Clowns, Roles, and Playing

Posted on August 20, 2026 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…