Thoughts on the performer as athlete

For the past month or so I've been meeting three times a week with some other clowns, developing material and characters and so forth. Like any clown process it's been sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating. I've got a new high-status clown, Paillette, and some interesting possibilities for solo and duet scenes.

Most of us have trained with 500 Clown at some point in the past, and early in the process we brought in Paul for a two-day workshop. At one point he mentioned his belief that a stage performer ought to be an athlete. I agree--and feel as though I have instinctively agreed for a while--but the discussion crystallized several ideas that I've been mulling over for a while.

First, there's just a question of physical necessity. Clown is gruelling. Most theater, if it's good, is exhausting. If you want to do it for any length of time, you have to make sure your body and voice are up to the task. (And voice, more than many people realize, is a matter of body. I remember reading an interview with one of the great Wagnerian sopranos. She mentioned that she'd just started going to a massage therapist who also treated a number of NFL players. On the first visit, the therapist said, "You know, you have back muscles like a linebacker.")

There's also a question of presence. People who are comfortable with their bodies are compelling to watch. I once saw a modern dancer, in his first speaking part, wipe the stage with a cast of more experienced actors. He was used to moving in a way they weren't, and everything that his body did was genuine and natural. That's an aspect of performance that trips up even luminaries like Gielgud (who was famously described as acting with a ribbon tied around his knees).

But beyond the argument of practicality, there's the quality that usually gets the name of "integration." It's a handy term but, I think, a fairly anemic one for one of the performer's most potent tools.

An acting teacher I had years ago used to talk about the quality of danger that a good actor brings onto the stage. It's not a question of menace but of unpredictability, of risk, of life that might burst free at any moment, passions that might turn violent. Of course those impulses exist in all of us on an emotional level; but in the physical actor, there's always a sense that the emotional impulses can immediately become action. They are no sooner felt than lived, without the intervention of conscience or intellect or social duty. Thence the danger.

We discussed this in a different guise, in the Philosophy of Performance class at the Accademia. We read "A Hunger Artist," which of course ends with the popular spectacle of the caged panther, whose appetites and actions are entirely one. We read this in the context of our discussion of Plato and the Platonic mistrust of the body (which evolved into medieval Christian mistrust of the body, which evolved into all sorts of unfortunate tendencies still with us today). Plato heartily disapproved of comedy and the physical effects of laughter, and I'm sure he would have considered clowns and physical performers as base as could be. Anyway, the point is, in a society that still doesn't quite trust the body (or treats it as something separate, an object to be altered or subjugated), the physical performer is an anomale. The difference helps create the necessary whiff of danger--a certain outsider status.

This is a lot of words for something that is easily illustrated with a few gestures. I typically avoid describing clown processes, because that puts me in too analytical a frame of mind; it's often antithetical to the actual work. But I may be at the point in my clown work where, to refine what I'm doing, I have to start describing it consciously. Well, so be it.