In heavy times, can being a clown help?

It was right about when I was asked to imagine a den of snakes in my torso that I started to doubt clowning was for me. 

I looked around the room, the Denfinity Dance Studio tucked behind a Jefferson Westside bungalow, to observe my clown compatriots jump into their serpentine tasks. They wriggled. They writhed. I tried to conjure pythons — I would even settle for a measly lump of corn snakes — and occasionally let my torso collapse in a way that felt vaguely pile-of-snake-like. 

No dice, and no snakes. Just a person not sure how to exist. 

To clarify, this was not red-nose-and-suspenders clowning. This was a movement-based practice where we mirrored each other, designed on-the-fly marches and responded — without words, only the flop and flail of our bodies — to nonsensical prompts like “Tell us the name of your favorite jellyfish” or “How would you move if your toes were jelly?”

I met the workshop’s instructor, Nicole Medema, at an artist party held by the Arts and Business Alliance of Eugene. When she called me the next day, she pitched that I participate in the workshop and write about it firsthand. I have no stage or performing experience, but who am I to turn down an offer to clown?

I expected a silly time. I didn’t expect an emotional journey, a group I felt free to be vulnerable with and a way to process big, unwieldy feelings in a nation and city in turmoil. 

‘The stakes have never been higher’

The intention of the class, Medema said, was to unpack the rigidity we carry in our day-to-day self-presentation. In an interview, she said that’s the entire reason for the existence of clowns — to question the rules of the game we all play as social animals.

“So much is self-inflicted restraint, versus what’s actually necessary,” she said. “I think people find it cathartic to express in ways that they don’t normally get to. It’s like scrubbing all the plaque off of the heart.”

My heart could use some scrubbing. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been worried about doing things “right.” I would stay up late doing homework, even in elementary school, which grew into a penchant for all-nighters. I chased the feeling of “right”: scholarship hunting, internships and later job applications, piles of early career programs, the validating rush of application and acceptance. 

All of this is, of course, absolutely antithetical to being a clown.

My workshop peers included performers, but also many professionals in buttoned-up fields. While Lauren Rivera, 36, is no stranger to performance (she is a flamenco dancer and aspiring stand-up comedian), she spends her days working from home in regulatory compliance for chemical engineering. 

Accuracy is sacrosanct in her daily job. Getting more comfortable messing up in front of others meant a total mindset change, she said. 

“Working in a technical field, I always felt like perfection was the true meaning of success. I wouldn’t learn from my mistakes. I would just try to forget it, or just shame myself and say, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ But this attitude shift really helped me realize, if I’m a lot more receptive to mistakes and laugh at myself, I learn better.”

Medema joked multiple times throughout the workshop before we started an exercise: “The stakes have never been higher.”

In a very real way, she was not joking.

She dispensed imaginary gold stars generously and in class voiced those internal questions that bubble up in achievement-hungry hearts: What if I didn’t do it right? What if people don’t like it? Why didn’t I do it like they did it?

Medema pointed out that they’re all the same question, a self-evidently ridiculous one in a clown workshop: “What if they don’t love me?”

First of all, ouch. Second of all, as I found out on the workshop’s final day, it was extremely accurate. We were divided into small groups and asked to improvise a song on a supplied theme, with a collective chorus and individual verses, all in 10 minutes. 

My mind started buzzing: My team’s theme was “I love it,” and our 10-minute preparation ended up being a loosely organized chat. Agitation curdled in my throat, and my lips went tight. I felt ridiculous for caring about doing something so fun “right,” and sad when I realized it’s a feeling I’ve had all my life.

My teammates told me not to worry. One said that her motto for performance was that if even one person connected with what we did, it was a success. We ended up with a disjointed, clapping holler call-and-response. I’m a ham at heart, unafraid to go big, and I hooted and sang what came to mind: 

Every day I wake up and I’m terrified, but that’s what I love about being alive / I get myself up and I get out the door, because every day I just want more / and I love it.

Clowning amid crisis 

It has been a heavy time to turn to clowning, one that grew exponentially heavier across the three consecutive Sunday mornings we gathered.

Our first session was weeks after Renee Good was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. The second was the morning after Alex Pretti was shot and killed in the same city, this time by Customs and Border Protection officers. The third came at the end of a week where a corner of downtown Eugene was filled with pepperballs and chemical irritants, as federal officers pushed protesters outraged by increased immigration enforcement off federal property. 

The day after Pretti was killed, like we did in each class, we went around the circle and shared how we were doing. I admitted that I had spent the prior day doomscrolling in bed, watching each new angle of the video that appeared, and that it felt strange to get ready for something as silly as a clown workshop.

For Molly Eno, an attorney who was in the workshop, the heaviness of the world outside wasn’t something to escape via clown; it was the whole reason she signed up.

Her work at the firm Reynolds & Steindorf focuses on defending activists and protesters, but she wanted to do more with performance after seeing protesters in Portland wearing inflatable costumes of frogs, unicorns and raccoons. 

“A clown in handcuffs is hilarious,” she said. “It makes cops look ridiculous. Not even cops — it makes the people-power structures look really ridiculous, because it kind of bears the truth of, ‘This is what you’re feeling threatened from?’”

The second class was centered on emotions. In one exercise, we cycled through four different emotions — sorrow, anger, fear and joy — and embodied each of them at escalating levels from one to 10. Sorrow was hard to access. But anger came easily, in bellowing screams as we roared.

It was good to have a space to process each of those feelings. But clowning isn’t therapy, as private practice mental health therapist and my fellow workshop student Kellie Kreitzberg reminded me in an interview. She said she realized in the third class that it wasn’t about being self-absorbed and spilling unruly emotion onto the stage; it was seeing and being seen in relationship to the audience.

“Clowning is a beautiful container,” she said. “It’s not necessarily taking the mask completely off and being raw. It’s more, ‘I’m showing up, and here’s myself, and what gift can I give the audience?’”

That gift, as Medema told me in our interview, is a sacred and profane one that has lasted for centuries: to poke holes and challenge the people and behaviors we take for granted as fact. 

Everything is absurd, she reminded us at the end of the final workshop. It’s also important and real, but it’s all a game. Some games have been going for hundreds and thousands of years, and the rules seem powerful and entrenched. But we can start new ones.

One activity we did each week was “I Know Nothing.” Medema scattered objects around the room — a baby doll, a plastic bucket, a rubber band, a grocery bag, a plastic whale — and tasked us with investigating them as if we had no idea what they were.

We pawed and sniffed at plastic, batted at boxes, imagined how we would approach something we saw every day as if we had just been plopped into a brand new world. 

At the end of each, Medema would ask us what we knew about the items. We each responded in tandem: “I know nothing.” 

Now, I know that I know nothing. But it’s more about the learning, anyway. 

Medema’s clown workshop will begin for a four-week run starting on March 8. The course costs $180 to $220 on a sliding scale, and runs March 8, 15, 22 and 29 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

All illustrations by Annie Aguiar.