Paghanini

I have a new clown. His/her name is Paghanini--one of those ambiguous-gender clowns. Not at all bright. Variously described as a hound and a Neanderthal when angry, which happens often and suddenly. But also really joyous when dancing. Paghanini's dance is a sort of stiff-armed popping and flapping; Allie called it a bouncy penguin dance. Paghanini is much more impatient than my other clowns. That's an interesting feeling to work with; though it's hard to say, given the brevity of the vignettes we're working on, I think it means in a longer scene Paghanini would make more things happen. So he/she may eventually be higher-status than other clowns I've had. Too much of a spaz to be the #1 (or, as Eli calls it, an In Clown), but conceivably a #2 in a trio.

We're working in nose and whiteface. No talking in nose. My clowns have always been fairly quiet (or limited to tiny, tiny vocabularies, like okay and please and that's it), but the discipline of total silence is really instructive. There is just so much you can do with gesture when it's honest. And I think the absence of language lets us mostly avoid the trap of trying to be clever.

It's been amazing, too, to see the changes whiteface wreaks in my classmates' faces. Rich--who's typically pretty bouncy and cuddly--turns into something scary; the makeup brings out all the sharp points in his face. Ryan, normally animated, becomes an incredibly deadpan neutral clown named Lars. His head is shaved and he never smiles. He drew in his eyebrows exactly parallel to his mouth. You could actually draw an oval with two lines for brows, two dots for eyes, a red dot for the nose, and another line for the mouth, and you'd have a reasonably accurate portrait of Lars. Liza, a Hermia type, becomes a wide-eyed three-year-old who's wandered out of bed and into the grown-ups' cocktail party. Vanessa is about the same size as Liza, but she turns into Margherite, who's stone-faced and humorless, the highest-status clown in the room. She looks like the ballet instructor who doesn't mind telling you that you should probably progress to anorexia, because the bulimia is not doing enough for your thighs.

Other aspects of clown don't change. It's exhilarating work, but outside the classroom you do start running into everyday actions that suddenly seem fraught with comic or tragic import, and you've lowered the barriers that would ordinarily keep you from expressing those feelings fully. Picking up a dishrag thrusts you instantly into the trauma of daily domestic life, for example. It's good that we're all living and working together, because all the theater students are going through the same thing, and we don't have to explain these moments to each other.