The Clown Who Wandered In
- Loveday Funck
- Jul 21
- 4 min read
There is a clown among the Unbelongings now.
It feels inevitable, although I did not plan it that way.
The Unbelongings have always been creatures caught somewhere between categories: ghosts attempting ordinary life, skeletons with hobbies, monsters who seem more bewildered than dangerous. They are strange, earnest beings trying to find their place in a world that was not designed with them in mind.
A clown fits comfortably among them, which may be the least comfortable thing anyone can say about a clown.
For the past two weekends, I participated in a clowning workshop with Dallas Akins. I should clarify that it was not “clowning” in the form most Americans are likely to imagine. There were no balloon animals, red noses, or aggressively cheerful birthday parties.
The workshop drew from a more European theatrical tradition, with an emphasis on performance games, physical comedy, play, and stage combat.
We learned how to pull hair, slap faces, and throw punches without actually hurting anyone.
Stage combat depends on cooperation. The person receiving the blow is just as important as the person delivering it. The angle has to be right. The timing has to be right. The reaction has to sell the illusion. A convincing slap is created by two people quietly taking care of one another while pretending to be enemies.
That may be one of the loveliest contradictions in theater.
We also played games designed to make us commit to ridiculous situations.
In one, we had to deliver a speech while Dallas repeatedly pretended to shoot us. Each new imaginary bullet required a reaction, but the speech had to continue. The body was collapsing while the speaker remained stubbornly committed to finishing whatever important point they had begun.
In another exercise, we had to chew a chocolate chip cookie while insisting that we had not stolen a cookie.
The evidence was right there in our mouths.
The challenge was not to create a clever explanation. It was to continue the denial while the body betrayed us. Crumbs, chewing, guilt, indignation, and increasing desperation became the scene.
There is something deeply human in that.
Most of us have probably tried to maintain our dignity while the evidence against us scattered itself across our shirts.
Dallas also handed us ordinary objects and asked us to create games around them: a flyswatter, a bucket, a towel.
The point was not simply to invent a story involving the object. We had to discover a pattern that could be repeated, developed, complicated, and heightened. The flyswatter might begin as a flyswatter, but once performers start paying attention to what makes the audience react, it can become something else entirely.
The workshop became a kind of laboratory for play. We experimented with physical reactions, conflict, repetition, commitment, and the strange alchemy that turns a bucket or a cookie into a theatrical event.
The exercises required us to stop worrying about whether we looked foolish.
That is harder than it sounds.
Adults spend years learning how to appear competent. We try to understand the assignment before beginning it. We want to know where the scene is going. We prefer to have an explanation ready before anyone notices the crumbs.
Performance games dismantle that protection.
You begin without knowing exactly what you are doing. You make a choice. Someone responds. The choice succeeds, fails, or mutates into something you could not have planned.
Then you keep going.
Over the past few weeks, I have moved through several different kinds of performance. I did my stand-up set, and it went well. I performed in my improv shows. Then I spent two weekends being punched, slapped, shot, accused of cookie theft, and handed household objects with no clear instructions about what they wished to become.
Each form asks something different of the performer.
Stand-up asks what you have to say when you are alone with a microphone.
Improv asks what a group can build before anyone knows what it is.
Physical comedy asks whether the body can tell the story before the mind begins explaining it.
Stage combat asks performers to create the appearance of danger through precision and trust.
The games ask whether you can recognize an interesting idea and keep playing with it long enough for it to grow teeth.
Visual art asks many of the same questions, although it usually gives me more time to answer them.
When I draw an Unbelonging, I often begin with a figure and no clear explanation of who it is. A skeleton appears carrying an object. A ghost develops an occupation. A strange little creature seems to have wandered away from another story and landed on my page.
Then I look for the game.
What does this creature want?
What keeps happening to it?
What tiny rule governs its world?
What makes the situation funny, sad, peculiar, or all three at once?
The Unbelonging clown arrived after these two weekends of theatrical play, but it is not a literal portrait of the workshop. It is more like a small artifact brought back from the experience.
The clown carries the awkwardness of trying something without knowing whether it will work. It carries the stubbornness of continuing a speech while being repeatedly shot. It carries the dignity of someone denying a crime while chewing the stolen evidence.
Perhaps that is why the clown belongs among the Unbelongings.
The clown does not have everything under control.
Neither do they, and neither do we.
The clown simply makes the uncertainty visible.
On Sunday, July 26, I will return to the visual-art side of this peculiar summer at the New Orleans Arts Market in City Park from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. I will have the Unbelongings with me, including the clown who wandered in after two weekends of imaginary violence, object games, physical comedy, and cookie-based deception.
I suspect it has found the right company.
