proyecto payaso

My brain is slightly fried from sitting down all morning and writing up 2 reports, 2 grants, uploading a bunch of photos, writing a bunch of emails, etc…. So this is what it is like to be a paper pusher…. I don’t think I could ever manage.

Anyway, I wanted to sit and take a moment to reflect. I had the opportunity to co-facilitate a workshop for Proyecto Payaso. It starts with my friend’s delightfully eccentric neighbor, Tony, who just happens to be one of the founders of a large organization that sends clowns to do AIDS education work. Its really the only way to do it in this culture. I read somewhere that laughter often bridges the gap between 2 disconnects or floats a soft carpet over the mud of anxiety. The reality of the AIDS epidemic is forcing this culture to change, to become more open, to bridge the disconnect between the squeaky clean public discourse about sexuality (like hell you’re all virgins) and the reality of its private practice, to face the intense church inspired anxiety around well, bumping uglies.

And so there we found ourselves in a truck crossing the distance between the cold Western highlands and the hot tropical Eastern lowlands synergizing, at the very last minute, what would become the curriculum for the 4 day training session. (did I mention Tony gave me no advance notice? A Clown organization…. Organized clowns? A contradiction in terms) It came together beautifully.. The day passed. The air thickened with moisture and heat. The rotten smell of harvested rubber plants. The increasingly dense layer of DEET covering my skin.

The sky changed color. At first turgid with gold, the great sack of blue above our heads drained to pale magenta and ever darkening hues of evening. We got onto the boat watching the color show, gigantic drums, puppy dog and all and headed across El Lago de Izabal. The thick forestation, impasto strokes of green, was dotted with white cranes. Like baldspots on the canvas, like flying orchids, ridiculous and elegant, devastatingly beautiful under the rising full moon, the slick parting of water around the bow of the boat mimicking the liquid obsidian of night. Sometimes things are so beautiful I feel my entire insides implode, my eyes roll back in my head, and my body moan in a strange mixture of gratitude and longing. This was one of those moments.

We arrived to a thatched hut on the banks of Rio Dulce amidst towering trees. An indigenous school and medical clinic. Kids get scholarships to come here and leave the hard existence of the remote jungle villages beyond the reach of the Guatemalan “education system.” Here, in their language and Spanish they study and work. Here we would work to train a group of new indigenous clowns to do bilingual “Intervenciones” in Kek’chi and Castellano.

The next day would mark the start of 4 days of increasing sleep deprivation. Our hotel sat on platforms a couple feet above the forest floor off the banks of a mediumish tributary. The forest floor moved if you moved to quickly. Little crabs crawled out of their holes and saught shelter, gigantic insects in the shape of leaves forgot that they were supposed to be acting like fallen leaves, spiders, shrieking birds, you name it. Thankfully the blood sucking bats only came out around and after midnight.

We caught the boat at around 6:45 and worked on theater and AIDS education all day long. IT was my first time doing full blown theater facilitation and it proved to me several of my own mottos:

1. Bite off more than you can chew and then chew like hell
2. Fake it till you make it
3. Lead with your heart and you’ll tap into more power than you thought you had
4. Screw the cultural dependence on experts

The activities went really really well. The first day focused on getting the kids loosened up and comfortable with the group experimenting with different walks, vocal warm ups, yoga, projecting their voice, using space, experimenting with different levels in theatrical space, learning names. The typical theater drill. The kids, all 22 of them, were a dream of cooperativeness after working with the intensely stifled young indigenous people of the highlands. It was another exercise in studying the impact of the armed conflict on the cultural psyche. These were the children of people who fled the violence in my neck of the woods: Quiche.

We worked and worked and worked until the kids started to bloom. There are some really great clowns in the bunch. Daisy, a budding Lucille Ball, Jose a natural leader, Adrian, the other star clown-love interest of Daisy (puppy love is so cute)…. After a great deal of training we headed out to do an “intervention.” This involved crossing Lake Izabal on a boat, exiting onto the CArribean, speeding up northbound on the Carribean, getting out of the boat and pushing it over a thicket of mangrove roots, heading upstream an hour or so on a slender jungle tributary and then marching two hours in the midday jungle heat under a big sheet (of course I forgot sunscreen I looked like a cheap plastic Virgin Mary) We arrived in a small very isolated rural village and the kids did their magic: applying clown makeup over beads of sweat in a small thatched hut. They performed their show naturally loaded with sexual humor. Women covered their mouths and flitted their eyes nervously to see if their neighbors were doing the same.

I will never forget the end of the day. The kids piling into the boat on the edge of the Carribean beach just as the color of the sky turned gold. The rainbow wigs illumed from behind speeding past palm trees. Faces still painted white, red, purple, green, all eyes and smiles. The boys on the bow of the boat in big floppy clown shoes singing as sheets of sea spray rose in the background frozen in time for a moment before crashing down on us, happily giddy on the energy of a show well done.