by Duncan Wall
The third type of clown, the entrée clown, requires more serious training. An entrée originally referred to a performance involving at least two clowns (e.g., Footit and Chocolat), but the definition expanded to mean any clown performance that takes up a unit of a show or “holds the ring.” Often the entrée clown is the star of the circus. He has to be able to capture the attention of an audience even while surrounded by Russian acrobats performing triple flips. Entrée clowns also often serve as a unifying force, stitching together the different pieces of a show and providing the narrative backbone for the audience.
Historically, even these top clowns lacked formal training. Most learned the craft from a parent at a young age or migrated from other disciplines, often after an injury. Footit, as I’ve said, “took up the whites” after losing his horse in a card game. Chocolat started as the assistant to Tony Grice, one of Footit’s comrades at the Nouveau Cirque. Emmett Kelly began as a trapezist. Otto Griebling, another famous American tramp, was an equestrian, as was William Wallett. Usually such clowns started at the bottom, beginning first as an auguste de soirée, then working their way up.
This system had several advantages. Practically, it gave circus performers a way to elongate their careers. Those who came from other disciplines were equipped with basic physical and performance skills, especially tumbling. Their first routine would often involve a burlesque of their previous specialty—a “clown to the wire,” for example, or a “clown to the horse.” (Such parodies are technically difficult, bringing together mastery and controlled failure. In his Book of Clowns, British historian George Speaight calls this combination the “golden rule” for clowning: for example, Grock sits down to play the piano, smashes his fingers under the piano lid, then proceeds to play a marvelous sonata; Buster Keaton trips clumsily out of a window into a bush two stories below, and manages to somersault unharmed out of his landing.)
But older clowns also brought an emotional and aesthetic resonance to their work, a sense of maturity, humanity, and tragedy. This is important, because a clown isn’t an acrobat. Clowns are like actors. At their best, they offer nuanced dramatic portrayal. To be a clown you have to be attuned to suffering, to how it feels to attempt and fail. In this respect, age helps. “One of the things about clowning is that you’re calling on a bag of tricks that has to be put together over the course of a life,” Bill Irwin once said.
A clown can be a circus unto himself. He may be an expert in any skill the art can include—music, juggling, tumbling, acting, comedy, drama. Clowns at the Moscow Circus School studied a single discipline for four years, and then learned additional skills in the next four years. The quintessential example is Grock (born Adrien Wettach), the Swiss clown, a European star for over forty years at the beginning of the twentieth century. Actor, mime, acrobat, author, musician, Grock spoke six languages, produced two films, wrote three books, and played twenty-four instruments, several of which he constructed himself. He also built watches and a card-shuffling machine. A good clown, as the great Russian-Armenian clown Leonid Yengibarov once said, is “an artist who can do everything.”
Today clown training is widespread. Many theater programs integrate clowning into a wider curriculum, often labeled as “physical” or “movement” theater. There are a few professional programs. In 1975, for example, Dimitri, a nationally renowned Swiss clown and mime, created the Scuola Teatro Dimitri, a physical-theater academy that is now part of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland. Also notable is Lecoq’s program in Paris,* as well as the dozens of spinoffs created by his disciples around the world, including the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training in Philadelphia; the La Mancha in Santiago, Chile; and clown expert Philippe Gautier’s school in London.
Most clowns, however, cobble together their skills from a variety of sources, especially workshops such as the one André was teaching. These workshops last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and, like the amateur juggling clubs, are open to the public. Also like juggling clubs, they are ubiquitous. Online I found them advertised in Argentina, Japan, Australia, the United States, Chile, China, Canada, Spain, and Norway. In Paris, I stumbled on their advertisements regularly in circus venues, grocery stores, and even the restaurant below my apartment. (“Everybody wants to be a clown, apparently,” the Harley-driving proprietor told me when I asked where the poster had come from.)
The workshops most frequently offer the sort of training André adhered to. One poster claimed clown training allowed a person “to get in touch with the naïveté of your inner spirit.” Another promised “a new and overwhelming sense of enlightened laughter.” It was as if clowning had superseded not just the circus, but all of performance, and had become a means of personal development. The New York Times once commented on this phenomenon: “Forget comedy class. This is more like philosophy, religion, psychoanalysis,” April Dembosky wrote. “In the face of uncertainty, some people go to church. Others dive onto their analyst’s couch. The next time life gets confusing, how about a clown workshop?”
AFTER THE WARM-UP, André clapped his hands and sent the clowns scuttling. The pudgy woman in the peacock skirt set up a boom box and lingered on the stage, picking at her feathers, while André settled himself in the front row.
“All right,” André said, taking a notebook onto his knee, “let’s see what you’ve got.”
Each clown had prepared an entrée on the theme André had designated for this particular workshop: the “clown in love.” This woman’s entrée was a dance. At André’s signal, she marched over to the stereo, hit “play,” and moved back to center stage.
As a line of opera unspooled into the room, she threw herself around the stage with mounting aggression, lip-synching poorly. She was not graceful. Her peacock fronds crinkling and crunching, she heaved herself to the floor, crawled several feet, hauled herself up, lunged again, rolled onto her back, and then pushed herself across the stage as if she’d been shot in the leg. Within a minute she was sweating profusely. I tried to read André’s reaction, but he sat stone-faced. Personally, I had a hard time seeing how the skit related to love. It was more sad than funny, even a bit pathetic, and when she finished, my overriding emotion was pity.
The boom box fell mercifully quiet. There was a pause while André reviewed his notes. The woman lay in a pile on the stage, breathing heavily.
“Here’s the thing,” he began, pushing himself up from his seat. “You’ve developed a wonderful beginning. Really. I mean it’s all very … exuberant.” As he was speaking, the woman struggled to her feet, all the while watching him intently.
“There are some nice things here,” he said, “but there are also some things we need to work on.”
He reached down and drew up the feathers of her skirt.
“Let’s start with your look. Tell me about this. What were you thinking here?”
The woman looked sheepishly at the skirt. “To be honest, I don’t know exactly.”
“I see.”
“No, but, I mean, it feels like me,” she corrected herself quickly. “The colors, the way it moves.” She shook her hips. The skirt rustled like a palm tree. “I do like how it moves.”
André was skeptical. “I think we can do better.”
Putting together a costume, he explained, a clown shouldn’t just pick elements at random. Lecoq called the process a “personal transposition.” A clown should look to express certain elements about herself and then exaggerate them. As Annie Fratellini puts it in Destin de clown, “I do not know of a single clown whose make-up does not correspond to his deepest being” (son être profond).
There are two ways of approaching this. First, a clown might call attention to a physical quality that’s already a bit unusual. For example, Rosaline Guinet always called attention to her arms, which were long and pale. More classically, a costume might emphasize a personality trait or characteristic. Enormous clown shoes are a good example. Clowns were historically known for acting
clumsy. (The word “clown” is etymologically related to the Icelandic klunni, a cognate of the Swedish kluns, or “clumsy.”) In the nineteenth century, Billy Hayden, a clown at the Cirque des Champs-Élysées, decided to create a signifier for the trait: he adopted a pair of oversized shoes that caused him to trip. In his films, Chaplin made the shoes even bigger.
The point, André explained, is to make the clown’s issues immediately recognizable and render interior dilemmas exterior.
He repeated what he’d told me previously: Like animals, he explained, clowns are physical beings. They represent their emotional states in their bodies. For that reason, clowns often develop telltale gestures, like Chaplin’s nervous mustache twitch or Groucho Marx’s lecherous cigar waggle. “The moment you walk onstage, we should know something about you.”
In this spirit, he and the woman spent a few minutes discussing costume ideas and explored possible gestures. He told her to jump up and down. She did, and the skirt shook on her hips. He told her to try jiggling. Then he told her to make a motion, any motion. “Just make it big.”
With surprising flexibility and force, the woman kicked her leg up to her face and nearly knocked her nose with her knee.
André perked up. “Okay! A big kick!” This was a starting place. He told her to do the move again and this time add another, small gesture with her head or her mouth.
Again the woman responded enthusiastically, with her big kick followed by a sloppy Bronx cheer. “Pfthhhhhh!!!” I had the impression I was watching a football drill gone terribly awry, but André was obviously into it. He had started bouncing on his toes and was nodding vigorously.
“Great, great, great. Now we need to reduce it. Watch.”
He took a step back and launched into his own version of the sequence. There was a raging quality to the movement, almost like an unconscious tic. Whereas the woman’s gestures had been loose and exaggerated, André’s were tight and controlled. His foot barely left the ground. His tongue turtled between his lips. I thought of his rooster impersonation.
“You see that?” he coached, when he had repeated the series several times. “When the actions are big, they look absurd and out of place. Smaller, they become something else. Il faut serrer, serrer,” he said. Make them tighter, tighter.
The woman gave it a shot, repeating the steps several times, kicking and licking with adequate precision until the motion had assumed the appropriate spastic quality, whereupon André told her to run the whole act again. Only this time, he instructed, she was to use the gesture as a kind of tic: anytime she felt excited or energized, she should express that feeling with the move, “like a dog wagging its tail.”
The simple change made a drastic difference. With the new tic, the act was more compelling. There was a manic quality to it. It was like watching somebody trying to express herself but failing—like observing someone with only a tenuous grasp on her emotions. In the audience, I now felt I knew more about her than she knew about herself.
When she finished, the woman gathered up her boom box and bounced in a satisfied way out the stage door, the sweat glistening on her cheeks. André deflated back into the front row of seats.
“It’s hard,” he said. “She can get a laugh just coming onstage. But you have to know how to use it. You can talk until you’re blue in the face, but ultimately it’s something you have to feel.
“This isn’t the Comédie-Française. If she tries to base the routine on acting skills she doesn’t have, the audience will know right away. We have to emphasize what we’re given.”
Next an Eva Braun look-alike performed a fantasy with a stuffed animal; then a shabby auguste in a navy suit juggled eggs with minimal success. Andre’s advice developed along distinct themes. Most of it opposed what might be considered conventional clown wisdom. For example, Steve Smith, the former director of the Ringling Clown College, once told me that a clown’s movements had to be legible “from the back of Madison Square Garden,” and as a result encouraged broad gestures and broad comedy. But André encouraged his students to work smaller and aim for subtlety. Often he used the same gesture exercise he’d done with the woman in the peacock skirt: begin big and then pull back. The effectiveness of the movement, he said, came not from being legible but from being “juste,” true or real. “In theater, or even in a little one-ring show, the audience is close. Don’t overdo it.”
Similarly, he told them not to force the jokes. “Pas de gag!”—no gags! The comedy was in the details, in the honest response of the character to a given situation, not the punch line. I saw this come up while he was working with a man and a woman both in their twenties. They were dressed like nerds, he in taped glasses and high-water khakis, she in knee socks and a short plaid skirt. Their skit followed a simple sexual line. The woman, having trouble adjusting her skirt, asks the man for help; he agrees and stands behind, but his assistance quickly derails; she ends up doubled over in front of him as he bounces his crotch against her backside.
Clowns have a distinguished history of dirty jokes, of course. In Rome, the clown character Stupidus wore obscenely sized phalluses, the equivalent of leather eggplants that dangled between his legs and peeked out from under his skirt or loincloth. Commedia dell’arte, as a genre, was obsessed with sex, and most of its plot lines can be summed up as an accelerated skirt chase. Here, though, the act struck me as juvenile and facile—it wasn’t performed well, and it was too aggressively realistic. I thought André would take issue with the entrée, but instead he objected only to the presentation.
“The joke here isn’t in the sex,” he said, pacing in front of the stage. “We’ve all had sex. We’ve seen sex.” He encouraged them to find the comedy in the characters. How do they feel about each other in the beginning? Is she coquettish? Or maybe she’s pursuing him? Don’t rush the action, he said. What if he realizes where he’s standing? Let us see that. Or what if he’s pulled into the situation against his will? Maybe she bends over and he finds her bumping against him? Maybe he runs his hand along her back, catches himself, and pulls it away. “All this can be a starting point. You can go anywhere from here. Don’t be afraid to sit on a moment and let it run. Let your frustration build. Follow your instinct. Go where it takes you.” The clowns performed the act again, allowing the situation to build more slowly. What had been a sight gag developed into a small dramatic sketch about a quirky couple and the push and pull of courtship.
It was a lesson about exploring the nuances of characters, but it also related to what André called “presence”—the clown’s ability to respond to the situation as it develops. First, a clown has to be “present” in the scene. Though some clowns, like Footit and Chocolat, refined their acts to exactitude, most clown entrées aren’t fixed. Clowns adopt the model of the commedia and the Fratellinis, improvising around a simple script, or “à la can.” It is close to improv comedy, with insertions of physical business, banter, and whatever else comes to mind. (Even the famous film clowns worked this way; Buster Keaton used to draw up a rough outline of his bits and improvise the details—the looks, trips, and twitches—on the set.)
Just as important, clowns have to stay present with the audience. This isn’t unique to clowning. In the theater, there is usually an imaginary divide between audience and performers, a “fourth wall”; in the circus, performers and audience always share the same space. The audience is responsive: they applaud performers throughout the show, they get up and walk around; for a hundred years, producers left the lights on during the circus so people could talk. As Pascal likes to point out, the circus ring is the only entertainment venue in which spectators can see each other. (“The other faces are part of the décor.”) Performers speak directly to the audience, saluting them and bowing. Often a ringmaster welcomes you at the beginning of the show (“Ladies and gentlemen …”). Paul Binder, the director and the ringmaster of the Big Apple Circus, has noted that he often has the sense of an audience entering his living room.
In his book La Pla
nète des clowns, Alfred Simon called this direct relationship the circus’s “great law.” Clowns in particular live by it. In the Place Dauphine, Mondor and Tabarin teased and sold potions to their audience. Dan Rice, nineteenth-century America’s most famous clown, scanned the headlines of the local newspaper every morning and improvised that night’s material around what he had read. In Shakespeare, the clowns often step outside the play and comment on the action. For a clown, few restrictions apply. I have seen clowns rubbing their backsides in people’s faces, giving viewers kisses, dousing the audience in water. A clown can literally come to your seat and drag you onstage. David Shiner was notorious for walking on his audience, literally crawling across their backs. (“He’s got this special technique,” Hovey Burgess told me. “It feels like he’s barely touching you.”)
At the workshop, this relationship between audience and performer was discussed most explicitly during an afternoon session with a pair of young clowns who stood out even among this eccentric crowd. The auguste, Mattieu Pillard, was tall and lamppost-thin. He wore a plaid suit and a beret and had a face like that of a drowsy field mouse. His partner, Patrick de Valette, was significantly shorter, but clearly the boss of the duo. In a white velour Midnight Cowboy–style pimp suit, he strutted around, his lips pouting under a prickly mustache, his hips thrust out in front of him.
“Whenever you’re ready,” André called from the front row, as the clowns huddled backstage.
SKETCHES OF AN ENTRÉE
(CLOWN enters at a jog, arms open.)
CLOWN: Heeeeeyyyyyy!
(CLOWN circles the stage, smiling, settling near the audience. Beat. AUGUSTE tramps on unenthusiastically. He jogs the same path as CLOWN, arrives at the same spot, bumping CLOWN in the back. CLOWN turns, scolds AUGUSTE with his eyes. He returns his attention to the audience.)