Time: 7 pm EDT
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In this talk, performer and scholar Tim Reid will ask a number of questions: What makes a clown? What is their function? Where can we find them? And how?
Looking at the relationship between humor and death will help, if not by providing any satisfying answers, at least to spread the asking around. Already, clowns’ relationship to life is not clear. Are they even alive? It’s more they cannot die, and that is — at least partly — what sometimes makes them terrifying, and often makes them funny. Because they do die, all the time. It’s a classic, regular trope, the most reliable punchline. Then, like clockwork — perhaps, like Bergson says of comedy, the “mechanical encrusted upon the living” — they get up and saunter off, only to do it all over again.
This structure or arc repeats, from commedia dell’arte, to the circus, to modernist theater. However, we’re not just looking for clowns there, on stages marked as such, but in the way clowns seem to saturate daily life, even today, having become ubiquitous as a cultural reference point. What does that tell us? This ubiquity, this resilience, is also an indestructibility, a refusal to ever really go away, which seems different than life or living as we know it, which, actually, ends.
At the limit of such speculation, clowns have been drawn into relations with spirit-workers and shamanic practice, but that seems specious, even presumptuous, unless it can be discussed in relation to their most degraded, popular, commercial forms.
To wander into these questions, this talk will consider something of the history of clowns, look at theories of humor and laughter, and take account of popular and commercial representations of clowns, particularly in the US, while moving to examine and discuss actual performers and people who work as clowns. In this, there are all kinds of laughter, the anxious or relieved laughter, the hysterical fit, and the visceral belly laugh. In all of these a kind of creature comes to the surface that we can recognize and call a clown, and maybe even ask all sorts of things.
Tim Reid is an artist, performer, writer, and facilitator for others. He is currently a PhD candidate at NYU in Performance Studies, where he is writing a dissertation on clowns and commercial regulations in the US. He has a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from CalArts in Writing. His work has been presented at Human Resources, LAXART, PAM Residencies, Machine Project, and Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, as well as Links Hall (Chicago) and Chicken Coop Contemporary (Portland) as part of PICA's TBA Festival, among others. He was an ensemble member with The Neo-Futurists (Chicago), with whom he wrote and performed for their long-running show Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, an original member of Wet The Hippo (Los Angeles), and Gawdafful National Theater (Los Angeles). He has been a curator at PAM Residencies, an editor with riting, a dramaturg for projects in theater, performance, and dance, teaches both academic and practice-based courses, and has been a guest lecturer and visiting artist at places including UNLV, Otis College of Art & Design, Fordham, and CalArts.Image: Illustration from a 1899 promotional calendar produced by the Antikamnia Chemical Company of St Louis, Missouri. The artworks on the calendar were created by Louis Crucius, a pharmacist, doctor and anatomy professor.