Rachel West is the engineer who became a clown who became a facilitator.

At the AMED Writers’ Workshop, she showed us how a bit of skill, dressed up as performance, can be very impressive to an audience. 

She drew on stories from her blog: - describing how her journey is taking her from structure to freedom to employment.  And the life lesson (if you want one) as well as the performance lesson (if you want one of those) is that mistakes can be incorporated – to let audience see the risk, and how you deal with it.

The unpredictable is often exciting.  We tried a classic clown exercise, in which you stand in front of the audience and ‘do nothing’.  It turns out of course that you can’t do nothing.  The audience is always reading something into what they see.  Traditional clowns used the red nose to draw attention to the face, so the audience can be even more focused on what is going on.  This fits with a view of the world as always interaction.  So the clown is noticing something too – and can’t help but respond. 

Rachel told us that in her training – doing this exercise over and over again – she started to observe her thoughts about the situation – and found it interesting that so much thinking and even movement was going on. It became an exploration into the impossibility of doing nothing, though doing nothing is the aim.  It reminded me of comedian Arnold Brown’s line about taking up meditation – ‘which is better than sitting around doing nothing all day’.

Can you do nothing ‘right’? Obviously not, though that may not make it ‘wrong’.  With an audience you'll achieve, for example, the satirical effect of breaking the convention of ‘get it right’.  In circus performing, you are encouraged to break down the fourth wall – acknowledge and work with complicity with the audience.  This allows it to be real as well as purely observed.  You reveal something of yourself (or your character – in more than one sense of the word).  And it is clear that how to get comfortable with those sorts of interactions is also a core need for a good facilitator.

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