How Being a Clown Can Change Your Life
The author in her clown regalia for Fou For Ha. Photo by Leori
By Allison Ayer
Are you afraid of clowns? Enamored with them? Secretly want to be one? Here in the Bay area there are potentially as many types of clowns as there are relationship styles or gender identifications. We have marching band clowns, porn clowns, drag clowns, acrobat clowns, butoh clowns, burlesque clowns, and more.
Circus is a venerated type of performance art in the world and perhaps one of the most accessible and established over the centuries. Purportedly, clowns have existed since 2400 BC,, and rather than solely providing entertainment, they have long been found in the role of socio-religious/psychological/political commentators and have even had overlapping roles as priests. How fascinating that our spiritual leaders were once synonymous with court jesters. One could say, without too much of a stretch, that some of our political leaders today are clowns, but perhaps not in the entertaining and insightful sense.
As an eleven-year member of a very Bay Area clown group, Fou Fou Ha, I understand that this category of performance art is very different for me than other types I’ve engaged in: acting, modern dance, and traditional abstract performance art. While clowning, I experience a flavor of profound human connection, both within myself and with my audience members. The creator of the Fous (Maya Lane), has long encouraged this orientation as well – the desire to normalize and encourage the full range of human experience. As a psychotherapist, her exposure to Jungian theory of the dark and light shadow led her to explore the creation of individual clown characters.
Most of us have heard of the dark shadow, the parts we are afraid of, ashamed of, that we hide from the general public. These sometimes come out in intimate relationships when we are triggered. Some may be familiar with the golden shadow (not to be confused with the golden shower). The golden shadow is what is referred to by MLK, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” He states that we are most afraid, not of our darkness, but of our light, and that we hold ourselves back in order to help others feel more comfortable. Because I am well-versed in Internal Family Systems work, I might phrase it as such: we have parts of ourselves/our psyches that shame us or tell us that we will fail, that we are ugly, unloveable, not good enough, and undeserving.
Clowning brings us out of such shadows. In Fou Fou Ha we borrow from traditions in drag, burlesque, clown, dance and theater to synthesize an alchemical interaction between performer and audience. Our psychedelic clown cabaret radically embraces and enacts these parts of us that have a habituated strategy to keep us in shame, keep us small, keep us from trying and failing, and from being seen in our vulnerable truths. We enact these parts and we make them exaggerated and ridiculous, ideally to elicit laughter. By doing this we allow our audience to feel understood, accepted, welcomed, and to perhaps have a moment of adult perspective on the silliness and messiness of humanity. That when we can take things less seriously they don’t seem as scary and shameful. And as many far wiser than me have stated, shame cannot exist in the light of day.
Fou Fou Ha. Photo by Curious Josh Photography.
Shame seems to be a large common denominator in many/most modern societies. Perhaps some have more body shame, others achievement based shame, or assimilation based shame. But what is true is that keeping our shame private allows it to fester and have a stronger hold on our actions and thoughts.
But do we need to vocalize our shame all the time? We have other options too; we can PLAY out our shame, just as we can play out our fantasies, our aggressions, our fears and dreams. The simple act of playing, as an adult, can be terribly embarrassing for folks who think they are constantly being watched and judged as lacking. Play can take the form of dancing, making jokes, being silly, making fun of yourself or dressing creatively, and can make conscious the unconscious anxieties around judgment. As we take risks to express ourselves, we feel first the fear and then the elation when we don’t DIE.
We all need play. Adults who don’t have sufficient play in their lives have lowered happiness, vitality and health, higher stress, and lowered creativity. Basically everything is suckier. And for children, insufficient play means delayed cognitive and social development, impaired emotional regulation, less athleticism and everything is also suckier. Children of this generation are spending far less than half of the hours in unsupervised play than children from a few generations ago. How will this impact our future creativity, innovation, health, connection and happiness? Probably not positively.
The author in her clown regalia for Fou Fou Ha. Photo by Leori
Clowning is like crafted play that can be for ourselves but is most often for an audience. As “performers” in our life, we can then get self-reinforcing feedback on our hilarity and creativity.
Do you want to infuse some clown into your life? Do you want your new pronoun of choice, like mine, to be “k/clown”? Here’s one tip you might find accessible or easy to try today: Use an object, any object, in a new way, when someone is looking. (Maybe you want to do this for your family, or a friend, or a complete stranger. Maybe one of those groups is easier to feel safe with than another. We are all different.) For example, there’s the famous “banana phone.” And, what else could a banana be? A toothbrush? A Q-Tip? A razor? A remote control? Can you commit to the gag? When someone quizzically gives you a look or a giggle when you try to change the channel on your TV with a banana, where can you go with that? Look for a place to change the batteries? Hit it to see if that gets it to work? Complain that the new brand of universal remotes always sucks?
And how will you know if you’ve succeeded? Someone, maybe even you, will be laughing.
Allison Ayer is a Clown Diva in the SF based troupe, Fou Fou Ha, as well as the creator of The You Lab and Wake the Talk UP! On the daily you can find her coaching, resetting the nerve receptors in her clients’ bodies, guiding inner psyche work, cavorting in the sunny East Bay, or guiding folks to more skilled verbal negotiation and radical, tender ownership. Or maybe honking her cacophony of rubber chickens. The pink one, Hildi, is her current favorite. A native Vermonter, Allison has way too much pride in her rugged individualism at the same time that she loves consensus thinking and being a complex and contradictory human stew of parts. Find out more at allisonayer.
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