Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Inner Clowning Around Is Hard Work

By Carol Mell, 4-07-07

	Colleen Creegan, who lives in Albuquerque, teaches clowning and acting (here in Taos). The inner clown, she says, is not created but discovered.

“And where are the clowns? Send in the clowns.”
--Stephen Sondheim

This is not about the pet food recall. It just happens that once when checking out some actors preparing in Taos for a performance of “American Buffalo,” I found the three men rehearsing this intense play amongst cellophaned mountains of dog food in the back of a pet supply shop.

For the second time investigating theater types recently, I find them seeking their inner clowns against a corner backdrop of dog and cat food. This time in veterinarian Glenn Karlin’s office. Karlin himself is one of those common Taos hybrids, a veterinarian who is also a first-rate operatic singer. His wife and children are among the seekers I am seeking, all looking for our inner clowns among the Science Diet products.

“Send in the clowns. Don’t bother they’re here.”

A clown class, I figure, will be light and frothy, laughing all the way, but what I find is a serious group of singers, actors, students, lawyers and retired folks. What I see is a young man, a high school student named Eliot Mickelson doing a goofy limp in his droopy felt hat and red plastic nose, being grilled by the teacher, Colleen Creegan. Who would have thought clowning around could be so tough, like your first day in boot camp? Creegan plays the drill sergeant.

“You’re a liar,” Creegan shouts.

“Am not,” Mickelson counters.

“Are you going to cry?” she asks.

“No,” he shouts back. “No, No.”

“You say you are a musician but I don’t believe you,” she says. “Show me.”

Finally, he kneels and sings Beethoven’s “Fur Elise,” running his fingers over an imaginary piano. Then, his lesson finished, he turns his back on his fellow clowns and removes his Rudolph red nose. When he turns round again he uses his normal voice.

“Music for me,” he says, “is what thrives in the mind. It was hard to portray music outwardly.”

“Remember,” Creegan tells him, “the clown’s story is not your story.”

“I’m still trying to find my clown,” he admits. “You broke me down. You wouldn’t let me be happy.”

What a surreal scene; a sad clown who wants to be happy, a stern clown teacher, a circle of serious people in ridiculous clothes (I like the guy in the pink feather boa and red bikini) in front of the kibble shelves surrounded by a bunch of dogs and one kitten furiously bawling in their cages.

The next student up says, “I’m tired.”

Creegan says, “Show me don’t tell me.”

On his turn up, the guy in the red skivvies, Bjorn Halvorsen, asks, “Where is my back thing?”

Creegan says, “If you are going to talk, take off your nose.”

She doesn’t give anybody a break. Talking in your regular voice with your red nose on is a clear violation of the strict clowning code. When your nose is on you are “in clown.”

Halvorson switches over to his “tracheotomy-tube voice,” a voice he later tells me he modeled after his one-time New York landlord.

“Don’t let the actor take over,” Creegan warns. “Let your clown be in charge.”

Afterward I ask Creegan, a professional actor, about her teaching method.

“The first step in helping students find their inner clown is to find the physicality,” she said. The first step is to find the natural exaggerated walk. The second step is to find the clown’s story and back-story. No analyzation, only impulses. You don’t think about it, it emerges.

“If you have one minute to be funny, that comes out of truth and desperation. Clowns are desperate to be liked. As a teacher I’m looking for their defenses, to break them out of their tricks, to put them in physically impossible situations. I have to find my way into the crack. I find their weakness and push and push until the truth comes out. It’s not about getting the answer right. A breakthrough allows an actor to see how far he can go. Then you will react and have the true moment. A breakthrough normally involves crying and wanting to kill the teacher.”

She’s lucky only rubber guns are allowed in class.

Creegan says clowns show us extreme versions of ourselves.

“There are clowns for every situation,” Creegan says. “They come out of necessity to express things we couldn’t express in our daily life. If we are showing 1 to 2 percent of our emotions, a clown is showing 8 to 10 percent. If we are frustrated by a situation, say driving in traffic, they are absolutely explosive about it. Clown is so big and absurd. It’s cathartic for us because the emotion is so extreme.”

Her students are enthusiastic. Attorney Gary Feuerman discovers his inner clown is a transvestite. “The six inch go-go boots transformed me,” he said.

Creegan and her teaching partner plan to teach an acting and clowning intensive next summer. Fun, I think, until I remember that my inner dog food room contains an inner scaredy cat. Nose or no, no way that cat gets out. She’d only reproduce.

“And where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns ...
Well, maybe next year.”

Actor, clown and teacher Colleen Creegan can be reached at 505-779-3245.

You know you are danged if you do clown and danged if you don’t clown so you might just as well clown around.

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