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Clowning

CLOWNING- So what’s the purpose of clowning? the idea of clowning was to bring out the inner child, release any thought of doubt and authentically get things wrong and be ok with that, its being vulnerable within your self. strange because most acting we do, everything needs to be filtered and right, but no clowning is less serious and more playful. Thats why we relate it to being a young child again, we were less bothered about who's watching and imagination took us away, we would play the silliest games with our friends and create our own, no rule world. Then i guess as we grow up, all those natural abilities, were taking from us, as we had responsibility and a life of our own which indeed we had to take serious, so i guess clowning is learning to take all those layers away and express it authentically to the audience, i mean its the opposite of a perfectionist, like myself so i knew id struggle however learn a great deal about myself as a individual actress, which is needed for my growth. 

SKILLS AND TECHNIQUES WHICH WE LEARNT- The lessons on clowning, were very fun and exciting and also interesting. We play games which helped us bring out our child like side and encountered fun and being playful the correct word for this is LE JEU, for example the games which we played were, grannies foot steps, funny nun, Crocodile, and my favorite one was this very interesting game were we would have to listen to the banging drum and react, with real emotion and clock that we had been caught, then we’d play ball with another person and show our inner clown, by TAKING RISKS, which was another key factor of clowning and then being able to CLOCK and take a look at the audience with the correct timing. To help us comprehend this more, tutor Josh made us play a simple game of walking down and to CLOCK the audience at the correct time, i found this easy and fun to do. Yet i found i struggled at the Funny nun game, as it helps show the humor you have which each person playing the game, the whole point of the game is to catch someone laughing who you look at and say ‘Its a very sad and sorrow day isn't it’ yet you have to reply and not smile nor laugh, its serious game, the other person gets to be goofy and fun to catch the other person out. I struggled as i laughed at times i shouldn't of due o everyones humor being different of course, and comprehending the unique relationship which everyone in the class, who ever has the best humor together, is more likely going to performing clowning better. The next game was intense, you and your partner standing very close face to face, saying nothing just staring in each others eyes and if one of you even smiles of laugh, then a slap is acceptable for any slip ups, i found myself to be very good at this as i had a lot of intense focus and concentration, et this game depends on the relationship with the other person as this also effect whether you are more likely to laugh or not. I found that when i was with Morgan, i was concentrated fully due to our connection, however when i was with Billy boy it all changed, we were a lot more likely to slip as we have a great fun bond together so it all comes down to the humor connection.

After games where played, this is were practice started and we had a series of noses which in this case were our masks, the first game was pick up a nose and walk into the room and stay still and silent and literally do nothing, i struggled with this one as am very hype and extroverted naturally, so bringing it back was hard as talking and moving about is my usual and how i openly express myself, yet i forgot when wearing mask where now in character, so i should of focused on that more, i learnt that i’m not so confident with doing the opposite of myself with is nothing as am mostly doing everything. The next game we did was telling jokes with one of the noses on, which i found funny to myself, this helps with finding out your true inner clown, which the audience are connected and entertained too. I then found my inner clown was serious and very sensitive, as this is complete opposite of who i am in general. which is why its usually funnier. The next game was to go out the room while students and teacher pick how many items and guide you by saying responding to hot as clapping and not hot by silence, the items they choose you have to figure out what to do with them and the further along the harder it gets. I found this very hard as the audience barely gives you clues or hints and it literally could mean anything, i took the game too seriously which made it way less funny then it could of been, instead i should of enjoyed the journey but as my tutor said i made it into more of a drama. The aim of the game was to play with the audience and do things wrong but enjoy that and take your time to figure it out in your own way.

TEACHERS OF CLOWNING-

Marcel Marceau was a French actor and mime artist most famous for his stage persona as "Bip the Clown". He referred to mime as the "art of silence", and he performed professionally worldwide for over 60 years. This is one of the teachers we looked at for clowning, then there was Decroux the inventor of corporeal mime, he is the first to formalize his art for his teaching, he teach his students to keep their face covered and learn to convey every emotion through their body. As for Marcel he invents a character who combines chaplin movements with the look of harelquin. 

So in lesson, we learnt about Marcel and his mime techniques as these can be very useful for clowning, we practiced games such as being stuck in the box and it’s to do with timing and body structure, this helped us gain an idea of how realistic a certain movement can make you look, i found it pretty easy to do, i think it was just the timing. The next game was pretending someone was on the other end of the rope and trying to pull it up, i found this pretty easy too as i managed to make it look real as i had the correct facial expressions,timing and energy.

CLOWNING FEEDBACK

So my first idea of clowning that i came up with was ‘Being a baby’, i had partnered up with Kenzo at first the idea was exicting and then throughout Kenzo lost motivation and wasnt exicted to work on it with me, which slightly put me off. I decided to dress up as a baby with Kenzo and be in a Play centre, so i bought some dummies and bottles to make it look effective and dress up in kids clothing. The first time we performed, it wasnt really practised we pretty much just improved the whole thing, we just has to found out what type of clown we both were. I found i was and angry and sensitive clown, whereas Kenzo was a sarcastic and bully clown, this worked well as it needs to be like cat and mouse or boss and auguste, shown in a unique way in order to capture the audience eyes. We wrote down a small draft plan to work off and showed the class, it was very funny at first and ideas where floating out,the joshs feedback was saying it  could really work as we was getting laughs out of it , then he said for me to loose the accent so its better and the water as it makes a mess, Kenzo feedback was to play with it more and have fun also doing so. Yet overall the performance was good fun and laughable, then i noticed the more i did it the less funny it got, so i had to switch up with more ideas yet keeping it simple, i tried adding music and it worked for a while, then it kind of lost focus. Personally i found clowning quite difficult either because of how complex my ideas where or the person i was working with, as there was only some Le jeu now and then. I think i needed to focus more on enjoying it too, keeping up the excitement of the piece as this plays a big part when performing it. The final performance actually went better than expected as we added a few more extra parts towards the end which made it a success, however it could of been better if it had a strong idea of the beginning to the end and was kept more fun and risk taking, as i felt it was a little bit safe.

CONCLUSION-

If you're aware of your clowning or your comedy, then the audience starts to become aware that you're aware, and it starts to become a bit smart. This is what stand-up comedians are very good at doing, laughing at their own jokes, and presenting the idea that we live in a comic world, whereas actors have to play characters from the character's point of view, and those characters don't view themselves as being caught in a comic situation. It's actually often the opposite: the characters are in desperate situations and take desperate measures that become funny in themselves. One of the things that clowning requires, as opposed to perhaps drama, is a very strong connection with the audience; you really have to be in tune with the people who are watching you and you have to listen to them very carefully to know how to gauge how far to take things, and then play off this reaction. One of the things I've always found most interesting about 'edgy' clowning is the word edge, meaning the edge of the stage where you have one foot in the audience and one foot in the story and you ride dangerously close to living out of the story and giving the audience what they want, but also being reigned in by the discipline of what you have to do within the story. It is an edge because if you give the audience too much, then you don't have respect for the story, but if you give them too little then you're not playing with them enough. There's a fine edge where a character can be in the middle of something, but the audience's response can draw him out to them. There are two very distinct sorts of clowning: white clowning and black clowning. The white clown is very good at clowning, very good at mime and at generating laughter with an audience and playing with them. The black clown is the anti-clown, and he mocks mime and the idea of needing an audience, and questions how perverse he can be but still get the audience's laughter. He might mime grabbing a female from the audience, putting her on stage and undressing her and then doing the job on her and smacking her on the bum, which sounds ridiculous but the audience is in a state of laughter, so he looks for how he can take it further, to find what they won't laugh at. From this point he puts it back to the audience and basically says that if you are going to laugh at me and find some value in me, then don't try to change me. 

CONSENT with andy-

Taz what is taz?

They deliver one to one sessions, group work, open access, outdoor education, Youth Council and detached youth work sessions. To help keep the youth safe, well educated and able to trust the council at all times, especially emergency.  

We needed to make a drama piece which involves consent which means giving permission, for a certain thing. So the clients from TAZ introduced us with this, and told us we need to make a performance that involves CONSENT and we can perform this is any way as long as it adds every important detail in there and we deliver it in a way that our target audience eg; high school students 13-14 can comprehend, normally small amounts of humor will keep the audience interested, and they will definitely remember it which is good. We figured out a strategy to help us work up with this, which was to do a dance scene at the start about the boy with his girlfriend at his party, shows them dancing together and him getting pressured by his friends to sleep with her and she was getting pressured to drink, this would help us tap into the common social areas were people mostly crack and are more likely to give in as most young people now a days are influenced to drink, so using a common scenario will have more of a impact as it’s really realistic. Further on through the scene she’d get more drunk and be way more vulnerable and he would had given into his friends pressuring him and done the deed without CONSENT and this is where consent is then introduced within a social situation, then the dance would be repeated to the end, so the audience are introduced to it at the start and then it makes sense at the end. My role was to be one of the friends who pressured the boy to have the party and helped him talk to his girlfriend with the right thing to say, helps to show how much pressure the guy was under and it can be really relatable to young people shows the situation had led out of control all over one thing and it seems to be building up and getting worse. After the dance scene he gets mocked on the bus by his friends once again for being a virgin, so this part really highlight he feels worried of being judged and is upset of it happening so somehow feels like the only way to fit in to be socially accepted by his so called friends is by having sex, so then he takes his girlfriend for a meal and meets up with his friend, who were still of course questioning him about his girlfriend and wondering if he had still slept with her, this scene was important as it was the most triggered scene to the point where they almost fight as he was insulted when his friend called him a queer because he didn’t have sex, this the leads him to doing something he really didn’t feel like he wanted to do, yet left with no choice as he felt that odd as although he didn’t fit in, so he decides to prove himself as his friend offers to throw a party for him to loose his virginity too and he agrees but does his girlfriend? This was the sad part yet it involves the matter of consent and how serious of a matter it is, the girlfriend didn’t give consent especially considering she was under the influence of alcohol which makes conditions a lot worse, so the boy continued to peruse her through the night as his friends helped her get more and more drunk to the point where she’s not aware of her surroundings, making it a lot easy for the bad deed to be done, showing us no consent was confirmed leaving her in a very vunerable state, which helps shows awareness in the area of young people drinking alcohol and what it can lead to, I think we brought up more than one issue within consent which would also have a serious impact on people when they watched it. I think the consent piece was really good and effective as the little things such as the text sound effect catched the audience eyes and made them laugh, and the way the dance with the boy and his girlfriend was repetitive it stood out a lot more, stuck with the students. Then toward the end it helped unravel what consent was when the people spoke up on it, as it mentioned the cup of tea which was a great metaphor for people to comprehend it better. I noticed the music was suited for every scene and made it more interesting to watch, as it played a part.

When performing in schools, we noticed the first school was very echoey and it was overlapping sounds from one another, i found personally it was too small to perform in and was quite cramped, so the schools conditions wasn't suitable for such a active physical piece. However it was performed well, other than for going way too fast then it should of been, it was performed well, the only issue was the environment. To make it better we should of had a bigger stage, and found a way to deliver the bed scene so the audience at the back could also see the performance as it was done on the floor and usually they don’t sit on chairs in assembly, you’d just sit on the floor, that helps us adapt for next time if we arrive at a similar situation. The Q&A at the end could of been directed better so that people could ask questions about the characters and their situations that they were in, to get a better understanding.

AUDITIONS-

I had to find a monologue that fitted to me as a person and showed off my best potential, so i asked Andy to help me find a emotional piece, as that’s my strongest point when doing monologues so i found a Scouse play called Unpleasant and i was reading ALI, this was my contemporary piece, for my place in London drama school i would need 1 contemporary and 1 classical piece, so next was my search for a classical piece, this is where i found Ophelia by shakesphere, i found this difficult as i don’t know much about his work, and not done my research on him, so to really comprehend i need to read the text again an again to see the true meaning of the monologue. I performed the contemporary one first, my given feedback was to loose the legs on the table as it’s not needed for the character and it gives odd confusion for character, i got told i need to in tune with the character more and do less pauses, yet my problem was not learning the lines as that’s where the pauses came from. The pauses interrupted my character energy and flow, just when its getting exciting, i pause, however what i did good on was my anger on certain parts which involved in to make it look effective, my character which i played also suited me a lot as i was able to execute the right emotions at times, and the contrast of emotion were shown correctly. So i needed to learn the whole of my monologue to avoid that mistake, next was my classical monologue piece which i found difficult as for most of it, i didn’t over-stand the correct meaning of the piece and the words nor timing, the audience and Andy picked up on this, so may be i need to be spending more time on translating it in English so it makes sense and then am able to deliver it in a more authentic way.  I think i needed to take more time to get the character right too, these little adjustments will make a big improvement.

The feedback we got given off Andy and the students, where effective as it lets us see from and outer perspective, and then when we realise where we go wrong, we can improve from that and get even better, so i think this really helps. We can see the good things and the bad things that needs to be worked on more, and then we get to perform it again for sure to show how much we’ve improved. We also get told whether our work is put down as a Pass,Merit, or Distinction, and its interesting to know why? from the teacher and students.