Six Masks
The story of my time at clown school
Shaman’s Sickness
After a two year stint of unemployment I’d finally gotten a job down in Seattle, but I was fired nine months later and forced to move back in with my mom. We were just down the street from the house that had been reclaimed by the bank after my parents’ startup failed, and whenever we drove by I would complain about how the new owners had cut down the plum trees to make room for more parking.
To pass itself off as a quaint seaside village, the town forced businesses along its main commercial strip to follow strict bylaws that mandated the materials of their signs: even international chains like Subway and Scotiabank spelled out their names in driftwood.
After a week of becoming familiar with the ceiling of my room, my friend from high school invited me out to karaoke with his older brother Felix, who I’d always had a crush on.
They pulled up to my house in a shitty Toyota Tercel. I slid into the back next to a 12-pack of Lucky brand beer and jammed my knees into the seat in front of me.
“Would you like some banana bread?”
Felix was sporting a scruffy moustache, a wry grin, and what appeared to be a full-on devil costume complete with horns, a red cape, and pitchfork. I accepted his offering, and asked him what he’d been up to.
“I’ve been living on Cortes Island in a house full of witches, but I’m moving to Vancouver to help teach a clown course”
We arrived at the dive bar and took a table near the back. I was told we’d probably only get to sing once, so we had to make it count. I wrote down “One Headlight” by the Wallflowers.
“Clown school?”
“Yep”
He took a swig from his beer.
“You sculpt a series of six masks out of clay, but the masks are all you, like if you dumped a box of legos out onto the floor to take a look at all the pieces. There’s a two year waitlist to get in, but sometimes people drop out...”
A voice came over the loudspeaker. “Is there a “Drew” out there? Drew please come to the stage”
Felix smirked. “You better get up there”
Initiation
Hello Drew,
Well, quite surprisingly, someone has just backed out of doing the course. So, should you wish to jump aboard, there is a space for you to do so.
Let me know what you think. :o)
Best, David
I read the Wikipedia page and watched every Youtube video I could find on the internet.
The tradition of Canadian Clowning was started by Richard Pochinko, and aims to be a seamless combination of American style gag clown, European character clown, appropriated Native American culture, and 1970’s woo. The Pochinko “Mask Method” was apparently revealed to him in a spiritual vision of an ancient shaman.
But my soon to be clown teacher, David MacMurray Smith, was a bit of a maverick: cutting against the mainline tradition and playing by his own rules. He took a postmodern perspective on the spiritualism aspects and rejected the red clown nose as a limiting frame. He developed a series of body-based meditation techniques called “Biokinetic Release” built off of concepts from Wilhelm Reich, and incorporated the practice of rivering from the work of Jerzy Grotowski (who is the theater director that they’re talking about in My Dinner With Andre).
The news that I got in came two days before the start of the course. Felix had vaguely intimated that I would be able to crash at his house for a few days, but he wasn’t answering any of my increasingly desperate messages as I travelled to the city by ferry. He was, I found out through the grapevine, at a music festival for the weekend. I managed to at least find out his address.
When I arrived I found an old house covered in rainbow murals, plants, and a series of small sculptures. But I was misinformed: Felix was actually moving in next door, the second of the two condemned buildings that were being converted into art projects. Nobody had finished moving into the second one yet so it was still just a shitty old building.
One of Felix’s new roommates let me in without asking too many questions. Apparently everyone living here was a graduate of David’s clown course.
The house didn’t have any furniture or working wifi. I tethered to my phone’s internet and burned through my data for the month in a furious half hour of frantically messaging everyone I knew trying to find a place to crash for the next three months. I slept in Felix’s bed.
The next morning I arrived at the #55 Elks lodge a half hour before class started. The building was run down. It reminded me of the church basement where I used to go to catechism: drinking watered down grape juice and memorizing prayers in exchange for oversized chocolate bars.
David looked nothing like his somewhat sober voice on the phone had led me to believe. He had buck teeth, a pointy curled moustache, and long braids cascading down his shoulders. He was barefoot, and wore rainbow suspenders over a mickey mouse shirt. He shook my hand and handed me a thick booklet of various incomprehensible clowning concepts with a wink.
What the fuck am I doing here?
Felix and the other teaching assistant, Mira, showed up right at the last minute from the festival, bleary eyed from a lack of sleep. We gathered in a circle and David passed out Groucho Marx glasses for everyone to wear while we introduced ourselves.
Sarah: Just passed the bar, didn’t want to practice law
Ezra: Therapist focused on psychedelics and addiction
Callum: Product Manager by day, unicyclist, juggler, and hat-maker by night
Hannah: Dancer, DJ, “cool girl”
Kai: Nonbinary Drag performer
Wren: Created “kinetic body sculptures” for photoshoots and runway shows
Carol: Some sort of mental health coordinator in her 60’s
Caleb: A nomadic documentary filmmaker
Everyone except for me and the old woman was incredibly athletic and flexible. The exercises pushed us to bend, fall to the floor, writhe, crawl. Up again, down again. I was determined not to fall behind. As we neared the end of the class I was exhausted and sweaty, and my knees were bruised.
“Drew, since you have so bravely travelled here on such short notice to take this course, I wonder if you would be brave enough to join me for a demonstration?”
He waved me over. I laid on my back at the center of the room. The rest of the class crept in close.
“Good. Now I want you to just breathe normally. Notice the in and out pendulum that your breath makes. In. Out. In. Out.”
I don’t remember exactly what he did. He must have whispered something, or tapped on my solar plexus in some particular way that interrupted my rhythm. I started breathing chaotically, keenly aware of the eyes all around me watching my heaving stomach and the bottom of my belly poking out of my shirt.
“After an animal has a near death experience, you can see them shaking violently. In the modern world we don’t move nearly as much as we need to release this trapped energy. An infant comes into the world knowing exactly what to do.”
I started laughing.
“See, you’re doing it already.”
Descent
There was no furniture in the house. After a few days of awkwardly leaning against walls and sleeping on the hard ground, I took to spending my time in the McDonalds down the road, nursing on a small diet coke next to a Ronald McDonald statue and using their wifi to reassure my mom that everything was going great. My body was aching.
I finally found a place to stay just before Felix’s new roommates moved in. The daughter of a famous Canadian painter and poet had seen my Craigslist plea and took pity. She was willing to rent out a small room in her basement suite for $550 + yard work.
The ceiling was low. At first I thought this was charming, like a little hobbit house, but then my neck began to hurt. The bed felt somehow stiffer than the floor had been, and I found I couldn’t sleep for more than four hours without needing a hot shower to calm my back pain.
But a ten minute walk away, through a large cemetery, there was clown school.
“Today we’re going to think about patterns. As you follow your impulses, focus on any repetitions or loops and consider bending or extending them to explore new territory. But once you break out, you’ll probably find that you’ve just entered into a larger pattern”
Everybody had a notebook except for me and was diligently writing down everything he was saying. Why didn’t I have a notebook?
“You might move from happiness to sadness in a swing. Instead of stopping at one side, see if you can push through into a wheel. Wheels can take you places.”
I imagined what they must be writing. push... through... wheel…
“If you’re not moving there’s still movement, even if you don’t notice it right away. Unless you’re dead. Remember, nothing never happens.”
nothing... never... happens…
I was surprised by the sheer physical effort that was involved in trimming my landlady’s hedges. Specks of green flew into my eyes and mouth, and my shoulders burned raising the electric trimmer above my head. The work I was used to involved emotional humiliation: forcing myself to care about things. Nothing so real and present as physical exhaustion.
When I was making six figures I would eat out for every single meal. Now I bought cans of Chef Boyardee, packs of ramen, and $1 frozen burritos. I found a thread on Reddit about foods that you’d only be familiar with if you grew up poor and the concept of ketchup sandwiches came up, so I bought some white bread and a bottle of ketchup. Ketchup sandwiches are actually quite good, they basically taste like a BLT. They’re just waiting for a restaurateur to elevate them with ciabatta bread and homemade artisanal catsup.
“Alright everybody, wash your hands”
We closed our eyes and were led one by one to be seated in front of an unknown partner. We were told to place our hands on the other person’s face and try to picture what they looked like. The person I was with smelled like a woman, and lemon-scented dish soap. She ran her warm hands along my cheeks as I felt along the ridges of her eyebrows. I thought that it was Hannah but it turned out to be Sarah, the lawyer.
She told me she was glad that we were paired together, she wasn’t sure if she’d have been able to do the exercise with anyone else. She knew it was me immediately because I was the only person in the class with a beard.
We were asked to do the same exercise again with a lump of clay: feeling it, trying to discover a face that was already there. We donned our blindfolds and the teachers went around the room whispering a word to meditate on as we worked.
North
I was vibrating with the strain of holding myself up as I knelt next to the clay, huffing and puffing. After a few minutes of this they tapped me on the shoulder and led me to a table, where they sat me in a chair next to the old woman.
When I opened my eyes the clay face looked almost nothing like I had pictured. In fact it almost looked like nothing at all. Eyebrows and a nose, but the rest was smooth.
I looked around the room and saw fully fleshed out faces with looks of surprise, joy, and disdain: horns, tusks, and tongues jutting out. I began to wonder if I’d done something wrong.
I wasn’t the only one: Sarah was nearly in tears over the shredded and mangled clay in front of her. “Can I try again?”
Dismemberment
David only charged around $1100 CAD for 186 hours of instruction time. This was because, due to regulations targeting small language schools that defrauded immigrants, if he charged any more he risked having to submit to regulatory oversight by the Canadian government.
A five minute walk away from the house I was staying at there was a balloon store with a help wanted sign in the window, but I scoffed at this: too on the nose. Instead I contacted my old teachers from design school, the former creative directors of Adbusters magazine, and worked for them editing videos and putting together a multimedia website for a Philadelphia cabaret troupe. Once I understood the scope of what I’d agreed to do, I realized that I was working for less than minimum wage.
Every day I walked past that stupid balloon store with its fucking sign, taunting me.
Kai, the nonbinary drag performer, invited me over to their house for a DIY cabaret. All of their friends wore glitter and high heels, performed bad karaoke, and did odd interpretive dances. Traditional RuPaul style drag was considered cringe and cisnormative: these were all gender politicians in a wet lab, discovering virulent new pronouns to unleash upon the unsuspecting masses. All proceeds from the cabaret were to be donated to the indigenous people of Hawaii or something. I asked to share one of my songs: my fingers trembled as I plunked out the chords, eyes fixed away from the audience.
I applied paper mache. I painted each mask in the series by carefully “embodying” each color in the paint set, feeling where those colors resonated most on the mask. I held North in my hands: its rainbow-brite 100 mile stare passing through me.
I did everything I was supposed to do. I felt the shape of its eyebrow and nose, the lines streaming down where its mouth should be, the white streaks pouring from its eyes. I put the mask on my face and wandered the room, trying to catch glimpses of the character underneath the paper. I saw the green over the eyebrow and mapped the greenness onto my own eyebrow. I was terrified I was doing something wrong, but Felix told me I was doing fine.
“You are trying to make things make too much sense. Just feel it.”
I laid myself over a few chairs with my head hanging off the edge and asked it to tell me its story.
i was confused. had seen too much.
wandering the world forever.
it... he... was an alchemist. crossed a witch who gave him what he wanted.
he could not die. watched them all go one by one.
no more space for memories.
I had a daughter. danced with her. watched her die. laid her to rest.
he wanders the world alone.
I led him over to the pile of costumes and let him choose an outfit: he chose a winter coat and a hat to keep himself warm.
After class I walked home through the graveyard, and I noticed that he seemed to like certain songs. I wondered how long he’d been with me, as I wandered the streets of New York, or Seattle, in a daze.
My mind was alight with possibilities, and when I slept on my rock-hard bed I dreamt strange dreams of distant travels.
Journey to the Upper World
Mira told me that I’d lucked into finding a teacher as nice as David. Apparently the training for clowning is known for being quite harsh. Philippe Gaulier was the world’s most prominent teacher who had trained many of Europe’s most famous performers including Emma Thompson, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Helena Bonham Carter, but was known for completely breaking people down. I once looked into studying with him but I found out that he was in his 80s and his courses were mostly taught by assistants. If I’m going to be beaten with a stick to a bloody pulp, it’s at least going to be done by someone famous.
Other than David, Mira had studied with a teacher in Montreal that she described as “a witch”. The only thing she got out of it was that it prepared her to clown in warzones.
I repeated the mask making process five more times, until I had a complete set.
South murdered his brother in a frozen lake and was turned into an all knowing wraith. I had a pretty contentious relationship with my older brother growing up, and would often resort to cutting the power to his room when he would keep me awake blasting music at night.
East was a huffy magical golem, bitter that he would never be a real person. It reminded me of when I used to sing in a community choir with Felix and I would hide in the janitor’s closet during breaks to cry.
West was a world famous performer who could destroy anyone with words.
Below Below was the daughter of the devil, who had to put on a good face.
Above Above was... a bird?
The successful travelling clown troupe James and Jamsey, who were former students of David’s, held their annual meeting before class. In exchange for free pizza we acted as “community representatives” while they attended to the sober details of their projected revenue and outstanding debts in their meeting minutes. It hadn’t occurred to me that people actually make a living doing this stuff.
Ezra, the therapist, told the class he had had to schedule time away from working. “My mind is like an open wound.” I nodded along in sage agreement.
In our daily floor exercises I’d crack open my eyes to peer at the mass of bodies wriggling around. I would laugh, and cry. and cry. and cry. and cry and cry. We’d move into our river exercises, a state of dreamlike play, and I’d form myself into a tight bundle of pity and refuse to interact as everyone else danced and sang, formed gangs, turned into monsters, flew through the sky, and sacrificed each other to the devil.
Carol, the old woman, quietly dropped out of the class.
We’d take turns performing “turns” onstage—peeling back the self-serious masks just enough to insert a glimmer of play. I learned to laugh at all of these dark corners of myself and to share them with the room.
We were not supposed to look at ourselves in the mirror as we worked, but I did anyway. I spent long hours in front of the mirror playing through each of my masks. The person staring back at me was beginning to look like a stranger. While I was trimming my beard, I suddenly decided to get rid of it. Felix had a moustache. David had a moustache. Richard Pochinko—the man who had invented the mask method and died of AIDS back in the 80s—had a moustache too. I had worn a beard since I could grow one at 14 years old to hide my face. I decided to mow it down.
At first I was ecstatic. I looked at the man in the mirror with the simple kindness you might afford a stranger. Then I noticed that I’d fucked up one side of my moustache, and I knew it wasn’t going to grow back in time for the final performance. I cried that I didn’t look hot like all the other clown boys.
In class I’d finally begun to take notes. Every time I had a thought or heard something interesting I dove for my notebook.
“What we’re doing here is a process about process”
“Character is the soil in which seeds grow and crack the cement of our institutions.”
“Loosen your anal sphincter.”
Even after David poked fun at me directly (”are you writing me a poem?”) and I made a point to put it on the other side of the room, it never left my mind.
In the river I dragged myself across the room on the floor towards it, sobbing, while Wren pantomimed setting me on fire, peeing on me, and shitting in my path. Caleb started screaming “there are no rules” and accidentally smashed Kai in the face with a hat. I brought my notebook to the center of the room and did the clock stretching sequence from the Big Comfy Couch.
Death and Resurrection Show
After class was over, Felix and Mira invited me to go swimming at the rec center. As we floated in the hot tub, Felix ranked who from the class he would most want to see naked. David of course was at the top of the list. I noticed that I was nowhere to be found.
The next day I went downtown to meet with a friend and attempted to buy a 50 cent pack of stickers for my nephew, but my card was declined. I checked and I only had 5 cents left in my account. We went to an upscale furniture store and discussed what we were going to buy, but none of it seemed to meet our sky-high standards.
On the morning of our final Clown birth debut performance, we sat in a circle and shared our thoughts.
Kai: “There are so many bad things in the world, it’s so nice to get the chance to see the energy behind those things, and allow them to move you”
Sarah: “I’m starting to question the rules that I’ve made for myself. This voice I assumed was the God that I believed in as a child has turned out to be the mask of a mean nun, scolding me”
Caleb: “This is a really beautiful exercise, to see all of these people being forced to be so true and in the moment because they can’t plan ahead due to sheer confusion. It takes bravery to accept these masks the way they are without knowing what they mean.”
David sighed and looked down. “You know, anything that you may have learned here cannot be attributed to this course. Directly. I mean, maybe it helped you along a little bit... but these masks are, in a way, just a physical metaphor for things that are happening every day. The purpose of learning about them is to let go of them. It’s just life.”
After we finished warming up, we set up the chairs and laid out the snacks, juice boxes, and cake. Our close friends, family, and other clowns arrived one by one as we prepared ourselves for our debut.
Rest and Resonation
One of my friends from Portland had driven up for the performance, and she lent me the money for the trip home. I arrived back at my mom’s house and fell asleep. I woke up at 1:30 AM and began exploring our closets, looking for costume ideas.
I found a sparkly cocktail dress that fit me extremely tightly.
I found the cowboy costume that I wore one Halloween: the authentic cowboy hat, boots, and Peruvian alpaca wool poncho I’d bought in a manic spending spree no longer seemed contaminated with bad memories.
I found an insane ski jacket covered in neon prints and patterns. We always used to make fun of it growing up, but now it seemed perfect.
In the kitchen my mom was awake in her house coat. She gave me a hug and we spoke in hushed tones. She told me the story of her jacket: how she saw it in the back of a ski magazine, and my dad spent $800 in 1980’s money that he didn’t really have to buy it for her. When she wore it she never felt more proud, even long after it became deeply uncool.
She said I could borrow it whenever I wanted.
In the coming months I would be forced to deal with the fact that life, in all its imperfections, goes on and on and on. My mom convinced me to get my masks framed by my uncle, assuming he would give me a good deal, but he ended up charging me more than what I paid for clown school itself.
But in that one shining moment, lying in my bed and looking at the familiar features of the ceiling once again, I knew that things were never going to be quite the same. I wasn’t changed, or fixed, but I could finally see myself with kindness.
i liked this. thanks.