Clowning: A Way of Catching the Passing Moment
Adrian Underhill, UK
Adrian Underhill works as an international ELT consultant and trainer, which means things like running training courses, writing articles, working as series editor for the Macmillan Books for Teachers and speaking at conferences. Increasingly he provides training and consultancy for leadership and management in ELT organisations, helping them develop schools that are themselves learning cultures. He has been teacher, trainer and director of the International Teacher Training Institute at International House in Hastings and is a past president of IATEFL. A few years ago he followed an inspirational Masters course in Responsibility and Business Practice, as a result of which he developed a passion for the learning power of Action Inquiry and reflective practices, which he now integrates into his workshops and consultancies. Adrian is also member of the Creativity Group. E-mail: adrian@aunderhill.co.uk
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People like learning
We like learning about teaching
Improvisation in teaching
Clowning
The editing of self
Natural absurdity
Catching the passing moment
Teaching too is a performance art
People like learning. We may not always enjoy school, but we like learning. And we like learning in others around us. We like to be with friends who are learning, to be brought up by parents who are learning, to have children who are learning and to be taught by teachers who are learning. We like to be led by leaders who are learning. In stories and theatre and films we love to see people being changed by life, learning – or not learning – from experience. We love to see the vivid engagement of babies and toddlers in their moment-by-moment learning, finding ourselves spellbound by their charismatic and naturally effortless mastery of learning. Perhaps it resonates with memories of our own similar experience. Learning attracts us.
We are human beings and social beings, and we are also learning beings. We can be delighted when we find ourselves in the middle of learning, as if learning makes us feel more ourselves, as if learning is somehow what I am for. At that point learning becomes its own motivation, self motivating without need of external reward. Although we usually experience ourselves as being motivated to learn by the desire for new knowledge or a new skill, like a language or painting or dance or a musical instrument, alongside that motivation this other motivation can appear, that of simply experiencing ourselves as learning organisms, a kind of coming back to ourselves.
Many teachers commit to learning about their teaching. We care about our teaching and want to be better at it. We are learning teachers, teachers who know we don’t know everything., and who learn from watching and reflecting on our practice. And sometimes we dare to go further and to do our teaching by learning, and then our teaching becomes an act of learning or opening to what is going on at that moment in the class. When we enter the classroom, we may have a book and a plan, but we still don’t know what is going to happen. All the time in class we teachers are making small improvised responses to things we did not know would happen, or that we thought might happen but not like that. There are obvious unpredictable, like who will be there that day. And there are subtle unknowns close to where the learning action is, like the fifteen different private lessons going on in fifteen different students all responding to the same classroom activity. Sixteen, if you include the teacher’s private lesson.
When we are attentive we see that every lesson is full of moment-by-moment not knowing. And the students see both themselves and me dealing with this not knowing, sometimes well, sometimes less well. When we are ‘teaching by learning’ we are trying to open to the learning moves of our students so that we can respond more appropriately. They are learning the language, and I am learning them, we are all on the same side of the learning fence. And this is why improvisation is important. It goes on all the time in class just as in a conversation.
To be free to respond to the learning moves as they occur requires improvisation and spontaneity, but these are not highlighted or developed in our ‘received methodology’ for ELT. We all improvise to a lesser or greater extent, but we tend not to discuss it, reflect, evaluate and feedback on it, so it’s difficult to get better at it. But other performance arts like drama, jazz and clowning discuss and develop improvisation from the beginning.
I was an improvising musician before I became a teacher of English. Many of the musical improvisation activities involve listening carefully and making and taking apart sequences of notes, and this could be applied to work with language in my ELT classes, providing engaging and creative activities which complemented activities in the ELT books. Over the years I followed the theme of improvisation in teaching through work with Caleb Gattegno’s Silent Way, through learning the skills of facilitation, particularly the application of Carl Rogers’ ideas. Later I got involved in spontaneous story telling and in theatre impro, especially with practices developed by Keith Johnstone and Augusto Boal.
Recently I’ve had the touching and challenging experience of clowning, a particular school called Nose to Nose (www.nosetonose.info/index.htm) that has a lineage going back several centuries in France and Italy. It’s not circus clowning, it’s not about custard pies or buckets of water or face paint or playing for laughs, but there is a red nose and colourful and eccentric costumes. Rather than ‘write about it’ here are some glimpses through several personal encounters with this form of clowning, mainly through a one week programme that took place in July 2014 at Emerson College in the UK
Monday Morning in the Eurythmy dance hall…. a blue rope is laid out along the wooden floor. All the empty space the other side of the rope is our stage. On this side of the rope we are off stage and can discuss and reflect and form the audience when others are on stage.
Our facilitator says: “Ok, now three of you go onto the stage and hide. As soon as you are sure you are perfectly well hidden, go and find another hiding place, and then another, and so on.” (Remember the stage is completely bare, there is nowhere to hide…or is there?)
Later on she says: “Now, five of you form a five-headed being. Whatever one of you does, you all do. So go on stage as this five headed being, work your way across the stage and see what happens on the way. Come off stage at the other end.”
And later: “First one of you goes on stage. Make yourself at home with what’s there (some cushions) then another comes on. No 2, see how you respond to entering this ready-made scene with No 1 already in it. No 1, how do you respond to this newcomer? Show us what you think and feel.”
A bit later some solo work. She says: “Enter the stage. Encounter that colourful silky cloth lying on the floor. Engage with it. Do only one thing, though you can repeat it. Take your time, but don’t prolong it. Then exit.” I search for something interesting to do with the cloth when I get there. As if reading my mind she adds: “And when you get on stage let go of whatever idea you have in mind…” Oh, damn that was quite a clever idea I had. Now what shall I do? So I drop that idea and grasp for another, and as I approach the cloth she says : “And whatever you have in mind as you approach the cloth, let go of that too….”
This is difficult for my normal logical mind which likes to construct what to do in advance. This is a contrivance that I have constructed in my life to ensure I am not caught out with no plan, with nothing to do. During this experience of clowning I became aware of my tendency not to show that I am taken by surprise or that I don’t know what to do, by making it look as if I am taking it all in my stride…. By smoothing the bumps. Banana skins don’t happen to 007. My clown exposes my self importance which I am usually reluctant to see. In fact clowning tends to make self-importance visible, not deliberately, and not in order to teach a lesson, but simply through a deft (or bumbling) exposure of the truth. I gave this tendency to self importance the name of “my contrivance”, a kind of artificiality, a behaviour shield, which protects my self-importance from getting exposed.
In a scenario where I had been asked to improvise with another clown, I was lying on my back with my feet in the air and she, the other clown, finding my feet close to her face, sniffed and clowned about with the smell from my feet. And what did I do? I missed the opportunity to take up the offer of smelly feet, and to work from there, and instead pretended nothing had been said. So the offer was ignored, the energy was lost, and both clowns and audience had to start again. In retrospect I saw many ways to accept the offer. One way could have been to show the shock to my self importance of the smelly feet accusation. Another would be to appeal to the audience. Another to try to smell my own feet, and perhaps other feet…and so on. But I smoothed the ripples as if nothing had happened….
Another time I was doing a solo and the brief was to come on, show a mood, explore some props including a wooden bench with three legs, look at the audience, and exit. So I came on, did a couple of things and then sat on the bench facing the audience … and extraordinarily, and to my and everyone’s surprise, the bench whirled round 180º so that I ended facing the other way with my back to the audience. But even this free gift, which plays right into the clown’s hand, was smoothed over by me. I did not really notice my inner surprise at the whirling bench, and so could not convey that noticing or nor exploit it. (The physics was that the bench was warped, such that if you sat in the middle it was possible that the legs at each end would not touch the floor, so it could revolve. Not a designer prop, just a piece of rickety furniture.). Free gifts are there all the time, but it takes the clown to see them. Clowning is a way of catching the passing moment. The space is not about performance and entertainment. There is no call to try to be funny. Humour comes without the need for that, from somewhere else
I see that clowning feeds through to teaching in many subtle ways, though I cannot list them. Teach playfully. Remain curious. Be open to each offer the leaners make through their attempts with language. Try to become more aware of four positions in myself: 1) Not hearing the learners ‘offer’ because I am with my plan, my outcome, my adventure; 2) Hearing the offer but not being free enough to be guided by it; 3) Responding to it but with habitual or clichéd responses that are part of my repertoire from the past, not a fresh and present repsonse, but a cliché. I call this a ‘hot lick’: 4) Accepting and being guided by the offer.
In the martial arts you use whatever happens to your advantage. The clown is not scheming enough for that, but in a sense the outcome is the same because naïvety and honest playfulness means that everything works out in the clown’s favour ….even when it doesn’t.
Afterwards I wrote this poem:
I carry on in my ‘well adjusted doing’
Which smooths over all the bumps…
The grip of my knowing….
But…no need to change it,
Just play with it,
Tease the rules,
Show what I feel,
Show I've noticed what I feel,
Show what I feel about that noticing....
Free gifts are here
All the time.
It takes my clown to see them.
Slowing down reveals them,
I get distracted from the gift
By the contrivance,
The hot lick.
Accept the offers,
Show the emotion,
Play the repeat,
Catch the passing moment.
Say yes to life
As it happens ...
And keep falling into the holes
In the road
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Drama Techniques for Creative Language Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
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