‘When they laugh your clown is coming’: learning to be ridiculous in Philippe Gaulier’s pedagogy of spectatorship

Abstract

This article sets out the relationship between students on stage and students in the audience in Gaulier’s classroom, termed here the Pedagogy of Spectatorship. Learning to be ridiculous does not entail a specific set of activities; rather it means learning to make people laugh, and to do that requires that there are potential laughers present. Students of clown workshops at École Philippe Gaulier take on the role of spectators and so enable each other to learn this elusive skill. The article begins by outlining how these roles are set up and played in the classroom, supported by pedagogical theories. It demonstrates the aptitude of pedagogy of spectatorship to clown practice with reference to practitioners who have gone on to make clown performances after leaving the school. It then considers a variety of political implications of this pedagogy, including those suggested by Gaulier’s and Lecoq’s writing, and interpretations by practitioners and writers who have experienced the training. It argues that while laughter in the classroom can highlight difference, vulnerability and weakness, the pedagogy of spectatorship offers the opportunity for a student to discover how s/he can be ridiculous, and to have agency over how and when to display this individual ridiculousness and to make an audience laugh.