Often I hear from actors about how ´terrifying' it is to do clowning. Or being on stage. Or doing a self-tape. Even so, we do it.
we want to do it.
why is it terrifying?
there is something about not being prepared. when we prepare, we plan. we plan everything: how it is going to happen, when, where...
but the truth is: in life there is no plan!
it never works as we planned.
To plan is to live in the future. in a future that will never happen. As we are busy living in our invented future we don't notice what is happening in front of our noses. We might lose the beauty of a simple breath, or the feeling that a certain light gives in a fleeting instant.
This boring and useless plan needs to fail. It always does because life doesn't happen in our heads.
When the plan fails we suddenly come back to the present moment.
What a wonderful gift it is to fail!
When we fail we fall. The fall is great. Grandious. Tragic. (if we let ourselves, we might think we will never be able to get back up)
However, in a true clown spirit: we bounce back. We bounce back by just realising that we fell from a great obsolete plan. In this confession, we touch our human essence. Between the flight of a dream and the fall of reality, that is where we exist.
Clowns live in this dynamic between a flying imagination and the fall into the moment. Playing with the red nose heightens our human essence.
I don't know why this might be terrifying, but possibly there is no need to ask why.
It is actually a great thing. Didn't we learn to walk by falling and getting back up?
Don't we learn by making mistakes?
It is possibly the fear of failure that is keeping us from doing amazing things.
What if there was a way to practice finding the pleasure to fail and bounce back?
actor: Nell Barlow photo taken by Zoe Birkbeck
"As an actor, studying and practicing the clown has helped me enormously. I have come to learn that the clown is about play, our relationship with the audience and our ability to be in the moment and exist there. These are the best tools an actor can learn. I have always been very cerebral in the way I work and to be trained in clown gives my body and emotional voice and a new breath. I feel less anxious actually and over conscious of what I am doing in my work as a whole" Nell Barlow
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