New Show performed at Theatre Royal Brighton on June 26

The result of several courses working with a great cast of seasoned clowns and beginners alike we created a surreal world where clowns can be spotted in every day situations, you just have to know where to look, walking the dog, on a blind date, out in the park, at the airport and even at a funeral. Cast included Neal Craig, Tim Eagle, Manda Stuch, Julian Howell, Sarah Jane Cook Eva Jeannette Hodgson and Polly Bishop, led by Chris Cresswell who directed and curated the show

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I recently rediscovered it in my research for a book I am writing on Teaching Clown and thought it might be worth sharing

Dream a Little Dream

Chris Cresswell click the name to access Total Theatre archive

Chris Cresswell takes us on his clown’s journey.

This is supposed to be an article about making a piece of work, a kind of artist’s diary of the journey of a particular kind of clown – but my first problem in writing lies in that word… ‘Clown’, it’s a difficult word, I use it to describe the work I do as a performer but then I always have to follow this up with a disclaimer and a long description of what it doesn’t mean. It can conjure up so many images that it always seems to need a follow-up explanation.

I make work in a variety of contexts: in theatre shows, in cabaret and sometimes on TV. I’ve worked in circus, theatre and cabaret, on the street, and in film, and I always have an awareness of a clown’s approach. It is a combination of innocent wonder, a sense of play and a delight in improvisation. I am currently working on a project that revolves around the story of a silent clown character that I first worked with about five years ago. I had reached a point in my career where I was really questioning what I was doing and what I wanted from my future work. I have explored and experimented with a variety of fairly extreme characters in recent years, and I wanted to find a character or style of performance that would make me feel at home. My original performance training was rooted in mime and improvisation, and I finally realised that I wanted to revisit the simplicity of a mime-based clown character. There, I have said it, ‘mime’ and ‘clown’, both in the same sentence!

Just a little background, I was originally fascinated by the likes of Marcel Marceau, Lindsay Kemp and David Bowie, then inspired by a workshop with Nola Rae, until I was sidetracked by alternative cabaret for a while, getting my equity card by joining musical duo Skint Video as a Cryptic Twin. I then met and worked in a mime-theatre company with the inspirational John Mowat, and subsequently found myself running away with the circus when I joined Ra Ra Zoo in the early 90s. This was a wonderful experience, taking me all over the world, and provoking some great friendships as I met other performers and great clowns such as Angela de Castro from Brazil (now resident in the UK), and Natalie Tarlet from France’s seminal French Circus Archaos. Other inspirations included Chris Lynam, a fantastically energetic shock-haired clown-performer who worked within the cabaret circuit – mainly by scaring the audience into submission. After Ra Ra Zoo I started producing cabarets in London, then moved to Brighton and started Voodoo Vaudeville which provided a wonderful platform for myself and many other performers to experiment with their form and practice.

When I think of clowns I tend not to think first of wild-haired big- footed grotesques, but rather of more subtle performers such as Jacques Tati, Harold Lloyd, Max Wall, even Eric Morecambe. These are the clowns that have inspired me, and this was the basis for this latest project: to find for myself a persona that I would feel comfortable within and that would sit in the kind of show that I have spent the last ten years devising. That is not to discount the place and worth of the traditional circus clown, it’s just not a path I have ever felt drawn towards.

There are wild-haired big-footed clowns in Slava Polunin’s Snow Show and that is a beautiful show, and there are complex suited clowns in most Cirque de Soleil shows – but I still find myself drawn towards the clown in a dark suit, the character that seems to represent the everyman, the bewildered innocent. The plain costume lets the face and body tell the story rather than signalling with bright clothes that this is an eccentric character – the suit is a neutral statement.

Moreover I wanted to find out what I thought about the theatrical clown. Does he have to be funny? Can he be about truth, love and empathy? Can he genuinely tell a story? I decided that I wanted to return to my mimetic roots and see if there was a way a clown could exist in a show in my current performance milieu, in front of a demanding cabaret audience.

So where did this particular journey start? Well, it started with a love affair – a broken heart and a particular song.

As is often the case, life, love, and art had mixed and I found myself with a case of the broken hearts. I was creating a show at the time, and suddenly a character and story emerged from this upset. This was in a show called Vampires of Variety which toured the UK in 2005. At the time, people responded to the pathos of the clown, but I wasn’t ready to relinquish the slightly more twisted and anarchic characters I was playing, and so left that character behind until I was encouraged to rediscover him when I pulled him out for a guest appearance in the La Clique Spiegeltent show in the Brighton Festival. He stayed in the background until last year when I started to feel like I had lost my way as a performer, and needed to reconnect with my original impulse and creative spirit.

So feeling like it was time to throw everything up in the air and turn full circle, I decided to make a show with this clown, based on the original clown characters I had loved – a simple, slightly forlorn character, dark-suited, and ever hopeful, whose physical performance is the storytelling vehicle.

We rehearsed over a three-week period; our very clear objective was to find the story of the clown whilst allowing a show to build around his journey. I rehearsed with director David Lavender on the fine detail of the clown act, whilst letting Kt Simpson (my regular co-director/choreography on Voodoo Vaudeville) direct the integration of the clown into the overall show. It was important that there should be opportunities for the clown to be given his own place in the show, to build in moments of solo performance, allowing the clown the chance to hold the stage on his own and to see whether this was possible in a cabaret setting before a Friday night audience at Brighton’s Komedia venue, which can be a tough crowd! It’s a big room, and I would be asking them to watch a show with no words and no MC to rescue the show.

The rehearsal process veers between being a tortuous dialogue with oneself and delight in finding new material as you bounce off other people. I discovered that I simply could not invent material whilst sitting in a rehearsal room on my own, I became more and more morose and distracted, doing anything to avoid facing myself and then suddenly someone would come into the rehearsal room. At last, a reason to live! I then would find some way to entertain them and then that quickly turned into material for the show.

Inspiration also came very much from music: from recorded songs that meant something personally, or a live musician improvising whilst I worked.

I worked closely with Foster and Gilvan, an inspiring musical double act who ended up in the show – we found a beautiful new act, a trombone duet with car horn…

So I had the beginning of the story using my personal history as a source and found whenever we were stuck for the next part of the story we would just look at what was happening in our personal lives and find the clues there, it was a story about love, and everyone has a story about love. As more performers joined the process, so we invented scenarios that the clown could weave in and out of, and this created new material for other performers.

For instance, Kt Simpson and Gil Cohen found the beginnings of a delightful double act when Gil, who is a new performer just discovering her clown, was desperately trying and failing to hoist herself onto the stage. Moments like these, invented in the last days of rehearsal, were what the whole process was about and will form the basis for future material, when we come to make the whole show.

So this phase of the journey has ended at the beginning of a new project. There is a place for this kind of clown! I am still not sure what his name is, or where he exists, but I feel a real sense of freedom – the clown doesn’t have to make the audience laugh, it’s great if he does, but we are not just looking for laughs, we are looking for the story.

I think that is what I have discovered. Audiences love stories and they want answers. The stories are to be found by sharing oneself. And the clown just loves to dream up stories.

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It is a 10 week theatre clown course running at the Theatre Royal Brighton every wednesday morning through Feb March to April

More details can be found at https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/school-for-clowns-10-week-course/theatre-royal-brighton/

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The main project has been my work with Age Is A Stage…www.ageisastage.co.uk

AIAS is a theatre company I initially set up with the help of Theatre Royal Brighton Creative Learning Dept to deliver creative and comic workshops for the over 50’s.

In the 5 years since we started we have gone from strength to strength, with numerous public performances, two appearances at the lovely Spiegeltent during the Brighton Fringe 23 and 24 and branched out to include a regular weekly session at Ropetackle Arts Shoreham. We have also been given grants to offer free workshops to the unwaged over 50’s. We have made a couple of short films, survived and carried on during lockdown and brought laughter and connections to lots of people. Photo above at Theatre Royal from our friday classes and photo below at Ropetackle Arts from our tuesday class.

Further info at Ageisastage.co.uk

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Beyond the Nose, a story about clowning and most recently The Insurrection Shuffle a comic protest show. Both played to really great and full audiences. As usual we aimed for the stars and created some memorable moments with a cast of willing volunteers sprinkled with some ‘old hat’ performers and enthusiastic performers. Fringe Review called Beyond the Nose “Daring Work” and said this about us “Juggling with techniques of improv, dance and mime, physical comedian Chris Cresswell flicks you beyond reason into a puddle of laughter. This is a man with a nose for fun, and he likes to keep it clean. He plucks the art of theatre clown out of thin air and moulds it to his will. With the help of his Age is a Stage theatre company, Chris has sniffed out a delightful seam of humour amongst the elders of the parish. Together they have devised a stream of playful adventures spanning hilarity and pathos, unlike anything you will have seen this year.

More info on our dedicated website ageisastage.co.uk

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looking forward to leading a fun filled and provocative  workshop on June 8th at Assembly Hall, Stanley Halls, 12 South Norwood Hill London form 11am to 4 pm

The workshop provides an opportunity to explore your creativity for performance and personal development. It is also is a valuable support for any performer -to help you keep performances fresh, be truthful and ‘in the moment’ onstage, it also brings great insight into how to engage and transport an audience… a way to create clown characters and performing ensembles with more edge and relevance, a way to make a more exciting and demanding rapport with audiences.

Chris combines his vast experience of working as a performer and training in the European style of Jaques Lecoq, the Russian character clown, and using the ‘flying in the moment’ ethos. This combination of styles and techniques provides a unique way to access and explore the performer personna.

Throughout the workshop, the emphasis is on having fun and searching for the beauty and creativity of each participant.  There will be an introduction to the classic disciplines that are necessary for a performer, including plastic training, improvisation and parody.

Accessible to those who are new to clown, as well as those who wish to play, develop and explore their clown or their performing, improvising and life skills. Clown is increasingly being seen as an excellent way to develop confidence for performers and non-performers alike particularly those having to make public speeches and appearances.

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