The Red-Nosed Revolution, Clowns Full-Tilt, WSJ
Posted November 1, 2011 at 1:54 pm
by Barbara Chai, Wall Street Journal
For Kendall Cornell, clowning around is about more than laughs. Her all-female clown troupe, Clowns Ex Machina, aims to carve out a bigger place in the profession for women, and to create humor with deeper meaning and a democratic spirit.
The troupe’s new show, “Clowns Full-Tilt: A Musing on Aesthetics,” aims to explore such subjects as the pursuit of beauty, free expression and the pursuit of love, and to find humor in those topics along the way.
Ms. Cornell has been teaching and performing clown work in New York and abroad for 17 years. At a rehearsal for “Clowns Full-Tilt,” which opens Friday at La MaMa’s First Floor Theatre on East Fourth Street, Ms. Cornell spoke with The Wall Street Journal, a red nose dangling from an elastic band around her neck.
Most people have conventional views of clowns. How is your troupe reinterpreting the idea?
There are clowns like Charlie Chaplin or Lucille Ball—people who are not heavily made-up, broad-humor clowns. There are people who have a different sense of humor, made for a different medium. It’s my humor, my interest. Especially in this show, it’s getting into atmospheric territory. I also find, working with women clowns, that same old stuff just doesn’t really bring out some of the personal things that I think women clowns have to offer in terms of revealing something funny in a certain way.
Do you think New Yorkers, who have their pick of art forms to experience, are receptive to clowns?
Clown is very immediate. It’s not like people have to understand the art form in order to enjoy what’s going on. It’s not like they have to say, “Oh, this is what the form is about.” Whether people want to understand how the red nose works, those are interesting questions, but as an audience member, I think most people can come and get what’s going on right away.
Clowns Ex Machina jettisons a lot of conventional clown gear, like oversized shoes, in favor of nude bodysuits, bloomers and bodices. So why hang on to the red nose?
When I was doing just solo work, sometimes I would do stuff without the red nose, and sometimes I would [keep it]. I decided it suited me. My costumes were not that outrageous, so it just added a little sense of absurdity. It changes people’s face a little bit when they have it on. I think that way we can get closer to something naturalistic without it falling into a naturalistic thing —their costumes can be closer to a normal person and still have something that’s not quite right.
How does a number like “Chain Gang Song,” in which the clowns line up and share their “done wrongs,” come about?
On this show, I used a lot of field recordings, music, and we do an exercise where I play something for them—something really far beyond their voice—and they have to listen and try to make that voice. It’s a really good exercise to generate material and push people beyond what they normally do. One of these pieces was a prison chain-gang song, and there was a guy talking about, “Oh I done wrong,” just in a matter-of-fact way about everything he had done. We had the microphone, we played with that, and somehow in an off moment we got in this mode. There was somebody messing up, and I was like, “You did wrong!” So then, just for fun, we did this “done wrong” thing and there was something so funny about the cumulative effect when they say all this stuff.