whatever I want, or chose to do (what a privilege! or is it?)
I just had another beautiful conversation with Robyn, the second in two days. She's one of my five roommates; one of the many daily mirrors to my psyche. She is a great woman. She's got the mind and the heart. I like her.
I told her I had a challenging day at school. It was also a really good day, because I learned a really big amount. It started by an acro class taught by a different coach than our usual. Xiao Hong, our teacher, was running late, so the other guy, Chris, took us in his scheduled class with the acrobatics program. Chris' comments were difficult to hear. He called me out after seeing me shake my head. "When you do that," he said with a paternalistic tone, "you've already failed."
I felt tears running up to my eyes, and remembered myself as a young soccer player. I realized that perhaps my main obstacle with acrobatics isn't my age, but the same habit I had during my soccer years... this lack of confidence, this feeling sorry for myself, this being so hard on myself for being short of perfection.
Then Xiao Hong arrived, and we worked on head springs and forward hand springs!! Such an edge.
For our second class, we had Dan Griffiths as a guest teacher. Dan came in strongly, he was so eager to work with our small group of clowns. "They say I teach hospital or therapeutic clowning," he told us "but there's no such distinction. There's only one big sacred way of clowning." He spoke of clowns like shamans, always standing between life and death... celebrating the obstacles, the failures and mistakes and short-comings of existence. "Clown is not a name, it's a verb."
He threw us into a series of exercises, starting with "the fall." He asked us to call each other out whenever we saw or felt inauthenticity. He asked us to open our eyes wide, and to breathe so as to entrain the audience with us in the emotional journeys we hopefully go into.
And so after class I was struggling a little bit emotionally. Self-doubt had been creeping in, and again I could see myself losing grip on this sense of possibility that I could hold not as late as yesterday.
In conversing with Robyn, somehow and oh! so beautifully, I came to consider some new things...
Yes, I am different. I want to talk about real shit, about important issues. I have a message.
"Cause I struggle quite a bit as I explore and open myself to different ideas and conceptions, about "what clown is" and "who my clown is". For around me, people seem to often speak of clown as simpleton. They speak of innocence, of basic human drives, of libido. They say that one cannot be analytical and do this work. I'm trying to figure things out here...
you see?! I'm so freaking heady all the time!!
But I've figured it out! My thinking is a defense mechanism, and underneath it there actually lies a river of feelings and emotions.
I think I'm not the only one this way.
That was part of why I was drawn to this work.
I remember.
And even though I didn't pick up on it at the time, tonight I remembered Dara talking about the... "uniqueness" of my work... about how it's not one thing. I have these different parts. There is possibly no single school or institution where I could bring these aspects together in "my work".
Robyn has a similar situation.
And she said that, to her, I could well be the person to bring "clowning" to a different population, because I can also be of this world, this real world of working people dealing with social and economical problems.
How to reach these folks?
And for the first time I heard myself formulate the idea that I might want to go to Europe in order to look for that depth, that tradition.
American clowning is often superficial, perhaps because the US of A is so historically uprooted and alienated form the cultures that constitute its melting pot.
I'd like to go learn German. I'd like to go find clown-healers and bouffons to be inspired by and to learn from. what else? I'd like to look for myself... I'd like to follow my path...
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