Juggling life
Clown school offers community-outreach classes and rubber chickens.

By Charlie Anders

ON FREDERICK STREET , just above the edge of Golden Gate Park, someone has scrawled a legend in the cement: "Clowns Live Forever."

A hundred yards or so away, in a building the size of an aircraft hangar, a man is tossing his wife into the air using his feet. She's in a suspended harness, and they both wear leotards. Above them, children swing by their legs on a trapeze, one by one, before somersaulting and dropping onto a big net.

The husband, Carlo, eventually hopes to be able to toss his wife, Orlene, with his feet without having to use the harness. He's also working with inanimate objects, including a baton. It's unusual for someone to foot-juggle both people and objects, but Carlo and Orlene are putting together a routine in which they portray a quarreling clown couple in a living room. "She'll throw an object at me, and I'll catch it with my feet," Carlo explains. Or she'll trip and fall onto his feet. All of the stunts will look like accidents.

The San Francisco School for the Circus Arts takes clowning seriously. The school added a clowning program to its classes in acrobatics, contortionism, and other circus skills in 2000. Between 10 and 16 students a year study clowning, which includes courses in acrobatics and basic circus skills. Roughly 900 students enroll annually at the circus school's Clown Conservatory. About 60 to 80 are serious about a career in the circus, SFSCA director Dominique Jando estimates.

Tuition is $7,600 a year, and students can work off up to $3,500 of that in "sweat equity." The school also offers some scholarships.

The closure several years ago of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Clown College left no serious clown school in the United States, says SFSCA Clown Conservatory director Jeff Raz. The SFSCA started its clown program with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and gradually built it up from workshops to a six-month program to the present yearlong program.

Graduates from the Clown Conservatory receive a certificate, plus a rubber-chicken key chain and a stuffed clownfish. Many alumni have already found career success as well, by winning the Jose Soledad Aycardo Award for best clowns in Mexico's first all-clown festival and touring with such companies as Montreal's famous Cirque Éloize, Lazer Vaudeville, and Make*A*Circus.

"There are lots of different venues that clowns work in," Raz says. "Some of them glamorous, some of them less glamorous."

Carlo and Orlene came to San Francisco to study at the Clown Conservatory, and now that they've graduated, they continue to train and teach there. One of the famous Castor brothers, from the renowned foot-juggling squad in the Teatro Zinzanni, is working with them on their act.

Two other performers, former members of Cirque de Soleil and the Pickle Family Circus, have come to the SFSCA to retrain and develop a new act.

One former SFSCA student, Will, is back for a visit. Will was in the youth circus program for 12 years and now studies at the National Circus School in Montreal, one of the most prestigious circus schools in the world. Jando says every year there are one or two kids in the SFSCA's summer camp who turn out to have an aptitude and drive for the circus. Some of them may go on to have circus careers.

The SFSCA doesn't have a formal career-development office, program director Peggy Ford says. But it does network on behalf of its students, and agents and scouts come to its annual show and regular recitals. "The circus is a big, old word-of-mouth place," Ford says. People contact the school looking to fill slots, too: the Marin Shakespeare Company just called seeking "a fairy who can do webs."

Some requests turn out to be unrealistic – companies call asking things like, "Do you have an army of midgets who can tap dance on our product?" according to Ford.

The school focuses on public service as well as careers. It includes a "Clowning in Community" program in which students study things like clown therapy and "religious clowning." They learn about clown traditions in other parts of the world to see how clowns serve their communities. In the second semester, students partner with hospitals, homeless shelters, schools, and other groups to research ways clowns can help locally. Some are working with the Alameda County Waste Management Authority, performing shows to educate people about recycling, reuse, and rot. Another used clowning to bring more physicality to a local Dungeons and Dragons group.

"In many societies, clowns are very central to the social and spiritual life of the country and the political life," Raz says. This has been true in America in the past. But "now, the most prominent clown is the corporate logo Ronald McDonald. We ask, how can clowns have another kind of influence that's not corporate?"

The SFSCA also has expanded its commitment to young people and offers Chinese acrobatics classes in Chinatown to youths.

That commitment to do-gooding not only attracts grant money, but it also draws students. Sarah has just auditioned for the Clown Conservatory because she feels clowning is "the most accessible theater." She studied circus in Brazil from 2001 to 2002 and would like to use clowning for "conflict resolution and social justice," she says.

The clown program also emphasizes clown history, with a reading assignment every week and classes that focus on "traditional clown material." It's similar to the way a music student starts with scales and then moves on to the classics, Raz says. "Students are not asked to create anything from scratch; they fill in and interpret classic material."

Later the students create their own material, including community-focused work. This year the clowning school will work with a group called Unconditional Theater to create a documentary theater project similar to the Laramie Project.

"It's a very intense program, and clowning takes a lot of individual attention," Raz says. A lot of the focus is on nitty-gritty acrobatics, like how to have someone stand on your shoulders. Or, in the case of more advanced clowns, such as the school's Chinese clowning instructor, Xia Ke Min, how to do a flip and land upside-down in a headstand on someone else's head.

"Really, I approach clowning from an architectural point of view," Raz says. The act must be technically perfect to allow the clown to create a memorable character who transcends the material. Great clowning comes from someone playing with his or her "quirkiest and sometimes least socially acceptable traits." But the training starts with laying the basic foundation. "I trust that every student coming in has a lot of quirkiness in them," Raz says.

Charlie Anders is a San Francisco writer and the publisher of other magazine.