Clowndance Questions

At 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