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.