Plunge into the deep mystery
When I first was studying clowning with clown master Philippe Gaulier in London, there was a student from Spain called Marta. When we all arrived at class she was by herself and very quiet and it soon turned out that she spoke almost no English. Our teacher had very little Spanish. This meant that each time she got up to do an exercise she only had a very precarious grasp on what she was meant to do, and no way in which to communicate her intentions other than through her actions.
In the words of Philippe she was ‘always in the shit’, which is a good thing for someone learning clown by the way.
At any rate, to watch Marta do an exercise was a celebration of abandonment, imagination and impulse, she didn’t know what she was supposed to do, we didn’t know what she was doing and because of that the possibilities were endless.
She could only respond from the heart and her sense of play to the chaos that she was always in, up on stage. Her presence was electric because she was sharing her humanity and having fun.
Furthermore, to get up on stage with Marta and do an exercise was to abandon all hope of rationality and linear narrative, you simply entered the lunacy and learned to fly to wherever the spirit was blowing. I learned so much from watching and participating in her chaos.
This is the electricity of abandonment and entering the unknown unknown. It is a space artists know well because it is a space that calls to them. The clown is a persona that willingly enters this space … to play, to discover, to help a friend, to … to plunge into the deep mystery.