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

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

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 of our sources was the many traditions across Europe that use mask, costume, story, event, character and symbol in communal celebrations and festivities. These include carnival, seasonal changes, saints' days and more. For the three researchers, these traditions are sometimes familiar, sometimes not, sometimes embedded in our cultures in forgotten places. We also are able to see parallels on other continents, but prefer not to speculate as outsiders beyond this acknowledgement.  Many of these traditions involve some kind of clown-like figure, often in the mode of trickster and frequently in the role of devils. As clowns, these are the most interesting to us. We wanted to make these kinds of clowns one of our starting points, rather than the kind of clown we had mostly been formally trained in, which comes from the very recent lineage of theatre clown training in studios, from Lecoq, through Gaulier, with many contemporary clown teachers reproducing the assumptions of what clown