Meg McHutchison

I am here. It is now.

rEVOLutionary Surrender
is
a LIBRATORY PRACTICE
an IMPROVISATIONAL SCORE
(a MAP BASED on ENERGETICS)
a CONFLUENCE of FORMS

a META MAP

INITIAL QUESTIONS

What does it take to lay down the guns,
lay down in the face of the guns
I am thinking of Dr. King
I am thinking of Ghandi
I am thinking of how can I
Practice revolutionary surrender
In myriad strata my life.


I ask with the lightest passion, “what is your relationship to violence?”

I propose to consider a dimension of political life
that has to do with our exposure to violence and our
complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss
and the task of mourning that follows, and with
finding a basis for community in these conditions.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York : Verso, 2004. (p. 9)


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In more ways than one, poetry must recall us to our senses—our bodily sensual life and our sense of other and different human presences. The oceanic multiplicities of this art call us toward possibilities of relation still very much alive in a world where violence speaks only to and of it itself. (Adrienne Rich. What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. p 273)

THE META INQUIRY:
If the question is between betrayal of self and survival,
what gets chosen?

What is chosen when what is at stake is your life, your children’s lives, your family, literally.
What does it mean to speak, knowing that without that act, you and your children will die a death of the spirit?
I am thinking about this microcosmically and macrocosmically. This information comes from this present moment and from long before this time.
The real threat of violence we face, most particularly women and children, across the planet results in a strategy of self-betrayal.
I feel the connection between the specifics of my story (which I have compassion for), and the violence that is systematized into oppression in so many
structures that is extremely difficult to get out from underneath. Any conversationthat expands the terrain of genuine listening is essential. Right speech, right action.
This sense of attunement is refining within me.
The knot: I sacrifice myself for you
OR in order for me to live, I carry your death with me.
I don’t mean this in a literal, one-to-one kind of sense (though it is true for some of us), but in the larger sense that each day we sit with this in America.
Our privilege here actively brutalizes and ends lives across the globe.
Can I hold this and still move?
This is the paradox.
This is the practice.
I arrive...

TRANSLATING ESSENCE:
On Clowns, Fools, and Folly

What draws me to the performance form of clown is the subversive possibilities within it. There is a connection between the practice of the clown and the transgressive archetypes of the fool and the trickster. I followed this investigation through mythic stories, research on the archetype of the fool,and primary interviews with contemporary clowns.
What continues to hold me is the degree of commitment that the life of the clown takes, and the physical precision and improvisational brilliance that the form requires. Even more: the choice to commit a life to laughter and to the mysterious ephemeral healing that transpires in the presence of the most committed character clowns. Clowns, in this tradition, embody a subjective humanity, reflecting and revealing essence through their discoveries.
I sensed that there was a richer thread to unravel in this investigation.
At significant crossroads in this research, prior to entering Goddard, I had been radically rerouted by the cascade of losses in my family. It took me along time to return to this investigation, and when I did it was even more compelling.
I did not yet know what I was seeking; I only knew that my desire was to follow.

CLOWN LIFE: AN OPENING (Spring 2004)

There is a clown character that I have always loved. Her name is Linda and she’s a security guard. She’s all about the rules.I asked the performer, Deloreze Leonard if she would ask Linda if I could interview her. Linda’s very, well, surly you could say. She said yes!
What struck me in my 2AM AHA!, was a sense of entry. A vision formed of having the serious discussion with Linda about the world, what she would do if she were president, what she thinks about sex. This was a great relief to me; the sensation of having a clear notion in all of this musing about clowns is liberating.
This is character that I know and who I can risk playing in this process with. I am excited to explore the art of interviewing and shaping this small story.
I want to make a jewel that is as transcendent as the performances of these people themselves. They carry archetypal weight as well as the traditions of the practice.

Clown Life (or Translating Essence: The Interior Life of Clowns), is the title for my research into this form.

THEORETICAL FOLLY

My curious investigation of the interior world of clowns informed my investigation of Folly through Erasmus and Willem Willeford, and strangely, Nietzsche and Artaud.
As my exploration of contemporary, archetypal, and historical content about fools/clowns and tricksters evolved, I embraced what continues to spark my passion about this subject. I am attentive to my personal history and to the questions posed by these people who live in between worlds.

William Willeford
Willeford’s PhD Thesis was published in excerpted form in 1967, as The Clown, The Kingdom and the Stage: A Study in the Forms of our Relationship to Folly. In this small volume, I encountered some keys to the work at hand. Willeford describes his study as:

...an attempt to see a wide range of fool phenomena as conforming to a type, that which can be called the fool. (p.2)

My investigation is related but travels a different path. I feel joy at finding these writings. The thread of my inquiry has to do with the fluidity of characterization that practicing and archetypal fools embody.

I am drawn to the mutability of persona that slips and slides out of definition.

Clowns and fools seem to have that ability at times, despite the fact that they are so visible in their presentation to the world. They raise the question of what is reality and who are/ what are they, and thus who or what am I? The fool, like the joker, has no fixed value. However, under some circumstances that card may be taken up and assigned a value. (p. 2)

Willeford refers to Nietzche’s Zarthustra, “a man [sic] must have chaos within him to give birth to a dancing star.” (p.24)

Imagine that.
I have LIVED with this quote for many years. I am attentive to these small things that resonate time and again.

The form we see in them [fools] must, they tacitly but firmly insist, be fluid and open enough to accommodate their characteristic life. (p.3)
The fool leads us to other modes of knowledge that both parallel that of drama and have an influence upon it—those of religion, philosophy and the workings of our mother wit... And since what the fool is includes our reactions to him, the attempt to describe him must take into account both the ways in which he intrudes himself as an object into the act of knowing and the ways in which he influences that act from the complex depths of ourselves. (p. 4)
My experience with the world of interactive, European clowning, and the contemporary practice of it, is that it is a form that invites the participation of the audience, if they are open and willing. At its very best, it is a revelation of essence, and a gift of energetic exchange. This is rare, but is a way in which some of the performers I know approach their work. It is an absolutely different practice from actors; these clowns build a life inside their character and work from that place. It is as rich an internal life as their “normal” lives.
Both the form and meaning of their affinity is a secret bond that is at the same time a wall of tabu. (p. 2)
Fools/Clowns also have a relationship to power that is outside the realm of defined conventions. Fools can speak their piece without losing their heads, and this part of the riddle is intriguing. I have spoken about the ability to speak the truth in troubled times. Who gets to do that, and why?

The fool is not in progress toward himself [sic], the fool is always himself. (p. 2)

This is the endeavor.

INDEED.

I am finding the language of the dance.

The fool is a riddle... that is fundamentally complex.

Willeford, William. The Clown, The Kingdom and the Stage: A Study in the Forms of our Relationship to Folly. Zurich: Juris Druck + Verlag Zurich. (p 2)_

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rEVOLutionary Surrender investigation (10/05)

RS studio practice. Processed video still.