By Yvonne Gleeson
“HELP yourselves to some cornflakes.”
He didn’t offer it with his hands. He offered it with his eyes, flicking from the cornflakes to our faces and back again, like a private little eye chat, back and forth, back and forth.
Oversized shoes planted wide. A red nose fixed on, a small red moon. Trousers hauled up to his neck by grey braces. He handed each student a chair on the way in, eyes sweeping the room with that particular clown glare that makes adults behave like children, naughty, hopeful, unsure whether to smile, obey, laugh, or just simply watch. Nobody spoke. We all felt it, we’d stepped into a workshop you couldn’t photograph. The invisible one.
I’ve always been terribly greedy for the arts that come from the deep core of inner source, the heart beats, the tummy jumps, the internal chat that screams: “Oh will ya come on, what’s going to happen next?” Plays, film, poetry, movement, music, a line on a wall, 15 black cows in a piercing green field, a seagull and a crow having a chat. I see it all. The more it risks, the more I want to know it.
Last week, during World Art Day at the Arts Centre, I signed up for a clowning workshop with Allan Gardner, 30 years in Jersey’s arts community, and still the sort of artist who can make a room go quiet without asking. He didn’t sell clowning as “come have a laugh”. He opened it up like an onion and let us sting our own eyes.
He told us about being a child in class, a teacher spotting something true in him, letting him perform for an hour, the sheer beauty of losing himself, as natural as breathing. He spoke about being taught by a clown from Cirque du Soleil, Misha Usov, who framed the whole thing with a sentence pinned right into my soul: “A clown’s job is to be funny. It’s to be alive and give a gift to the audience.”
I thought, perhaps if the clown is so alive, so alive, we then recognise the aliveness in ourselves.
That quote stayed with me. It asks more of you than jokes. It asks for presence. Allan spoke about performing even when there was “no crowd”, how the act still had to be done with full devotion, because somewhere, at a distance, someone might be watching… and even if nobody was, the real self would eventually take over anyway. That’s the part people don’t understand: clowning isn’t attention seeking. It’s attention giving. It’s gift work.
The class itself was a mix: performers and non performers, the brave and the baffled. Allan brought us straight to vulnerability, the practical kind. Timing. Reading a beat. Holding a stretch until it becomes a living thing. Performing a piece while also trying to hit a ball at a target, because life doesn’t let you do one thing at a time, and neither does the stage.
The instruction wasn’t “try harder”. It was “stop trying”. Lose yourself, but keep the rhythm. In Samuel Beckett’s immortal advice from the clown school of existence: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better and …do it with enough style and precision that it starts to look like progress.”
As a child, I saw clowns as the funny circus lads or Stephen King’s nightmare fuel. I didn’t know really about the layers, the Chaplin genius, the Laurel-and-Hardy precision, the way comedy is often just tragedy with better lighting. To the audience it looks easy. That’s the con. The real skill is holding a room in silence and still giving them something, something they didn’t know they needed, without begging for applause.
Allan and I are collaborating on a short story of mine, “The Last Walk”, where a child and father take their final walk of life together. It is filled with humour and it’s emotional in the way that sneaks up on you, not the way that announces itself. Just like the end of the short story, where it started to write itself, here we have the invisible clown taking over.
I think it’ll connect to Jersey audiences because clowning teaches the rarest thing on a stage, the courage of a proper silence, where feeling has room to arrive on its own. If you want to go deeper, “The Invisible Clown”, by Misha Usov, is a generous little book that quietly rewires your sense of craft. And if you keep a second book on the go, take a breath with Harold Bloom too. He’ll remind you that reading is training in discernment, what’s true, what’s earned, what’s just noise. Same discipline as the clown, really, no forcing it, no faking it, just staying in the pause until the smallest gesture tells the whole truth.
This island is magic, and it’s full of creative giants, some loud, some hidden, some wearing red noses and handing out cornflakes. Let’s look to our talent here, properly. Let’s build what’s in front of us, not what we think we’re supposed to import. The clown in the arts isn’t a novelty. It’s a living instrument tuned to truth, played in silence, and offered as a gift.
PS I hate cornflakes.
Yvonne Gleeson is a writer and playwright working at the intersection of community, memory and cultural change. She is currently touring The Wake of Yer Man in Ireland, adapted from a Jersey Festival of Words award-winning short story. She is developing The Bingo Bus for Jersey (April 2027) and collaborating with a professional clown on a performance-led work that brings physical storytelling into dialogue with her writing. She studies literature and Renaissance art, drawing on their symbolism and human insight, and is committed to widening the cultural conversation in Jersey by giving space to under-heard voices in the arts.
