6. Anecdote: Female Clown, Sue Broadway, Australia
I am looking at a picture of myself aged about twenty. I am wearing a clown ballerina dress, giant point shoes and a funny red wig. I am looking out past the camera with an expression of open-hearted pleasure, my eyes sparkling with the sheer delight of being in front of an audience. The girl clown I see in these pictures went into hiding shortly afterwards and it took nearly thirty years to coax her out again. There were other clowns; a fat lady with a stammer, an elegant white face in a sequined frock, a manic ‘beautiful assistant’ causing havoc in a juggling act, a pompous trapeze artist… but the simple, open naïve clown seemed to be gone for good. I had stumbled on her thoughtlessly, just the first thing that came to mind, without realising just how fragile she was.
How did she get lost? Well, she was a bit lonely. There were few other women clowns in evidence and none I could find from the past to look to for inspiration. I didn’t think to go looking in other art forms (Lucille Ball, Goldie Hawn, Guilietta Massina) and everywhere I came across conventional wisdoms that told me women and clowning were a problem zone. For a start, they said, the clown is androgynous and it is impossible for a woman to be androgynous. She carries her sex around with her as a constant. Other factors intruded; the male clown can take a fall or a hit and jump up laughing, but if a woman does the same it carries an inescapable implication of violence. Especially if the clown that knocks her down is a man.
Also I began to think – perhaps too much. I wanted my clowning to say something, to communicate ideas about the female condition, to provide a role model and a character that other women could laugh with. The naïve girl who was so happy in her skin and just delighted to be out there having a go at it seemed too simple and childish to tackle the big questions. So Frou-frou packed up her tutu and put her older, tougher sisters into the firing line. Maureen was fat and had a stammer, she wore a daggy dress and a headscarf and lived in a gag where she was constantly put down by two male clowns. But she was tough and acrobatic and always bounced back. She did dangerous things on a ladder and although she was a victim she never took it lying down. Then there was the nameless clown, she never spoke and people just called her Sue. She sabotaged the juggling acts of Dave Spathaky with her over enthusiasm, her clumsiness with props, her scene-stealing and her inability to concentrate. In the same company (Ra-Ra Zoo) she appeared as a trapeze artist striving for artistic perfection and failing.
Later there was Athena the white face, based on the goddess of Wisdom and War, her sequined dress was her armour and her mop was a spear. She appeared in a show called “Angels and Amazons” with Angela de Castro and Debbie Woolley. Together we explored the traditional Clown trio, White face, Bouffon, Auguste - in female form. This show was the starting point for a new search. Like many white faces, I came to resent the high status role, feeling (shame on me!) that I was doing all the set-up work and the others were getting all the laughs. So I set out on a quite deliberate search to find a naïve clown of my own. I’d forgotten that Frou-frou had ever existed.
That was twelve years ago. I started with Phillipe Gaulier. His course “Le Jeu” was an excellent beginning, the rediscovery of a readiness to play and of ‘complicite’ was just what I needed. Then I did his Clown class. In the circus when they want to teach the horses to lift their knees high in the air, they tie heavy weights to their feet for days at a time, so when they take them off, the horses’ knees rebound, creating that prancing walk. Training in Clown with P.G. was, for me, just like this. The experience was painful, dragging, distressing and exhausting, but afterwards…! The next time I went in front of an audience I was fearless. I had suffered P.G. and survived! I couldn’t make him laugh, but I could get my revenge by succeeding with an audience.
At a Gaulier Workshop in Sydney 1999 I met Jeff Turpin and later worked with him on and off for four years. This work provided a space for testing the discoveries made in workshops in the public arena. Jeff is a natural anarchist and his constant playfullness forced me to let go of my perfectionism and relax much more with the audience. There have been many other teachers and directors - Angela de Castro, Virginia Imaz, Shannan Calcutt, Tom Gruder, Therese Collie - and the experience has been quite different. These people all work in a much softer way - they create open spaces where it’s possible to relax and allow things to happen. Some people learn and develop really well by rising to challenges, but for some of us encouragement and a slower, less competitive process seems to work better. This is partially a gender issue, generally speaking, men seem to respond better to competitive training than women, while women prefer a softer approach, but there are always exceptions.
In 2002 Alicia Battestini, Angela de Castro and I convened a week of creative development in Wollongong. Eight women clowns got together and explored possibilities. It was only a week, but it was a very intense week and I came away from it with a script for a piece of clown theatre, a potential new clown partner (Fleur Evans) and loads of ideas for teaching and creating new work. One issue we came up against a lot was clown travesty, women choosing to play male clowns and vice versa. For many women the adoption of male dress makes a good starting point for clowning – it seems to free them from the constraints of the feminine and allow them to step outside themselves. I have never been attracted to the idea of parodying the masculine as a source of comedy. For me, the challenge has always been to create a female archetype that has the same force, simplicity and truthfulness as the male.
The biggest leap for me came at the Festival Internacional de Pallasses d’Andorra in 2001. This gathering of women clowns from all over the world showed me that there were hundreds of women exploring this work and the diversity of their styles and obsessions was awe-inspiring. I performed a small piece with Angela de Castro, “The Stagehands”, for which I put together a new costume and put on a nose (skin pink not red) for the first time in twenty years. Frou-Frou was back - renamed Soobee, but essentially the same open-hearted, brave and enthusiastic girl of my earliest shows. I finished the festival dancing eccentrically in the street surrounded by over eighty women clowns and went home filled with excitement and optimism. Two years later I returned to the festival in Andorra with a fifty minute solo work, “The Soobee Show”, which is a compilation of all my work of the previous twenty-five years.
So here I am in 2005, turning fifty, with, I hope, years of clowning ahead of me. I’ve let go of so much, I used to cling to the idea that I had to do something clever or dangerous or mysterious to keep the audience interested. Now I know I don’t need those things (well, not all the time). The older I get the looser my shows become and the freer I feel to go anywhere my impulses take me. I perform different clown pieces in different costumes, but gradually they are drawing closer together and I begin to realise that they are all the same clown, the same foolish person just pretending. A clown can be anyone or anything she wants to be.”
A Nose of Her Own, (pictured above) Wollongong, 2002. From Left, standing - Azaria Universe, Fleur Evans, Eleanor Davies, Angela De Castro, Alicia Battestini, Kate Kantor, Susie Dee. Seated - Sue Broadway.
Find more information on Sue Broadway’s work at www.artmedia.com.au/broadway.htm
Angels can Fly includes a mix of fiction which follows the adventures of ten clown characters, some personal clown anecdotes from clowns from around the world, a total of 50 practical clown exercises, and some theory on the nature of modern clown. The book is available on order through bookshops and online stores in New Zealand, Australia, America and England. Order your copy today. Find it on Amazon by following this link: http://tinyurl.com/9nrwj
“Clown is a fascinating, diverse, complex and exciting art form, which has existed around the planet for thousands of years. Like any art form it has to evolve to stay relevant to the culture nurturing it, and at the same time, and by its very nature, clown teases and turns upside down the cultural patterns and boundaries around us.”
