'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'
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| Photo credit: Rebecca Tidman |
Putting on a clown’s nose is a subtle and non-violent gesture to distinguish, but what exactly? The red ball on the nose un-identifies its wearer immediately, almost as if to become part of another species. Clowns may be funny and dramatic, stupid and incredibly smart, poetic without prose, offensive, scary, or sweet. Clowns attain to a world that mirrors the exaggeration of our being human.
The image of the clown offers the spectator a space to de-personalise in its turn, and in this psychological game the clown creates its playground. If a clown communicates, this is by touching all the unfolded layers we carry along within ourselves.
Indeed, clowns could very well have become a branch like ‘action psychotherapy’, only that clowns are much older than psychotherapy itself. Perhaps this is why many ideas about clowns are misapprehended, and a partly negative view or childishness in their regard belongs, not that much to them, but rather to how being human has been abased by their former appearances.
