Outrageous makeup, a cringing sense of humor, entertaining contents with a political dimension – drag artists and clowns have a lot in common. Even though they have their own existences and history, clowns have been inspiring drag artists for years. More than just an inspiration, it’s about taking ownership.
The word “clown” was coined during the 17th century in England. From fair protagonists to circus icons, clowns slowly started to leave the circus tent to become iconic figures of pop culture. Far from the entertainment they were originally assigned to, clowns became one of the best known horror figures. Killer clowns are everywhere, mostly in books and movies like for example IT by Andrés Muschietti (2017) but also in real life in attraction parks and escape game rooms. The clown figure has also been reappropriated by political movements in the 90s.
In Joker by Todd Philip the word “clown” is used by stigmatized colored people in NY to describe themselves by how they’re treated by cops and society. The word “drag queen” also comes from the UK. During the last decade drag has seen its visibility increase with the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race and alternative shows like The Boulet Brothers Dragula (rejecting the pageant codes of Drag Race).
ClubKids appeared in the 90’s with clubbing culture. Even if they claim they belong to drag art, they’re destroying gender codes with a more infantile and preposterous aesthetic really inspired by clown’s influence.
“For years I’ve been thinking about becoming a teacher, then I realized I hate children, so I decided to become a child by myself.”
Tiggy Thorn, co-founder of Kindergarten party, in Tracks, April 2019
Another example of drag art meeting clown figures is the 8th episode of the 4th season of The Boulet Brothers Dragula. The challenge was to make a Floorshow, a kind of performative and narrative runway on Killer Clowns figure. Each finalist decided on their own interpretation during the performance – popcorn clown, tramp, Korean theater clown or sad pantomime, which shows the diversity of horror clown figures, their influence and the ability for the artist to take ownership of those codes.
One of the contestants, Dahli, definitely built their drag character on clown codes. Dahli confessed during the show that they were fascinated by clowncore to the point that they developed a sort of clown kink.
Clowns and drag artists are kinds of cousins in their own artistic dynamics. They both use the image of buffoons and freaks they’ve been reduced to in order to claim their messages on stage. In a society where LGBTQIA+ people are still stigmatized and oppressed it seems logical to take the dusty clown figure out of the closet to give it a new life.
The Example of the Belova-Iacobelli Company through Three of their Shows
by Soizic Kukla
Pierre-Yves Jortay (source: company website)
The Belova-Iacobelli Company was born from a meeting in 2012 between Tita Iacobelli and Natacha Belova in Santiago (Chile) as part of the Festival La Rebelión de Los Muñecos. In the same city, in 2015, they created a research laboratory around contemporary puppet theatre.
Tita Iacobelli started in 2001 as an actress. In 2005 she became involved in the company Viajeinmóvil (created by Jaime Lorca) as co-director, actress and puppeteer. She teaches in puppet workshops and has toured in different countries with several shows.
Natacha Belova is a historian by training. She was born in Russia and has lived in Belgium since 1995. It was as a costume designer and scenographer that she took her first steps in the performing arts, then specialized in the art of puppetry. She works on different projects, theater, dance, circus, cinema, opera, as well as exhibitions. In 2016 she created a research and training center “IFO asbl” in Brussels on puppetry arts. In 2017, she directed her first production.
In 2015, Tita Iacobelli and Natacha Belova decided to stage their first show “Tchaïka”. The first performance took place in June 2018 at the Festival La Rebelión de Los Muñecos. This show is freely inspired by Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. The form of interpretation is a single actress-puppeteer on stage, Tita Iacobelli, and a puppet: “Tchaïka addresses the theme of the violence of old age, the loss of memory, the loneliness of retirement, and the richness in human subjectivity through the poetic imagination of an actress. This show is built on a permanent tension between masterpieces of classical theatre, puppet theatre and choreographed movement,” as stated by the note of intent on the company’s online website. They add:
“It is a play that describes impatient and radical young artists, but also the older generation that is happy with keeping the positions they acquired. […] It also deals with mutual misunderstanding, cruel troubles of fate. Finally, it is a play about the search for ‘true meaning’ without which life is only arduousness and horror”.
The second show, “Loco” was presented for the first time in Charleville-Mézières (Ardennes) during the Festival Mondial des Théâtres de Marionettes in 2021. I attended the performance in a gymnasium that had been reorganized for the occasion. The interpretation brings together two actress-puppeteers, Tita Lacobelli and Marta Pereira (a puppeteer and graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières). This creation is freely inspired by Nicolaï Gogol’s Diary of a Fool. The note of intent of the show indicates:
“Through the story of this little employee and Gogol’s life, we will question our own solitudes, desires, frustrations and troubles in the face of what is established and reasonable […], the vital need to acquire a rewarding place within society while noting the absurdity of its values, the identity conflict between “being” and “appearing” constantly stirred by the demands of seduction and performance that surround us”.
Natacha Belova, the director explains:
“The starting point was a memory of a staging of TheDiary of a Madman, seen in the Soviet Union in 1990. My father staged it in his little theater in Russia and he himself played the role of Popritchine, the madman. This show was not a great success, but I remember especially the silence after Popritchine’s last monologue when he wants to rest on his mother’s chest away from the taunts of men, from his desk, from the beatings of the stick inflicted on him in the asylum, away from his own delusions. My father, a little man sitting on the floor in the middle of a cardboard set, his big blue eyes frozen on the projector of his small theatre; the light was too dim and the audience seemed to grow larger in this great silence. I have many other, more honourable memories of my father: director, actor, eloquent teacher, a great man. But why does memory send me back this miserable image more often? […] Our intention is to mix the fiction of the story with the reality of its author who lived a solitary life in voluntary exile far from Russia. […] It is not a play in praise of madness as a pathology, but a need to “reshuffle the cards”, to get out of the usual discourse, to seek a new axis of view on reality. Leaving behind the usual logic, to dream of something else.”
The intention on the festival program stated only, “Poprichtchin loves Sophie, the daughter of his boss. Except that he himself is at the bottom of the ladder. But what if he was actually King Ferdinand VIII of Spain. This is the story of a crazy love.”
At first, I knew only one thing: the play was about madness, the story of a man and loneliness –why would I go see such a show, especially at the end of a day on the festival? But, well, I still had a ticket on my festival package and then it was a “recommended” show, so without little conviction, I decided to go! It was a revelation. The two puppeteers (loose, long hair and black clothes) manipulated the puppet together on a human scale: his face has a tormented human expression, his chin is mobile. The only other elements – his torso, his arms, his legs– are those of the puppeteers who are also actresses and as the story unfolds, they play with their bodies. The audience smile and laugh at the way their hair becomes a dog for a moment. Accessories also enter the game such as the bed, sheets or a suitcase. Light effects reinforce this solitude. A giant ball of paper expresses the weight of the character’s loneliness and stress. A show to see for its exploration of the thread of emotion, tenderness, distress, madness.
The company’s 2022 creation is street theatre. The puppet is still the focal point, but this time in the form of a moving visual element, “It is a performance project that consists of evoking a mythical figure in urban consumption spaces to create a poetic disturbance in a commercial movement,” according to the note of intent. In “Sisypholia” the central element is a giant ball made up of a multitude of clothes. This ball is rolled in busy places like shopping streets or shopping centers…
“Our Sisyphus will roll this giant ball of clothes down one or more streets, until he reaches a point where the ball will return to the starting point. Sisyphus, fully aware of the absurdity of his effort, will repeat the same task over and over again, without hope or intention of transcendence, with discipline and vitality. And just like Camus’s Sisyphus, he is happy to accept this reality, in a perfectly absurd way. We wanted to talk about our daily desires for consumption. We have looked for a way that allows us to address this theme without placing ourselves in a moralistic position or a role of giving lessons. Freely inspired from the myth of Sisyphus we imagined a strange puppet figure who will embark on an absurd and repetitive quest, in an environment unsuited to his approach in order to create a slight disturbance. An image that leaves room for free interpretation, that blurs the tracks of understanding, but will create a blank, a pause, a disturbance of meaning in the daily movement of a crowd. This is not about caricature nor aggression. Instead, we want to create a chaotic and disproportionate object that would be a kind of ironic creator of chaos capable of extracting us from the compulsive rhythm of our society.“
The public premieres took place in Toulouse from Wednesday 5 to Saturday 8 October 2022 on the busy shopping street rue d’Alsace Lorraine, as part of the programming of “La Biennale Internationale des Arts Vivants.” It was free and lasted for 40 minutes. Natacha Belova and Dorian Chavez directed the staging. Natacha Belova designed the ball. Dorian Chavez (an Ecuadorian artist) was Sisyphus.
The creations of the company Compagnie Belova-Iacobelli have a link. The conclusion of the proposals of these shows are not in the closed form of a period or an exclamation mark, or even a question, or three dots. The conclusion is in the hands of the spectators, where to place the cursor of values, their own and those of others.
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