Bubbling with Pleasure: Part 2

In 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.