The return of the clown

Meyerhold in his clown costume

Charcot identified a second phase of hysteria that he called “the phase of clownism” or later known as the buffoonery syndrome. Protracted movements, big gestures and excessive behaviour were main symptoms. Mady Schutzman spots this phase of hysteria in contemporary advertising. Hysterical joy, full blasted energy and euphoric uprising appear in hundreds of commercials in relation to a product to be consumed in nowadays capitalism. Bodies of women in commercials are putting the mask of hyperfemininity and are manifesting the buffoonery syndrome. Hysteria in its theatrical visualization can be used in popular culture as a critical tool in reviewing the construction of hyperfemininity as a clown discourse. If Charcot’s patients were considered “sublime comediennes” and studied by actors like Sarah Bernhardt for their melodramatic roles, the popular hyperfemininity can be read as a radical potential of buffoonery inspiration. The hysterical spectacle is an act of self-mockery, where subjectivity is replaced with something bigger, something oversignified, a suggestion of hypersubjectivity. The becoming of a clown implies the abandonment of consciousness that is understood as a lie, a myth that is to be avoided.

The clown manifests hysterical symptoms especially in the area of gender identification. The male clown acts his desire to be the female, the desire for women clothing. In Marx Brothers’ film A Night at the Opera, Harpo is caught wearing the clown costume of an opera singer. When he is ordered to take it off, he reveals the uniform of a naval officer, and from beneath it, a woman’s dress. If the naval uniform is the sign of masquerade, the dress underneath stays on, the unlayering goes no further. If the uniform used by the clown is a mockery of male authority that the hysteric rejects, the dress is the fantasy of femininity attached to the male imaginary, where sexual difference cannot function anymore. The story of the hysteric is as controversial as the story of circus clowns. They both had to disappear in the 20th century, due to their masterful refuse of mastery but their contradictions can be revalued and used in capitalism’s dynamic of its internal contradictions. As Mady Schutzman observed the clown is back especially in advertising, and hysteria is back in neurosciences.

The Tiger Lillies at Trafo - Budapest

First impact, the audience. Kind of scary. I definitely had different expectations when I entered the big Trafo studio. The chairs were put in nice rows and old women with their husbands were waiting for the musical performance. No freaks, no Goths, no clowns, nothing that I expected. The Budapest crowd was formed of old ladies, corporate middle-agers and a bunch of nice Western lost tourists. This should be interesting, I said to myself, knowing the songs and Tiger Lillies reputation. And indeed it was. But straight to the show: cabaret to the bone, cheap clown makeup, slap-stick comedy show outfits, typical gags with poor acting, falsetto voice a la castrato opera, playing with toy music instruments and so on. All the Tiger Lillies arsenal that I could dream of. And everything functioned brilliantly. I had a 10 times stronger feeling than watching a John Waters movie: everything is so bad and theatrical that strikes you and makes you stay there into the illusion, in their sad and hysterical world, with their pimps and whores and freaks and killers and circus kids. By keeping an eye on the beautiful theatricality you are not getting out of the illusion but in a Brechtian way, you follow what’s beneath, you get straight into its reality. That you know it’s illusionary. This was my first musical experience of this type: through music, I even got into their characters’ stories, their little gags and their melancholic parts. The public was incredibly receptive: they laughed and cried and applauded. They knew their songs and asked for more. But one thing I still missed: a good old cabaret atmosphere, loud and smoky, drinking alcohol and joking during the show. Coming from the other side of the performance, we, the audience, were not doing the right thing, we were out of the picture. And that was most impressive in their show: a certain type of performance asks for a certain type of spectators that they should slowly become, and that has power and trangressive force. What I thought I would never like in a show I liked it here: their great mannerism, the fact that they played the same songs and gags that they played over and over again for thousand times and you could see that. Their apparent boredom only made them more intense and the atmosphere more potent. All the time during the show I had one friend in mind: Olli (this is his website, just in case), an old clown from Switzerland who told me one amazing thing: a good clown doesn’t have to bring anything new, you need only one good gag that you can do it all your life, till it becomes perfect, a clown is not an actor, we function different. Tiger Lillies are not clowns for sure but they function in a similar way to Olli.

A happening in Belfast

here is what Arpad Schilling told me a few weeks ago. it makes you think about what kind of theatre you want to make:

"It was very funny, I met this Irish street artist and I tried to explain this problem with the theatre in Hungary and it was funny because in Ireland theatre is not so important inside the culture. No big theatres, no big companies, just a few money for theatre and he told me that he didn’t understand this problem. Because what is a theatre? Is it a big auditorium and a big stage? I’ve never been to a theatre, I’m not interested in theatre. I think that the interesting place is the street, back to the people, to paint something on the wall, to make a real action. A happening is good because is a real meeting and it has real effects. He showed me one action that his friends made in Belfast. They made an action in an army center. Some activists, they were actors or clowns, went to this army center and made a funny situation but it is a different culture. The army called the police and police arrived but it was not possible to take them out because is a different culture and a different kind of democracy. It was an interesting situation: the police, the army and between them there are the clowns. It was a real situation, with no in or out. They were able to take out the clowns in the end after one hour but after that the army center was closed. It was a big success for this theatrical action. It was only one day but they had to close the army center. And that was the real aim. "