Arts Fest: Class clowns
The next generation is carrying on the tradition of Canadian clown, an internationally recognized style that is developed through deep personal exploration.
Creative partners France Huot and Jenny Hazelton were reunited last week after working on separate projects – Huot is developing a stage production about mining and Hazelton was teaching a 16-day intensive in Ottawa. The creative duo known as Huot & Haze will be spending some time working on their arts festival show, Les Experts Sanitaires.
Inspired by pandemic protocols, Les Experts Sanitaires like to ensure everything is clean and safe. The routine was developed for Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario, a Francophone regional theatre in Sudbury.
“Since then, we’ve worked a lot together and improvised new material for other projects,” said Hazelton, “so we’re just really excited to go back to this project and find out what else could be in there.”
Hazleton is the founder and artistic director of One North Clown and Creation in Sudbury, which she calls the spiritual successor to The Clown Farm on Manitoulin Island, officially the Manitoulin Conservatory for
Creation and Performance, founded by John Turner, of Mump and Smoot fame, where people visited from all over the world to learn Richard Pochinko’s Canadian clown tradition. Pochinko melded European and Native American clown to develop a process of developing one’s clown using masks, the method taught by Turner and many of his protégés.
An intensive, also known as baby clown, requires 100 hours of class time. At the end, the students are born as clowns.
Huot and Hazelton both did baby clown in 2009, shortly before they met. What captivated them? Freedom.
“Anything can happen on stage,” said Huot. “There’s no fourth wall. In clowning, it’s always a big conversation between what’s happening on stage and with the audience.”
They agree, there is a rush that comes with reacting to what’s going on in that moment.
“The cool thing about this creative technique, or modality, is that you can keep mining it. We work a lot with colours. We work a lot with masks in the baby clown intensive. And people can keep exploring more versions of that work in their own creative life and apply it to their own creativity beyond clown, even if you don’t want to perform in clown,” said Hazelton.
“We get people who are non- performers all the time, that just come to shake up their creative life and they can take it into whatever they want. Lots of people, have taken it into visual arts, music, therapy, working with kids, and hospital clowning.”
“There’s a lot of misconception around clown. People just immediately think of circus or a birthday party or walk around clown, which are all valid areas of performance, but what we’re doing is, especially in the baby clown intensive, it’s very deep and vulnerable work. It’s really emotional and heart centered, and we get to the honesty of people’s personal archetypes,” said Hazleton. “We go really, really intense and really long, so that people break down their resistances a little bit and get really, maybe not comfortable, but get familiar with working with failure and working with fear and going for it. It’s pretty cool, special work.”
Their own archetypes are represented in the characters of Huot & Haze. They explain, in duo work, there is a high status and a low status clown – the Joey and the Auguste in clown terms. In Les Experts Sanitaires, Haze plays the Auguste and Huot is the Joey, the straight man.
“There’s lots at play there,” said Hazelton. “The the low status one tends to be needy, and the high status one needs the low status one, but not in the same way.”
“There are certain things that the high status is allowed to do that the low status isn’t. And so when their back is turned, of course, things go awry, and I get myself into a mess,” said Hazelton.
“And I have to clean it up,” said Huot.
“I think they’re probably just more like amplifications of ourselves, you know, like that exist in a very playful realm,” she said. “You amplify all aspects of yourself, right, in order to figure out what this relationship is and what the relationship with the audience is. And because the audience is also like our third partner in on all this, we have to take everyone along for the ride.”
Hazleton adds, “It’s honesty, and the audience laughs because they recognize themselves in the foibles of the clown.”
Les Experts Sanitaires – A free show at Creemore Village Green, at 2 p.m. on Saturday, October. 4.
