This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Roblin Gray Davis is a professional actor, and he’s bringing one of his favorite ways to hone his skills to Juneau in a five week-long clowning course.
He says clowning can break down the walls we put up, to see what’s behind.
Listen:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Roblin Gray Davis: I am Roblin Gray Davis, and I am a theater maker, a lifelong Alaskan artist. Been in Juneau for over 25 years now, I do believe.
Part of my interest in theater has been pursuing this idea of Mask Theater that comes out of the tradition of Jacques Lecoq, which was a school in Paris, that kind of was fundamental in maybe reopening the theater world, the contemporary theater world, to ask, you know, “how can we make this more lively and more topical and more interesting in general?”, and also, “how can we train actors and performers, designers, directors to maybe create original work?”
Though, I feel like I am still on my own personal journey in relationship to creating a red nose character. Sometimes the word clown is misinterpreted, perhaps because of all of the scary movies and all of the different forms that clown theater has taken in the United States, from birthday clowns to circus clowns to the scary movie clowns.
But this particular type of red nose clown theater work is coming out of actor training, so it’s really part of this world of mask theater, where we’re looking at putting on just “what’s the smallest mask we can put on our face?” And that is just a little nose. There’s something about how it changes the performer’s face in just enough of a way that the audience can see a character and not necessarily the actor.
Play and laughter and kind of a liberating creativity is the heart of this work, finding how we are unique as individuals, and how our differences, our idiosyncrasies, are our strengths in a way, as artists, that’s what makes us interesting.
If you can find that space as a creative artist, where you are hitting a nerve in your audience that elicits genuine laughter, then you are doing something miraculous, I would say.
I mean acting is, I think, one of the most difficult art forms. I’m not a classical musician, so I’m sure it’s probably a little more difficult. But as far as you as an artist, needing to be the art form — right — we are as actors, we are the art. So in order to tell those stories and to perform lively and with authenticity and being compelling as a performer on stage, is difficult. It’s a difficult task.
And so, I think as actors, we need to continually work on ourselves, to become more grounded, more present, more available to play, more in tune with our own creativity and those internal impulses we have.
All that stuff that I think makes a good performer or a strong performer. Someone who an audience goes, “it didn’t feel like they were acting at all. I felt that they were that character.” In order to do that art form, you have to be limber, you have to be strong, you have to be resilient, you have to be present. You have to be all of these things.
And this particular work of the clown — clowning around — gets at all of those really important principles of performing.