Writings
Making war with love: The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army — Kolonel Klepto
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency."
"One of the worst mistakes any revolution can make is to become boring. It leads to rituals as opposed to games, cults as opposed to communities and the denial of human rights as opposed to freedom"
Clunk… The heavy metal shutters of the armed forces recruitment centre roll down. Its 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon in Leeds city centre, no more soldiers, sailors, or airmen will be joining up today. Inside the deserted office the glossy exhibition panels exclaim "Be the best" in brash bold letters. But dreams of adventure and liberating foreign lands will have to be postponed, the office is shut for the day and a decidedly un-glossy spray painted banner with "Closed" written in wobbly green letters, is stuck to the shutters. On the pavement outside a makeshift recruitment stall is set up, and dozens of leaflets are being handed out to passing shoppers "Be Rubbish" they entreat "Join the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army."
A few minutes previously 15 clownbatants from the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA), dressed head to toe in combat gear delicately trimmed with pink and green fuzzy-fur and sporting sparkling steel colanders helmets, had marched into the centre and asked the recruiting officers if they could join up. In high pitched clown voices we told them about our previous experience in the clown army, displaying skills such as silly salutes, showing subversive slapstick drills, exhibiting the art of telling jokes that disarm and explaining that where their bombs fail we might be able to succeed with laughter.
Figure 1. Sorry. The army isn't recruiting today. Its closed.
But they hadn't taken our desire to join their army seriously, and a very large and extremely un-amused commando from the Royal Marines tried to throw us out of the centre with the help of a growing number of police officers. But it's hard to move a rebel clown, they don't resist in a conventional sense, but tend to slip out of the clutches of authority like wobbly jelly and distract them from their duties with loud gaffaws and stinging mockery. The more our pleas to join the army fell on deaf ears - "Please teach us how to liberate people!" "Where are the application forms? " "Why can't we have really really big guns like yours?" - the more chaotic the scene in the recruitment office became. Very long sausage ballons started screaming across the space sounding like ammunition about to explode, sherbert filled toy aeroplanes did manic loop the loops over the RAF desks, one clown crawled around the floor polishing soldiers boots with his feather duster while another read out loud the latest communique from CIRCA (see figure 1), which detailed the absurdity of the so called "hand-over " of power in Iraq and announced the occupation of Leeds by CIRCA and the establishment of the Clown Provisional Authority.
Figure 2. CIRCA Communique No 3.
Earlier in the day we had occupied the local BBC HQ, to search for dangerous propaganda (weapons of mass destraction), and the Labour party offices, where cabinet minister Hilary Benn resides when he has time to be in his constituency, in his absence he was offered the position of minister for International Clowning Development.
Figure 3. Clowns occupy MP Hilary Benn's office. But the clown himself wasn't there.
Two days later CIRCA was spotted marching around the Menwith Hill spy base, helping over 200 police officers - on foot, bicycle, horseback and quad bike - shepherd, film and document about 80 peace protesters around the base. Nothing undermines authority like holding it up to ridicule and one of the most efficient techniques of ridicule is mocking by imitation. Every time the police made a line to block the protesters way, the clowns would create their own line in front of them. Every time a policeman shouted to the crowd to "stay behind the line" (road markings) a clown would repeat the demand in a silly voice over and over again, ad infinitum - incessant repetition is key to ingredient of slapstick comedy - this would be followed by endless improvisations around the concept of the LINE, until eventually all 18 clowns speaking in chorus asked each policeman in turn "Officer …what's so important about the LINE". The police are comfortable with confrontational resistance but faced with the art of ridicule, they don't know quite know how to respond. In this instance they soon change their language and seemed to be too embarrassed to use the word "line" anymore, asking people to simply "get over there."
Figure 4. Spot the clown.
At one point a very long tape measure appeared and the clowns set up a competition to find the tallest policeman and the smallest protester, an exercise that ended with the clowns getting completely tangled in the tape and falling over. Whenever the very slick mountain bike cops passed by, clowns would idolize their "cool" lycra shorts,sunglasses and shiny new bikes, causing the police on foot to smile and thus teasing out some of the internal tensions of the force - "divide and fool" being one of CIRCA's key strategies to rebel against the forces of coercive power!
These two days of action followed three days of intensive rebel clown training at a "big shoe camp", held in a local church in Leeds, a fortnight beforehand. A handful of unofficial Training officers, including General Confusion and Private Property, were invited to the city by a local Peace group, Peaceniks, and the anticapitalist network, Leeds ARC (Action for Radical Change). From the training emerged 23 new recruits, who had all come to their senses and realised that in such an upside down world, what else can one be but a clown.
Reclaim the Clowns: The art of Rebel Clowning
"Clowns always speak of the same thing, they speak of hunger; hunger for food, hunger for sex, but also hunger for dignity, hunger for identity, hunger for power. In fact, they introduce questions about who commands, who protests."
CIRCA is not another excuse to dress up and bring colour and laughter to the grey ranks of protests. It isn't just a ragged bunch of activists sporting false noses, a smudge of grease paint, camouflage pants and bad wigs, but a highly disciplined army of immaculately trained clowns, a militia of authentic fools, a battalion of natural buffoons.
Within CIRCA we are developing a form of political activism that brings together the ancient practice of clowning and the more recent practice of Non-violent direct action. We aim to develop a methodology that transforms and sustains the inner emotional life of the activists as well as being an effective technique for taking direct action. CIRCA sees both the soul and the street as sites of struggle, realising that a destructive tendency within many activist movements is forgetting the inner work of personal transformation and healing. And that innovative forms of creative street action are crucial for building and inspiring movements.
CIRCA's combatants don't pretend to be clowns, they are clowns, real clowns. Clowns that have run away from the anemic safety of the circus and escaped the banality of kids parties, Fools that have thrown away their sceptres and broken the chains that shackled them to the throne. CIRCA aims to make clowning dangerous again, to bring it back to the street, reclaim its disobedience and give it back the social function it once had: its ability to disrupt, critique and heal society. Since the beginning of time tricksters (the mythological origin or all clowns) have embraced life's contradictions, creating coherence through confusion - adding disorder to the world in order to expose its lies and speak the truth. The clown soldiers that make up CIRCA embody life's contradictions, they are both fearsome and innocent, wise and stupid, entertainers and dissenters, healers and laughing stocks, scapegoats and subversives.
The use of carnival as a form of joyful resisitance has become a key tactic of the global anticapitalist movement, with "Carnivals against Capitalism" taking place across the world. Clowning, like carnival suspends and mocks everyday law and order and like carnival the clown exists on the borderline between life and art, in a particular midzone. In all ecosystems, it is the spaces in between, the edges (such as where land meets water) where the most evolution and bio-diversity takes place. Clowns takes this magical no-man's land, wherever they go, spreading a spirit of creativity that dances on the edge of chaos and order.
How to be stupid: Training the Rebel Clown
"Play cannot be denied. You can deny if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play"
Like all armies, people who wish to join the ranks of CIRCA have to undergo training. Every one has a rebel clown hiding inside them somewhere, but bringing that clown out requires hard work. Before going into battle with CIRCA, civilians take part in intensive "bigshoe camps". Using games and exercises fresh recruits are able to begin the slow and often difficult process of rediscovering/uncover ing their inner clown. The one that was there as a child, the one that we all grew up with, the one that society stamped on and imprisoned in stories and fairgrounds, theatres and circuses. The one that wandered through daily life impeccably innocent and wonderfully wise, the one who learnt though playing and knew that the difference between the world of imagination and reality was only a matter of opinion.
Finding ones own clown is about learning to cultivate a state of being rather than a technique. It doesn't matter how well you can throw a custard pie, fall over or tell a joke, if your entire being has not taken on the state of clown and isn't committed to staying with that state, then it becomes a pretence, mere acting. Clowns become through their bodies, they think with their hearts and feet, and they play with everything and everybody. Play requires surrendering to spontaneity, losing all our exspectations of success, stopping the compulsion to be clever, letting go and trusting the flow - Something many activist find hard to do.
Like the Taoist and the ecologist , the clown believes that the world is alive, that everything is connected to everything else, and that left to itself life has a capacity to self organise. He she or it, for its gender is often uncertain, knows that small is not only beautiful (think of the small props that clowns love) but effective, and that it is often the little disturbances in life, the right trick at the right time in the right place, that can make a big difference. This thinking small is an immediate challenge to the quantative desires of many activists strategies want to have more members, more numbers on actions.
Activist culture is often parlysed by the desire to get things right. The fear of not creating the perfect action/campaign that will change the world, can be an enormous block to creativity. Yet many classic clown acts are founded on the idea that from failure comes opportunity, from the mistake - the falling over, the foot in the bucket - comes the game, the improvisation, the gag . The clown knows that the problem can be the solution, and is thus always learning and evolving. This requires keen observation and the ability to perceive every detail of a situation. If the clown doesn't prioritise listening s/he isn't able to play properly and make the most out of so little.
One of the biggest challenges for the novice rebel clown, which is in fact a process of undoing, is being able to get the right brain (intuitive, emotional)- to loosen up and to disable the dominance of the left brain (rational analytical). Once achieve, through learning to be stupid, this balance of left and right brain gives the clown the tools to play creatively and embody a deep spirit of honesty and openness. And the greatest thing they can give to cultures of radical political struggle is the gift of vulnerability which literally means the one who may be wounded, stemming from the Latin: vulnerablis - meaning wounding . Those who are vulnerable have skin that is open to attack.
What a bunch of 'nanas: Peeling off the activist armour
"No sooner do I get upon the stage than all my self-protective armour peels away from me and I am a recording instrument as sensitive as a mimosa plant. There is nothing I cannot feel and nothing I do not react to."
When the skin looses its thickness and our heart opens. When we start to listen differently and refuse to pretend that nothing is wrong with the world. When the injustices of the system don't feel normal anymore. When ecological devastation stops being perceived as the collateral damage of capital and inequality is no longer seen as inevitable. That is when we become active, that is the moment when we identify ourselves as "activist" and start to disobey and rebel, dedicating our lives to struggle and creating a better world.
But something seems to happen to many activists, after a certain amount of time trying to create a different world, a detrimental change takes place, not in the world but in ourselves. The sensitive vulnerable human being who felt what was wrong with the world and transformed those feelings into action, looses the humanity at the centre of the being, looses the ability to feel and with it looses the ability to take effective action.
With every image of another casuality of war, with every experience of police repression, with every new statistic of global poverty and pollution, the activist skin hardens, layer by layer, getting gradually thicker and thicker, until armour appears. Armour to protect her/himself from the debilitating feelings that are aroused as s/he understands more and more the absurd scale of the world's problems and the vicious levels of repression targeted at anyone who decides to work for radical change.
Encased in self protecting armour, without feelings left, it becomes easy to turn to violence, to isolate oneself from mainstream society and to be unable to relate well to fellow activists. Without feelings, listening to oneself and others becomes difficult. Often we cover up this loss with the idea that we have become fearless - we become the brave warrior, the heroic guerrilla , often making reckless decisions and putting ourselves or other into dangerous situations. But a warrior who is unable to really feel and perceive what is around her/himself will soon end up a dead and ineffective one. Fearlessness comes from escaping our bodies, forgetting we are made of flesh and blood and living in the pure abstraction of mind. By working with the body, the art of rebel clowning peels off this armour, to reveal the soft skin again, to find the vulnerable human being who once felt everything deeply, the sensible person - the person with profound senses.
Finding ones clown transforms fearlessness into courage - a word that has its roots in the French word 'coeur', meaning heart. Courage is not a loss of anything, far from it, it is embodied heart felt strength. Armed with courage, rebel clowns make war with love, feeling and acting at the same time. In an era of permanent capitalist accumulation and expansion what could be more spectacularly useless to the rational productivist spirit of capital than an army of clowns. In a time of permanent global war on terror, what could be more dangerous than gaggles of clown soldiers, armed with love and driven by courage.
Confusing the enemy (even though we know that we are all the enemy)
"All the acts of drama of world history were performed before a chorus of the laughing people. Without hearing this chorus we cannot understand the drama as a whole"
CIRCA is a fighting force that exists between chaos and order, obedience and disobedience, reason and madness. We exist to resist in the streets, to take direct action and clog the machines of oppression and violence. We see rebel clowning as an extremely efficient and effective force with which to do this. Unlike most armies, CIRCA doesn't attack or retreat, in fact we don't confront at all, realising that confrontation is the language that all authority is trained to be able to deal with, it's their own language - a language of dualism and coercion. Instead of conflict and confrontation with police and forces of order, CIRCA has developed the deadly tactic of confusion.
Through our mockery and creative chaos we hope to speak a language which, on one level , authority understands - every one has an opinion on clowns, they either find them fascinating or horrifying and they are one of the most ancient forms of live performance and thus a profoundly popular form. But on another level they find it deeply bewildering. It is only the human being inside them, the child like circus goer, that recognises the clown. The other part of their being - the cop, the torturer, the killer, the authoritarian -cannot comprehend resistance that doesn't use conflict and yet has the power to mock and ridicule them. A gaggle of clowns in this context is very confusing.
We dismantle their power through the liberating force of laughter and like the body of the clown laughter is slippery and ever changing. You can laugh at someone and with someone, one minute it's an act of solidarity, the next a gesture of contempt. Like fear - the force that those in power try to control us with - laughter is infectious. Where fear constricts and closes, laughter releases. It opens the body and mind, throwing it into a transformative chaos - it can turn humiliation into humour and a situation of terror into revealer of truth. It's a form of sensuous solidarity which crisscrosses the normal lines of conflict - one minute those in authority are laughing at your stupidity, the next they are cowering from the mockery targeted at them.
In the trainings, the rebel clowns learn to march in perfect military formation and to scatter at given moments. The contrast between the ordered marching obedient bodies dressed in similar uniforms - a form that reflects the form of power - and the chaotic scattering of disobedient individual clowns in every direction, playing on and with everything in the vicinity, is another successful tactic of confusion.
Because the clown loves failure, even acts of repression can become spaces to mock and play with. Whenever the police put us into pens, we jump in willingly, turning a 'police pen' into a 'play pen', but then we jump out again (or get stuck trying to get out) and plead with them to throw us back in, because we so enjoyed it the first time. In order to mock the stop and search terrorist laws, which are regularly used to intimidate protestors, we fill our pockets to the brim (which often makes CIRCA members seem more portly than they actually are!) with stupid things - strings of sausages, underwear, rubber ducks, pink furry stuffed pigs, sex toys, miniature garden gnomes, old bones, small tanks, rubber ducks, plungers and more, which all have to be layed out on the street during searches. Dozens of police officers searching an army of clowns is a weird enough sight, but when members of the public see all the objects being taken out the absurdity of the situation overflows.
One of the things that the police are most unable to cope with is the fact that we are staying in clown character for the entirety of an action. Often they ask us to come out of character so they can talk sense with us. During an action against a conference for the corporate "reconstruction" of Iraq, a high ranking officer leaned over to one of the clowns and said "Can I have a serious word" - "A serious word" echoed Coco Bella, with his nasal twang, "what is a serious word? - Is 'encyclopedia' a serious word?" At which point the officer retreated, unable to communicate with the universe of the clown, unable to turn this object of deep humanity and humour into the enemy.
"We are you" the Mexican rebel Zapatistas declared and not so far away the rebel clown echoes a similar sentiment, "I may be different - a poor scapegoat, a grotesque ludicrous caricature, an object of ridicule " s/he proclaims, staring deep into our eyes and smiling anonymously from beneath layers of grease paint. " BUT - you - are - me." A silence fills the circus ring and then the audience laughs nervously, beneath their embarrassed smile they know that the clowns antics are honest reenactments of something they don't wish to reveal, the bottomless depth of their own folly.
" ….the clowns are organising, the clowns are organising - over and out…"
Kolonel Klepto is a member of the Clandestine Rebel Clown Army along with dozens of other buffoons, pranksters and misfits from around the UK and the world.