Pierre's Parentheses

Pierre's Parentheses

Most days of the workshop included a parentheses in the mid-morning.  These activities were instructed by Pierre and consisted predominantly of tricks that we could put into our proverbial clown bags (hats?), to incorporate into our improvisations, our more rehearsed performances, and (presumably) our work beyond the workshop.

The tricks are standard.  Pierre emphasizes the importance of articulation of action.  He demonstrated this by breaking up the somersault into thirteen steps, but the extension of this articulation is to link the action to the (always flopping) task of the clown.  But, the first step of the baby clown is to simply articulate the steps, and so there is always time to practice these basic clown skills.  The same concept applies to our other parentheses of throwing an imaginary object in the air, double takes, delayed reactions, and an infinite number of hat tricks!

I was struck by how much clowning/performance and physics actually do have to do with one another.  OKOK.  I could have a one-track mind.  I could also have been misinterpreting Pierre's French.  But this is  not the first time that master teachers of physical theatre have made such connections.  I remember Daniel Stein at the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre reiterating to us, "If it's true in the physical world, it's probably also true in the metaphysical world, and vice versa."  And, to stretch my memory/imagination even further, I remember my high school physics teacher delivering a performance not unlike one of Pierre's parentheses this August.

It must be said that Pierre likes to talk.  His stories form the actual parentheses around the activity of the day.  And many of the parentheses have to do with the manipulation of space and time (which is, of course, what good theatre does anyway).  And physics is largely about the behavior of bodies in space and time.

I slipped on my own spacetime continuum, from Locarno in August 2012 to New Hampshire in 1996(? whenever it was that I would have been taking physics).  As Pierre threw his imaginary ball into the air and instructed us that it is the clown's purpose to facilitate the audience's imagination of that ball through space, I remembered an almost identical moment in which my high school physics teacher, Mr. Lorenz, also threw an imaginary ball in the air for our physics lecture on gravity.

Pierre threw his ball into the air and described the experience of a student's reverie, imagining the ball soaring through clouds as the student became a bird in flight in a a clown performance that expanded space and time through his commitment to the image.

Mr. Lorenz threw his (imaginary) ball into the air and became that student lost in reverie before our class.  The lecture was about gravity, and Mr. Lorenz committed to the imagination of a ball travelling through the universe without the gravity of Earth's atmosphere keeping it in place.  He threw the ball up and watched it travel past the moon, out of the solar system, through outer space, to the other side of the universe.

Pierre's parentheses was meant to tell us that it is our job, as clowns, to remind the audience of the things that we throw out and up in performance.  To keep all of our narrative, mimetic, and physical balls in the air and present in the mind of the audience.  I think Mr. Lorenz's ball is still in the air, in my imagination, even as I write this blog.