by Duncan Wall
As he said this, a little boy walked shyly up. He had a round face and a mushroom cap of black hair, and his little fist was raised in front of him with a late offering for the clown. The clown didn’t even acknowledge him, and instead went about lashing his suitcases onto a dolly with bungee cords. The boy in turn hesitated, uncertain how to proceed. Obviously, he was looking for some small acknowledgment.
After what felt like minutes, the clown caved. Grumbling unintelligibly, he gestured with his head toward the pillowcase lying on the ground. Disappointed, but relieved to be free of the stalemate, the boy lifted the opening, chucked the coin inside, and scurried back to his parents.
The clown meanwhile clipped the last bungee cord in place, double-checked it roughly, and then slumped past me, dragging his dolly like an unwanted pet.
Later, I found that his silent-film bit was actually stolen from another clown, David Shiner, an early star with Cirque du Soleil. He’d created it while working the exact same plaza almost two decades before.
It would be another month before I revisited the subject of clowns.
POOR CLOWNS. If jugglers have it bad (“Hey, juggler!”), clowns have it awful. The word “clown” for most people evokes the images of paunchy men sucking on cigarettes behind big tops, of rubber poultry, and lonely bachelors who live with their mothers.
It’s hard to say exactly where this scorn comes from. Some of it is inherent in the job: after all, the clown’s function is to be mocked. And even in the circus, among the dog-faced boys and the flying transvestites, clowns are conspicuous. They’re the only performers who fail, who disguise themselves in outlandish costumes and makeup, who flaunt their emotions—laughing, crying, shouting, pouting. Still, it seems like our feelings have slipped beyond ridicule into something closer to suspicion. While I was surfing the Internet one evening, a picture of a maniacal knife-wielding clown popped up on my screen under the words “Shoot the clown and win a free laser pointer!” The game was a joke, but its tone struck me as representative.
I’m sad to say that when I came to France my own attitude wasn’t much different. My experiences with clowns as a boy had been fleeting and unsatisfying. I remember seeing a few at parades, looking burdened under the hot sun. On television, they cropped up annoyingly in shows and commercials (e.g., Ronald McDonald, Bozo). My only direct encounter came at a pool party when I was six or seven. We were having cake and ice cream when a clown came striding through the backyard gate, throwing his hands in the air like a rock star.
I remember feeling put off by the chafe and stink of his rainbow-striped jumpsuit as he hugged me, by his forced enthusiasm. He was a walking cliché. Having plopped down in a deck chair, he knotted us a malformed balloon animal. Later, he tried and failed to pedal his unicycle through the grass. He struck my young self as more pathetic than joyful. I wondered who would choose to live such a life.
Six months at circus school had done little to change my attitude. To the contrary, my distaste for clowns only deepened as my respect for the circus grew. I came to see them as a sign of the circus’s decline. In the past, I learned, clowns were important figures, satirical spokesmen who railed against cruelty and injustice. “Centuries ago, the clown was an obscene, diabolic figure,” Nobel Prize–winning playwright Dario Fo writes in The Tricks of the Trade. “In the cathedrals of the middle ages, on the capitals and the friezes above the entrances, there can still be seen representations of comic buffoons in provocative couplings with animals, mermaids, harpies, grinning broadly as they show off their organs.”
But the character has become, as Fo notes, “a figure whose job is to keep the children happy. He is synonymous with puerile simple-mindedness, with picture-postcard ingenuousness, and with sheer sentimentality.” Since a clown is now mostly defined by his costume, circus producers will hire anybody to play one. I once observed this firsthand at a Shriners Circus in Montana. The show, a traditional three-ring extravaganza, took place in the university basketball arena. Outside, a gaggle of clowns leered at the children as they arrived, welcoming them in overly enthusiastic voices. I talked with one of them afterward.
Her name was Freckles. She wore a yellow polka-dot jumpsuit suitable for someone twice her size. The paint on her face, a white base splotched with red dots that resembled sores, had smeared, leaving a streak of pink. I asked where her name came from.
“I’m Freckles because I’m all covered with freckles!” she sang.
I asked how she came to work for the circus.
“Oh no,” she said jovially. “I’m just a volunteer!” In real life, Freckles explained, she was a “part-time claims adjuster, part-time mom.”
The Shriners is a wonderful organization. Every year they put together circuses to help fund their hospitals. And what better way to add some inexpensive festivity than a few volunteers in face paint? But for clowning, and for the circus as a whole, Freckles was a problem. Every time she cooed at a burgeoning circus fan, the kid’s response was fear rather than joy. Freckles, without knowing better, was the circus decline personified, all skill subsumed by clichés.
To understand the circus, though, I knew I would have to try to understand clowns, whom Barnum once called “the pegs used to hang circuses on.” So I put out the word among the students at the school that I wanted to talk to a modern clown, somebody articulate, energetic, and influential—Jérôme Thomas in a rubber nose.
One name kept coming back: André Riot-Sarcey. When I looked him up, I discovered he was the director, developer, and motivator of an important French clown posse called Les Nouveaux Nez. I got his number from Anny and gave him a call. His wife answered and took a message. An hour later, my phone rang.
“So I hear you want to meet a clown” was the first thing he said.
After a quick description of my project and my unfortunate clown-bias, he agreed to meet and set me straight. His company would be performing in Paris that weekend, he said. I should meet him beforehand for a chat.
“But just to be clear,” he said as I was about to hang up, “you’re a clown, n’est-ce pas?”
I hesitated. Clearly, something had been lost in translation. No, I explained, I was not a clown, just an interested party.
“But you know what a clown is?” he asked, after a long pause.
“Actually, that’s what I was—”
“A clown is a poet in space,” André interrupted. “Do you know who said that?”
“I don’t.”
“That was your compatriot, Henry Miller. A clown is une bête de la scène. He doesn’t know the rules, so he makes them up as he goes. Every moment is an adventure, a new life—the present instant! Always the present! Like an animal.”
I had found a pen and was scrambling to take notes. “The clown … is an animal,” I said aloud.
“No, no! He’s like an animal. Like a dog or a fish.”
“Like a dog?”
“And do you know why?”
I checked my notes. “Because of the instant thing?”
“That’s right! The clown lives in the present. Also, he has to have la rage.” As he said this last word, he slipped into a growl. “All the best clowns have la rage. Rhum had it. Grock had it. David Shiner has a mountain of it. It’s another way of talking about that côté brut that every clown has, that part of their spirit that’s not entirely human.”
I was silent.
“Anyway,” André said, calmer now, “if you ever hope to be a clown, you’ll have to get in touch with la rage.”
I stopped writing. “You know, I’m really just curious. I don’t plan on becoming a clown myself.”
A chortle rose on the other end of the line.
“Right, well, okay,” said the clown, chuckling. “We’ll see about that.”
THIS IS THE STORY of André Riot-Sarcey and Les Nouveaux Nez, France’s most famous modern clown quartet. Like most circus icons today, André grew up outside the circus, although an interest in theater led him in 1972 to Paris and the a
cclaimed École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq.
Then and today, the school, informally known simply as Lecoq, was a force in the modern theater scene, and arguably the single most important institution in defining modern clowning. (“Lecoq is where we begin developing the spirit of the modern clown,” André states unequivocally.) Founded in 1956, the school was created and run for over thirty years by Jacques Lecoq, a former gymnast and physical-education teacher who had migrated into the theater. In the course of the two-year curriculum, students cycled through a wide variety of theatrical disciplines, or “territories”: melodrama, commedia dell’arte, tragedy, bouffons, masks, comedy, acrobatics, even animal movements.
They also studied clowning. As a scholar, Lecoq investigated how clowns provoked laughter. But he wasn’t interested in circus clowning, at least not as traditionally practiced. As he writes in The Moving Body, “As a child I had seen the Fratellinis, Grock, and the trio of Carioli, Portos, and Carletos at the Cirque Medrano in Montmartre, but this was not the sort of clown we were researching at the school.” Rather, he wanted to understand clowns as historical figures of ridicule and shame. He investigated as far back as the Middle Ages, and, based on his studies, created a philosophy of the craft. Playing a clown, he noted, was different from most acting: the clown was less a role than a reflection of self, a comic doppelgänger. “One does not act to be a clown,” he notes, “one is a clown, when one’s deepest nature is revealed, in the first fears of one’s youth.” In his classes, Lecoq encouraged students to “find their clowns” through “the search for one’s own ridiculousness.” The goal was vulnerability onstage, the ability to work in a “state of openness without defense.” “The less that he defends himself, the less that he attempts to play the role of a character, the more the actor allows himself to be surprised by his own weaknesses, the more forcefully his clown will appear.”
André took to Lecoq’s ideas with abandon, and in the school’s mirror-lined classrooms he fell in love with clowning, so much so that upon graduation he decided to pursue a career in it. André joined one of the original companies of the modern circus, the German Circus Roncalli, a “neoclassical” single-ring show founded by Austrians Bernhard Paul and André Heller.
Riot-Sarcey spent three years with the company, working as principal clown and choreographer. Afterward, there followed a period of theatrical wandering in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. Other clowns were also in the process of “liberating” their discipline from the circus by creating acts for the stage. These were full plays instead of short bits, combining traditional clown techniques (e.g., physical comedy, slapstick, and pantomime) with more “theatrical” elements, such as text, plot, light, and sound.
Today critics call this genre “clown theater.” In Europe, its proliferation was spearheaded by students of Lecoq and a few renegade mimes: in the Czech Republic, Ctibor Turba made macabre clown pantomimes; in Switzerland, Dimitri Jakob Müller (a.k.a. Dimitri) studied under Marcel Marceau and appeared with the Circus Knie before creating a theater company of his own.
In America, the movement started as avant-garde theater, progressing to the mainstream in the eighties. In 1984, Lecoq graduate Avner Eisenberg (a.k.a. Avner the Eccentric) premiered his one-man show on Broadway. (Television critic Joel Siegel called it “hurt-yourself, hysterically funny.”)
A decade later, Bill Irwin, a founding member of the Pickle Family Circus in San Francisco, teamed up with David Shiner, who had been a street performer before being recruited by Cirque du Soleil, for an even bigger success in Fool Moon. Billed as an “evening of inspired lunacy,” the two-hour show, which was derived largely from the clowns’ previous material, featured the two men tumbling, bouncing, singing, and generally goofing through physical sketches, stunts, and gags, to the folk music of the Red Clay Ramblers. The show, which was a smash hit, ended up returning to Broadway three times, for some five hundred performances, eventually landing a Tony Award for Live Theatrical Presentation. For the clowns involved, it was a windfall: Shiner landed a deal with Paramount Pictures and went on to become a director for Cirque du Soleil; Irwin came away with a $500,000 MacArthur award—the first clown to win one.
In France, meanwhile, the movement floundered. Despite the presence of Lecoq, clowns were slow to emerge. Ironically, the one exception was an American: Howard Buten (a.k.a. Buffo), who had created a silent solo show that made him a local icon (along with a novel, When I Was Five I Killed Myself, which sold more than a million copies in France).
Hoping to change this, André went in search of collaborators. At the time, he was teaching acting at the nascent National Circus school in Châlons-en-Champagne (his official title: Professor of Circus Acting and Clownish Arts), and in the inaugural class four students caught his eye: Roseline Guinet, Nicolas Bernard, Roger Bories, and Alain Reynaud. They were all skilled musicians—Reynaud had studied accordion at the National Conservatory of Lyon—but André spotted something else. “It was as if they were already clowns,” he told me.
In 1989, the four students graduated. André asked them if they would be interested in creating a company, a clown quartet specializing in shows for the stage. They would be the stars; André would direct and act as artistic guide, drawing on his diverse experience. When the young performers agreed, the group set up camp in Bourg-Saint-Andéol, where Reynaud’s family ran a woodworking compound. André led the rehearsals, helping the four refine their clowns. In 1990, they premiered Cinq Folies en cirque mineur in Paris under the moniker Nouveaux Nez (meaning both “new noses” and also a wordplay on nouveau-né, “newborn”). The show looked a lot like others of the period: employing music, physical business, and banter, Nouveaux Nez wrapped a series of bits around a loose story to create something like a coherent tale. But the execution set the show apart. The product of André’s knowledge and the broad training of its clowns, the show combined an almost virtuosic number of elements. A critic from L’Express called a later show a “delirium of intelligence, finesse, and Dadaist gymnastics.” Each word, slap, and musical note was choreographed, imbuing the show as a whole with an almost musical rhythm.
Success came quickly. In Paris, Libération called Nouveaux Nez “the inheritors of France’s mythic clown past.” Afterward, the clowns found themselves jetting all over the world, as far as West Africa and Thailand. In the meantime, the company collected a mantel of trophies, including the Minister of Culture’s Grand Prix and a Prix Raymond Devos, a prestigious French comedy award—making the group the first clowns to win one. Since then, the company has created five more shows and performed over eight hundred times, to some five hundred thousand people. At Lecoq, current students venerated Nouveaux Nez. “They were the original masters,” one told me. Another called them “the Beatles of the clown world.”
André really was the Jérôme Thomas of clowning. In interviews, he talked about his craft in inspired language. He referred to the clown’s “presence before the world.” “When we try to enclose clowns,” he said, “they flee.” In 2003, he helped create in Bourg-Saint-Andéol a “house of the clown and circus arts,” a multipurpose center for classes, shows, and seminars on subjects like “the clown and transmission of knowledge.” In short, André took clowning very seriously.
ANDRÉ HAD SENT ME the address of the theater where the company would be performing, a little converted venue on the eastern outskirts of the city. I got lost looking for the place, and ended up approaching a tall young man with a backpack and a vaguely circus air. His name was Georges. As luck would have it, he was a student at the National Center for the Circus Arts in Châlons-en-Champagne, and he was headed to the theater himself.
We chatted on the way, first about Georges’s experience at the school, then about André and the company. “André’s very good,” Georges said in a serious tone. “He’s a real clown.”
I asked him what he meant. He smiled down through black bangs.
“I take it you’re not a clown?”
I admitted I wasn’t.
Georges nodded. “It’s just that I have this little theory.” He believed that each circus discipline attracts a certain type of personality. “Acrobats tend to be pretty easygoing, which is about right, since they have to take risks. Or think of contortionists. The ones I know all tend to be pretty hard on themselves, which in a way is good, since your success as a contortionist is totally determined by how hard you’re willing to push yourself.”
“So what are clowns?”
Georges mulled it over for a second and said, “I’m hesitating, because my instinct is to say that clowns are sensitive. But that’s not quite right. Or it doesn’t do them justice. ‘Passionate’ is probably a better word. Real clowns are passionate.”
Out of curiosity, I asked Georges what he was studying.
“I’m a juggler,” he replied, before adding wryly, “We tend to be heady.”
Besides being a theater, Le Samovar, where Nouveaux Nez was performing, was also a clown school, Paris’s largest and the only one offering a full three-year degree in the discipline. Inside, I made my way through a crowd gathered in the lobby, a low-ceilinged room lined with clown posters and black-and-white photos of famous graduates. At café tables, fans sipped Heinekens and chatted about the troupe. From behind a makeshift bar, a tall woman pointed me to the theater, and I went in.
“Okay, Rosaline—how’d that feel?” André was sitting in the front row, his fingers knitted over his knees, a derby cocked haphazardly on his brow. He spoke loudly toward the stage. “Rosaline? Do you hear me?”
Upstage, a woman poked out from behind a black curtain. “Yeah, I think it’s fine,” she said, drifting downstage. Tall and flamingo-thin, she looked like Audrey Hepburn dressed like Gilda Radner, with tortoise-shell glasses perched on a red rubber nose. I recognized her from photos: she was Rosaline Guinet, also known as Madame Françoise, the lone woman of the company, and a female icon in a discipline that favors men.