited little twist in his diaphragm that he must often have experienced just before he is going to tell someone a funny incident that has happened to him.’ (Seyler and Haggard, 2013, p. 51) This is developed in the 21st Century edition of the book into an exercise where the actor delivers a speech cold, then spends a little time chatting nonsense with a friend before attempting it again (ibid 2013, p. 55).

My three dancers each performed a short solo sequence they had prepared, in leiu of the speech, once cold, and then following a quick and silly chat with another performer. The second performances had some distinct shifts:

- An unexpected deepening of muscularity and embodiment in the movement quality, perhaps as the dancers relaxed and ‘owned their gravity’ more (see Monday)
- There was a lot more happening in their faces- we all found we were watching faces more than bodies the second time
- There was a sense of commenting on what they were doing, as in ‘whee! A cartwheel!’ or ‘oh, I’m stuck’ at a moment of bound tension.

So to a degree, we were seeing what Seyler described, particularly her concept of comedy as a point of view, a comment on what’s happening onstage. The dancers were excited by the possibilities of working this way, particularly coming out of a full day of working on a state of play…

Participant post-it note reflections, 18/07/22

I can see life differently, everything can be funny. My body can feel joy and share joy with others. Wow! Who knew!

It’s not about the laughter, it’s about the joy. I feel like I’ve found the gold!

I was excited too, but I didn’t feel that we’d quite found the state of bubbling with pleasure yet.

I had been thinking about the phrase ‘dance like nobody’s watching’- wondering what that looks like for dancers, and also why we associate dancing for your own enjoyment with shame. The phrase implies that if someone were watching you wouldn’t dance like that, or indeed, at all.

From this thinking came a game, Dance Like Everybody’s Watching, that I’ve described in the course write up (See TUESDAY). I wasn’t specifically seeking comedy here, but a sense of openness and connection with the audience that we struggle with, I think, in dance. We feel a connection among ourselves as we improvise and make material, but it’s not something we proactively train dancers to develop.

The dances that we improvised, with no other instruction than to ‘fucking love it’ and to share that with the audience, felt revelatory. Watching them back on video gives only a tiny sense of what we all experienced. One dancer was close to tears afterwards, saying she never thought she’d be able to dance like that, as honestly as that, to the piece of music she’d chosen, in front of other people. Our discussion immediately afterwards centred around vulnerability, feeling free from judgement, and being OK with not being perfect. Thinking back on it though, what I saw from everyone was a different kind of perfection. They were perfectly themselves, and there were moments of pure, perfect pleasure. We were bubbling.

Lucy Wordsworth

Esme Blood

Samantha Bosworth

Ana Raquel Azevedo

Kitty Winter

Sarah Butler

Participant post-it note reflection, 19/07/22

A massive sense of freedom. Being able to experience new versions of myself.

So what was going on? How did this game make us feel so profoundly different to any other dance improvisation task? I have a few theories, that I would like to test further:

- We built up to this very exposed, solo improv task with lots of games, play and conversation. That conversation included swearing, jokes and anecdotes (Seyler’s route into bubbling with pleasure). We felt as if we knew each other a little as people, not just as dancers.
- I actively seek to create a playful and nurturing atmosphere to make any kind of performance work or training. I’m only now starting to identify this as a key strand of my practice as a director and educator (see Bonding, Needs and Boss Clowns).
- By using music we had each chosen, and giving no choreographic instruction beyond enjoying dancing to the track, we were dancing (as you would for joy, for fun, at a party, when drunk), not doing dance (as an artistic discipline we train hard to do.)

Asking dancers to simply dance, making full use of the emotive power of music, seems such a simple way in to a state of pleasure that I’m slightly stunned. In fact, it's something I already use but hadn't seen in that light; one of my go-to rehearsal warm up activities is to ask everyone to put a tune onto a playlist (sometimes the song that was number one on the day of their birth), and all simply have a groove together.

Journal extract, 20/07/22

Dancing IS bubbling with pleasure!

Continued in Bubbling with Pleasure Part 2

Figure 1: Portrait of Athene Seyler. Photographer unknown. From https://www.rada.ac.uk/profiles/athene-seyler/

Bibliography:

Seyler, A. and Haggard, S. (2013) The Craft of Comedy. 21st Century Edition. Edited by R. Barton. London, New York: Routledge. Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/dmu/reader.action?docID=1128307&ppg=3.

]]><![CDATA[Clowndance Questions]]>Tue, 16 Aug 2022 21:41:19 GMThttp://clowndance.co.uk/blog/clowndance-questionsAt the start of each day of the Clowndance Summer Course 2022, I wrote a series of questions that I thought the day’s work might address. In true clown style, we failed to answer any of them!

Here are each day’s questions, left open. Some I'll return to in a later blog post, some may fall by the wayside, and some might become central to a later stage of the research. Most will birth further questions, and I suspect none will have definitive answers.

Monday: Play

What does play do to your body?

What do we see in others as they play?

How can we dance as we play?

How can we play as we dance?

What happens to technique?

Tuesday: Audience

How much communication can we have with the audience non-verbally?

What happens to dancers’ faces and their bodies if they constantly seek to communicate with the audience? Can they turn away?

How transformative can simply having an opinion be?

Sarah Butler and Samantha Bosworth play together

Wednesday: Clowns (dancing)

Can we find a genuine feeling of failure with trained bodies?

How do we feel about failure and the flop, if what we want to make is dance?

What does John Wright’s state of bafflement feel like, look like, in our bodies?

Thursday: Choreography

Setting material gives a tighter structure, but can it work like game rules?

How do we make material that always considers the audience?

Is there a particular movement quality that feels like clown?

L-R Lucy Wordsworth, Kitty Winter, Samantha Bosworth. We have no answers, only questions

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Monday: Play

Tuesday: Audience

​Wednesday: Clowns (dancing)

Thursday: Choreography

Wednesday: Clowns (dancing)