After moving to Portland, it was only a matter of time until I succumbed to the call of the clown.
In one of the first classes I attended, Anne Zander described the relationship of the clown to the audience as a dissolving of the fourth wall: “Their breath is your breath. Their heartbeat is your heartbeat.”
The blurring of boundaries between performer and audience has been a core part of my artistic practice (when I am able to practice) since undergrad, and discovering clown a decade later felt like discovering a new artistic home I didn’t know existed.
In The Moving Body, Jacques Lecoq writes “The actor is masked, partly protected by the little red nose,” explaining how the clown is shielded from being hurt by the audience’s laughter. But he also writes, “You cannot play at being a clown; you are one… With the clown, I ask [the students] to be themselves as profoundly as they possibly can, and to observe the effect they produce on the world” (Lecoq, The Moving Body, 156, 159).
It’s not the complete elimination of the boundary between performer and audience, or between actor and character that excites me, but the partial blurring, the entangling, the complicating. I am putting on the mask of the clown, and at the same time I am striving to be myself as profoundly as I can. I am holding two contradictory things as true at the same time and am unbothered by it. I am filled with peace.
There’s something here that connects to what draws me to roleplaying games. It’s a thread that pops up in unexpected places.
OSR style play is one of those places. In Principia Apocrypha, Ben Milton, Steven Lumpkin, and David Perry write: “Don’t Mind The Fourth Wall: Don’t worry much about ‘metagaming’, or the dissonance between what the players know and what the characters know. Favor the ingenuity of the players over strict personification of their characters.”
Triangle Agency comes at this from the opposite direction, and the fiction reaches out to consume the player. This sidebar on The TTRPG Initiative explains why the Agency has chosen to make the characters (Agents) aware of their players, or table-selves: “Reality Alteration is very powerful, but it’s limited by the user’s belief in the plausibility of their change. Prior to the TTRPG initiative, Agents struggled to use this power due to the many things they passively considered fixed about their world. Now that you are “fictional characters piloted by an alternate table-self,” you’ll find the process goes quite smoothly” (Triangle Agency, 41).
Like, if, within the fiction, “Brendan Albano” is the table-self of my character “Liv Butkiss”, then does Liv knows everything I know, and what does that mean for ideas like “metagaming”? If I want my character to keep a secret from another character, do I the player want to keep the secret from the other player? Not to mention my obsession with the rule that “breaking the rules for narrative reasons earns your character a demerit”.
This sort of boundary blurring is always present in RPGs, but it’s really exciting to me when a game (or play culture) acknowledges it head on and asks how can we use this bluriness to enrich and complicate our experience?
I started this blog post a long time ago, and never quite finished it because it’s a much bigger idea in my head that’s swirling around and I was struggling to actualy get going on it. But with my success at coming back for a second part of an ongoing topic, and I’m just going to leave it as is as a little introductory nugget, and hopefully come back for more later!
In the meantime, I recommend meditating on this beautiful take on clown ecology for His Majesty the Worm.
Also, this draft was so old that after the scattered notes it still had a little “links” thing at the bottom that I was briefly into! So let’s keep it. These are some things that I read/listened to around the time that I first created this draft!