Richard Pochinko takes his clowning seriously and, through his passion for the art, inspires others to do the same.
EVERY ONE OF US HAS A CLOWN INSIDE; IT’S JUST A MATTER OF FINDING THE WAY TO DO IT", says Richard Pochinko. From anyone else, that statement would sound like saccharine pop Psychology is a clown teacher. In Canada, where only a decade ago the art of clowning was almost non-existent, he has been responsible for spawning a host of performers, men and women who are now earning their living as professional clowns
We are sitting in the Montreal apartment which has been his home for the past two years. The apartment has an atmosphere of quiet restraint. It is sparsely furnished; a few masks and batik hangings on the theme of clowning decorate the walls. But the charismatic presence in the chair opposite me charges the room with vitality. Pochinko’s blue eyes light, his whole body is animated as he talks about the art of clowning. As he speaks, I begin to understand how much more there is to clowning.than painted faces and circus gags, and why it is said that the clown is a free spirit who makes it possible to view the world in new and extraordinary ways. Richard Pochinko’s passion for clowning has propelled him across the nation again and again over the last nine years, teaching the future clowns of this country as well as giving workshops to people without such ambition, people who just want to find their laughter again.
But how do you teach someone to be a clown, to be funny? "You don’t", he says. "You guide them. When I say "Eileen: Clown, what comes into your mind?" I sat for a moment frozen into a self-conscious attitude, hands folded under my chin, thinking frantically. "There!" he exclaimed, mimicking my gesture. "What just went through your head?" I answered that as first I was panic-stricken, then I saw all the different Possibilities. "Yes, and between the panic and possibilities lies your clown. The panic and the possibilities are universal. If you can learn to laugh at your panic and together we can find a way to express it, then people will identify with it and go through their panic with you and release it. So you see what you’re doing for an audience? The audience identifies with the clown. That’s the difference between an actor and a clown. While an actor is playing someone else, a clown is playing himself and you. A clown doesn’t act; he pretends, like a child does. but is the innocence after experience"
Over the years, Richard Pochinko has sought to develop a uniquely Canadian brand of clowning. Before he began teaching at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 1972, anyone in this country wishing to become a clown had to go to Europe or the United States to study "As Canadians, " he says, " we are wonderful imitators, and Canadian audiences accepted the classical tradition of Europe and the Barnum and Bailey circus type of clowning without thinking of the potential alternatives we could offer." Pochinko, who studied both the European and American styles and did not feel satisfied with either, searched for another direction. He found it, after many detours, in the ancient tradition of North American Indian clowning.
A clown teacher is an odd professor for someone who, as a child growing up on a farm outside Winnipeg, hated clowns; they frightened him. It was the theater that attracted him. In 1960, at the age of 14, he left his parents’ farm to enter a four-year theater program at the Manitoba Theatre School under the direction of John Hirsch. After graduating he embarked on a career as actor. director, choreographer, working in theaters across the country. By 1970, although he had gained a sizable reputation, he began to feel restless, confined. His classical training, he felt, was too limiting, it didn’t speak to the present age, yet the outpourings of the new theater of the late sixties seemed to lack form and roots. He decided that he needed to broaden his understanding of what theater was. That year he applied for and received a Canada Council research grant. With it he traveled to England, Greece, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia; watching performances, rehearsals, attending workshops and seminars. Eventually, he ended up in Paris.
It was in Paris that his fascination with clowns began. "I lived across the street from the Cirque d’Hiver. From my window I could see the clowns coming and going and became intrigued with them. I began following circus after circus all over Europe...It wasn’t just the circus I was following. It was something bigger, something to do with the ability to laugh at yourself. I realized that this must be what clowning is all about and got more deeply involved."
Pochinko enrolled in Jacques LeCoq’s mime school in Paris where he spent a year studying mime, mask and clown techinques. In 1972, he returned to Canada but was immediately invited to teach mask work at the University of Washington in Seattle. While in Seattle he continued to study clown technique, this time with a professional clown named Bari Rolfe. It was in her studio that he came into contact with a North American Indian clown, Jonsmith, who became his mentor and initiated him into the tradition of North American Indian clowning.
Jonsmith was the one who helped Pochinko find his own clown. "The first time I met Him, he walked into the studio wearing a business suit and a hat with a feather in it. He looked at me keenly and said: "So you’re interested in masks, boy," Pochinko adds, laughing. But from that moment on, Jonsmith took Pochinko under his wing. He spent months working with Pochinko on Native Indian masks, telling him stories about clowns, recounting Indian legends, imbuing him with mystery of clowning.
He told his pupil how his people had always had clown clans as part of the social make-up of their tribes, and that clowns were revered as powerful shamans, healers, as well as being "delight-makers." They were the ones who kept people in touch with the everyday while fulfilling the need for a connection with the sacred. Functioning as social regulators, they had absolute freedom to ridicule whomever they pleased, and whenever the society became too rigid, the clowns were called out to perform their raunchy antics. They would insult and humiliate the chief and the elders in public, to show them that they were only human. They would defy accepted behavior, turn the world tospy-turvy and bring new insight into the truth about Man’s place within the order of the universe.
"Then one day, quite abruptly," says Pochinko. "Jonsmith sent me away: 'I’m not going to see you again. Good-bye,' he said. 'But I’ll always be there if you really need me.' I never saw him again. But sometime when I’m standing in a class facing a problem, not knowing which of the multiple possible solutions to choose from. I can feel him looking over my shoulder, saying ‘So what are you going to do now? and I hear him giggle."
Richard Pochinko now believes North American Indian clowning to be the highest refinement of the ancient art. "I the American circus, "he says, "the clown is not important. What’s important is the gag. That’s why you never remember individual clowns (with the possible exception of Emmett Kelly). It’s the gag that’s handed down from one generation of clowns to the next and the audience laughs, not at the clown, but at the gag. In the European system you’re laughing with the character in a situation. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, for example, are basically Europeans clowns who brought that tradition to America. but the North American Indians consider the clown to be holy man; he is the ‘messenger of the gods’ - and the gods have an incredible sense of humor.."
Upon his return to Canada from Seattle at the end of 1972, Pochinko was hired as a freelance director at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. He convinced Jean Roberts, the artistic director at the time, to sponsor a Centre of Research into masks work, clowning and circus techniques and sent out a letter across Canada inviting anyone interested in clowning to write to him. Within weeks he had 600 responses. From these he chose 28 actors to join the workshop.
The workshop lasted approximately a year. Pochinko taught the usual clowning skills, mime and mask work, plus tight-rope walking, unicycling, juggling. To acquire practical experience the group even joined an American circus touring the Maritimes. For a whole month they slept in tents, did one-night stands, and when the ringmaster bellowed: "And here come the clowns, "all 28 of them would come out and perform the regular circus gags. But the most and continues to be, to teach each person to find and express his own personal clown.
To do this, he involves his students in a lengthy series of exercises involving movement, mask work - making them and wearing them - and psychology techinques aimed at stripping away the layers of social persona they have accumulated, in order to find a neutral place within from which to work. Only then, he believes, can a person begin to find the character of his clown - and often what emerges is very surprising.
Pochinko tells the story of a woman, a protestant minister, who came to a clown workshop he gave a few years ago in Toronto. "She said she came because she had a lot of questions about her faith and thought she needed a good laugh. The first day, she brought a balloon saying ‘God is love.’ I told her that was the phoniest thing I had ever seen.
She was furious. For the next class, I asked her to bring all her slogans, to come dressed in all the ways she could sell God. Well, everything was there! Buddha, crosses, a Salvation Arm drum, slogans, banners; I made her do a strip-tease of sorts, throw everything away and see what she had left to sell. In the end what she was left with was - God: just her faith, which was very strong. She came selling dogma, but she did, in fact, have a real faith which emerged the minute she stopped selling it. I would love to hear one of her sermons now.
Richard Pochinko is a most unusual teacher. One of his former students, Cherly Cashman (whose highly acclaimed show Turning Thirty toured Canada during the last two years) says that there was always as energy and air of excitement in his classes: "Richard is not a methodical teacher; he works spontaneously and by instinct, giving personal attention to each individual. The atmosphere he creates is inspiring; people would do anything he asked - things they never imagined they were capable of. In the end, I think what I learned was that clowning is more human and more intimate than acting. The clown is the basic unltrammeled self. It’s the closest one comes to the real ‘I.’"
Out of the original center for research and subsequent workshops that Pochinko has been invited to give across Canada over the last few years, about a dozed professional clowns have emerged. Performers such as Montr‚al’s Bob Pot, Jan Kudelka in Toronto, Jan Henderson in Edmonton and Michael Fahey in Halifax are passing on what they have learned by teaching as well as through creating their own clown shows.
Jan Kudelka pictured on the cover, who spent three years working with Pochinko, credits him with being the finest theatrical teacher she has met. Kudelka was part of his maritime tour and went on, with another Pochinko student, Marsha Coffey, to put together a show called Circus Gothic. It has toured parts of Canada and is presently under option for off-Broadway productions.
These are not clown shows for children. Performed in theaters and cabarets, they are intended to stir adult audiences to reflect and laugh and rediscover their sense of play. In his show, Birth of a Clown, which played across Canada this year, Ian Wallace, another former Pochinko student, takes the audience on a journey form birth through life and then beyond. Wallace (professionally known as Nion) breaks all the cardinal rules of traditional clowning. A clown is one persona; Nion is continuously transforming himself from one character into another, but without ever losing his essential clown. Traditionally one never combined props and mime, and mime language; Nion does. Under Pochinko’s direction, Wallace gives a mesmerizing performance which keeps us laughing, astounded, and at the same time puts us back in touch with the mystery of life. as we observe and interact with Nion in his various situations, we become aware that he is listening for our reactions and, by improvising on them, Bringing something of us onto the stage so that we begin to see ourselves and laugh at ourselves.
Today Pochinko is more interested in directing and producing professional clown shows than in teaching. Having spent many years as a traveling clown teacher, giving workshops and master classes in response to the needs of performers and lay people in different parts of Canada (which he still occasionally does) he now prefers to work on the next plateau with clowns he as trained: the development of clown shows for an adult audience. Over the last two years he has been working closely with Cheryl Cashman and Ian Wallace on their respective solo clown shows. Their performances have received rave reviews in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montr‚al.
Richard Pochinko believes that the performers he has trained are a new breed of clown. A clown closely in touch with the people and rhythms of this country. "In traveling across Canada," he says, "you see how diverse it is. You can feel the different quality of energy in the different provinces. I say it in the workshop, how differently the same mask was worn, which parts of the mask people chose to interpret."
There are more clowns performing in Canada today than ever before. In Qu‚bec, where clowning has long been actively supported, a whole new generation of clowns is playing to packed houses. In Toronto, York University’s theater department is offering a new course in clowning taught by Dean Gilmore ( a Canadian clown trained in Jacques LeCoq’s school). Next year, Pochinko hopes to open a center in Montr‚al for further clown study. He’ll call his company Les Productions D‚rido (a play on words ‘des rideaux’, and an amalgam of the names of himself and his two partners, Debra Silver and Pierre Dominique Fecteau).
Perhaps all this interest in clowning reflects the state of the world," he says. "Clowns are born when society has a need for them. Remember that Chaplin and Keaton were most popular during Depression. And that the Indians say that clowns appear when the leaders get out of hand!
"What we need," Pochinko concludes, "is a clown for our time. A clown that gives us a larger sense of God in each of us, that celebrates our humanness, our animalness, and the times that we can touch each other in a moment of laughter."