Over the next few days, don’t be surprised if you see a lot of red noses, yellow wigs, and rainbow-coloured suspenders around town. The Toronto Festival of Clowns is back with a trunk full of tomfoolery, plus plenty of great live performances.
In addition to showcasing local talent, the annual event presents a bevy of international performers. Besides the usual slapstick, there will be a selection of world-class bouffon artists, vaudevillians, dancers, and an astonishing array of other performers who specialize in physical comedy.
Now in its eighth year, the Toronto Festival of Clowns is an annual highlight for Toronto’s clowning community.
In the recent past, many Toronto-based performers traveled to Europe and studied under old-world masters like Jacques Lecoq and Phillippe Gaulier. Things coalesced in 1997, when Michael Kennard and John Turner, better known as Mump and Smoot, founded The SPACE (Studio for Physical and Clown Exploration).
After The SPACE closed in 2002, the community was left without a base—or, as festival artistic director Adam Lazarus describes it, its members were “clowns without a home.”
Fast forward four years. Lazarus, along with fellow performers Sarah Buski and Dave McKay, established the Toronto Festival of Clowns. Before long, the festival had outgrown its original venue in the Distillery District.
An expert at bouffon, Lazarus studied under Phillippe Gaulier. The form is now one of the festival’s specialties.
Bouffon shares similarities with traditional clowning, except for a key element: the bouffon is prickly, with an edge traditional clowns lack.
To differentiate between the two schools, consider this scenario. A clown appears on stage, then slips on a discarded banana peel, resulting in laughter from the audience. The bouffon’s approach is different. After he slips on the banana peel, the audience laughs as expected, but then the tables are turned. The bouffon eats the squished peel, regurgitates, and then, encouraged by the audience’s squeamish laughter, licks yellowish bile off the stage.
The bouffon knows no limits. Between belches, he licks his greasy lips, thanking the audience for the tasty treat.
There are no sacred cows in the eyes of the bouffon. All is open to ridicule. It’s routine for a bouffon to break through the fourth wall to expose audiences to the ills of society and its hypocrisies.
Lazarus is quick to distinguish between performers at the festival and clowns working the birthday-party circuit. In his view, annoying birthday party clowns should be held responsible for the childhood onset of coulrophobia.
Lazarus explains emphatically, “It starts at birthday parties when the birthday party clown says ‘Look at my balloon’ and the kid says, ‘Noooooooooooo’. The clown says, ‘LOOK AT IT!’ and the kid starts crying and the clown keeps doing the same thing.”
According to Lazarus, most birthday party clowns violate a basic tenet of the craft. A performer must give the audience what they like, and what they paid to see. Lazarus says, “If they like it, do it again. If they don’t like it, you change.”
Ross Travis and Nathaniel Justiniano in the bouffon performance You Killed Hamlet.
A Toronto Festival of Clowns performance already receiving hype is You Killed Hamlet, from Naked Empire Bouffon Company. An import from San Francisco, the troupe creates controversy wherever it performs.
Who isn’t curious to see a farce about Hamlet performed by characters resembling a creepy Michelin Man after a drunken bender, or a demon Marge Simpson? You Killed Hamlet reduces the death of Shakespeare’s most revered character to, “The god of Emo bullshit is dead!”
The festival will host a Student Soiree on its final night, during which, up-and-comers from across Canada will showcase new material. Wrapping up the festival, the third-annual Mark Purvis Bursary will be presented to deserving students keen on continuing their study of physical comedy.
Photos courtesy of the Toronto Festival of Clowns.