far and wee

so I've been thinking a lot about authenticity in acting and performance lately. I've focused on clowning since there aren't many conversations about 'method clowning,' but there is a lot of disccusion about what good clowning is and where it comes from. I'm paraphrasing so don't quote me on any of this, but the current thinking about clowning tends toward the play philosophy, that true clowning is off-the-cuff improv resting on character and audience interaction and you can't plan any of that out or it loses the life and energy needed. The now old school concept of clowning was that it came in learned skills and involved routines and practice and lots of thought beforehand. You can blame Lecoq for that really, there's definitely a pre-Lecoqian and post-Lecoqian divide.

Personally I'm somewhere in the middle. I think it needs to come initially from within, finding your own styles and rhythms and character, and then you can develop routines and skills and repeatable things out of that inital spark.

I don't wish to argue with either side, being in the middle as I am, but for those that claim that it's all spontaneous improv, don't cite the greats to prove your point. The Marx Brothers toured their routines all over the country gauging the audiences reaction to every single line and finally using the best version in their films. I mean a lot of their classic routines are stage pieces anyway, like the Tootsie Frootsie Ice Cream routine from A Day at the Races? Tell me that doesn't look like two people on a proscenium stage. But anyway.

So to parallel this train of thought, I've also been reading a fair amount of poetry lately. Some I like, some I don't, some gets me kind of frustrated. And in being frustrated, I realized that my feelings about it were not limited to poetry. In fact they're very like my criteria for judging dance.

I look to art, be it performance, writing, whatever, for something outside of the normal way of doing things. I like it to express something that can't be expressed in everyday life, like a dancer doing superhuman things, or a clown doing something simple that I never thought to do that makes me laugh, or a poet who uses some combination of words to express something that was stuck on the tip of my tongue. I want to see something that takes me out of my reality as I know it, not necessarily into a fantastical world, just something that points out things about life that people don't say.

For example, we did a clown show last December that was a clown version of A Christmas Carol. One gag was that Tiny Tim was in fact lame, not crippled, just into really lame things. We spouted a list of them-like pretending to be a dinosaur and listening to Coolio-that pretty much took up the whole scene. Then afterwards, as Scrooge moved onto the next vision, he says "so that Tim is pretty lame, huh?" and the Ghost of Christmas Present says "yeah I think we drove that joke home pretty hard." Granted this isn't hilarious, but it lays it all out on the table, commenting on itself and winking to the audience that we're in on the joke.

So I suppose that's the kind of authenticity I'm striving for. One can be over the top and ridiculous but self-aware at the same time and it assumes that the audience has some intelligence. I was taught as a clown that if a child were to ask how old you are, you don't insult their intelligence by saying "I'm 4 year olds!" when you are clearly not, you take the oppurtunity to say something ridiculous, like "well I'm 20 in dog years, 47 in cat years, 190 in mosquito years and 3.65 in clown years so..."

So onward and upward the search continues. And now, a poem I do like.

may my heart always be open to little

birds who are the secrets of living

whatever they sing is better than to know

and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry

and fearless and thirsty and supple

and even if it's sunday may i be wrong

for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully

and love yourself so more than truly

there's never been quite such a fool who could fail

pulling all the sky over him with one smile

-ee cummings