The fool and the frown

All the cars had parked along the pavements, so the people (unable to move between the wing mirrors and the walls) had all taken to walking in the streets. They moved like rivers, sweeping up drifters and carrying them along.

Have you ever seen a child separated from their mother? If you do you’ll see the face of absolute misery, like the frown of a melancholy clown. I saw one lost child last week: he had chocolate on his cheeks (perhaps from an ice cream or a crepe he’d merrily munched earlier) and now his salty tears were washing off the sugar. When his mother found him, he clung to her for a moment and when his sobs subsided he jumped down, took her hand and laughed. And they went together to one of the Festival’s clown shows. Children feel emotions in a pure and simple way don’t they?

Circus clowns base their acts on simple childlike emotions: often exaggerated by the painted expressions on their faces. That’s why people enjoy them, they are empathetic characters, often simpletons, who struggle with inanimate objects and find their own bodies hard to control. But the exaggeration in their behaviour and the paint on their faces can make their true emotions hard to read.

Last week I saw a pair of clowns perform – Bibeu and Humphrey, from the L’Attraction Céleste in France. They interacted like an old married couple, awkwardly balancing each other. Like a pair of Greek theatre masks she was jolly, he was glum; she was fat and he was thin. Bibeu talked in gibberish and shrieked with laughter while Humphrey’s voice was low and clear. They were wonderfully old-worldly and charming to watch. Their show had no story line and they made no progress; it was just an absurd little transient thing.

Bibeu and Humphrey weren’t the only clowns performing in Saint Leu that week, but some were not for children: Cedric Paga performed his show Que Sommes-Je? (Who Are I?) as his alter-ego Ludor Citrik. Citrik is a clown that Paga developed back in 2000 and has been experimenting with since. Now this is just hearsay, but here is what they say:

Cedric Paga is an interesting man. Trained as a dancer and performer, his interests lie mostly with the world of the clown. He is a method clown: in Que Sommes-Je? Ludor Citrik (Ludor acidic) is born on to the stage in plastic wrapping, naked and niave. But Paga had to know how it felt to be able to act it. He spent days in nappies with a carer to change him, he breast-fed, he was disciplined, he prepared. In the show we watched him form childish obsessions with the things he found: fascinated by a mirror he shows his own reflection his genitals and is amused to find they match; when he rips out the cotton padding from his nappy he tries to eat it then plays with it as though it were snow.

The only other character to appear is that of a watchman, a discipliner in a suit that enforces the world of conformism on him, rewards him for ‘good’ behaviour and punishes him for anything too free spirited. It was an exceptional performance, strangely psychological and brilliantly funny.

Apparently Paga runs workshops in clowning, should you be interested. The application form runs on for pages and if you are excepted you are told a location to meet and from there you are taken, blindfolded, to secret places where he teaches you his craft. Though the workshops only number 10 or so people, I’ve heard few make it to the end. Many find Paga and his program too unsettling. He might make you crawl across railway tracks naked, or eat disgusting foods to learn facial expressions, to leap around, fondle yourself nude in public…

When he washes off his face paint he’s quite a gentle looking man, barely recognisable in fact. We sat near each other one lunch time, and there he was, just a bald man with a single silver hoop in his left ear. Every so often he’ll look up and grin and idiotic grin and his voice becomes the high voice of his alter ego. Ludor Citrik does not live on a stage… Citrik and Cedric live on either sides of a mirror plane.