Clowns, Tornadoes and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

The comical death of Buffo the Great

Buffo is the Clown of Clowns. The Head of Clowns. The Master of Clowns. He wears a bladder on his head. Think of that, says Carter. He wears his insides on his outside, and a portion of his most obscene and intimate insides, at that; so that you might think he is bald, he stores his brain in the organ which, conventionally, stores piss.

Crowned by a bladder. He wears his insides on his outside. Bladder on the brain. 

What is the clown made from? What makes the clown? Insides on the outside. 

How does it stand humiliation?

Carter notes the terror that children have of clowns. It looks like the laughter of the audience is a kind of hysteria, an explosive response to suffering. Violent slapstick is Buffo’s specialty, she says. Extravagant humiliation. Buffo himself says the child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. 

The wearing of the bladder. The Clown’s Funeral. He is himself the centre that does not hold. In The Clown’s Funeral, Buffo is stuffed into a coffin by clowning pallbearers whose march is impeded by their own work of clowning. The work of being a clown is an endless disruption of the work the clown is doing.

The despised and rejected, the scapegoat upon whose stooped shoulders is heaped the fury of the mob…

The A card

A long time ago a friend told me that he got the A card every evening. The asshole-card. The person chosen, consciously or unconsciously by the group, to be the asshole of the evening. The asshole of the evening is then poked and prodded with every pointed joke. The laughter of the group doesn’t have the extreme violence of the massive circus audience watching the bladdered head of Buffo. But the asshole of the evening feels the laughter as a collective force.

How does it stand humiliation?

How much of your insides do you need to wear on the outside to be the asshole of the evening?

Is the Asshole of the evening the asshole of the evening? Is he crowned by his most obscene and intimate insides?

Inside and outside

When I worked as a street performer with Kristian Al Droubi, we were the paid entertainment at many events. We had an endless battle with the Dressing Room. The Dressing Room was an imaginary place, a thing to look for, a question to be asked of bewildered events organisers who always imagined that our performing selves and our non-performing selves were interchangeable. The concept of changing was unknown to them.

We changed in toilets, behind buildings, in a floorless room next to dogshit, in crowds, in semi-public spaces, on streets. Street art itself, being, essentially, an outdoor presence that does not rely on the concept of private space, is public in many of its parts, along with the whole. 

I had a long and frustrated search for a dressing room in every event we worked at. Kristian, a much more seasoned performer, didn’t bother to ask. He has the gift of being able to change everywhere, anywhere, to treat the state of being undressed with absolute indifference. 

I went through the more common cycles of confusion, indignation, shame, undressing, frustration, dressing, and eventually getting over it.

When I worked as a live model, the process of undressing caused me a lot more embarrassment than the hours spent nude. Undressing in public seemed rude. Being naked was art – or in this case supporting the creation of art.

To go through the cycle of confusion, indignation, shame, frustration and recovery is very similar to undressing. The nude body has a surprising amount of resilience, it rises up when everything else is shed.

Buffo spins

At the climax of his turn, everything having collapsed around him as if a grenade exploded it, he starts to deconstruct himself. 

He begins to spin round and round where he stands. 

Then, when you think, this time, Buffo the Great must whirl apart into his constituents, as if he had turned into his own centrifuge, the terrifying drum-roll which accompanies this extraordinary display concludes and Buffo leaps, shaking, into the air, to fall flat on his back.

Questions: 

• What are your constituents?
• When you fall, how do you land?
• How much are you willing to deconstruct yourself?
• How do you bring your constituents back, when you are done falling?

In Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time, the theory of Time, represented by a woman, is that each moment is constructed out of the death of the Universe of the moment that preceded it, and the reconstruction of the Universe in the present. When Lobsang, son of Time, takes over from his mother, he has a period of unstable presence. He turns into a mass of blue dust motes and implodes back into himself, continuously, until he regains control over his constituents.

What are your constituents?

Many, many more than you will be able to recognise the first time you undress, willingly, in the company of a partner or a group of strangers or one stranger.

The primary ones are:

• The monster self you kept hidden from the world in all the years when you thought there was something secretly wrong with your body that no one else had ever had or would understand.
• The social self that was constructed by your immediate environment.
• The monster self that you were not aware existed, which looked so powerful, so indestructible, that you might be inclined to hide her away before she blinded you.

Maybe every process of dressing and undressing is as much one of containment and concealing as it is of revealing. 

You imagine that your constituents look like this. That they are selves you can recognise when you look into the mirror. That they are also wholes, shadow-selves, but they carry the shape of you. 

You would never imagine that your constituents could be a lot tinier than this. 

you never take your organs into account. You are a bladder, a pair of lungs, a kidney, a liver. 

You don’t realise that constituents could be a lot smaller than your imagined selfhood. It is memories, however many thousands of them there are. It is things that happened to you and things you happened to. It is a lot more people than you.

You don’t imagine that constituents could also be movements that you made, from one self into the other, from one memory to the other, from deconstruction to the reforming of the self. 

Constituents: bits, bobs, insides, shells, conversations, alien invasions into your own body, incursions into other people’s territories and bodies, what you did and how you did it, why you did it, whodunnit to you, how they dunnit, what you did after they dunnit. 

Buffo, spinning, constructs his own dismemberment, almost falls apart into his constituents, leaps into the air and falls. 

Alien invasion

When you stand naked in front of a group of clothed people, you are no longer contained within your skin. Your aura expands, and you are present in a way that they are not, and they feel your naked presence with an intensity that comes from being suddenly reduced. The instant creation of an audience. 

How does the audience protect itself from you? Containment. A sudden transformation into absolute professionalism, a slightly shaky hand, a silence. A dramatic display of confidence. I’m not scared, see how close I got. Hostility. Giggles. Sneers. Whispered attacks. Naked curiosity. On rare occasions, a gaze that is a combination of curiosity and pure, unrestrained creativity. Mostly, there is hostility. And this is a polite group. A civilised group. 

How do you protect yourself from the audience? You cannot. Every single one of these responses will go through your body and if you’re lucky they’ll make their way out in an hour. Or in a day. Each of these incursions makes a ripple underneath your skin, and maybe the safest way to deal with it is to allow it to make its movement. This is invasion. 

Compression

compression

/kəmˈprɛʃn/

noun

noun: compression; plural noun: compressions

1 the action of compressing or being compressed.

◦ the reduction in volume (causing an increase in pressure) of the fuel mixture in an internal combustion engine before ignition.

It looks like this:

Imagine a tornado that goes through you. The dust it kicks up is your life. Everything you went through, every memory, every move you made, every picture you took of yourself. Pictures you didn’t take. Seen from the outside. Seen from the inside. A whole life, moved. Everything made visible. To you and tornado-chasers. Picture the mad rage of Buffo, bladdered, the burning fire of laughter that runs through the audience. Now look at you. You are here, within the tornado.

What do you see? There are many ways to proceed. You can follow the movement, and trace yourself, your own path. As far as you like. You can resist the movement, try to pull back. You can stand still and watch. You can close your eyes and go to sleep.

Now imagine a compressed tornado. Each ring is laid out, one next to the other, squeezed in tight, and you can see all the way to the horizon. Your life. Pick a memory. The first time you wore a red dress. Every time you wore a red dress, every dress you wanted, every red you coveted, every dream you had about it, every haunting, every lingering hope, every time you lost. All laid out, in front of you. 

Now pick another memory. The last time you had sex. The first time you had sex. Every single fucking time you had sex. Every time you were abused. Can you watch? 

Can you watch, and can you stand to be watched?

Insides on the outside, turned inside out. Did you ever wonder why the circus looks like heat and dust, combustible air?

Exercises:

1. Stand naked in front of the mirror. What do you see? I like popping pimples. When I popped a pimple, it would grow in my eyes, be magnified, until I couldn’t see my face anymore, just an inflamed red spot, heating up, changing colour. When you stop looking in the mirror, and step out into the world, the pimple is magically shrunk. The world sees your face. You see your pimple.
2. Step out into the world. Clothed, if you will. What do you see? You see people looking at you. Break it down. Do you feel bad? Let me make you feel better. Do you feel good? Let me make you feel bad and make you feel better. Parts of you grow, that you never noticed. Your body expands, your head contracts. Get back in front of the mirror. Somewhere, sometime, you will find your shape. 
3. Look through a pinhole camera into your past. Watch a pimple, growing in size, heading towards you. Or the opposite. A row of inflamed red spots, leading to one red spot of pain. Drop the camera. There is a whole life, a whole body, a whole person left behind.
4. Let it run. Let the ball roll. A whole life. Dust, kisses, burns and starlight. Artist Kristian Al Droubi and I tried to make an installation once. We gathered up his treasure chest of memories. Photographs, letters, postcards, notes, bills. We hung them up on a screen made out of fishing lines. We planned to project moving pictures. On a screen made of bits and pieces, we planned to watch him move. Both things, one on top of the other. Memories as scraps and the person as movement. When we went to make the performance the next day, we found the entire installation had disappeared because of infighting at the performance space. Later, we found the pieces of our installation in the trash. It is a risk, to perform with your self as much as you do with your body. When you allow those bits and pieces to go out into the world, they could very well be trashed. But reforming, this does not take piecing together scraps of paper. When Granny Weatherwax entered the space between two mirrors, she found infinite reflections of herself. Death told her, when you find the right one, you can leave. I already know, she said. This one. She wasn’t looking into a mirror when she said it.
5. Watch the tornado. There is a reason why they are chased.

The tragic death of Buffo the clown

Back at the circus, Buffo tells the story of the clown, which he claims is a real-life incident in the life of every famous clown. He learns about the death of his mother on the morning when he buries his wife, who had died while giving birth to a stillborn son, his only possibility at having a child. On the same day, he goes back on stage, and while he stumbles through his performance, he collects more laughs than he ever did. The sky is full of blood, he cries. Roars. Out of the ring, in a bar, he finally settles into misery, and the barmaid asks, why the long face, and suggests that he go and watch Buffo the clown to cheer him up.

The clown watching the clown. It is the performance of Buffo that transforms his misery into farce, into a horror of incomprehension. He can communicate, but only in colour. His words are spoken in contortion. Central to the art of the clown, the face of the clown, is the exaggeration of emotion. If he pours everything into the performance, all his sorrow, it will be blown up, explode into laughter. 

Later, Buffo is lost forever onstage. His last performance is a hysteria fit. It is cut short by a blast of water that sends him on the final somersault of his career. He is carried offstage, vanished from the face of the earth. While his fellow clowns ran round and round the tiers of seats, kissing babies, distributing bonbons, and laughing, laughing, laughing to hide their broken hearts. 

A foreverstage. Encircled by tiers of seats. A life in public view. A disappearance from the face of the earth, also in public view. A great cloud of laughter mingled with sadness. The clown’s life is lived in colour. The clown’s face is his real face, stretched into a mask. In Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms, the Clown’s Guild keeps a Hall of Faces. Every clownface ever made. No two masks can be alike. It would be like exchanging faces.

Can it stand humiliation? Only if it understands what humiliates. A life in public view. A public in view. What is at the centre, the heart of the storm? The eye of the tornado? 

Would you let yourself stand at the heart of the storm, in the eye of the tornado, at the centre of a circus ring, surrounded by tiered seats? Sadness only if you can find joy. Humiliation only if you can stand to be proud. Abuse only if you can find your way back to pleasure. 

This marvellous machine

Back in smoky old London, Fevvers, trapeze artist with wings, talks about this marvellous machine that is her body. Sprouting feathers, itching, swelling into a sticky pair of wings sometime around puberty, she works her way into flight. It takes a lot more than flapping.

At the moment of taking off from the rooftop, she suffers a moment of vertigo. The edge of being. I feared the proof of my own singularity, she said. 

So I kicked up with my heels and then, as if I were a swimmer, brought the longest and most flexible of my wing-tips together over my head; then, with long, increasingly confident strokes, I parted them and brought them back together.

It is interesting that learning to fly is a complicated series of movements. Free falling is how we have always fantasised about flight. But this complexity of movement is grounding. It teaches us that the air, like the ground, is one more space to navigate, to work our way through. 

Just as Buffo, spinning, is dismembered, Fevvers is temporarily grounded by misery and a broken wing. By being witnessed, she is remembered. When she cannot be seen with clarity, when she is hallucinated into a mythic being, she loses herself. Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am? Then a gust of wind catches her, and she puts herself back on stage, throws a big smile at the audience, and she is, once again, pure performer, and the hidden self takes flight beneath the bottle-blonde she layers over herself. The blood sang in her veins. Their eyes restored her soul.

In the tarot, the Death card never signals death. It is always rebirth, transformation. Maybe it’s because tarot readers don’t like to talk about death. Maybe it’s because that would be too obvious; why make cards with pictures if they’re going to be taken literally? Death of Buffo. Birth of Fevvers. Everything happens in the circus. On the stage. In the eye of the tornado. Heart of the storm. Dismembered, remembered. 

You have to be seen to be known. You can be taken apart, broken down into constituents, in a variety of patterns and structures. You can piece yourself back together, with maybe a push and nudge along the way. How much you can bear to be seen depends on how hard you’re willing to work at taking flight. Like a swimmer, she says. This is a physical effort, a labour of love. Survival training. Being seen and being known. 

Author: Priyadarshini John

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus is probably the definitive circus book. I found it more than twenty years ago in a library and I was entranced by the title and the cover. It is everything you’d want it to be.

Images in this piece are part of a photo performance titled Clown on Strike, in collaboration with performer Kristian Al Droubi.