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.
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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.

Method:

Set the timer for 4 years.

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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)

(Written while in post as AD with Hearts & Minds)

Brain Awareness Week got me thinking. Thinking about how unhelpful thinking is when you are clowning. Thinking about how thinking about not thinking is even less helpful. Thinking about brains and bodies.

In face of the prediction that 131.5 million of us in the world will be living with dementia by 2050 and that according to EPAD (European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia Consortium) there hasn’t been a new medication for Alzheimer’s in the last twenty years, it strikes me how important it is that we pay attention to how to be with and celebrate a person once their brain doesn’t work as it once did. To consider that we are more than our brains. We are bodies, and as Jules Montague puts it in her ted talk, ‘embodiment allows people to exist in the world, to be resolutely present...it is our gestures, habits and actions and Dementia can’t take that away.’ 

As therapeutic clowns we are responding with our whole body and not just our head and thinking brain.  The thinking clown might come in to a ward with a plan to entertain, but the embodied clown will arrive with the intention to meet someone in their gestures, habits and actions to create a tailor-made theatrical experience. For it is in this embodied place that we share and recognise our humanity and sense of self, regardless of cognitive capacity.

By using therapeutic clowning to connect in an emotional, person-centered way, we observe that people become more verbal, more interactive and less isolated – observations backed-up by recent compelling research by Daisy Fancourt that the arts can play a vital and central role in the general wellbeing and cognitive health of people living with dementia, ‘enjoyable activities can induce positive affect and heighten arousal which has been shown to lead to improved cognitive performance.’ 
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Intellectual thinking is highly prized to humans, but profound experiences of human connection rarely have anything to do with rational thought.

(Written while in post as AD for Hearts & Minds)

When people ask what I do for a living, once we’ve established that it is not frightening children, they often comment on how difficult and sad it must be.
It’s hard for me to see this job as sad. My overwhelming feeling is that it is rewarding and exciting. I regularly see the transformation of a child lying down in bed with tubes coming out of their arms, pale, unengaged and anxious to a child sitting up in bed laughing and controlling the action. On dementia wards it is the same. People seemingly locked in their own worlds unfurl and begin dancing and singing with us. It is a huge privilege and often joyful.
Of course the reality is that we are often visiting very unwell people and there is potential for this to affect us personally. There are days when we come onto the ward for our handover to hear that someone we regularly visit has died and this is upsetting. But the clown doesn’t just help us to connect – it also keeps us emotionally safe. Once we are in our clown state, the present moment is all there is. And for a clown, the present moment is always full of potential for shared joy and playfulness.
Self-reflection and collaboration are built into our practice. We work in pairs so that we can check-in with one another – take a moment to refresh, breath, reconnect if needs be. Regular confidential supervision as a team gives us space to celebrate and grieve in a natural way. We know that burn-out is a possibility and we look for red flags: when we start to feel indispensable, ‘but it has to be me who goes to that unit’ and a sense of ownership, ‘I’m the only one who can connect with that person’ and then we do something about it. It isn’t always easy, but it is our responsibility to ensure that we are in a fit state to do the job that we are required to do.
Ultimately, we know that their struggle is not our struggle. Any difficulty we encounter is not ours to bear and for this reason we can invite people out of their circumstance to meet us in worlds of play and imagination.