I always think it’s a bit suspicious when the mainstream media are chasing down clowns for interviews. Makes me wonder what terrible atrocities must be happening that require the services of us expert distractors. It’s a major part of circus clowning, to have something up your sleeve to help deal with the unexpected. When the trapeze artiste falls from the sky, they send in the clowns to cover up the real chaos behind the scenes.

This is my second Guardian interview in two months, which clearly indicates the world is going to shit! Come the apocalypse all that will be left will be clowns and cockroaches. 

Hmmm, this is quite a dark way to start a blog. But this is exactly how I started my interview in a cafe with Guardian science corespondent, Linda Geddes. 

“Ooooh that’s good,” she said with a wry smile on her face, “Can you say that again and I’ll record you?!” 

And so began our interview.

Linda had come across the term,“lemonading” - the ability to turn lemons into lemonade, recently coined by scientists over in the States who discovered from a study conducted during the pandemic, “…people with high levels of playfulness may be better equipped to cope with the dud cards life throws at them.” Linda spent a week hanging out with playful people to test this theory out for herself.

Here is the article: Wallowing in a soup of despair? Try ‘lemonading’ to buck the gloom

The interview

I enjoyed chatting with Linda, she's a good listener, she asks great questions and she brings herself into the chat. It was fun teaching her a few ways to access the play state (Bafflement - bringing your attention to the back of your head, The Note of Infinity  - bringing your attention to the space above your head and The Secret Weapon - focussing on one wonderful feature of your body, but trying to keep it a secret). She gave them a good go, bringing us both to fits of giggles and eliciting quizzical looks from the other diners in the cafe.

I am really glad that they included links to some of my Clown Workout youtube videos. It’s funny that they still have a life beyond the pandemic - when they were hastily and roughly created as a way to alleviate the suffering of clowns in isolation!

Reflecting back on that bizarre time, I recalled the riverside walk I took with fellow clown teacher, Robyn Hambrook, just before the first lockdown happened. Both of us were camera-shy technophobes, but we knew, as fit and healthy, childless, playful people with time on our hands, we had a duty to do something to help others! By the end of that walk we’d dared each other to make a short video workshop and so began our adventures as The Online Clown Academy. 

Robyn and I playfully spent our pandemic encouraging people to move, breathe, express with their voices and bodies, connect with each other and interact with their all too familiar objects with curiosity and imagination. Responding to demand, we progressed from Youtube videos to Facebook Lives to Zoom Clown workshops, to running two international online Clown conferences (Clowns in Crisis and Clowning Out of Chaos), all in the space of a year and a bit! 

It was good to think back to those prolifically creative times. I’m proud of the work we did. It was a life-line for us and a safe haven for many clowns and clown enthusiasts around the world. 

Reflections

I like the article. I think it’s well written, well referenced and funny. I love that I get to share column inches with my playful peers, comedian Louise Leigh and the outdoor play crew down at Golden Hill Community Gardens (where Linda got to make her new stick friend). How lovely to feel part of an extended community of play enthusiasts here in Bristol!

For the record, I don’t think that play is THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING and neither do the lemonading researchers, by the way. But I do think play has helped me enormously throughout my life in many ways. Play is and always will be at the heart of all my work. It's my medicine, my inspiration, my fascination and my way of dealing with the confusions and pains of life. Play opens up space around any notion of a fixed reality, offering a broader perspective, unveiling infinite options and producing countless solutions. 

It’s funny that both of these Guardian articles have focussed on my clown work - as I kind of stopped offering clown workshops when the world opened up again, for various reasons (mostly grief and burnout, but also a change in direction). 

I still offer the occasional clown workshop, if commissioned, I offer one-to-one support to clowns, clown doctors and clown teachers and am involved with creating gathering spaces for clowns. But I am now mostly focussing my workshops on exploring embodied, creative, playful approaches to parts work, combining Fooling (solo impro where the performer embodies the voices in their head), Internal Family Systems (IFS), dramatherapy and mindfulness (more about that here) and creative facilitation training.

However, the mainstream media appears to be intent on trying to drag my clown out of retirement! After the first article, I was approached by a spattering of radio stations and magazines, but my all time favourite offer was from Dragon’s Den, asking me if I wanted to pitch to the dragons! What an offer! There’s *NO* way that they were after cheap and easy clickbait by humiliating a clown on national TV, was there? Ha ha ha. No thank you!

The photoshoot 

Guardian photographer, Adrian Sherratt wanted to come round to my flat to take pictures of me offering my three ways to access the play state.

It was a one-to-one day for me, which means working from home, online, offering creative therapy, supervision and creative consultancy to a succession of wonderful humans. The only time I had available was during my lunch break and Adrian wanted the full hour, so I spent the morning being a therapist whilst wearing stage make-up. Luckily my clients know my background and didn’t seen that surprised. 

Adrian arrived just as I said goodbye to my final client of the morning. He set up his lights in my dark cave of a living room (I'm temporarily subletting a basement flat), while I tried a thousand different ways of suggesting it would be better to shoot outside. “There’s a wonderful wall out the back! I could do something fun in front of it for you!” Poor Adrian has had run-ins with clowns before, he told me tales of high maintenance clowns with very particular requests and I took the hint, “OK we’ll do the shoot in here!”.

The photos felt staged and forced and fussy, “Turn your head to the left, chin down, eyes up, hold the banana in your left hand, no down a bit, up a bit, now do bafflement with your face!”

He seemed pleased with what he’d got, but just before he was about to head off, he said, “Alright, show me that wall, then” and I did, and guess which shot they used? The one at the top of this blog, of me doing something fun in front of the wall!

Here’s the Guardian article again.

Here’s the previous Guardian article

Here's the full Clown Workout playlist on Youtube

If you want to be where all the playful people are, come to The Clown Congress in Bristol, 5th and 6th April 2025