This thesis analyses my own clown practices in a range of projects between 1978 and 2010, placing them in relationship to the practices of a number of other clown practitioners. It contextualises the ways in which the figure of the contemporary clown is enmeshed within the practices of various institutions in which clowns find themselves. Thus it is my contention that both the clown and the institution are best analysed through the analysis of their actual practices. The core argument of this thesis is that the clown plays with and subverts the rules and indices of the institution through parody and burlesque. However the clown does this from a position of marginality and may be subject to disciplining by the institution. I recognise, however, that the destructured nature of clown practice, does not sit easily in a structured, linear thesis. To mirror the failures, flops and play of the clown, a clown voice, who by extension is Richard, is dialogically intertwined with the so-called academic voice in number of ways - a short story, notes for a performance, anecdotes, and asides (as footnotes), plus the occasional playful comment in the text itself. This thesis draws upon recent and current debates concerning practice based research, developing Melissa Trimingham's 'hermeneutic - interpretative' method (2002), as a focus for my own creative practice. Tracing the threads of my own practice constitutes a 'genealogy' (Foucault 1979) of the contemporary clown, which divides into roughly two parts - from 1978 - 2000 when I worked professionally as a clown, and from 2000-2010 when I became a lecturer in an institution, the University of Winchester. The threads of my practice are loosely knotted together (but always liable to unravel), when I analyse a recent and developing clown role, which I call the 'dramaturg clown'. The thesis contributes to the field of studies of popular forms in performance, specifically developing the range of studies of the clown, and the different arenas in which the clown works. It also engages with the ways and contributes to debates around the ways in which clown practices are merging with other contemporary performance disciplines, including site-based performance, walking as a performance practice, and live art practices.

This thesis examines how far clowning can be used to augment the aims and effects of a Brechtian theatricality. To do so, it first establishes a series of characteristic processes for the identification and analysis of clowning, based on the author's own clown training with John Wright and Philippe Gaulier. It then explores the nature of Brecht's interest in the clowns Charlie Chaplin and Karl Valentin and their influence on his thinking. Next, it examines how far Brecht's interest in clowns and clowning can be seen inscribed in the texts of his plays and how far that clowning enables the aims of his theatre to be realised. Then it looks at a specific example of Brecht production, the author's production of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, to examine how far what has been seen in theory in fact works in practice. And finally, it moves beyond Brecht but remains in the Brechtian tradition, by examining the show Can of Worms, directed by the author for Strange Bedfellows theatre company and asking how far a pure clown show can achieve Brechtian effects. Throughout, the thesis is concerned to establish how far the specific incidences of clowning examined accord with particular effects of the Brechtian theatre, most significantly Gestus,d ialectics and the VerfremdungseffekItt. concludest hat clowning is a form particularly well suited to the pursuit of these processes.

This thesis examines five individuals in the tradition of freakery: the performance of constructed abnormality as entertainment. Departing from a tendency to explore the ‘freak’ and the ‘freak show’ from the mid-nineteenth century, this thesis starts at the beginning of the 1800s to explore the diachronic evolution of freakery as it went from small-scale transitory exhibitions to large-scale commercial enterprises tied to the burgeoning entertainment industry. This thesis argues that, as the freak show changed, it functioned as an index for broader social changes across the nineteenth century. Each chapter represents one or more of those changes, probing the construction and presentation of a specific identity rooted in a particular epoch and framed around the life history of a performer, whether this biography was alleged or ‘real’. The five agents explored in this thesis are Daniel Lambert (1770-1809), who displayed as a Fat Man; Chang and Eng, The Siamese Twins (1811-1874); Charles Stratton (1838-1883), a little person known as General Tom Thumb; Julia Pastrana (1834?-1860), billed as The Baboon Lady; and Joseph Merrick (1862-1890), The Elephant Man. Freakery was a lived identity reliant on a biographical history and dependent on numerous discourses that turned constructed identities into ambiguous, paradoxical and ambivalent representations. The hitherto entrenched historiographical dichotomy between the ‘offstage’ and ‘onstage’ life of a ‘freak’ is substituted for the claim of interdependency between performer and performance, reality and representation: agencies and the culture of everyday life were imbricated in the construction of ‘freak’ identities that were marked by character as much as corporeality. Overall, this thesis presents a picture of pervasive freakery in nineteenth-century London and beyond: a practice and discourse that permeated life and culture, representations and perceptions.

This is the first full-length study of clown training at Gaulier’s school. I take literally Gaulier’s statement, ‘The work of a clown is to make the audience burst out laughing’ (2007: 289). I interpret this to mean that the relationship with the audience plays a defining part in clown practice. Throughout the thesis I consider clowns to have audiences, and argue that the presence of peers in the classroom is a key feature of the learning. I take into account the individual nature of learning, by examining my own experiences learning Clown at the school, and comparing this with the experiences of other writers and a selection of practitioners that have given interviews towards this project. What I call a pedagogy of spectatorship focuses students’ attention towards their classmates, who are audience to everything that takes place in the Clown classroom. Gaulier’s observational skill and charismatic teaching style can enable students to perceive audience laughter and silence as crucial feedback. I demonstrate the audience role in three areas of clown practice: complicit play, the ‘flop’ and the use of the body as ridiculous. I argue that the École Philippe Gaulier provides lessons on the skills necessary to listen to audiences, so that each student can discover the ways in which she can ‘make the audience burst out laughing’.

Women who learn to clown within Western contemporary theatre and performance training lack recognizably female exemplars of this popular art form. This practice-as-research thesis analyses my past and present clowning experiences in order to create an understanding of a woman-centered clown practice which allows for the expression of material bodies and lived experiences. It offers a feminist perspective on Jacques Lecoq’s pedagogy, which revolves around a notion of an ‘inner clown’ and is prevalent in contemporary UK clown training and practice. The thesis draws on both the avant-garde and numerous clown types and archetypes, in order to understand clowning as a genre revealed through a range of unsocialised behaviours. It does not differentiate necessarily between clowning by men and women but suggests a re-think and reconfiguration to incorporate a wide range of values and thought processes as a means of introduction to a wider audience. Specific concerns with the terms clown and clowning initiate this investigation, resulting in the creation of a ‘clowning continuum’, which offers a practical way of understanding various modes of clowning and various types of clowns. I examine my experiences, including those of ‘failure’, while working with renowned performer trainers, as well my negotiation of gender and sexuality through both my clowning in character and my creation of clowns. The twentieth century avant-garde artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who inspired me to create ‘Clown Elsa’ and take her to art galleries and onto the street, is identified as a ‘radical female proto-clown’. My practical investigations into the potential interrelatedness of the masquerade of femininity and the mask of the clown are also shaped by discourses of hysteria and the carnivalesque. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concepts of carnival, dialogic practice and heteroglossia, as well as the transgressive potential of classical myth and archetypes for women, this thesis reconfigures clown practice and discourse by both challenging and developing upon Lecoq’s outmoded pedagogic practice. Its goal is to open it up for more types and modes of clown, in particular an ‘inner clown’ that can operate in a number of masks. It culminates in my creation of a feminist clown, Sedusa, who is inspired by Hélène Cixous’s writing on l’écriture feminine, myth and laughter in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976). Sedusa expands clown models and masks for women by exploiting the ‘masquerade’ of femininity, a term originally coined by Joan Riviere in 1929. The thesis includes a performance as Sedusa as an embodiment of my research findings.

Female solo aerialists of the 1920s and early 1930s were internationally popular performers in the largest live mass entertainment of the period in the UK and USA. Yet these aerialists and this period in circus history have been largely forgotten by scholars. I address this omission by arguing these stars should be remembered for how they contributed to strength being incorporated into some stereotypes of femininity. Analysing in detail Lillian Leitzel, Luisita Leers and, to a lesser extent the Flying Codonas, I employ a cross-disciplinary methodology unique to aerial scholarship that uses embodied understanding to reinvigorate archival resources. This approach allows me to build on the wider scholarly histories of Peta Tait, drawing important conclusions about the form including how weightlessness is constructed and risk is performed. In the introduction I re-evaluate the nostalgic histories of circus to establish circus’ and aerialists’ popularity in this period, before exploring how engagements shaped careers. Chapter 1 considers the difference in experiencing aerialists in the USA and UK by bringing together previously unrelated data on circus, variety and vaudeville venues. Aerialists made good celebrities because their acts, located above audience members’ heads, challenged the conventional relationship between ticket prices and sightlines. Chapter 2 explores how the kinaesthetic fantasy evoked by experiencing aerial action created glamour and how glamour had the power to reframe femininity in the 1920s. Glamour and celebrity have often been confused and Chapter 3 distinguishes the two before considering what characterises aerial celebrity. Reconfiguring Joseph Roach’s public intimacy as skilful vulnerability allows me to analyse how risk was gendered and performed in relationship to skill. The gendering of risk leads me to consider what in society contributed to aerial stardom by drawing upon Richard Dyer’s argument that celebrities embody a cultural ambiguity. Female aerialists reframed their femininity in a similar way to women who aspired to the modern girl stereotype in wider society. In the final chapter I expand on the activity of the modern girl, comparing strategies used by young exercising women to female aerialists. This enables me to draw conclusions about how witnessing these stars tapped into national ideas of citizenship, and to designate aerialists as the first to use the power of glamour to make muscular femininity acceptable.