At a clown rave in Glasnevin, performers strut their stuff

Attendees laughed along the side aisles and up the stairs. 

Maria Cunningham introduced the first performer, a lone clown, the first of eight. 

Cunningham, in the front half of a two-person horse costume, doing a bit herself with an accent – and the two doing poses strutting around the performance area.

Many people have played the back-half of this horse, Cunninham said: ex-boyfriends, family members, best friends. 

She made the horse costume herself. Designed it herself too. 

The person in the back half has to bend over and hold her tummy or shirt and follow her movements. It is intimate, she said. “It is … It's hot in there. It is hot in there,” she said. 

That’s how clowning is, Cunningham said. In fact, it’s definitional to many of the performers: clowning is intimate. 

Cunningham hadn’t been sure how many would show up to the clown scratch night and clown rave on Friday 6 February at Daylight, members-funded social centre in an industrial unit in Glasnevin Industrial Estate. 

A few days before the show, she had sold a few dozen tickets of the 100 tickets, she said. By the time the day rolled around, though, they had sold out.

The event is part of a growing clown culture in Dublin, said performer Francis Breen, who organises a gathering, Who’s That Clown?, every few months on Pearse Street.

The scene is in a good place, he says, really open and experimental, and it’s just breaking through. “So I think we’re all just enjoying the ride, is the kind of vibe, you know?”

What is a clown?

No, calling someone a clown is not offensive, said Cunningham, the organiser, an actor and theatre maker, who got into clowning via training in a drama school.

“I would say, you know, I'm an actor, I'm a clown, I'm a theater maker. Like, I am a clown is definitely something I would say.” 

Being a clown means being open, vulnerable, says clown performer Dagda Semler.  It’s about being embarrassing, a fool, says Cunningham.

It’s about reacting to the audience. A clown needs an audience to riff off of.

There’s an idea that making mistakes and not knowing what to do and having questions makes somebody a fool, he says. “It's used in a negative way.”

But clowning subverts that, she says. “It’s about making mistakes and letting people see that and like, really rolling around in the not knowing, and in the flaws,”

It’s about falling flat on your face and that being a good thing, she says. “Like that is a great place to be as a clown. So we're self aware. We're self aware about being fools and clowns.”

What exactly a clown is is personal. 

On Friday, Conor Clarke McGrath did an act playing a little Welsh child (he’s from Wales), and his bit was he’s afraid of clowns.

“My character isn't scared of arty European clowns,” he said. “My character is, like, specifically scared of, like, kind of American circus clowns.”

But like McGrath’s rendition literally as a child – for many, clowning is about returning to their inner child.

“It’s vague,” said performer Semler, who got into clowning via drag.

"My friend hosts a queer club night in Galway called taboo. And so she asked me, would I be interested in drag? So I thought, yeah, okay.”

 She said she is always doing little bits with her friends anyways.

“We'll have an afters at my house, and it'll be 3am, I'll be like, right, I'm gonna put the clown nose on,” she said. 

“And I'll come downstairs with a prop or something. And all my friends will be drunk,” she said. “I just sit them down and give them a show for like, 10 minutes or something.”

“It’s supposed to be something you feel,” said Breen, the performer, who became a clown after being part of the stand-up world, and got exposed to clown work for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Performer Conor Clark McGrath, said the same: he first got exposed to clown work at the Edinburgh Fringe as a teenager. He met someone who had gone to École Philippe Gaulier, a famous clown school outside Paris, and he went.

“It’s improv on steroids. Really the purest way is just to get up with nothing,” he said. “You see your audience, you do something that makes the audience laugh, and then you repeat it, and then you keep doing it until they stop laughing.”

Semler said when she did a clowning course she came to believe that it doesn’t have to be funny. 

“I realised that clowning wasn't just about happiness, but it was about like, tragedy and sadness and like, there's actually a lot of depth to it, which made me really drawn towards it,” she said.

“Clowning is very much a very honest representation of myself, like it's, it's kind of me and my most vulnerable state, or like, the child version of myself,” she said. 

Breen, too, said that it doesn’t have to be funny – but he likes being funny. 

“I just sort of exist and I'm not really particularly funny or there's not much going on,” he says, “and maybe it's a flaw in in my practice at the minute where, like, I'm happy to live in the silence and just exist and just sort of see how people are feeling”.

But for McGrath, clowning does have to be funny, he says. “Yeah, absolutely, they have to be funny. They have to be in the moment, and then they have to react to the laughter.”

Back at the show?

There were eight clowns at the show on Friday at Daylight, which lasted two hours. 

Breen was in all white with a white face, another clown was in a spider costume, performer Muireann Kavanagh was dressed as a businessman, and another had a party hat, clown nose, and dripping makeup as she performed a clown's guide to heartbreak.

Cunningham said that while this was a once-off for now, as a fundraiser for a play she’s putting on, there’s more clown events on the horizon. There’s Who’s that Clown? every couple months on Pearse Street that Francis Breen puts on.

There’s also Clown Hall, which started in February and is supposed to be on every week, said Liza Borghesani, who co-hosted it, who also performed at the clown scratch night on Friday. 

“Clown Hall is just a place for people who want to try out clowning bits, but also are just curious about clowning, to do it,” Borghesani said, "It's stupid, it's beautiful, it's simple, and it's really tender as well."

McGrath said that’s how he ended up at this clown event at Daylight. He saw about the first clown jam, Clown Hall, on Instagram at the start of the month, and went along, and then heard about this scratch night.

He didn’t expect it to be like in school – told on the spot that it was his turn to go. “They pulled names from a hat,” he said. “I went first.”

"It's a radically give‑and‑take space. And it's also just stupid – like, it's so stupid. Here I am trying to intellectualise it, but it's a body experience," he says.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.