Marmalade?

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. 

The thing about clown character, certainly in the context of therapeutic clowning, is that beyond inhabiting a clown state that is open, simple, honest, joyful, light and and whatever that brings out in you in each moment, it is informed by context - by the environment, the people you meet, the circumstances you find yourself in. It is in constant motion, always changing. 

The idea that your clown has a character who moves and speaks in a certain way at all times is a straight jacket that diminishes our options, limiting our capacity to connect and be alive to the moment. Sometimes even the act of putting on a red nose can do this to people. Their voice might become small and sweet, their steps flighty or stilted. I’m not saying these elements can’t be part of how you are as a clown, but they can’t be everything - just as no human is wholly small and sweet all of the time. 

When I trained as a therapeutic clown, Dr Maybee was in-part created during training workshops, through working with embodied practices that both helped me to understand my own body better and ways of being - how I am seen despite my attempts to hide, as well as other practices like moving from different centres of the body, or with different elements - exercises that helped me to experience what more my body was capable of, and what creative and imaginative doors this could open for me. The rest of Dr Maybee continues to be created, moulded and re-moulded by the people that I meet in hospital, by my partners, by the environment.
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I remember expending a lot of energy becoming really concerned with ‘finding my character’ or ‘knowing my character’ in my first years of clowning, but now I see that this had more to do with my own sense of self as a person - or lack of it. The more secure I feel, and self aware, the more fun I have playing with the whole range of what is possible when I am clowning - the light and the dark and all of the absurdities that lie between.

So let’s see what this outfit, this city, these people, this heat brings out of me and how I find a way to play with that in a way that can serve the moment, my partner and most importantly the folk we meet.