ROBYN HAMBROOK
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  • Home
  • COURSES
    • Comedy Summer School
    • Clown Soup
  • PROJECTS
    • Clown Congress
    • Clown Congress Catering Manager
    • Nomadic Rebel Clown Academy
    • Sealine Confidential
    • The Trickster Laboratory
    • Sexual Health Circus
    • Street Art Porfolio
    • Rebel Clowns
    • Canary
    • Arthur's Odyssey
    • The Vampire Rabbit
    • Interactive Theatre
    • Youth & Social Circus
    • The Online Clown Academy
  • Training
  • Clowning & Activism Blog
    • Tools of the Activist Clown
ROBYN HAMBROOK

Day 2: Anti-Racism & Decolonisation

26/9/2022

 
by Jon Davison
On the second day we explored clowning from an anti-racist perspective and how to decolonise our artform.

Session 1 - Halima Habil – Clowns Without Borders Anti-Racist Training
Halima Habil shared the anti-racist training she has been developing for the last 2-3 years at Clowns Without Borders. As a response to the dangers of white saviourism in the charity sector (including clowns), Halima is part of an advisory board that produced an inclusion, diversity and decoloniality policy. They provide advice to CWB chapters on challenges, best practices and accountability.

The session guided us through exercises in self-reflection on:
  • Our privilege
  • Imagining others’ privilege/disadvantage

Some of my notes on how to describe white privilege and allyship:
White privilege:
  • No-one here can do it
  • I can do it
  • You need this
  • I felt great when they laughed
  • It’s a pity I can’t go back

Allyship
  • Offer to work together
  • Find people that can help
  • Reference her
  • Mention her name in conversations to others
  • Recommend her
  • Ask what she needs
  • Ask what she struggles with
  • Ask what she knows

Resources shared:
Me and White Supremacy https://g.co/kgs/Q8WPCD
Cohesion Collective Www.cohesioncollective.com
Session 2 - Fatina Cummings and Jon Davison - ‘Contested Workshop’
We decided to ‘play ourselves’, which meant:
Jon: white cis male, older than many present, author of books, clown teacher internationally – gets to speak and tell others what to do
Fatina: black cis woman, ‘new’ to performing, challenged by her white and black peers, often excluded by programmers, teachers, etc.
We had agreed on jointly presenting one of Jon’s exercises
After an introduction, Jon explained the phases of the exercise, where you can only perform your script when the audience are laughing. Shortly into this process, a participant challenged the fact that this seemed like just Jon giving a workshop. My (Jon) response was, and is, to note that this is ‘us playing our roles’.
Fatina then took the lead by describing some of the challenges she faces as a black performer and how she has sought to meet those challenges.
We then jointly presented the main phase, asking participants to take a recent news story relating to colonialism and to stage it. They then performed according to: only perform the script when we laugh.
Some performances revealed quite a lot of discomfort, about: refugees and racism (Ukraine and black refuges).
My own big learning point was around the group of 5 white participants who I and Fatina both coached during the process, who expressed firstly that they felt no connection to the news story (about a young black man killed during the previous weekend’s Notting Hill Carnival), but who felt so much (discomfort) when having to perform that they refused to perform (the only group who refused). Fatina’s reflections on this were very clear, about the privilege white people have to not feel discomfort. So, although black and white clowns have different discomforts, we can all play and clown those discomforts.

‘Colonialism is our script’
Session 3 - Open Space – discussing issues relating to decolonising clown and anti-racism
Groups formed to discuss some of the issues raised earlier, such as:

How do CWB behave when they travel to a different country/culture?
  • Holding space without taking space
  • Research before travelling
  • Listening before responding

Racism in the clown workshop
What is the lineage of racist clown exercises?
  • Now do a Russian dancer
  • Washing machine exercise
  • Negative stereotypes
  • Elements of culture out of context
Excluding classroom spaces
  • Asking where people are from
  • Who can be vulnerable?

Discomfort
There’s a reason we feel discomfort
  • Discomfort leads to growth
  • It’s not about feeling guilty. Find out what it’s about if it makes you feel this way
  • Graph with two axes: privilege and oppression. Use the graph as a basis for a poem or playwriting
  • Discomfort through just walking into someone
  • In clowning – ‘I’m just done’. Seeing someone relax … beautiful
  • What inspires your work? Something’s up. The elephant in the room. Us running away from ourselves.
  • You don’t create good work being safe
  • How do we react to discomfort? Numbing out. Switching off. Digging into why we’re feeling what we’re feeling.
  • Black people not being allowed onstage alone. Chocolat. Mr Bo Jangles. Buddie Bradley. Hidden histories. History of blackface
Online Panel Discussion – Clowning, Equity and Social Justice
This online panel discussion was be moderated by Amrita Dhaliwal from the Idiot Workshop in Los Angeles. She posed some of the Clown Congress’s key questions to clown artists who are actively working on issues of social justice.
Panel guests: Jacqueline Russell, Barry Bilinsky
20 people attended online
Questions discussed:
  • Who do you clown for? Who is your audience? Your community? Is there such a thing as a globalised clown (audience)?
  • What does a decolonised clown landscape look like?
Watch the recording righte here:

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ABOUT ROBYN

Robyn is a Bristol-based director, teacher and performer. With over 20 years experience she is a passionate practitioner of clowning, physical theatre, circus and street arts. She has a MA in Circus Directing, a Diploma of Physical Theatre Practice and trained with a long line of inspiring teachers including Holly Stoppit, Peta Lily, Giovanni Fusetti, Bim Mason, Jon Davison, Zuma Puma, Lucy Hopkins and John Wright.
Over the past five years she has been exploring the meeting point of clowning and a deep desire to address the injustices in the world. This specialism has developed through her Masters Research ‘Small Circus Acts of Resistance’, on the streets and in protests with the Bristol Rebel Clowns and in research residencies with The Trickster Laboratory.
Robyn’s Activist Clown research has led to collaborations with Jay Jordan (Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, France), Clown Me In (Beirut), LM Bogad (US), Hilary Ramsden (Greece) and international Tricksters; ‘The Yes Men’ (US).
During the pandemic in 2020, Robyn set up The Online Clown Academy with Holly Stoppit and developed a series of Zoom Clown Courses. Robyn’s research, started during her Masters, has been exploring the meeting point of clowning and activism, online, in the real world and with international collaborators. With this drive to explore political edges of her work she has also dived back into the world of the Bouffon; training with Jaime Mears, Bim Mason, Nathaniel Justiniano, Eric Davis, Tim Licata, Al Seed and the grand master Bouffon-himself; Philippe Gaulier.
Keen to explore the intersection of clowning and politics, Robyn is driven to create collaborative, research spaces, testing and pushing the limits of the artform to create new knowledge and methodologies for her industry and strengthen partnerships for future work. Some of her most recent collaborations and teaching projects have included the Nomadic Rebel Clown Academy (5-day Activist Clown Training), The Laboratory of the Un-beautiful (Feminist Grotesque Bouffon Training for Womxn Theatre Makers) and the Clown Congress (annual gathering of clowns, activists & academics collectively exploring what it means to be a clown in this current era)
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Photo by HeardinLondon Photography