DEEP CLOWN

Laughing and crying the whole way....

I’m pretty sure I cry every day of the course, I say, and Nayana agrees it is the same for her, but that she is crying over a heartache.

It’s morning, and I can hear the rain pounding hard and fast on the roof as I come downstairs. It’s still dark outside, and the wind has thrust a couple of brown leaves up against the window.

Nayana is in the kitchen packing her lunch for the day. I join her with my cup of cocoa and sit on the bottom stair leading to the attic loft. She is facilitating a weekend intro to clown workshop, and I am participating in the intermediate portion of a three-year somatic therapy training course. I ask her if we can take a moment to remember our experience of Deep Clown, and if it is ok for me to record it. I press the red record button on my voice memo.

Other than the crying, the next thing that comes to my mind is that every day we ride our bikes to class. We remember that it takes just over an hour and involves a lot of hills. Nayana is riding a crappy bike, and she chimes in that it is called Big Blue or Big Red and that it has only one gear.

I do remember that Nayana is experiencing some sort of heartache during the intensive. She and her husband have begun exploring an open marriage, and she is in love with the downstairs neighbour. The neighbour has lovebirds that are free to fly around the basement suite. Sounds romantic, but they also shit all over the place. This man is stunningly beautiful and can sing and dance like the best rock stars of all ages. Nayana and this man have been having a love affair. Has he decided it should be over? I forget to ask her about this detail. I imagine that she is pedalling out her grief during our bike ride to class. She tells me that she remembers going to the window of his basement suite to say goodbye in the morning. He opens it and has pigeon poop on his face. Or dove, she corrects herself with a little eye roll, laughs, and makes a motion of her fingers dripping down over her forehead.

We do this bike ride five days a week for five weeks, and also, there is more than crying. We also laugh. A lot. It’s hard. I love it and I hate it.

We arrive for the start of the class, which is 9:30 am. I imagine that we begin with a circle check-in, but then commence with what we know as rivering.

Rivering begins with a bio-kinetic release practice referred to as lightening-up or as a clown shake-down and involves lying on gym mats covered in coloured fabrics. We begin face up and are invited to breathe in, but maybe not all the way, and then exhale the full breath to end on a heh-heh. Each new breath henceforth has a different amount of intake and a full exhale, followed by the heh-heh. We are breaking up the patterns of our breathing. In clowning, we are waking up to breaking patterns. Before too long, deep laughter and sobs are erupting from around the room. I can hear Nayana laughing and sobbing during our clown shake-down; she sounds like a dolphin.

I remind Nayana of this, and she laughingly nods her head. She still sounds like a dolphin when she laughs.

I often lie there on the mat listening to the chaos of diaphragms spasming around me, wondering if my laugh-er is broken. I feel like a lawnmower that won’t start. It is hard work. But many days, my diaphragm does catch, and my lungs heave out sobs that rip apart my heart. I cry. Boy, do I cry.

The teacher speaks about the physiology of laughing and crying. They are the same. Our diaphragms open and shake, sounds emerge from our mouths, and tears come out of our eyes. He suggests we consider the nature of the story we put on to this shaking and sound-making. I feel grief-stricken. I feel like my esophagus is a tunnel to a cave of sorrow. I can’t give you an exact story that fits the grief I sense. The teacher sits with me. He holds a very safe space for us, and as I am learning now in my Somatic Therapy training, he is what we might say, trauma-informed.

After eons of working out our diaphragms, which is also about twenty minutes, students begin rolling onto their sides, fronts, all fours, two feet, or something different. I often find myself in a cat cow position, shaking my head and wagging my tail. This feels good. Shake shake shake. I feel good with my eyes closed. Perhaps I’ll keep my eyes closed today. What would that be like moving through the next hour with no sight to guide me?

Nayana says she has a memory of me on all fours, swishing my hair around on the floor, saying NO NO NO. Yes, I laugh and continue, I spent two days of our rivering on all fours with my eyes closed, but I forgot that I was saying No. You were the one swishing your hair on the floor, I say, and you were saying SHIT SHIT SHIT. Oh yeah, she laughs.

In the rivering, we follow our impulses and our imagery, either or both. We move alone through time and space around our classmates, each of us intensely focused in our own solo worlds. After some time of following our impulses and playing out our image-worlds, our eyes begin to meet each other. We collide like atoms and create mini worlds, and then drift apart when these impulse stories we are creating fade. Groups attract together and push off into solos, duos, trios, and back again or not. Sometimes the entire class will form to play out some made-up on-the-spot game. After a total of about an hour, the teacher encourages us to invite transition where we then go into a hunker.

Hunker: crouch position, head down, both hands resting on the floor, palms up. We ask ourselves what was the nature of this experience. We stay in this position until our bodies have an impulse to move.

Our clown teacher, David, relates rivering to automatic, or free-writing, the exercise where you put the pen to the page and keep it moving to write whatever comes out. Rivering is free-writing, but with our bodies.

It is dipping the dream body in the stream of consciousness, he says.

How about the building? I prompt Nayana. This building, FANTASTIC SPACE, is no longer in existence, but for this course and the twenty or so years before our Deep Clown Intensive, it is vibrant with life. The ceiling is painted black with sparkles, and Nayana reflects that this is so clear in her mind. We both agree that it is probably because we spent so much time during the bio-kinetic release on our backs, looking up. The wallpaper to one side of the hall-like room consists of black velvet images of famous artists such as Laurel and Hardy, Fred and Ginger, as well as Charlie Chaplin and others. I remind Nayana that the framed bit of torn FANTASTIC SPACE wallpaper in my living room belongs to her and that she can take it whenever she wants. She remembers that she and Jessica, another classmate, rode out there together specifically to get this. She says they also used tweezers to take sparkles from the ceiling and put them into little glass jars. How did you do that? I ask, amazed, for that ceiling was very high. We used a very tall ladder, Nayana nods.

There are framed photos of past students on the wall. There is a series of people captured in their extreme ecstasy as well as their extreme agony. Throughout the course, we are encouraged to consider the swing between these two emotions, but also the swing between any opposites. How far can we stretch this range? Our teacher never tells us to do anything- he is always inviting us to consider the nature of, saying things like- I would posit.

During the five weeks, we explore taboos, that which irks us (my paraphrasing), flirting with the audience, and playing with toys, to name some of the exercises that come to mind. Eventually, these explorations are taken to the stage where we are encouraged to share each impulse, emotion, and discovery with the audience.

Nayana said that she remembers strongly the playing with toys exercise. She says during our solo-play portion, she was playing with a doll and recalls that it was very sad, and she was very much going into the heartache. She muses that the doll either represented her current loveache or that it represented caring for someone.

It touched something very personal, deep, and challenging for me. But when we went into the performance aspect, I used something else, like robots or something.

I pipe in that they were action figure guys. Yes, she says emphatically…

…and what I remember the most was that it was very fun and very funny, and I put my head down because it was so funny for me, and then I kept playing with my head down, having the ‘I know you know’ going on without my face present. That was a huge a-ha for me, that you can be in the ‘I know you know’ without your face there.

The I know you know is a 7 times reflection with the audience. I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know I know. This is the nature of clowning. I am pretending up here on the stage, and I know that you know I’m pretending, and I know that you know that I know you know I know I’m pretending. It is a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, acknowledge everything that is happening here.

Discovery is also important. Watching someone discover something is captivating. Watching them respond to this discovery is compelling. It must be honest. The mastery comes from repeating these impulses, discoveries, and responses as if they are happening for the first time. How the audience responds informs how the player responds, and repeat. This audience response factor makes every performance something new, even when the written beats are the same every night.

We talk a bit more about who was in the class, and I am surprised that I am completely blank on some of the other students. Nayana interrupts to say she had best get focused and ready to go.

Will I see you later? She asks. I don’t think so, I respond, my class ends at 6:30, and I guess you’ll be gone by then.

I stop the recording and head upstairs to begin my morning practice. Let me know when you are leaving, I yell down the stairs. I’ll come down for a hug!