Palestinian clowns entertain children, in Deir al-Balah town in the central Gaza Strip.
On April Fool’s Day, I was one of 12 people who climbed the stairs to the second storey of a shophouse in Desker Road to attend a class in clowning.
Among us were a software engineer, a dancer, an educator, a pharmaceutical executive, a trichologist, an A-level student from Brunei and an NSman.
Our teacher that afternoon was Singaporean clown artist Shanice Stanislaus, who trained with Philippe Gaulier, the French clown master who taught film stars Emma Thompson and Sacha Baron Cohen.
I had signed up for the class as therapy because I felt weighed down by work and bad news, and wanted to learn how to laugh again.
Four hours of clown class helped me and, since it’s World Laughter Day today (yesterday), I thought I’d share how my classmates and I learnt to use our bodies to play, connect and make one another laugh.
It liberated us. What’s more, there is mounting evidence that laughter is good for us.
Here’s a shortlist from the medical experts at the famous Mayo Clinic: laughter stimulates major organs such as the heart and lungs; fires up and then cools down the body’s stress response which results in a good, relaxed feeling; boosts the immune system; lessens anxiety and depression, and aids in pain relief as laughing can cause the body to produce its own natural painkillers.
A process of unlearning
We started clown class with simple movements: a walk around the room, a little jump, a twirl. We played simple games with a ball and then with our bodies, as we stood in a line and walked together as though we were parts of a human centipede.
Slowly, our group of 12, who had started out as strangers, grew more relaxed around one another. We paired up to perform a catwalk to music. Then, we had to pretend to trip while doing the catwalk.
The biggest guy in our class threw himself into the task and staged a big trip with his arms flung high above his head and his legs flailing behind the rest of him. His partner on the catwalk froze, opened her eyes wide and glared at him. She said nothing but the look on her face spoke volumes: “Don’t you dare fall on me.”
We laughed.
The spirit of play was in the air and that was good, for without play, there can be no clowning.
Play, or “le jeu” in French, is central to the European clown tradition. Gaulier tells his students to find the game in everything, and that “a clown doesn’t understand but wants to play anyway”.
Play is what allows a clown to be open, curious, and eager to try.
“Clown is not something you learn, but is rather a process of unlearning,” writes American clown artist and teacher Laurel Butler in an article for humanities website Project Muse.
“It is about remembering what it was like, as a child, when everything seemed new, a time when we did not know, but found ourselves in a constant process of discovery.
“As children, this is a natural condition of existence; as we grow older, it becomes a radical act.”
Butler also writes about the red clown nose, which practitioners call the world’s smallest mask. A mask can transform its wearer, and free him or her from the inhibitions of daily life.
Butler tells her students that “once you put on the nose, you are no longer you: you are the clown part of yourself – the silly, ridiculous, curious part of yourself that doesn’t care what you look like. Your body will feel different than it usually feels. Your eyes will be much wider, as though you are seeing everything for the very first time”.
That sense of freedom was something we were to discover for ourselves as our clown class progressed.
Sharing moments
The first challenge, though, for some of us at least, was how to get the red clown noses made of sponge to stay on our flat Chinese noses.
We found that the plastic clown noses with strings that went around our heads worked better.
With these tiny masks on, it was time for us to get to work making our audience laugh.
Before we got started, our teacher Shanice warned us that if we could hear the sound of the air-conditioner, that meant our act was falling flat and it was time to try something different.
She then put us in groups of three, played bits of music from her iPad and told us to mimic the sounds we heard.
I felt dread as I was recovering from a sore throat and the last thing I wanted to do was sing. Worse yet, she played me a piece of classical singing.
With no time to think, I acted on impulse. I opened my mouth wide and pushed out as big a sound as I could from my diaphragm. What came out was a cross between an operatic wail and a croak. The miracle was that my listeners laughed.
Keep going, Shanice said, and look at one person in the audience as though you are in love with him, and wink. I did as told. The man I gazed at laughed so hard, I could see tears in his eyes.
Eye contact is key to good clowning.
Eye contact is asking permission to engage, writes Matthew Allen Wilson, a clown doctor who uses clowning to empower patients who are children.
“If there is no eye contact, there is a decreased likelihood of interaction. Sometimes, even if there is eye contact, there is no interaction. There must be a breath, a moment of recognition, a physical call-and-response: ‘Hello. I see you. Do you see me? Aha! You see me, and I see you. We are now sharing this moment,’” he writes in an article on medical clowning published in the Journal of Childhood Studies.
The moments that compose an encounter, he explains, are co-created with “complicite”, or agreement, between a clown and his audience.
That is what I was blessed to experience in my first clown class, and there was magic in that brief encounter.
It showed me that the best way to forge a genuine connection may not always be through words, but by paying attention and really looking at another person.
Reconnecting with our bodies and one another
Clown class confirmed my belief that the performing arts can help adults learn physical and emotional agility, so as to expand our range of responses to life events and other people.
That was what I first realised more than 10 years ago as a student at Stanford University, when my adviser recommended I take a class at the Graduate School of Business called Acting with Power.
The class was designed and taught by psychology professor Deborah Gruenfeld, who used drama to teach her students how to project social power.
She showed us how to switch between low power, which makes a person appear relatable, and high power which creates distance between a person and others and makes clear who’s in charge.
She also brought in theatre professionals, to teach us how to use voice and body language to achieve our aims.
Clowning, too, is a performing art that uses body language to achieve its ends, which are play, connection and laughter.
What I gained from clowning was freedom – to play and laugh in the face of life’s seriousness. And the laughter, in turn, lifted my mood and transformed my outlook, if not my circumstances.
On this World Laughter Day, I hope you too will find a way to let the clown part of you emerge. Perhaps you might like to put down your device to play a game, do a funny walk or try a dance.
You might find yourself having more fun than you expect (wink). — The Straits Times/ANN
