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We walk in as the mum is laying a bundle of egg blue blankets on a huge cushion. She sits to one side, and the dad sits opposite her, like two proud golden eagles watching over their nest. We walk towards the bundle, and see a tiny face. I am looking at a foetus. No. A baby, whose tiny yellow body is somehow managing to breathe on its own. I look at the mum and she smiles sweetly, expectantly, inviting us to stay. I look at Wallop. The need for this encounter to be perfect fills every cell of my body. I take my harmonica out of my pocket and start to play very quietly, tuning into the shallow, sweet inhalation and exhalation of the sleeping baby, putting everything into making this moment as sublime as possible. A nudge on my shoulder, heavy breathing, that builds to a snore. Wallop. Unbelievable. I stop playing and under my breath hiss, ‘Wallop…please…for once in your life, be professional!’ The Dad giggles. Wallop wakes herself up, apologises, and we begin again. Again the snoring. ‘Wallop….if there was one moment in your life to do a good job, it is now!’ Get…a….grip!’ The dad guffaws. And so we continue until the little boy opens his big blue eyes to the bubbling, contagious music of his parents laughter. I heard that the baby died a few days later. ***** Igor and I exchanged messages today about the possibility of clowning and teaching in Dnipro in June. I had the most extraordinary bodily sensation of knowing immediately that we are going and simultaneously feeling flooded with fear. We’ve got our eyes and hearts open, and so much love around us. And who knows what will happen before then. The thing is, I have this one small thing I can do in the face of pain and fear and grief, and a path has opened up. It seems to be that I have to do it. ***** We are in a bed bay, visiting a baby, when my antenna hears a nurse and a mum say to a 10yr old boy behind us, ‘you said you were brave, well that wasn’t very brave, was it? What a scene you caused…’ We finish up with the baby and I turn around and my eyes fix on a pink armchair in the corner of the room, facing me. Fear floods my body, ‘McFlea! McFLEAAAA!!’ I shout-whisper, ‘Don’t look now…but….is that chair looking at me?!’ McFlea uses her most expert spy body language to check, ‘Yes…Yes it is’. I hold my breath taking in the gravity of the situation and notice the 10yr old boy looking at me and nodding. ‘You see it too?!’ I shout-whisper again. ‘Yes. It’s looking at you’ he replies loudly and with glee. My hands feel funny, I flap them. I am hyperventilating, I start to pace up and down the corridor in the middle of the room. ‘It’s looking right at you!’ For some reason both McFlea and the boy are enjoying themselves a great deal. Pleading for some empathy, some sense of camaraderie, some solidarity, I ask, ‘What do you do when you are freaking out? Do you have any calming ideas?!!!’ ‘Nope’ ‘Can I hide behind your curtain?’ I say, as I wrap myself in it. ‘Nope’ I emerge, desperate, ‘YOU HAVE TO HELP ME!!’. ’Sit on it’ ‘What?’ ‘Sit on the chair’ ‘Absolutely not’ ‘You have to sit on it’ ‘No thank you, Nope’ ‘You have to face your fear’ ‘…. …..’ ’GO AND SIT ON THE CHAIR RIGHT NOW!!’ The authority in his voice gives me some resolve. And a fright. On balance I think I might be more afraid of him than the chair. So I walk towards the chair. My body is tense, shaking. I say goodbye to McFlea, internally hoping she will relay my bravery for years to come, as I turn and lower myself slowly into the seat, eyes squeezed shut, ready for the inevitable. At last my bum makes contact with the seat. It’s…soft. It sort of holds me, embraces me, and my body melts into it. A wave of relief washes over me that feels like…LOVE. Ha! This is it! This is my place on Earth. Right here. This is my purpose, my meaning, my North Star! I’ve never felt such peace and happiness! I look at the boy as he laughs and says, ‘No, You can’t stay here’ I pause, confused. That’s impossible. This is LOVE. I HAVE to stay here. I communicate all of this with my desperate eyes. I begin to shuffle with the chair across the room as quietly as I can. ‘You can’t take it with you’ ‘I’m not’ ‘I can see you’ ‘…….’ ‘I can see you!’ I have to…leave it?’ ‘Yes’ ‘Forever?’ ‘Yes’ I embrace the shiny pink leatherette, resisting a kiss as everyone is watching, including perhaps half a dozen healthcare staff. I walk away slowly, wistfully, each moment thick with meaning. My heart is broken, ripped asunder, bleeding onto the floor. ’Take your broken heart and GO!!!’ He shouts with glee, laughing with his mum. I take a deep breath, pick up my broken heart and go. Five minutes later I see him with the nurse receiving his treatment, calmly. ***** She is in her usual place, lying on the floor; a yellow nightie covering thin bones. Although she is quite happily on the floor whenever we come, part of me clearly feels that frail old ladies should be tucked up comfortably in bed. I breath into my discomfort and Petal and I crouch down beside her and wait. She looks up and smiles in slow motion. I hear Classic FM playing on the radio in the corner and exclaim, ‘I’m going to the Royal Concert Hall tonight! With a boy! To see Swan Lake!’ She looks me in the eye and her usual rhythm starts up again, a vocal repetition, ‘da da daaaa da, da da daaaaa da, da da daaaa da’. For some time we sing with her until her eyes shine and she says, ‘I met a nice boy! da da daaa da, da da daaa da, da da daaa da…’ I so want to hear more but the rhythm resumes. I gradually shift from mirroring her, to singing the theme of Swan Lake. I surprise myself that I can remember the tune and that I am mostly hitting the notes. Surprise turns to admiration, and I am full of my own voice. In my minds eye I am leaping across the stage in tragic abandon. She is watching me intently, no longer singing her own song, fully engaged. I am sure we are all transported into the same transcendent fantasy when suddenly she says firmly, ‘Stop it! Now isn’t the time!’ Chastised, I stop it. A long silence. The Classic FM jingle. And then her body begins to melt, cell by cell. Micro-moments of surrender, each one a tiny death. Her eyes drift closed. We stay by her side for minutes, in awe. Her body is suspended in space, her head, hands and feet hover above the ground. This impossible and perfect image stays in my mind for days, so uncanny, familiar, strange, beautiful. Today I looked up John Everett Millais painting of Ophelia. That’s exactly how she looked. “To die, - To sleep, - To sleep! Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life;” (Shakespeare, Hamlet) Maybe she was dreaming of her nice boy. I hope so.  The talented and skilled partners accompanying me were Diane Thornton (Dr Wallop) and Zoe Darbyshire (Dr McFlea and Petal Elderflower). We are all able to do this work thanks to the small but mighty charity Hearts & Minds, based in Edinburgh.
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I was stuck in a cupboard, and needed help. A woman who had been standing quietly over the bedside of her teenage daughter reached out her hand to help and as I took it I twirled out into the room, liberated! And then she twirled, and the sun came out across her face too. The social worker here said that probably, that is the first time she had ever danced like that. It was certainly a first for me. ***** We are sitting on the rooftop and Igor is reflecting on being at the SriRamana Ashram, saying that it is a place filled with miracles. And as he says it, I see us, two human beings sitting side by side, directly in front of us, two songbirds balancing on a wire, all four of us watching the Sun rising over the distant horizon as the Earth spins on its axis. ***** The Patriarchy is in full force here and shows up all over the place. The Director of the hospital who summons us to a meeting and talks so quietly from the end of his comically enormous table that we all have to lean forwards to hear him. He never addresses me, or answers me even when I speak, even though I am the one with the information he needs. The waiters who always place the menu facing Igor and never ask me what I want to eat. Police, security guards, anyone in public positions of authority, are all men, most holding sticks and all wearing uniforms. There are never any bins or newspaper in the women's toilets, but always signs saying 'please wrap sanitary products in newspaper and throw in the bin'. The phallic temples. The photographed faces of men all over the city who have paid to have their faces on a billboard just so that their faces are on a billboard. It really wears you down after a while. ***** Here, Cancer is still a dirty word. Children who have cancer are stigmatised, their families often don’t tell anyone they are ill. It’s even a taboo to touch a child who has cancer here, apparently. Mothers sit by their child’s beds, hearts filled with love and shame. The ward is still and silent and nobody lifts their phones to film when we enter. After 15 about minutes of us being in the room almost everyone in the bed bay is spontaneously laughing and singing a ‘meow’ song together, including a teenage girl who can barely lift her head from the pillow. Later I see a video of Trump and JD Vance showing the world what American diplomacy really looks like - has always looked like - in front of the worlds media, threatening world war three, and I think about the mothers on that oncology ward and all that they hold and care for and the tenderness and shame they carry versus the pure shamelessness of men who hold power, and my heart….well my heart aches with wishing it were different. **** A girl who had followed us and played with us all day yesterday was there again today. When I first saw her she was in her pyjamas, standing next to me and smiling. About ten minutes later I looked down and there she was again, wearing a turquoise sparkly princess dress, the same colour as my skirt. The miracle of this did not pass me by, and she giggled with delight. ***** I walked around Arunachala barefoot. ‘Though Arunachala appears outwardly as a hill of mere insentient rock, the true devotee understands it to be the all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful Supreme Lord, who is guiding him both from within and without at every step and turn of life, leading him steadily and surely towards the goal of egolessness.’ David Godman My feet are fire and broken glass within about 10 minutes of walking but somehow I don’t stop. Life with Endometriosis has taught me a lot about how to live alongside pain. Yes to the burning fire of my feet, yes to the warm sun on my back, yes to the air in my lungs, yes to the light shimmering on this silver street decoration, yes to this sweet calf with legs growing from her shoulder blades, yes to this ache and yes to the exquisite, complicated, messy abundance of life that fills every moment. I am pulled around the circumference of the mountain by the river of souls who have walked this path for thousands of years before me, by the force of the mountain itself. I laugh with joy, with peace, with gratitude and at that moment, my mind grasps onto this feeling and my body bursts back into pain, my mind flourishes with it’s banal running commentary - judgements, comparisons, wishing it were different, wishing it would never change. I breathe. I say hello again to the pain, I say hello to the joy, I surrender again and again and again to Arunachala, to presence, to all of it. And I think - this is life, isn’t it? Constant pain, and constant joy, and none of it is me. ***** We are at the entrance to the hospital, waiting for our auto. It is hot so we sit on the pavement in the shade, a little behind the security booth. As is often our way, after a few moments we start to sing a little song to pass the time - a percussive, joyful rhythm. I can see the security guard in front of us smiling, and he taps his wooden stick along to the beat. A week later I am there as Maybee, and Robin is playing his harmonica. I am dancing, and I risk reaching out my hand to this guard. There are maybe 30 people watching. He takes it with his free hand and while I can see he wants to dance, is stilted and uncertain. Someone gestures to the stick in his other hand and he hesitates between worlds and then looks me in the eye and suddenly is holding both my hands and spinning me around. The stick has been abandoned and his eyes are shining. ***** We’ve been clowning for maybe an hour outside the hospital and now we are back at the entrance, a small crowd of children and their parents surrounding us. Our focus is still on the small square of paper that has been the source of our play for the last thirty minutes. It is clear that no one child can keep this scrap of paper - that has been the subject of an epic opera. The best case scenario might be that one of us takes it, but even that doesn’t feel right. The paper is passing between the children, who are doing everything in their power to keep the game alive. Suddenly Robin and a small boy grab it at the same time, and the scrap is split into two. I take my chance and take one piece and tear it again. Now there are tiny hands tearing and tearing and tearing and the paper is confetti and it belongs to all of us and none of us, and Robin and Maybee turn and dance back into the hospital, waving as we go. ***** Today we finally stroked the mangy local dog who nobody touches. We both agreed that if we die of Rabies it would be worth it and not at all embarrassing. ***** Mister Robin had finally committed the ultimate betrayal and ditched me for another partner - a teen boy who had been following us, warming up to us all morning. I had overcome my shock and sadness, and was now bubbling with anger. As I stepped out into the corridor at one and of the bed bay, Robin and the boy stepped out at the other end. It was clear that a street fight was on the cards. The boy stepped into the middle of the corridor. I stepped in opposite him. He pulled back his shoulders, and so did I. His eyes narrowed, my eyes narrowed. We stepped closer, and closer until we were centimetres apart, eye to eye and I saw a steely and real anger in his eyes and was..so impressed by his strength that I smiled slightly and he smiled slightly and we melted until we were smiling broadly at one another and he took my hand and lead me back to Robin and joined our hands together. ***** Igor teases me that I keep filming shadows. I just can’t resist the quietness of them. The simplicity. The refuge. **** After watching The Office for 2 straight days while eating watermelon, papaya, and crispy spicy snacks, I dreamt that I was cradling Steve Carrell in my arms as he wept. ***** I danced with a nurse in the bed bay today. She was timid at first, but something shifted in her after the first time I span her around her eyes welled up over her mask. I noticed a thought cross her face and a moment of tension in her hands and instead of stopping as I thought she was going to, in that moment she surrendered to some inner desire to live out in the open, and our hearts span and span together, and the patients on the ward clapped and cheered. ***** In airport security there aren’t any signs about what you have to take out of your bag. By the time I went through the scanner, I had used 6 different trays for different objects and had 4 different guards take their pleasure in telling me something else I had to do. I wished I had been clowning then. But instead I was tired and pissed off and said ‘oh for fucks sake’ loudly under my breath and then felt bad. ***** I remember in the first weeks and months of clowning in Barcelona seeing the male clowns perform improvised circle shows for hundreds of people and feeling my heart heaving with envy. Not so much about the crowds, but at their flow and skill and the way they created wonder out of nothing and transformed the space completely. I wanted so badly to be them. I tried clowning on my own in the street a few times and it wasn’t safe at all. 23 year old me would have been so amazed and happy to see me clowning on the hospital grounds this week. There was such a big crowd. It was effortless and joyful. We reflected afterwards that everyone else did the clowning for us. ***** Things that are different: In the public hospital here, the children don’t wear ID wrist bands, and nobody has notes at the end of their beds, and the beds aren’t numbered, and there aren’t names written anywhere. And there are no machines or beeps. There are no individual rooms. The sheets are blue or purple, not white. The food smells delicious. There are no televisions, no cartoons on the walls. Doors that need to be closed are locked with padlocks. The windows have bars on them and the guards carry sticks that they sometimes run along the metal of the cots to get attention. Things that are the same: People feel anxious and sad and bored and angry and confused. People love their children and want them to be well and happy. People are tired and overwhelmed. People blame themselves for their children being sick. People love music. People are obsessed with their phones. People love people walking into things and getting things wrong when they are really trying to get them right. People love to be seen and heard and valued. People love people. *****  Bonnie Elderflower is heavy with gloom. With an audible and somewhat melodramatic sigh, she turns and catches Frank’s eye, who fires her an eyebrow raised in curious bemusement;
‘Oh it’s just that I’m grumpy and I don’t know why!’ She exclaims, exasperated, ‘Ahh…’ A long pause before he responds, almost inaudible, ‘you’re stuck, you see….Like me’. ‘Stuck…Yes! That’s it, I’m stuck!’ and she slumps down by his chair, the relief of being so thoroughly seen flooding her body. She takes his hand in hers and their eyes meet, ‘It feels…terrible’ she sighs, and he responds with a nod of weary resignation. Now at his level, she sees he is so gentle, so full of compassion and care that she feels like a little bird in the palm of his hand, something precious and delicate and worth caring for. After a time (seconds? minutes? Weeks?) a sudden glimpse of light flashes across the deep pool of their gaze (impossible to tell where it began) a micro-twitch of eyebrows, the corners of mouths lifting in the faintest glimpse of a smile which grows as the tension builds until laughter spills out between them, across the furniture, pouring freely and with abandon, washing every nook and cranny of the room with its light. The stillness that follows is rich with a bittersweet echo of something forgotten and a sudden rush of anguish crumples Franks face, a wave crashing over the shore. It recedes, just as quickly as it came, and his brown eyes look up again to meet Bonnie’s; clear, shining. Slowly, he points to his cheek, ‘A tear…’ he whispers, with surprise ‘Oh yes….a beautiful one…’ she whispers back, smiling ‘Yes…’  Going into this room there is no sense of being able to fix anything or cheer her up. I only know that when my heart is open, as it is when I am clowning, I am able to go towards this kind of distress without fear.
I crouch on the floor and begin to mirror her anguished crying, harmonising with her tone, matching the rhythm of her sighs. I hold her head in my hand, and gently caress her temple. She looks into my eyes for a brief moment, searching for something, totally lost. I say, ‘I don’t know’. After a few minutes here, her legs move and her foot presses against my armpit and chest. I giggle. ‘It tickes!’ She looks at me again. A brief moment of silence before her cries start up again. Then her legs shift, and I cry ‘Oh Janet! It tickles!!’ And she looks at me and her face is transformed into a map of smile lines, revealing a whole lifetime of laughter. She looks me in the eyes, and we laugh, our laughter generating more laughter, our eyes shining together. Before we left, she took my hand and pulled me close to her face and just looked right into my eyes. Found.  The journey to Sheshagiri is a dream come true. A train from Bangalore to Haveri - sitting at the open door watching the sunrise over the city as it slowly transforms from colourfully painted concrete flats to palm plantations and rice fields. We arrive and take a small mini-bus to the residency space that collects and drops off local villagers on the way. Red dust earth, bright green fields and clear blue skies. I take a million photographs and miss everything interesting - the man riding a bicycle carrying an impossibly massive bushel of grass, the 5 person family on a motorbike, the most beautiful cow I have ever seen, elaborately decorated tractors, flocks of egrets silhouetted against the sky, a monkey. Finally we arrive at a huge pink building - by far the biggest in the village, towering over the dusty lanes and bright green fields that surround it. We push open the front door and step inside, eyes painfully adjusting to the darkness. It is a huge auditorium space with high ceilings and a stage. Good. We go to switch on the lights. No power. Huh. As we open the side doors, the evening sun floods in and reveals a thick layer of dust covering everything. A quick recce of the sleeping areas reveals just two indian style toilets between 17 of us, a few dusty mattresses and no bedding. When the power comes on and we turn on the lights, they reveal a dense cloud of mosquitoes. Okay…we are in Hell. Earlier that day Igor and I had been laughing about the overuse of the term ‘holding the space’ but now it becomes clear that this is exactly what’s needed, since the space itself seems to be hanging on by a thread. We have to accept the possibility that people might not want to stay or work here, and it’s important that the group can express their concerns and discomfort freely and without fear of judgement, and that we have to be open to changing the program completely. I was also mentally preparing myself to be able to focus and deliver decent training whilst being simultaneously eaten alive. I imagine a scenario, mid-improv, where clowns are working delicately with presence and connection while I am waving my hands in the air, slapping myself erratically and shouting ‘Fuck Off!’ at passing mosquitoes. In the end, the excitement at being together in this incredibly beautiful village had at least temporarily superseded any concerns for physical comfort, and we all agreed to see if we could survive the night and to take it from there. Our room has a single bed frame piled with a few thin mattresses. When I lift one up, a cloud of dust and more mosquitos fill the air. I open the door to the back of the building and more mosquitos burst in. I slam it shut and shudder. Looking up at Igor, no words are required. To stay alive and sane we have one task and one task only - to eliminate every single mosquito from this room. We get to work stemming the flow by papering the cracks in the windows and doors with card and medical tape. Once satisfied, we switch to Ninja-Mode - zen-like stillness and silence followed by sudden claps, splats and ‘fuck-it I missed it’ s. We sleep in this hot and airless room with sheets pulled over our heads and tucked under our feet, like two caterpillars awaiting transformation. And it seems that transformation, in one form or another, is a theme over the next 5 days. During our first morning session, as I lead a warm-up, the sun slowly rises through the front door of the building and then through the top window, casting a warm golden corridor of light across the room. As the participants' bodies gradually wake up and move through the space, they begin to fill it with their vibrance and energy. By the end of this first day, a layer of laughter and light has settled over everything. By the end of the second, another, until, by our last day it seems the very walls have absorbed the joy, tenderness and presence that we have shared here together. Survival has shifted to immersive creativity and we don’t want to leave. And just as the space is transformed by the presence of this courageous and creative group, they are in turn transformed. With each warm-up, exercise and improvisation something essential and forgotten is revealed, celebrated and nurtured. Everyone becomes perceptibly lighter, more available and playful - layers of ‘shoulds’ being shed in favour of the delight and freedom to be just as we are. I’m reminded of my first clowning workshop with De Castro and how that process opened me up. How it was to wear a red nose for the first time, to start to inhabit this clown state, finding the beginnings of a character, the first improv where I understood what connection with an audience really meant. How scared and nervous I had been on the first day that I wouldn’t be ‘good’ and how that workshop changed my life forever. I have a sense that, for some of these participants at least, that door has opened for them too and I am so excited to see where it leads them. From our first day in the space, we have regular visitors from the village - the actors who built and run the theatre and groups of children who watch first from the door and then edge themselves closer and closer until at one point they are sitting on stage with us. We continue working and beyond small greetings, don’t acknowledge them, but on that first evening, Igor and I realise the absurdity of this situation. We have a group of new clowns in need of experience in the real world with the public. We have a public so curious and interested that we are like magnets to them. We discuss and agree on how to set up a game that would make it both safe for the new clowns, manageable for us, and hopefully a lovely experience for the villagers. When the time comes the clowns step out of the front door and are met by a stream of children walking home from school. We take a class photo, and the children join, giggling and shy but tangibly excited to be a part of it. Our outing takes the form of a kindergarten sight-seeing trip. Our clowns travel ‘crocodile fashion’ side by side, holding onto a rope with Igor at the front and me at the rear. We chose three stops where they can explore for 5 minutes before they return to the rope. The main and last game is that each clown is allowed to touch the village flagpole once, with one finger, one at a time. With the repetition of this, and the unique way in which each clown undertakes this magnificent task, the audience grows bigger and more confident until they are fully involved in helping the clowns and finally singing a song in chorus with us as we travel back down the street to the theatre. The next day, when we are packing up, a group of boys who had been playing run past, holding their fingers to the sky shouting, ‘see you at the flagpole!’ and I realise that for them too, the space is transformed - the ragged functional pole at the centre of the village now a pinnacle of play and delight. As for me, I am not exactly sure what transformation has occurred, but of course this experience has got inside me, shifted things and is asking questions. I don’t feel any anxiety to answer right away as I might have done a few years ago. For now I am letting everything percolate, trusting that its essence will rise to the surface like a delicious coffee decoction.  Sometimes you meet someone and you know your life is changed for the better just by the fact of knowing that they are in the world. To say that I am inspired by Gitanjali Govindrajan doesn’t nearly do it justice. I am awestruck by what she has managed to achieve in the last ten years, and her unremitting dedication to Inclusion. She is generous, dynamic and authentic to the core.
She has invited us to visit the Snehadhara Foundation's Direct Care Space to play. ‘The Direct Care space of Snehadhara is our realm of caring, advocacy and inclusion practice. Respecting every child’s unique needs, our programmes are carefully designed to enhance their abilities and meet their therapeutic goals. Our aim is to address the social and independent goals of the children to meet their aspirations for life, vocation and livelihood along with nurturing a sense of social inclusion with arts’ Compared to the endless levels of bureaucracy and patriarchy that we have been faced with when talking to hospitals, this is a balm. We arrive for breakfast with the young people and staff, join them for assembly, and then have half an hour or so to explore the space and get ready. The gentle rustle of palm leaves and the fact that this is all I can hear is so soothing. My mind begins to empty into presence. The space we are to play in is a circle, with a thigh-high wall around it. Everyone is sitting inside, except for one teenage boy with severe autism who is curled up enjoying the warmth of a sun trap. Occasionally staff encourage him to join but he evades them like a cat. We march around the circle's perimeter with a joyful harmonica, giving time for everyone to see us from a distance and for us to feel their response. When the time comes to enter, we are stuck. The wall is too high. Impossible task. Straight away, a boy, age 14 or so takes Igor’s hand and pulls him over the threshold, a huge smile bursting across his face. For a brief moment, I am on the outside, looking in, and I see this boy and Igor looking into one another’s eyes. I realise I have never seen Igor’s face look so open, so simple, so sweetly radiant as in this moment. A totally reciprocal exchange. No giver, no receiver. Pure, joyful connection. I yelp ‘HELP!’ And grab the limelight. Our play oscillates between finding individual connections with staff and young people and creating games or music that hold the whole space together. One girl giggles gleefully when Igor mimes going down in a lift. A boy is fascinated and giggles at his squeaking hand. The staff are delighted by Igor's ridiculous game of hide and seek. Our original saviour takes on his role with gusto, coming to our rescue over and over again with humour, grace and playfulness. On our way out of the circle, we pause in the sun spot where the boy is rhythmically shifting from his heels to his toes in a squat position. Side by side, we begin to mirror these rhythmic movements. With each rock to and fro it is as if we gently drift into his universe and the voices and laughter around us slip away. A few moments later, our arrival is greeted with a glimpse of a smile. Permission to stay. Now he takes a tiny pebble between his fingers. Igor finds another pebble and passes it to me. I take it and swap it for the tiny one and the pebbles begin to weave silent complicity and connection between the three of us. I feel the thrilled, as if I've discovered a secret code. Later, once we had changed and were eating our lunch at the table, this boy, who until our sun trap moment had avoided us all morning, came and sat with us. And there we were, eating parathas, three friends together. In the car on the way back into the city I chatted with Gintajli about our visit, reflecting on the space she has created, on inclusion in general. I was saying how much fun we had with this boy who had saved our skin so many times and she told me how he had come to be at the centre. He comes from a socio-economically deprived family who couldn’t cope with his size and his autism, so they tied him to the window frame by his wrist. Then she told me that a couple of months ago she had taken a group from the centre to a local train station for a field trip and officials and staff had refused them access. ‘What do you mean, refused entry? It’s a public space!’ I blurt ‘They said it would ruin the sanctity of the space' she replied calmly, 'I made a big noise about it - a video that went viral. You know, in our last space, in the city, local people would throw stones through our windows, so we moved here, to the outskirts where we have space and peace’ I look out of the car window and my heart and mind do what is becoming a familiar wrestle. My supervisor said it would be this way, ‘you are going to love it. And you are going to hate it’. My mind is furious and despairing at the ignorance and injustice and fear that drives humans to act in such abjectly cruel ways. My heart: Bursting with gratitude for Gitanjali and her vision and tenacity. I look over and see her quiet radiance and feel at its core a boundless love - radical, powerful and unstoppable.  I love co-facilitating workshops with Igor. The process of planning and delivering and debriefing these sessions together has been so enriching. As always, I suppose it comes down to cost that this isn’t more common but I love it as a participant too - having more than one perspective offers more keys to more doors to the myriad of possibilities of what clowning can offer. Co-facilitating helps keep up momentum, means that we can offer differing skill sets, and demonstrates that there is no one right way to do something. Participants can experience different delivery styles and energies, and hear an additional perspective. And of course we are learning from one another all the time as teachers. My facilitation is better for being in the space with Igor while he teaches. It is also grounding to have someone to talk to after each session, to check that we are noticing the same things, to remind one another of little breakthroughs we have seen in the group. It creates a natural mechanism for supervision and emotional safety - in the same way as when we work in hospital, this partnership means that we can see both the participants and ourselves more clearly and compassionately. Planning this training feels like mountain climbing, in the best possible sense. At the beginning of the walk everything seems possible - why not climb two summits today? Before lunch?! As we climb further, the enormity and complexity of the task reveals itself, each step revealing both how far we have come and how far we still have to go. The summit (clowning in hospital) keeps slipping further and further away, entangled in a cloud of bureaucracy. We know it is there, we know reaching it is possible, but we have to be patient, flexible and responsive. Summit fever is a trap and will lead to exhaustion, burn-out, and is unsafe, so on the way we have clear pit stops to aim for, principles that can be explored and embodied and practised, and this is what we focus on. We go one step at a time. And time is against us, of course, as in any mountaineering expedition. We cannot possibly share everything we want to in the time we have available, and expect anyone to be able to usefully understand, process and integrate it. Our challenge for this training is to distil healthcare clowning down into what is essential. We need to empty our backpacks and travel light. Igor led the first three days before I arrived so by the time I got here, the group were already at basecamp, inspired, acclimatised and ready to go with a solid grounding in clown language. Now, after our next three days with the group and more time for acclimatisation, we are planning our 5 day residency. This will take us to the proverbial Hilary Step…and conditions allowing our first sessions in hospital. One week here and I feel like the vibrant chaos of this city has started to infiltrate my mind. I’ve been trying to formulate thoughts for a blog for days, but everything is coming out in a jumble of colliding thoughts. Nothing fully formed, nothing quite articulate, but so much I feel I want to share.
This weekend Igor and I delivered training to what will hopefully form a new community of healthcare clowns here in Bangalore. Community feels like the right word, and already after this weekend, it feels tangible. The Sunday afternoon after our session seemed to reverberate with the themes of our teaching. Our focus had been the game, improvisation and the comic body, and at every turn it seemed we were offered up the chance to notice these things in daily life. The importance of committing to the game, regardless of your aptitude to do it well. Noticing when the game is over and letting it go. Knowing my interest, pleasure, joy in something is what makes that thing interesting for someone else. Celebrating our own uniqueness and difference. We were invited to a cultural event organised by the Namak Art Experience and arrived at the venue an hour early. We saw that there was a Bachata dance class - wonderful! We took off our sandals and joined in at the back with gusto. Not even 2 steps in, somebody came to let us know the class was full. We promptly put our sandals back on and left. Next idea! Let’s go to this nearby park and relax under a tree! Google maps showed a huge area of green trees just a five minute walk away. We found a gate and entered a tiny walled garden. Not like a The Secret Garden, but a triangle of dusty plants, a rickety path, broken benches, dry, brown leaves and a huge wall topped with rusting barbed wire. I looked at the park sign and saw it was called ‘Colony Park’. Hmmm. On the way back we spotted a goat tied to a post. She had the most disproportionately long ears imaginable. They almost reached her knees, and gave her a forlorn look. Her eyes, alien-like and positioned on the side of her head, gave her an added air of confusion. There she was just irresistibly being herself. Igor gently strokes her shoulder. She leans in. When we arrive at the venue it is all hands on deck to help out with food. We insert ourselves into a chain of activity, putting different items on plates, handing out the food. I love this feeling of synergy, of being a part of a team, the way a game can turn something stressful into play and fun. The satisfaction when things run smoothly, the humour when they don’t. Within a few minutes I feel that I am friends with the rest of the team. We are laughing and being silly, and I am unselfconsciously being myself. Today we went for tea with a writer, theatre maker, and director who gave his perspective on India. Spiritual and religious beliefs being harnessed by politicians to fuel division and hate in order to garner power and support. People being killed for as little as passing through the land of a higher caste member, women beaten for wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes, writers murdered for criticising the government. As he was talking I understood this new clown community in a more urgent way. Beyond what clowning can do in healthcare settings, I wonder if clowning here can offer a unique space that transcends these divisions, differences and hate? As bel hooks says; “Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003 I dearly hope that this is what we are creating here, with this group. My cold and the dry air have conspired against my vocal chords and this morning I woke up with no voice. Workshops start tomorrow, so I have to really concentrate on not saying a word today in the hopes that I will recover by then. Igor is deaf in one ear from his cold, so we are going to make the perfect pair! Today we clowned in the street. Specifically in one of the economically deprived neighbourhoods in Bangalore near our apartment. The idea is that clowning in these urban areas will form part of the Bangalore team’s activities, as well as clowning in hospitals. We changed in the apartment and had our photos taken with our hosts, then walked down the main street, past a holy cow, to the entrance of the neighbourhood. We warmed up gently (it was already blisteringly hot) and crossed the threshold…by climbing over a metre high bank of dry mud. Yesterday we had done a recce, to see how big the area was. As we walked down the path in our plain clothes, understandably people looked at us blankly as we passed by. Someone gave us directions as if we were lost. I somehow felt like a giant; clumsy and out of place. Today as we entered the neighbourhood, I felt light and spritely and curious. It took us some minutes to find the rhythm of how we were going to inhabit this space. I’ll admit to feeling self-conscious about being filmed (Sriharsha is documenting our sessions to help with communicating about the project), about being in this new costume and not having a voice to play with. A couple of times our sense of where the game was diverged and we lost one another, but the beauty of this work is that if we allow ourselves to take each moment at a time, these small failures can stay in their place, and we can move on from them, and find something new. All we needed was just a few metres of travelling time together to find a rhythm, for me to shift my attention to receiving everything around me, rather than focussing on myself, and take a breath. Then things clicked into place. With this complicity, we could more easily find connections with the people around us - a game of call and response that hadn’t landed a few minutes ago turned into a full crowd of families joining in once we were in our groove. Our session ended with a long goodbye. We waved as we walked backwards down the street, reaching our arms around the corner, waving out from behind concrete structures and trees. A small group of children followed at a distance, waving back, all of us knowing we can’t stay but wanting to stretch out this moment for as long as possible. We crossed the mud bank threshold and took a breath, hugged, and looked back to see the group gathered together at the end of the street waiting for another wave. And so this waving goodbye took us all the way back up the main road, Igor using his red coat as if we were on a huge ship leaving the shore. With every metre further away we took, the group moved closer. When they reached the mud bank, the distance between us gradually began to grow - they had reached the edge of their world. The waving continued and the connection between us remained, as if we were joined by an invisible thread, soft and strong like silk. The connection transcended this physical bank of mud that only we were allowed to cross and somehow I can still feel its echo in my heart.   I have brought a new costume here with me (created in Glasgow while I was waiting for my marmalade to reach boiling point), and it got me thinking a little about character.
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AuthorI am a therapeutic clown and performer. Writing here is part of my wider practice and maybe some of my thoughts will trigger some thoughts of your own and I hope that helps. Archives
March 2025
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