Dear Ceaseless Reader, I will write this review in a strange way. It will be both a review of the show, as well as a clown history review. You see, my own knowledge and research begins to become inseparable from the knowledge presented at the show. Now, I invite you to travel along with me.
The Journey
The journey to the Kuriosum began, as all proper pilgrimages must, in confusion. I had received word that Joanna Bassi — a name spoken with the reverence one reserves for saints and/or true scoundrels — would be presenting a history of her and her family’s art under the title Die Unschuld des Humors or The Innocence of Humor, and so I set forth, balanced atop my bicycle through frigid streets that chilled the bones of my unshoed hands. It was my first approach to this particular venue: a collection of buildings, vehicles, contraptions and gardens dropped into a lot as if an entire circus ground had simply never left, accumulating attachments over the decades. These are Berlin’s cultural hearts: these seemingly temporary shacks growing organically, defiantly. Spaces of true creativity and art which have made the city the wonder that it is. (Spaces our brave government hopes to eradicate as quickly as possible for the sake of progress and productivity. Godspeed.)
The air was festive, winter coats standing around fire barrels, holding steaming mugs of blood-red elixirs. Merchants hawking their wares. Art, handmade clothes, jewels. I asked a man selling keychains where to find the stage. He’d never heard of one, but directed me to a Glühwein vendor who told me I should go through the garden. I nodded as if that made perfect sense, eventually finding a path between some bushes. It wound through industrial wreckage fashioned into furniture and overgrown with plants, and led to the theatre hidden behind the greenery. Finally inside, and thoroughly stamped by the ticketmaster, I turned around to find Joanna Bassi herself! Dressed in gold and white layers, poofy sleeves, a feathered cone hat, she fixed me with a look reserved for the perpetually late. I tried to appear unabashed as I hustled across the entire auditorium, the eyes of the audience upon me, just in time for the performance to begin.
The Performance
A violin sat upright on a chair, and to its right, Joanna spoke to us directly, as if we were all friends meeting for tea. She transports us back to the 18th century: to the origins of Circus and Clown. Of course, fools and tricksters stretch back to antiquity, likely before homo sapiens made the mistake of getting involved in agriculture. Circus itself started as a way to show off horse-riding skills. Clowns, acrobats, jugglers, and others were brought in to add variety the equestrian shows. The Circus ring itself allowed for the audience to see the riders, and also permitted riders to do amazing tricks, like standing on a galloping horse, due to the centrifugal forces generated by the circular path. Being a strongly visual affair, the circus could cross language barriers, and so many began international tours. It here that clowns found their home.
Clowns became famous the way an actor or a singer is famous today. Names like Charlie Rivel (famous in Berlin), Grock (who they called the king of clowns), and Walter Galetti commanded serious respect. While European circus resisted the industrialization and “respectable family entertainment” branding of the PT Barnum circus in the United States, they lagged behind some of the state supported artistry of the Soviet Union, and began to ossify. Circus, she explained, stopped evolving. It became hereditary repetition: you did what your parents did, and theirs before them. The acts became focused around preservation. The whole enterprise a mausoleum of itself, rolling from town to town. Meanwhile, society moved on, and the image of clown became fixed and twisted by businessmen who put the image to productive use selling hamburgers. Ronald McDonald. Daytime children’s programming. A figure that once satirized power became a figure that served it. And with this shift came suspicion. The clown, defanged and commercialized, grew uncanny. People began to fear what they had once celebrated.
The clowns, whose art had always been responsive, improvisational, and on the level of the common people, could not remain in a form that refused to change. And so many left their home of circus.
This was the era, my dear readers, that drew me across the Atlantic. The street clowns. The buskers who performed in piazzas and markets, who built crowds from nothing. Joanna saw it rise, and has seen it fade. The reasons deserve their own investigation, which we will soon publish.
Grock’s Violin
After many stories, she lifted a violin — Grock’s very own violin, she told us, whose story we hope to publish. She played it for us as images of 19th century clowns appeared via projector.
For years, Joanna had researched her family history, however, the photographs she found frustrated her. The clowns in them looked so stiff. Rigid backs, frozen faces. It was impossible to get a sense of personality. But of course, in those days, you had to hold a pose perfectly still for an eternity while the old cameras captured the image. One could get the impression that people were simply stiff back then.
So she kept searching. Endless calls. Pestering French authorities. Until finally she received word from a film digitizer in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. He led her down into the dungeons of that building, sat her before a screen, and showed her some of the oldest moving pictures in existence. They gave her the copies which she put on for us to see. Filmed outside in Lyon, bouncing balls on their heads and playing in the most skillful yet silly way. These ghosts of the 19th century, performing in front of strange new devices which captured them without requiring stiff postures. And one of them was her great-grandfather. After the films, she brought us to the present. Much of her career behind her, she presents herself as a transmitter of what came before. History is so easily lost with the passing of time and generations. It haunts her, she told us — the question of how long she will still be able to perform, “They say the first thing to go as you age is your balance.”
She finished the show by balancing Grock’s violin upon her forehead, a quote projected behind her which I furiously scribbled down:
“Such as angels, they are neither men nor women, though probably the most human of us all… Clowns are from beyond, beyond mistakes, truths, lies… Clowns play everywhere, in Circus, in Theatres, in the Streets, but also in Hospitals and war zones… we may discover a clown within ourselves! How wonderful! But beware of its coming out, for a clown gets lost where there no longer is humanity.”
~Your Relentlessly Incorrigible Correspondent, B. C. E. Neiderlage