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Tim Reid on Rachel Mason: FUTURECLOWN
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Tim Reid on Futureclown

Rachel Mason’s Futureclown uses clown to bare the literal speech of those in power. After developing the character while making a rock opera, she did a few stunts in the makeup and costume of Futureclown. For one she sang Stairway to Heaven in a Guitar Center accompanied by a middle school marching band. Then one day, watching the absurd performance of a Republican filibuster, Futureclown found its context and political voice. As with many things, her project may have come to an apex with the ascendancy of Trump.

Among the functions of clown is to accompany ritual. While the drizzle fell on DC on January 20th, Futureclown lip-synched Trump’s first words as president in a live stream recorded in the storefront of LACE on Hollywood Boulevard. The resulting video documents the peaceful transfer of power and shows the fool becoming sovereign.

Through a laptop camera set on a table looking up, the clown addresses us directly with occasional looks to the right, to a screen we can’t see that broadcasts Trump delivering his speech. As Trump has, for once, looked to his teleprompter, the clown looks over to check and incorporate the president’s physicality. The ongoing struggle to accurately lip-synch the speech heightens a sense of distress. In the disjuncture between the mouth we see and the words we hear, the words gain visceral force. Their weight is registered.

For Futureclown, Mason adopts the whiteface, high status clown. Her makeup accentuates the eyes and mouth. Against the base layer of white, her eyes are each in the drop of two big black inverted tears whose tails travel onto her cheeks. In the center of her face, her mouth stands out also lined in black. The nose is not otherwise adorned and we see it mostly in the shadows of the two nostrils.

The white clown, bossy and authoritative, was the preeminent clown of nineteenth century Europe. It was often paired with an Auguste or red clown, a low status clown closer to our contemporary inept and bumbling circus clown, putting the two in a master/servant relationship that followed the traditions of Commedia Dell’Arte. The white clown can also be something of a dandy, and Futureclown’s performance draws out this aspect of Trump. Along with mouthing the text, she performs his gestures, his right hand pinching the air like there was a little more ketchup to squeeze from it.

Though Mason accurately depicts him as the white, on the campaign Trump played the red. He was called this by media and critics: a clown, a buffoon, an idiot. Perhaps this explains his popularity, and his resilience. Clowns are known for their sensitivity, their ability to change according to conditions, to be especially aware of hierarchies in flux and to play in the space of imbalance and disorder. They inhabit contradiction, and already dangling from the lowest rung, ready to swing lower, insult, critique, and satire cannot level them. Instead, such low blows reinforce their position. A clown, then, must take Trump quite seriously. Physically agile and emotionally fluid, clowns are indestructible. It is this that can make a clown terrifying.

As critique, Mason’s performance is not attacking or satirical. It does not feed that narrative which reaffirms the power in place, or perform a joke that allows dismissive laughter. Neither does it offer anything which a supporter of the administration could outright deride. Futureclown simply and gently frames Trump through his literal presence, his voice in the room. Not making a specific argument, this general mode of criticism cannot be attacked as simply, point by point.

Through the particular intimacy of its performance, Mason gets, via her clown, an opportunity to learn of its subject: channeling this other, inhabiting that energy and power in a way perhaps similar to how the dispossessed have been awakened in championing Trump. As Mason told me after her experience as the medium of his language: “Trump has a kind of unbridled sense of something that is much more. His ambition just doesn’t know any bounds. This might not be enough for him, achieving the presidency. I get this feeling of total desperation from him for something even greater and bigger, and he needs more and more. I think with Obama, I think he felt he needed to accomplish a certain thing by being in that highest of positions. Where Trump is something more complicated. I wouldn’t even try to understand it.”

Better than any CNN or Fox News footage, Mason’s performance clearly renders the historical moment of the speech as, in addition to Trump’s words, one also sees their effect. This is most striking in the moments when Mason must pause for the applause. In those gaps she holds, stilled, and stares at the camera. Some sort of fear is palpable. In playing Futureclown Mason does not need to add anything. The subject provides all the hyperbole and exaggeration. Mason’s performance exhibits another aspect of the liminal. The clown serves as the space between the president and a person under that rule. Through Futureclown we see the speech and its reception. The clown makes space for both to be visible beside one another. To play that way requires a sensitivity and lightness and porosity. And in that we see her, and our vulnerability.

Tim Reid makes theater, writes, and performs. In Chicago he studied clown and worked with 500 Clown, and in Los Angeles he has worked principally with John Gilkey and Mady Schutzman. He was an ensemble member with The Neo-Futurists in Chicago from 2008 to 2011, and was an original member of the Los Angeles-based Wet The Hippo. He most recently presented a play he made at PAM and has been writing little melodramas.

Rachel Mason filters the archetypal forms of political art through an expressionistic physicality, makes video, drawing, and handcrafted sculpture, and has recorded 14 albums of music and written 3 operas. She is currently working on a large scale multi-media performance series called, The Moving Mountain. 

photo courtesy of the artist

Tagged Long Riting  LACE 

Posted on March 10, 2017.

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