“Okay, who wants to get angry? Come into the center,” says Chris, our clown instructor.
There are about 20 of us in a circle in the small theater. A middle-aged insurance broker named Wendy walks into the center.
She gets into a wide squat stance and starts screaming, “This is your head! Boom! Boom! Boom!” she brings her arms down forcefully from overhead over and over again. “Boom! Boom! Booooooooommmmm! I am crushing your fucking heaaaaaaaaaad!”
After a couple minutes her face is red and she is out of breath, and she leaves the circle. We all applaud, and the next person enters the circle.
Time for a little context – why was I spending my weekend in a black box theater in Brooklyn, screaming, crying, and laughing at Clown for All Weekend with Christopher Bayes?
One of my first coaching clients was an actor. We were working together on boosting his confidence to fully embrace the identity of actor and start auditioning for parts again after a hiatus. It was an inspiring journey to be a part of, and along the way he told me about clown.
I was a little surprised when he first mentioned the word clown – I was picturing the classic red-nosed Bozo the Clown or Pennywise archetype, but hey, no judgement here. It’s your world, I’m just livin in it!
He went on to explain that this version of clown was more of an acting philosophy – or as my future clown teacher Christopher Bayes says, “Moving at the speed of fun, faster than your worry, louder than your critic.”
The idea is to strip away the layers of judgement, cynicism, cleverness, and self-consciousness until you are in a place of pure presence and spontaneity. This is where the real comedy gold is, yes, but it is also an extremely powerful place to be simply as a human moving through life. The more my client told me about his experiences with clown in his acting journey, the more I began to imagine how it could help me on my own journey.
I have been working on being more emotionally expressive for awhile now. Over the years I built up so many protective layers in my psyche that I wasn’t even able to see how blocked I was. Part of it was a survival strategy growing up as a sensitive nerdy boy. I had to be ready to be made fun of for any arbitrary detail – if someone thought my shorts were too short, someone didn’t like my shirt with frogs on it, someone didn’t like that I liked reading, someone didn’t like that I was passionate about xyz thing on any given day.
I slowly turned down the volume of my external displays of excitement and expressiveness. There were certain spaces where I felt safe, and I also did my fair share of rebelling and had scuffles with bullies over the years, but it was exhausting to always be on guard. I added more layers – and one of the big ones was blocking myself from crying in front of people.
It was okay at funerals and in dark movie theaters – or listening to the Braveheart soundtrack alone in my room – but crying for joy or from emotional overwhelm in front of others was firmly suppressed.
My wife has been very supportive of me reconnecting with my emotions, and a recurring example that has helped me to realize how blocked I am was at our wedding. I didn’t cry at all that day. I was smiling and happy and in performance/meet and greet mode throughout the day, and looking back I realize that was all a form of suppression as well. My body simply wouldn’t allow that kind of vulnerability to come to the surface in front of a crowd.
At first I was defensive when we would talk about it. I would insist that I just didn’t feel like crying – I was happy, so what’s the problem? But as time went by I began to notice moments where I would feel a swell of emotion, but then, as though a switch was being flipped, an internal process would take over automatically that would flip me to happiness/smiling or frustration/anger, depending on the situation.
This awareness was the first big step. Since then I have been chipping away, becoming more and more comfortable with being seen in general, and especially being seen in high emotional states – giving up on trying to control how I am perceived, and just being authentic in the moment.
So, knowing all this, you can see why I was very interested when I read reviews like this about Clown for All Weekend:
"Taking class with Christopher Bayes changed my life. He introduced me to the most beautiful thing in the world and I will cherish it for the rest of life. Before studying with Chris, I was afraid to truly reveal myself to the world -- afraid that if I let all the messiness of living tumble out, I might be judged, ridiculed or dismissed. But Chris created a safe, fulfilling, vulnerable, creative space of empathy and open-heartedness that allowed me to overcome my fear, bare my soul to my classmates, and discover that instead of being judged, ridiculed or dismissed, I could be seen, heard, and accepted for all that I am."
After a few months of keeping an eye on upcoming workshops, I signed up for the March 2025 weekend.
On the first day of the workshop, we did the following in the first hour:
Go around the circle and introduce ourselves.
Raise our arms overhead and scream as if we had just jumped out of a plane.
Ugly cry for several minutes.
Laugh for several minutes.
Stomp on the ground and yell expletives for several minutes.
After getting warmed up, one of the exercises was to make up and perform a song called “I Love it” with a small group. The song had to include a chorus, an improvised solo from each person, and some element of musical harmony.
My group came up with a rough concept and I began thinking about my solo. I knew it was supposed to be improvised, but part of me kept wanting to have something ready. The first group performed, and were very raw and intense and funny, and I started getting nervous – and then it was time for lunch and I tried not to think about it while I ate my giant chicken mole burrito from around the corner.
Our group went up first after lunch, and I was still in my head, trying to come up with clever ideas around the “I Love it” theme. We stood “offstage” (against the wall, fully visible to the audience) and looked at each other – we had a whole intro sequence prepared, we were going to dance onstage one by one – but then the guy next to me ran out and started screaming, “I loooove it! I looooove it!” – totally different from what we had planned, but it was perfect because all thoughts immediately left my head and I jolted into action.
We did a short uncoordinated dance together, and then the solos began. The guy who ran out first did a rant about how his cat had cancer and was going to die soon. There were groans and laughs from the audience. The next two solos were a blur, but I remember the one before me was about loving being alone in the shower and how you could sing or cry or do whatever you wanted. Then it was my turn.
I basically blacked out as I stepped forward, but when my group member had sung about crying in the shower it had sparked something, so I just started shout-talk-singing about how I had come here hoping to learn to cry more. I had some lines about not crying at my wedding, how as a man I was taught to push down my feelings and only let them out as anger or laughter. I talked about crying in my room to the Braveheart soundtrack, and I was surprised to hear laughs and cheers from the crowd.
I ended my solo and we did a final barbershop quartet style “I love iiiiiiiiiiiiit” harmony, and ran offstage. I was exhilarated, drained, and dehydrated, and I drank from my Nalgene and laughed and applauded as the rest of the groups went up to perform.
One of my favorite NYC street performers is Matthew Silver. If you ever spent time in Union Square pre-pandemic, you probably saw him in a leotard, holding rubber chickens and yelling, “Love! Love! Love! Fart! Fart! Fart!”
My corporate job’s office at that time was right next to Union Square, and I loved going from the sleek glass walls and white desks of the open-plan office full of financial consultants to watching Matthew roll around on the dirty pavement during my lunch break. He was incredibly committed and was out there pretty much every single day.
I remember one time I saw him interacting with a group of teens who were laughing timidly and recording him doing his thing. He went up to them and started yelling, “You can do it too! You can do it too!” and encouraging them to join him.
That line has really stuck with me through the years. It’s so simple and he was so right – there was nothing stopping me from running up and joining him other than my own mental blocks. A part of me wanted to, but I never did. I stayed an observer because I was afraid of how I might be perceived.
And there was nothing stopping me from quitting my corporate job and doing what I really wanted to do, but I had to do a ton of inner work to shift my mindset and allow myself to believe that it was possible. To stop allowing the judgements of others to dictate how I live my life.
What does your inner clown want to do? You may not realize it, but when you let your most authentic, uniquely awesome self take the stage, you are inspiring everyone around you to be a little more genuine. A little more expressive. A little more human. So the next time you see someone doing something that speaks to your soul, remember…
You can do it too!