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Text by Igor Narovski & Suzie Ferguson  Towering before us, like a cliff, like La Scala opera house, stood The Lviv Academic Puppet Theatre. Above five gigantic arches hung three vast coats of arms that would befit a mediaeval castle. Their designs shifted seamlessly between theatre mask, war shield and back again. In this building's shadow, we ourselves became puppet-like - small and fragile, revived for a moment by the will of the puppeteer, by the will of their hand. In front of the theatre, a long bench stretched across a wide square. On it, we laid our sweat-wet costumes to dry after our hot shift at Lviv Regional Children's hospital. Suddenly, as if from the Gods, a woman dropped into view. “Igor? Suzie?” “Yes,” our puppet heads nodded. “Marichka,” the woman introduced herself. “I’ll show you the room for your masterclass. Just give me a minute, I'm dying for coffee…” While Marichka grabbed her coffee, we rolled up our laundry, packed our dry, sun-smelling clothes, and got ready to follow our guide into the puppet kingdom. And off we went. With each step, the Puppet Theatre advanced as its monumental facade reached skywards. Colossal archways hovered overhead. To the right of the entrance was a poster - not an advert for a performance but a sign leading to a bomb shelter. As the magnificent door to the Puppet Kingdom loomed before us, its wooden handle met Marichka’s hand. She gently pulled it. As if under its own weight, by itself, just waiting for the slight impulse of a human hand, it swung open. The dark, cool hall appeared before us, revealing a solemn marble staircase that led to the finest heights of puppetry. We stepped over the threshold and entered…not the Puppet Theatre, not the salve of its cooling marble, but into the bright, white, studio in Glasgow. We’ve entered the past - two weeks ago, when we were preparing a master class program for Ukrainian clowns…  It dawns on us that in going to a war zone to work with clowns who are living through war, who are working with children displaced by that war, we cannot, not address the war. And as this realisation settles in the gut as truth, the question, but how? bursts through the solar plexus. It is starkly obvious that we are not in the same place as these clowns so how do we talk directly about war, coming from our privilege? How do we balance keeping the space emotionally safe while honouring these professionals with the artistic rigour & respect they deserve? How deep do we ask them to go? How much should we provoke? Why is it worth the risk of travelling across a war zone to attend? What if someone is shelled on their way to get to us? We realise that this workshop is an act of mutual aid - professional healthcare clowns with time and resources helping out professional healthcare clowns who are in need. Their need is unique: They are experiencing the same war as the children they visit, the same horror, devastation and fear. How can they be playful, creative and present with this as a backdrop? It occurs to us that we don’t need to invent anything new - we can apply our healthcare clowning practice to this context. Working in hospitals, we know that if our tendency is to run from our own emotions, we will run from other people’s emotions too. Our resulting work will be superficial - we will dodge and distract rather than validate. There is a difference between when someone tries to distract you or fix your situation; ‘It’s raining and i'm cold and wet’ - it’s fine, you’re going to be okay, it’ll stop soon… And when they acknowledge your situation and empower you to feel your own agency; ‘It’s raining and i'm cold and wet’ - yes it’s raining, I see that you are cold. What would you like to do about it? If you avoid your own emotions and needs as a healthcare clown you will find yourself standing in the rain unable to use your umbrella because you haven’t acknowledged that you need it. Accepting the fact that it’s raining and that you are cold and wet means that you can put up the umbrella that you have been holding in your hand the whole time. Only at this point can you invite someone to shelter with you, or help them to put up their own umbrella. Our goal was to help the Ukrainian clowns accept ‘the rain’ and find their ‘umbrellas’. An idea emerges to create a map that guides the group back to 24th February, through their own experience, making sure that they are in a safe enough emotional territory to slow down, feel again and reconnect with themselves. Once re-tethered to this inner-wisdom, we can journey onwards to their work as Healthcare clowns and make the shift from victim, ‘it happened to me’ to clown ‘okay it happened, i've learned from my experience and I’m ready to play with it’’. The shift from ‘I’ve found and opened my umbrella’ to ‘I become someone else’s umbrella’. 
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When giving and receiving feedback it helps to focus on what you like about the way your partner works - what we put our attention on grows and expands, after all. This was easy today as Igor is a sensitive, embodied and creative clown. We find we have a good foundation to build on - we read each room in the same way and have a similar sense of when to leave. We both feel supported - any ridiculous offer would be taken wholeheartedly by the other and built on, and a happy bonus - we find each other very funny. Igor reflected that I make clear offers, quickly. This was a compliment, but I know that it is something that plays against me too. Visits would also benefit from me allowing more time to let things emerge. An example from this morning was when a grandmother had specifically requested a visit for her grandchild who had been crying. I don’t think I had fully let go of an internal pressure to ‘fix the crying’ before I entered - a recipe for an offer that comes from the brain's intellect rather than the bodies. The girl was right at the end of the room, sitting on her mum’s lap. There were three older girls in beds around her. I brought out my tortoise puppet immediately, thinking this could be an indirect game that might end with the girl playing with it. Cuckoo faithfully jumped on board, and while he and the other girls in the room engaged happily, the small girl remained unsure. And the more unsure she was, the more invested the grandmother became. As it turned out, my indirect offer wasn’t indirect at all. In her desire to cheer up her grandchild, the grandmother signposted the game in neon, ‘THIS IS FOR YOU AND WE WANT YOU TO LIKE IT!’ We needed to retreat and try something else but I wasn’t sure what. At this moment I looked at Cuckoo as he brought out an orange scarf and simply threw it into the air. As it floated down, everyone's eyes lifted, their faces softened and their hands reached out for it instinctively. The purposelessness of the game and the softness of the image shifted the mood. The grandmother’s attention was on the scarf so the child relaxed. The scarf was gently passed around the room and the pressure released. Tomato was safely returned to my pocket without anyone noticing or caring and we floated out of a room full of smiling, relaxed faces. Without a robust reflective practice, I may have internalised this experience as a failure on my part, rather than being able to see the bigger picture - an example of good, supportive partnership in action. I am struck by how generosity, respect and responsiveness defined our morning and held us in a state of open playfulness and flow.  Professional water from real doctors cup. Delicious. Walking down through the park back into the city with Evgeniia after our shift, I am still a bit giddy. She describes a government initiative to make Lviv a more desirable tourist destination by cleaning up the city’s beautiful old doorways. She gestures to one with intricately carved handles and brass details bathed in sunlight and I wholeheartedly agree that Lviv should be a tourist hot spot. And then I catch her eye and she holds it for a moment and there is nothing more to say. I continue to experience a kind of emotional whiplash as we walk. We pass a vibrant book market. A huge statue celebrating Ivan Fedorov (father of Eastern Slavonic printing). Sandbags. A beautifully ornate church. A poster advertising ‘ShelterFest’. Sun dappled, cobbled streets. A dad in army fatigues. An absurd statue of a fish with hands coming out of it. My heart is beating between so many different sensations that I have no choice but to surrender. How do you feel? I don’t know, but I feel all of it, all the way to the edges. I’m aware that in an hour or so we will be delivering a 7 hour workshop to a group of Ukrainian healthcare clowns who have travelled across the country to be together and work with us. We arrive at an Armenian coffee house where, instead of the balanced and sensible lunch we had been planning on sustaining us through the afternoon, we drink rocket fuel prepared in hot sand by the most serious of baristas, and eat cake.
Our workshop is hosted at the Lviv Regional Academic Puppet Theatre - a huge and grand building in the middle of the old town. Marishka welcomes us and is exhausted after hosting a weekend of concerts there - the busiest she has ever organised. After drying our sweaty costumes on a bench in the hot sun, we settle into our room. Our first clown arrives, 20 years old, not-so-fresh off the train from Dnipro. She explains that the journey took 20 hours and that she is exhausted - the train has to go slowly in case of rocket fire. Not your average commute. The responsibility we have to hold this space with just the right balance of pastoral care, professional respect and playfulness drops into my chest. I connect to my centre, ground myself, make eye contact with Igor and breathe. The workshop we have planned is something that feels brand new for both of us and somehow simple and radical all at once. We will be taking a risk, but neither of us has the stomach not to try. These clowns' courage deserves to be met with courage; “Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.” David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words Here goes...  L-R: Hristina, Maybee, Cuckoo, Evgeniia Evgeniia Arakielian meets us at the door of Lviv Regional Children's Clinical Hospital along with Hristina Bogatirjova, one of the child psychologists based there. We can visit anywhere, except Acute Trauma. Fair enough. Changing and warming-up alongside Igor today feels familiar already but the hospital itself is dramatically different from what I'm used to. I switch my focus to the work, which is identical - meeting the same needs (isolation, loss of control, trauma, anxiety, boredom) in the same way (presence, playfulness, connection, technique) to the same effect. The juxtaposition of being in an environment permeated with acute pain, anxiety and suffering whilst experiencing feelings of joy and exhilaration can be disconcerting; 'According to the UN children's fund Unicef, the hospital in the Ukrainian city of Lviv on the Polish border is overwhelmed by the number of injured children arriving from the contested regions...A UNICEF spokesman in Geneva reported that doctors in Lviv had to set up a sticker system to coordinate the treatment of the children. A green sticker means: injured but not urgently needed, yellow means: needs treatment, and red means: this child needs immediate attention. There are also black stickers, the spokesman said: the child is still alive, but it cannot be saved and the hospital is forced to focus its resources on other small patients.' . It is human nature to expect suffering and its recovery to be a serious business that requires our full adult, serious attention. Playfulness is a luxury reserved for when the Sun is shining, for when our hearts are full. Our luxury as healthcare clowns is that we can be the Sun. Our hearts can be full enough for everyone. Our joy and exhilaration comes from witnessing the various ways in which we see children, parents and staff expand into themselves throughout the course of the morning, as we ourselves expand to meet them. Our visits flow from room to room. A small boy on a bed giggling his head off at the fact that no matter how hard he tries, no matter how good his moonwalk, Cuckoo can’t enter the room without squeaking. In the end, the boys arm movements dictate the rhythm to a song and dance that free Cuckoo from his Squeak jail. Another boy with an arm recently put in a cast grows about a foot taller with pride at helping Maybee up from a bench she had been reclining on. A room full of girls giggling as Cuckoo tries to enter without Maybee seeing - first behind a nurse, then behind a pot plant. Another room with two teenage girls, a baby and a toddler who all help us play a lullaby for the pigeon sitting outside on the windowsill. The interactions with staff - hugs, smiles, compliments and warmth. Sunlight and love radiates, sticks to the walls, permeates the skin, reminds us all of our shared humanity, of what is still possible. At the end of our shift, Evgeniia says that she was reminded of the importance of play and humour as therapeutic tools, something that the serious task of being a child psychologist in a war zone over the last five months had taken from her. This afternoon we have our workshop with a group of Ukrainian healthcare clowns, who are travelling across the country to work with us. My memories of that first evening in Lviv are bathed in a golden glow. My dear friend and clown colleague Diane Thornton, who has extensive experience working in conflict zones as a theatre practitioner, had told me to expect the unexpected. And it’s true that I hadn’t expected to find Lviv so unspeakably beautiful. I catch myself looking for signs of war around me, on the faces of people passing by. The streets are busy - bustling even - but the atmosphere feels like the bit of a funeral wake where everyone has done their crying and now have to tidy up the old sandwiches and plates before they go back home. Sadness and resolve permeates everything, on a backdrop of stunning renaissance architecture and a vibrant cafe culture. We pass advertising boards that praise Ukrainian soldiers for their compassion and solidarity. The occasional government building is surrounded by sandbags and defences that I recognise from Saving Private Ryan. Occasionally we pass Ukrainian men wearing army fatigues who must be on leave from the front line. I hesitate to call them soldiers - they look just like my friends back home, wearing the wrong clothes. When we arrive at our hotel, there is a photocopied paper sign on the wall saying ‘Shelter’ with an arrow pointing to the basement. Nobody points this out to us, or explains the protocol. In fact we miss our first air raid siren, absorbed in writing and listening to music. Igor receives a message saying ‘are you afraid?’. He replies with a long message about finding Lviv beautiful and welcoming. ‘No, Igor - because of the siren’. ‘Oh’.
When we hear the next one - a sound at once totally familiar from films and intensely anxiety-inducing - we go downstairs. The ‘Shelter’ is the hotel basement. Next to the entrance there is a storage room filled with old paint cans and turpentine. There are no lights, no water, and no other people. I’d been following the news closely before we left, so I knew that the risk of Lviv being bombed were relatively slim. I’d also read that locals had long stopped responding to the sirens - in a choice between functioning on a daily basis and diving into a shelter because you believe you will die, this makes total sense. Cognitive dissonance reigns. In the morning when I ask the guy at reception if he ever goes to the shelter he laughs, ‘if a rocket hits us here we are dead - that shelter won't save you’. Gotcha. It’s 37 degrees and sweat is streaming down my face before I’ve even moved. We find a small patch of shade behind a tent to warm up - the gradual process of dropping down into my body, finding my voice, and finally connecting to this inner spark of joy, playfulness and love is delicious after so much time spent in transit. Any nerves that I had about being good enough are superseded by my strong desire to inhabit the refuge that is Dr Maybee, to do the thing I have come to do. It’s not busy on this side of the border. A food tent, UNICEF tent, information desks, a few volunteers line the path that leads to border control. Families - women and children - come in dribs and drabs, lugging too many, too heavy bags, eyes fixed on the border, hearts fixed on home. We agree that this time will be well spent finding a shared language so that we have something to build on the next day when we will be in hospital. Cuckoo and Maybee stand side by side and take a deep breath. As we inhale, Cuckoo’s leg lifts for our first step together. His legs are very long and he can lift them unfathomably high. Maybee stumbles. We look at one another: No matter! We must try again, and we must try harder! The second step works, a sigh and a smile of wonder and delight as we step forward into this new world together riding the wave of a pure and hopeful exhale.  Within minutes, Maybee has her foot stuck in a huge black tarpaulin sheet and it seems there is no escape. The world of possibilities from just a few moments ago? Gone. She is destined to be here, in this tarpaulin, in the blazing sun, forever more. Cuckoo tries to sing her free with the harmonica to no avail, and then flies around looking for solutions - under the tarp, around it - all the while being directed by a man sitting in the shade who is laughing with delight. Finally the man shouts, ‘go down on one knee!’. Cuckoo goes down on one knee. ‘Music Maestro!’. Before we know it, the man is singing the wedding march in full voice, ‘Da da da daaaa, da da da daaaaaa’. Cuckoo takes Maybee’s hand and swings her into a dance, and she is released, spinning and twirling in amazement. Cuckoo and Maybee are married, love has set us free, and we have hit our stride.  We both have a shared understanding in the importance of inhabiting a game and clown world that is rich and real and requires our full attention. People find Cuckoo and Maybee ‘in medias res’ and in this way our game serves as an invitation rather than a demand. Igor and I see people on the periphery and moderate our play to suit what we see, but we make don't insist. Passers by can feel safe to come close, to play on their terms or to walk on past. I found Ira Seidenstein’s description of this parallel reality very insightful; ‘Containing one's focus is the single most important discipline for an artist. They have to self-impose a form of ‘myopia’ or what I call one-sightedness. Yet, especially for a stage performer in acting and clown one must also have multi-sided awareness of the whole space and everyone in it. That Duality is: One-Sightedness, AND, Multi-Sided Awareness’ * We walk full of joy towards border control and as we near the door we stop with the sudden, sinking realisation - Cuckoo is on the wrong side of the railing. Our eyes meet. we look down at the railing, we look at one another, back to the railing, slowly back to one another....separated…forever…and so soon after the wedding! But no.. we must take courage…there must be a solution! As we quickly post Cuckoo through the middle of the fence, in her efforts, Maybee ends up balanced precariously on top of the railing. Cuckoo does his sweet, clumsy best to lower her down, but when a man arrives who is helping a family to cross the border and offers his hand, she takes it and is lifted, light as a feather, to the ground. Maybee is saved and her gratitude is boundless. Now Maybee and Cuckoo are bearing witness to an emotional goodbye between this man, two women and a small child. It seems the only thing to do is to hold this as gently as possible, to give their emotions space to flow. Maybee plays a melody on her ukulele and Cuckoo joins to sing the man's name. After a while, the women offer their names to be included, and the mood brightens as we celebrate this tender moment of deep gratitude. The girl, however, dramatically turns her back. She wants us to know that she is not okay about this. Just as we are saying goodbye, Cuckoo bends over and something squeaks. The girl is intrigued and moves closer with a smile. He gently touches her upper arm - squeak! She immediately giggles. She touches the same place and it squeaks again. More giggles. She does it again and again and again and the giggles have their own energy now, taking on a life of their own, as if she has started up a 2 stroke engine in her belly. Her mum touches her arm too. More squeaks, more giggles. They are all giggling as they pass through the turnstile and enter passport control, waving goodbye to their friend, squeaking all the way.  Back out of costume we are queueing at passport control to cross into Ukraine. An old lady dressed in pink with bright, shining blue eyes comes through the door. She is clearly hot and tired, so I wave her ahead of me in the queue, without much thought. She tries to say something to me and I don’t understand. She tries again and I say, uselessly, ‘English…?’ and she shakes her head, smiling. She turns away to pick up her bag and then before I know it she is back, right in front of me. She takes my face in her hands, looks me in the eyes and kisses me warmly on the cheek.
It strikes me then that the more acute the pain, the more impactful even the simplest gestures of love can be. There couldn’t have been a more tender welcome into Ukraine. * I highly recommend subscribing to Ira’s newsletter: https://iraseid.com/international-school/newsletter Objectively, going to a war zone for the first time to clown with someone you met 3.5 months ago and have never worked with before might seem like a surprisingly bold risk. On the plane to Warsaw, I woke up with a start. I had a nightmare that someone had sprayed a red swastika onto the baby of the people sitting next to me. As my stomach dropped to the cabin floor, the risk suddenly felt large and looming and my mind flooded with anxiety; ‘What are you doing? Is this vanity? Or ego? Can you really make any kind of difference by clowning? What if your clowning is so bad you make it worse for people? What if Igor realises that you don’t know what you are doing? What if you get bombed and everyone says ‘well she had it coming?!’ …I take a breath and remind myself: I have a rigorous, professional practice, and an interest in exploring the reach and difference that therapeutic clowning can make. In how we can respond to this rapidly changing and increasingly perilous world in an agile and meaningful way. To do that, you have to take a step towards the thing and look it right in the eye. You have to say yes. **** My clown partner on this trip is Igor Narovski, and we are here because we both do just that. Our journey through Poland is characterised by fantastically monosyllabic bus drivers. It seems to me that we are two little yeses being bounced between ‘No’s’ and shrugs and long queues. Two days of non-stop motion later - car, plane, taxi, train, bus, walk, bus, walk - we make it to Medyka, on the border with Ukraine where finally our clowns, Cuckoo and Maybee, meet... Being in Denmark for 7 weeks and not understanding a word of Danish might have felt more lonely if it wasn’t for the work. Not the fact of having work, but for the nature of it. Each day I visited a hospital or care home or school as a clown, I had sweet, silly, funny and wordless conversations; wholehearted, profound and totally coherent. In my daily life here, in the in-between times, interacting in shops and sitting on the train, Danish voices wash over me, completely incomprehensible. People here are contained and polite and respectful. There have been occasions here where I have had the strongest (and not altogether unpleasant) sensation that I am invisible. This is often followed by an equally strong impulse to disrupt, do something irresponsible or alarming. It seems I too need to be seen, understood, and touched. My awareness of what a subtle balm simply being seen and heard without judgement can be has deepened. More than ever I understand that the language of therapeutic clowning is the language of breath, body, space and vibration. It is the rhythm, tempo and tension of a place and our physical and relational response to it. Words can provide landscape, but they are not the conversation. I have barely noticed that I don’t speak Danish on the days that I am Clowning. Dr Maybee and Bonnie Elderflower transcend my personal need to meet mind to mind. They go straight to the heart. I tried to write about some of these encounters, but my words flattened and confined them, so then I tried to draw them - the results of which I share here. This is a visit in an SEN school with an autistic boy who had become fixated on drawing the line between the bricks with his finger. Maybee added voice to his action, he understood he had control, and he broke free: Below is a visit in a Carehome - an emotional (almost wordless) rollercoaster shared between Bonnie and this gentleman. I just loved the equanimity of his response at the end. The most profound conversations I’ve had over the last seven weeks, be it professionally or personally have been wordless. Postscript: There is one word I started to hear in amongst the jumble of vowels and on Tuesday when I was clowning in hospital as Dr Maybee. I finally asked...what does 'måske' mean? ....'maybe, Maybee, it means maybe!' This is a sketch - a kind of field guide to connection, inspired by a recent visit to a Carehome where I accompanied a mother living with dementia and her daughter on a journey to a new kind of conversation, with support from Rights Made Real and My Home Life. Imagine a path that is paved as the person you love walks it. And imagine that you are walking alongside them. With each step, you walk, not towards a destination, but into each moment. The path is paved by the act of you being present in this moment, together. Each encounter is new, each path unique and full of possibility. Gently let go of the ‘how are yous’ of everyday meeting, for this is not an everyday meeting. Allow yourself, instead, a moment to notice what is beautiful, and to share it...’oh! My love! Look at your shining blue eyes!’ As you walk slowly along, you see signs - invitations - for you to follow, like symbols on a map. Perhaps a gesture, a word, a breath, a glint in the eye, a touch. You notice them all and choose to follow one. First, you observe, carefully, without judgement. Now you repeat, feeling it in your own mouth or body, discovering your own pleasure in it. Next, emboldened, you begin to build and gradually explore - curious for where this tributary will take you both. Through this exploration, your loved one knows that they have been seen, been heard. You confirm their place on this path, and that you are there, walking in-step. They sense that what they have said or done means something important to you, and is worth repeating. Hitting your stride now, you make an invitation of your own - exploration becomes exchange as the path clears and the horizon comes into view, the sun-kissed landscape rolling out before you. You lift your eyes together, at all the possibilities, full of ease, grace and wonder. You will see, of course, that not all invitations are possible for you to travel together. Some will be a dead end for you or for your loved one, some will feel disorientating or confusing, some will simply disappear as you move towards them. There will be times when you feel lost or stuck. When you can’t see any signposts at all, when the fog comes down and the compass is spinning. It’s natural now to feel the loss. The despair of what is no longer there. The vertigo and fear that comes with constant change. The desire to to make sense of the senseless. That’s okay. When that happens, pause on the path-side awhile, sit on your suitcase and breathe. the breath is your North Star. When you breathe together, you’ll never be truly lost.   Today I feel like I’ve been plugged back into the mainframe. I’m so full of energy; I spent the day coaching/clowning with a DanskehospitalKlovne duo near Copenhagen and wanted to share this beautiful moment:
It’s the end of the shift and we are laughing as we bubble back down the corridor, enjoying the afterglow of the day, heads already drinking a coffee in the staff room. There are two residents on the corner, maybe in their 80s, frail. One sitting, one standing in front of him. Not speaking or looking at each other. Sort of hovering in one another’s orbit. As we pass, one says something like ‘can you play that thing?’ to Zippo, gesturing to his guitar. Zippo stops and begins to play. By now, I’m on the threshold of the staff room door but when I hear the music, I’m drawn back like elastic. I stand beside standing man and we are already feeling the groove, knees bouncing, hands dancing. Opposite, sitting man looks up and his eyes shine. I begin to play the trombone in the air. He nods and picks up his air trumpet. Now I am on the mic with the tall man, scatting, chhh chh chhaah chhhh chh chhhah dippiddy dappidy...When I look back, the sitting man is now on the clarinet. I give the saxophone a go. He laughs and the lights go down and we are in a smokey jazz bar, playing our usual slot. We are in synch, in flow, light as a feather, eyes bright. The cool cat crowd hang on our every note. They are in the palm of our hand. Sitting mans eyes flick to my skirt and back again. I look down...my petticoat is showing. Mortified, I quickly hide it and look back at him for reassurance. He laughs heartily and nods as if to say ‘it’s okay, kid, you got away with it’ and we play on until the small hours... It’s good to get the band back together. As part of the HCIM International meeting, I was asked to be on a panel about leadership, there to represent the 'next generation of Artistic Directors' that are taking over from our Founder/Ceo's. By the time of the conference (it was delayed by 1 year) I had handed in my resignation, I wanted to be honest about my experience on the panel and somehow only Dr Maybee knew how. People have been a little taken aback by my use of the word failure when talking about this. But I'm comfortable with the word...you don't do clown training without becoming comfortable with it. Failure is central to our work...and while of course it is a vulnerable place to be, it is inevitable & natural and a source of great learning and power. In refusing to feel shame, I hope that I can provoke a wider conversation and learning about how we structure our organisations and how we empower one another to thrive - just as we empower the people we visit as Therapeutic Clowns. So here it is, Dr Maybee's Recipe for Failure.   Ingredients: 1 x beloved organisation transitioning from Founder/CEO/AD in the midst of financial difficulty with no strategy. 1 x Skilled therapeutic clown with no interest in business and a lot of passion for delivering best practice. 1 x Board in transition whose longest standing member has been in role for 2 years.  Method: Set the timer for 4 years.  Step 1: Gather your equipment:
Overhaul training, communication & costumes with the artistic team. See a sustained and bubbling improvement in morale and the quality of delivery. Check-in regularly, stir occasionally and continue for approx 18 months. I knew that I needed this in order to stay grounded and connected to myself and the work, and found it so challenging to ask for it, even though the CEO at the time was very supportive. It’s hard enough to know what your needs are and express them. It’s even harder to insist on them when it seems other things are more important to your colleagues or the organisation.  Step 2: When the CEO leaves suddenly, pour over anxiety and marinade for 2 months. Add an Interim CEO who is deeply sceptical about therapeutic clowning and keen to make his CEO mark. Turn up the heat, go to the board and get him removed. Vigorously mix your courage and leadership skills and suggest to the Board that the AD and CEO should occupy the same shelf to address future power imbalances. Simmer gently when the Chair says no. I had this sense that 'this isn’t my world'. Everyone else knows better/is more confident/understands more/is more experienced, so I didn’t voice my misgivings at first. I didn't feel I had the personal or positional power to express my concern. Of course, this is my 'stuff', but it also comes from the Patriarchal structures and systems that surround us, that have surrounded me since early childhood, that show leadership as a white middle aged man in a suit. The organisation relied on good chemistry and communication between the CEO and AD but there were no systems in place to support that or to support us if things went wrong. The final say would always be with the CEO as the top of the organisation which meant the AD would always be vulnerable to an imbalance of power. The combination of that, and my feelings of responsibility to the programme and the artistic team soon became totally unmanageable.  Step 3: Now quickly discard the parts of the AD job that you love to become Interim CEO for approx. 4 months. Stop practice, studio time and stretching during meetings. This is now ‘unprofessional’. Meanwhile, scatter more spreadsheets, budgets, meetings and stress onto your agenda. Cut programmes in half, lengthways. Stop sleeping. Keep an eye on the artistic team and continue to support them to flourish, build trust, and deepen their practice, despite the shrinking artistic programme. People seem to find it amusing when I say how difficult I find it to work with budgets or spreadsheets, as if it is a question of simply trying harder or applying myself. I never question anyone when they tell me they would be terrified to perform in front of a crowd of people, and it would be absurd to expect someone to do that without all the support they needed in order to thrive. Boards and organisations need to really take a look at how to make their organisations inclusive and accessible in a meaningful way to people who embody different ways of being in, seeing and experiencing the world. How can they encourage, welcome and make space for people as their whole selves? The people who love spreadsheets and details and the ones who are terrified of them?  Step 4: When you notice the pan smoking, recruit a bright and brilliant new CEO and set aside your worries. Sigh a sigh of relief for around 1 minute.  Step 5: Make a suggestion to put ‘Pandemic’ in the risk register and laugh along as everyone else laughs at you. When the pandemic comes to the boil, your chefs instinct will tell you to pause and reflect. Many people in the team have caring responsibilities. The CEO will continue to stir with enthusiasm and vigour. Hold onto your mental health - you might need this later. Divide your time between creating a new digital programme, teaching yourself video editing software & skills, creating online content, supporting the artistic team and managing your anxiety. At this point it’s normal to feel both proud and overwhelmed.  Step 6: Add renewed conversations about Strategy, the need to innovate and diversify and notice that the hierarchy of the organisation and of information feels more pronounced. Stir in a feeling of unease and clarify your artistic vision. When conversations reach boiling point, suggest the SMT gets team Supervision. First, learn that not everyone is as comfortable with emotion as you are. Then, gradually learn that the rest of the SMT thinks you are inflexible and they don’t support your artistic vision. There are no more sessions. Discard. Sprinkle over some paranoia and Prozac. Mix in the feeling that the CEO would like creative control. It was always my instinct and way of working to be open and transparent with the artistic team. Many of them are more experienced than I am and run their own theatre companies. As time went on, there was more language in the SMT around not telling the team about certain decisions as it might worry them - a leadership style that was at odds with my own.  Step 7: To make sure your failure is certain, recruit a dynamic new General Manager who who uses the word ‘unprofessional’ when talking about the artistic team, highlights your many administrative errors, and suggests ‘breaking the mould’ of best practice. Attempt to be open and honest about how impossible and undermining the situation feels. Stir in powerlessness. Now mix in the feeling that your role is redundant. Repeat this process for a few months. Sandwich yourself between the SMT and the Artistic team and spread yourself thinly. Now is a good time to check what the alternative artistic vision for the organisation is. If the CEO says ‘I don't know, I just know that we have to be open and flexible’ one more time, you know your failure is nearly ready to serve. I want to emphasise that the team were good, skilled people. Everyone was doing their best. But of course people are very messy. We bring with us lots of internalised bias, preferences, needs, likes, dislikes and insecurities. In many working environments, being ‘professional’ means not showing any of these things. As a matter of fact, what is deemed as ‘professional’ can be extremely narrow and uninspiring. I understood at this point that this wasn’t a dip, but that I had reached the end of the road. Leaving felt like the only act of agency available to me. I had to trust that I would find other ways and means of serving Therapeutic Clowning and at this moment, my mental health had to come first.  Finally, share your letter of resignation with the artistic team as an act of defiance, transparency and hope. People say they love having an artist in the office but not, it seems, if that means compromising their preferred ways of working and being. There is very little space or understanding of neuro-divergence, or divergence of any kind in many workplaces...and according to this article I read last week: 'Roughly one in 20 people have ADHD. We know that one in 10 have dyslexia, one in 60 have autism – and in fact roughly one-fifth of the human population are neurodiverse. One in five people can’t be seen as errors of genetics. We have to acknowledge there is diversity of human neurocognitive capacity and we’re all the richer for it.' (read the article here)  Enjoy your failure with friends! Great with a side salad of perspective, humour and learning. It is ableist to frame neuro-divergent people’s worldview, behaviours or ways of interacting as less desirable. This 'failure' in my role as AD has helped me to realise how much effort and energy it took me to fit into society's neurotypical expectations of me - throughout my life and most acutely in these last 4 years.
It has been a very cathartic and healing process to write this and to share it. And I do it in the hope that our organisations take a pause, and really, really listen. I know I am not the only Artistic Director who has struggled, and I know that there are General Managers and CEOs who are also challenged by this working dynamic. I don't have answers, but I feel certain that listening and being present is a good place to start... And in the meantime I am good. I chose freedom, and all is well. |
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
November 2025
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