Eggsodus

On our last day together in Athens, the three of us revisited the project and reflected on: - 2 days collaborating with others - the whole project and the lessons we can draw - what we want to do next Group cohesion and complicity  Compared to the first day, the second day with collaborators brought a higher level of cohesion and group complicity. This probably arose from having a group organization, with tasks assigned from the beginning of Day 2, as opposed to Day 1 when each individual could set their own tasks. Particularly on the return to the workspace, there was much more group work than on the journey from the workspace to the designated place of action on Day 2. However, valorising this is not an easy task. Some collaborators, in the feedback, valued the individual freedom of Day 1 over the group cohesion of Day 2. The feedback of others was the opposite. In general, this valorisation was related to the fun that the person reported having. This raises another question: how is

The three of us spent the morning assessing the previous day's activity and coming up with a new plan for the afternoon.  We decided to plan a simple scenario with clear differentiation between roles, that we would invite collaborators to make real, first by making costumes appropriate for each role, and then by going to a specific nearby square to carry out the scenario.  IN order to simplify this transition from idea via costume to street action, we decided that the three of us would assume key organising roles, to avoid collaborators having to concern themselves with direction, and also to ensure we stayed on track.  The roles were: - central figure / silent clown (Jon) - high priestess (Hilary) - ritual organiser (Robyn) - 2 free clowns - several ritual enactors The free clowns had the task of engaging verbally and gesturally with any onlookers, encouraging them to ask questions such as: What are they doing? What is this? What does it mean? The aim was not to provide answers bu

  Public workshop 1   Six participants with a variety of performance skills and experiences attended the workshop.   Introduction We briefly explained our project, how we were funded and the themes and ideas we had explored in the 5 preceding days: ·        our clown lineages, and how these were very euro-centric and similar to each other ·        our desires to interrupt normative patterns of behaviour in public spaces ·        experiments in inviting passers-by, the general public to participate in our creations - egg games and (sort of) meaningless non-competitive competitions ·        our desires to create work that provokes through entertainment, addressing political and social justice issues   Performance preparation We then invited participants to go out onto the streets with us in a short, improvised performance around a central theme of a clown ritual involving eggs. The emphasis was to come up with costumes and a basic choreography within 20 minutes. I

Prior to our days of collaborating with a group of local clowns and artists who responded. to our invitation, we gathered together what we were interested in taking forward with that group.  In order to make some sense of all of this, and to be able to communicate some of our direction of travel to people joining us, we found the categories below to be useful.  The plan for this new phase of the research was as follows: 1. Short Discursive Introduction a. Our starting points  - decolonising clowning - the third concerns of old trickster traditions, political activism and public spaces b. What we've come up with so far - see below for categories of the work c. Our invitation to the collaborators - the intention of the workshop is to simply continue in the same direction we have taken on previous days, continuing to explore, to ask questions in practice, to test ideas, to reflect. The presence of the collaborators will of course alter and influence what we are doing, and enable new t

What will happen? This is a different question to: how will we relate? Or: what will we look like? We knew that we wanted to explore actions and events in public spaces which use some interaction or participation of onlookers. This desire stemmed from our interest in disturbing norms with a view to opening up new ways of seeing our society, that might lead to re-imagining it along more socially just lines. Inviting onlookers into what happens also drew on what we know about traditional festivities, where the roles may be clear but there is a sense that anyone and everyone is participating. This is very different to the modern practice of actors owning the stage and audiences paying to occupy the auditorium.  We explored some of the common storylines of events that crop up in traditional festivities, such as: - someone is chased (out of town) - someone dies and is resurrected - a space is made for a special figure (to dance) - a special figure arrives (from above) - permission is reques

Some extracts from 'The Street Scene - A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre' by Bertolt Brecht, translated by John Willet, with annotations and commentary relating to our project. the point is that the demonstrator acts the behaviour of driver or victim or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident. Finding ourselves in such a tourist city as Athens, we wanted to avoid presenting people with something they simply consume and take pictures of and say 'oh that was nice' The demonstrator need not be an artist. The capacities he needs to achieve his aim are in effect universal. We worked quickly, with whichever collaborators turned up. The intention was more important than any supposed technique. This is in opposition to most clown training in Europe today, so influenced by Lecoq and Gaulier.  Suppose he cannot carry out some particular movement as quickly as the victim he is imitating; all he need do is to explain that he moves three

Here are some of the actions, objects and stories we thought to use with eggs. Objects Cardboard trays Wooden eggs Plastic eggs Bouncy eggs Real eggs Blown eggs Actions Throw eggs into your hat - blindfold the hat wearer/thrower - move around Lay/shit an egg (after catching in hat (and digesting) Egg races - rolling, spoon - get over the line - shove ha'penny - towards X as destination Representation and Story Eggs = people Eggs = populations (maps and pie charts of migration) Paint faces on eggs  Paint the face of whoever you choose - family, enemy, neighbour, famous person, politician, fictional character Painting the face humanises the object (cf. dehumanising of refugees, the other) Look after the egg, incubate it in hands, pass it around - invests with empathy The Unknown Egg 9soldier) - large egg without a face Egg mask on person, draw, write, paint on it Photograph your egg - passport, facial recognition technology Gallery of photos of egg faces (the egg registry of clowns)

As soon as we got up on our feet and started doing something active we began to discover how we tend to take on roles. After a while messing around, we identified a main description for each of us: the innovator, the formaliser and the follower.  The innovator got bored quickly, didn't want to follow rules and was on the look out for something new and surprising. The formaliser saw the new and moved to find and establish patterns and rules. The follower looked for whatever was happening and a way to join in. Although each of these was identified with a named individual, we felt that each of us could also choose to play each role. Other terms that seemed appropriate for some of these roles were: disruptor, rule-maintainer, and so on.  The three roles might also easily map onto other ways of understanding clown roles, such as the circus terminology of whiteface clown, auguste, counter-auguste and ringmaster.  Looking at traditional festivities, we also noticed three parallel roles: 

From the beginning of this project, we knew that one element of our research would be a self-examination of our own practices and histories. Over the past two years working remotely, we had all in some way come up against the problematic assumptions in much contemporary clown performance and pedagogy. These cover a number of areas, such as: - the individualistic vision of clowns as personal: depoliticises clowns - the binary of inner/outer, where the inner is supposed to hold the truth: ignores societies structures - clown as self-help and life-coaching: presents specious claims to relieve anxiety and suffering - the notion that clown is an invariable and definable thing: ignores non-European cultures and also our own European history - the assumption that clowns appear in training under duress/shame, whether playfully or cruelly: leads to the dominance of clown teachers, mostly white cis het men - the assumption that clowns appear when you show vulnerability: ignores the structural vu

 

 One area we wanted to explore was costume, and we decided to work with simple, cheap materials that could be shared between us and our collaborators. We began by using paper, card, sack, string and other related bits and pieces. Some of these we brought with us, some we shopped for in the many small shops in central Athens near to our two working spaces in Exarcheia and Monastiraki.  These materials seemed like they might work to make quick costumes inspired by some of the carnival and other traditions we are interested in. During the first five days we created several costume pieces and imagined several more, including shirts, trousers, skirts, collars, hats, shoes, noses, etc. See below for some images. Jon Davison Materials: Costume pieces: