The Clown, and its relation to our present work.

The Clown is an essential aspect of the core personality of every one of us. He and she is our unspoilt and unsophisticated selves, equipped with the complete range of human emotional response and yet oddly incapable of grasping the everyday rituals and the subtle dishonesties that accompany these, which our adult social life requires of us.

In some ways the Clown reminds us of our own child selves - but there is a stoicism and an unhinged quality of independence about the Clown persona which is different from the child quality. The child, we should remember, is always ready to adapt to prevailing adult demands, whereas the clown merely pretends, or else tries and inevitably fails, to make these adaptations.

The Clown aspect, is most essentially living in the moment - which means also living with the immediate emotional tides of the moment. The logic of the clown's life is always about to fly off at a tangent - abandoning those acculturated commitments to everyday normality - and regularly offending against the received definitions of what we suppose to be the real business of life. The clown is incapable of conducting this "real business" because he or she is always subverted by the inordinate flux of his or her emotions, and constantly the victim of the de-railing influence of happenstance and accident.

We as observers cannot predict how the clown will respond: as a seagull flaps past the window one clown may respond with beatific delight, as if this were the most glorious moment in her entire life; another clown, perhaps, might become horribly and strangely depressed. We are unable make sense of the clown's emotional response; the clown herself is not concerned about whether it makes sense or not.

It is not just inexplicable surges of emotions, or random everyday events, that hijack the clown's attention and focus. Even in moments of calm, the clown will be seized by unprovoked flights of imagination. So it is that - in a variety of ways - the clown's world resembles our dream life far more closely than the life we enact during waking hours.

The Clown persona is worth cultivating simply for its entertainment or therapeutic value. It offers us a sorely needed respite from those exhausting definitions of ourselves which we conscientiously maintain: for the supposed benefit of our work colleagues, for our clients or other social contacts, for our loved ones, and for our own oppressively conformist super-ego. The Clown is available for a more radical employment however, and this is what I want to borrow him/her for. He/she is going to help us enhance the negative capability which is the core of our method: the "configuration of grace in the now".

The clown's way of cultivating negative capability begins with suspending our practical commitments; we have to release ourselves (temporarily at least) from the domain of practical consequence so as to claim for ourselves that same freedom of expression, that fluidity of experience and action that is the stuff of our dream life. This is to find a way of being in the moment freed from all practical and moral responsibilities - for as long as we remain within this protected, imaginary improvisational space. Here we may inhabit our artistic persona, our clown persona, without reservation, and with no need for censorship.

In our research setting we shall practise this same negative capability in a variety of different ways (which I plan to introduce in other sections of this blog). Our practice will include the warm-ups, inductions, and improvisational set-ups which some of us have learned from the "Nose to Nose" school of clowning under Vivian Gladwell. This is a set of skills we can practice and support in our own small group settings. In this, we shall learn to take equal responsibility for our own improvisational presence of mind and performance, at the same time as we are committed to facilitating and helping to nurture a similar quality of presence in our companions.

More information about Nose to Nose Clowning