this is such a nice town...

 Finding Pleasure in the Shadow
Six organisers, two facilitators, two vegan chefs, and twenty activists and clowns from across Europe squeeze ourselves into a youth hostel outside the small, nice town of Malters—a 20-minute train ride from Lucerne. We're here for ‘Patridiot’, a 10-day advanced Rebel Clown training organised by Clownlabor Schweiz and TO Vienna, an association of Swiss and Austrian clowns. This is the Nomadic Rebel Clown Academy's second collaboration and training with Clownlabor in Switzerland—a chance to further develop the rebel clown training, deepening the political and social possibilities of the clown performing in public space, whilst collectively embodying self-efficacy, creativity, and democratic participation in our process.

Hilary Ramsden and I, with a strong desire from the group, are focusing on a key ingredient in the Rebel Clown mix—the deliciously dangerous Bouffon.

For those unfamiliar, the Bouffon is the outsider who takes great pleasure to mock. According to Philippe Gaulier's creation myth, the Bouffon were the medieval outcasts, those who didn't fit into beautiful society. The lame, the deformed, the syphilitic, the sexually deviant, the witches—they were sent to the swamps and ghettos. Here they formed communities and developed their scorn and mistrust of authority and power. Once a year, they were invited to return to the town to provide entertainment for high society. Little did the beautiful people know that the Bouffon had watched them through a holes in the town walls and gaps in fences, developing nasty yet precise parodies of the powerful people, 'the bastards'. The aim of their performances was to cause those in power to laugh so much that they would have a heart attack and die. The enemy would literally be attacked by the weapon of laughter.

As a theatrical form, the Bouffon brings sharpness and street-wise savvy to the Rebel Clown. We move away from the naivety, innocence, bafflement, and vulnerability of the clown to a creature with a honed sardonic edge, a dash of smarm, and plenty of pleasure in the darker representations of our themes.

The theme of the training was in the name—‘Patridiot’—a celebration of the idiocy of patriotism, nationalism, tribalism, fascism, and flagism. Aligning with Switzerland's National Day on 1st August, the framing was certainly around holding a mirror up to the hypocrisies of a 'neutral' country and loving everything Swiss. Perfect territory for the Bouffon, and the group actions were designed to build and push themes to their absolute limits.

Taking Things to Extremes
One action took the theme of militarism and sacrifice to the extreme of cannibalism. A group of clowns in military fatigues based themselves at Löwenplatz—a reverential site that commemorates the 700 Swiss Guards who were killed in 1792 during the French Revolution as they protected the empty Tuileries Palace in Paris. The absurdity of the story was not lost on the clowns, who carried the theme of meaningless sacrifice through their action. An ever-rotating stream of tourists at the site were greeted with an unexpected spectacle of clowns carrying out military drills, each one ending in the death of one of the clowns. Some spectators were coerced by the leader—often without much effort—to choose a victim from the others to "kill." More audience members then lined up to receive and eat a mimed piece of the 'dead' body. It was grotesque, absurd, and yet the audience played along with a mixture of bemusement and hilarity.

Another action called "Swiss Cleaning" revealed the underside of Swiss "neutrality." A banner was unveiled exposing the links between Swiss bank UBS and the funding of Israel's genocide in Gaza. At a nearby fountain, the clowns invited audiences to help them "clean" dirty money. The naivety of the clown, literally washing money, suddenly exposed the shadow of this hypocrisy when two young girls came in to help with the washing. Their innocence made the point all the more poignant.

Another group explored patriotism, naming their action "Swiss Wives"—patridiots who took their love of Switzerland to absurd extremes. They posed with oversized Swiss Army knives and machine guns, getting over-excited listening to an Alp Horn. Their ludicrous play drew smiles and curiosity—until the Alp Horn player jumped into the game and spanked the clowns with the horn. The line between mockery and participation blurring beautifully.

Then there was the feast. A staple of Swiss celebrations on National Day, the feast was set up by the clowns, who brought out food gathered from skips—a comment on the staggering fact that one third of all food in Switzerland is wasted. The feast, polite at first, soon descended into debauchery, with clowns eating food from the ground and rubbing it over their bodies. It was a ritual of excess, a mockery of plenty.

These actions and our play reveal the useful dynamics of the Bouffon:

• The build – taking things to absurd extremes
  
• Flocking – as a key devising tool for ensemble chorus work
  
• Finding & following pleasure – especially in the shadow and hypocrisy
  
• Featuring the big themes of humanity
• The vertical axis - while human drama plays out on the horizontal  the Bouffons exist on vertical line – between heaven and hell – close to god, sanctity, ritual – and the base pleasures of eating, shitting, and fucking

Post-script – The Bouffon Spills into Life
But the Bouffon became more than a theatrical form; it spilled out into our lived experience.

In our youth hostel on the edge of town, where we lived, trained, ate, and played together, we were the outsiders—looking through the gap in the fence to watch the world of the elites, planning the mirror and mockery we would perform for them.

Our first investigation of public space, in the streets of Malters, didn't go unnoticed. For a couple of AFAB clowns, the transgressive experiment of sitting topless on a park bench brought the police running. Looking back, we could have seen it coming after our encounter with the police last year in Belp. We know that the public, the curtain-twitching-small-town-folks police their own space. The usual procedure occurs—the police ask what we're doing, demand to see IDs, and express their outrage—all while our participants keep their red noses on.

The Bouffon offered some catharsis to the clowns' collective outrage at the policing of our bodies. In our Bouffon session the following day, we played with the material—"You can't do that here" and "This is such a nice town"—building a wild parody of the outraged small-towners.

And that's the thing, isn't it? "This is such a nice town"—but you don't have to scratch too deeply to discover the anger and vitriol beneath. The Bouffon knows this. The Bouffon revels in it. And by playing in that space, we don't just expose the hypocrisy—we find a strange, liberating joy in exposing it.

Photos by Robyn Hambrook, Hilario, Lenin and Lakritze