What clown school actually teaches you.
A first-week diary from one of Europe's quieter clown courses, where the red nose comes out late and the silence comes first. I spent five days as an observer, watching twelve adults learn to be honest in front of a room.
If you have not read much about contemporary clown — and almost no one has, outside the small ecosystem of performers and trainers who keep the tradition alive — you may have a particular image in mind. White face, baggy trousers, a bouquet that squirts water. This is not what is taught. What is taught is closer to a particular kind of attention.
The course I observed runs out of a converted barn near a small town in the Hauts-de-France. Twelve students, three teachers, three weeks. I sat in only on the first week. It was, I was warned, the gentlest of the three. The students agreed.
Day one — the chair
The first morning's exercise lasted three hours and consisted, almost entirely, of one student at a time sitting on a chair at the front of the room. The instruction was: sit. Do nothing. When the audience laughs, notice why, but do not change what you are doing.
For the first six or seven students, very little happened. They sat. The audience watched. Occasionally a small laugh rose from the room, usually because the student had done something almost imperceptible — a glance, a shift of weight, a sigh — that suddenly seemed funny in the silence. The students invariably reacted to the laugh. They smiled, or shifted, or tried to do "the thing" again. The laugh stopped.
By the eighth student, something had changed in the room. She sat down, looked at the audience, and did not try. She did almost nothing for nearly four minutes. The room watched her. At some point — I cannot identify the moment — the audience began to laugh, quietly and steadily, at nothing in particular. She did not break. She sat. The laugh grew. When the lead teacher finally called time, the room applauded, and she got up looking faintly embarrassed but no longer afraid.
The exercise is not about being funny. It is about being seen, and not flinching.
Day two — the corridor
Day two introduced movement. The students entered, one at a time, from a doorway at the back of the room, walked the length of an imaginary corridor towards the audience, and exited through a second doorway. There was no music, no costume, no character. Just the walk.
This was, by the students' own account, harder than the chair. The walk takes about twelve seconds. In those twelve seconds, the student is required to do nothing but walk — which is to say, the student is required to be entirely present, in front of a watching room, for twelve seconds. Most of them lasted three or four before they began to act.
Acting, in this context, is the problem. The course's central proposition is that the clown is not a character but a state — a willingness to be seen, including in your smallness. Acting is what most adults do when they are afraid of being seen.
Day three — silence
Day three was silence. The exercises were the same as days one and two, with one additional instruction: do not speak, and do not attempt to communicate non-verbally. Do not "say" anything to the audience with your face. Do not perform reactions.
This was the day on which something broke open for several of the students. A particular student — a forty-something man who had spent the first two days at the back of the room, watching — sat in the chair on day three and, for the first time, was funny without trying. He did nothing. He looked at the room. The room watched him. He blinked. The room laughed. He noticed the laugh. He did not chase it. The room laughed again, louder.
The lead teacher, watching, did not comment until afterwards. When she did, she said only: "Now you know what your face does when you are not protecting it."
Day four — partner
Day four introduced a partner. Two students at a time, sat opposite each other on chairs, four feet apart. Same rules. No speaking. No attempting to communicate. Sit. Notice.
This exercise produced, in my notebook, the largest number of underlined sentences. The presence of a partner changes everything. The student is no longer alone in front of the audience — there is now another person in the field of attention, and the student is required to remain present to that person, without performing anything. Most students collapsed into small habits within a minute: a fixed smile, a held breath, a small fidget.
The teachers stopped pairs frequently, sometimes after twenty seconds, sometimes after two minutes. They never explained why. They simply said "thank you," and called the next pair. By the afternoon, the students had begun to understand without being told what the teachers were watching for.
Day five — the nose
The red nose appeared on day five, late in the afternoon. The teachers handed one to each student, one at a time, in a small ceremony that took about thirty seconds per student. Each student went to a mirror, put the nose on alone, looked at themselves for as long as they wanted, and then walked back to the chair to perform the chair exercise again.
I had been told the nose would change things. I did not believe it. By the end of the afternoon I was a convert. The students were demonstrably different with the nose on. They sat differently. They looked at the audience differently. They were, somehow, both more vulnerable and less afraid.
The nose, as the teachers explained at the end of the day, is not a costume. It is a permission. It is a small object that the student can point to as the source of whatever happens in the next five minutes. It allows the student to step slightly outside the part of themselves that protects them from being seen — and to be seen anyway.
What I came away with
I left after the fifth day with a notebook full of half-sentences and the strong suspicion that I had observed something that I would not be able to fully describe for some time. The course had taught its students very little in the way of technique. It had taught them, over five days, something closer to a working relationship with their own attention.
Whether the students will go on to perform is, the teachers say, almost beside the point. The course is, on its own terms, not a vocational training. It is a fortnight of being looked at without flinching. What you do with that, afterwards, is your business.