Specifically, I'm going to get into the nitty-gritty of the performance style we use.
Often, when we're touring in Europe, we'll see this style of clown that is very European, or we'll see a style that is a very LA clown, which is very ironic and sarcastic. To me, there's this beauty of Canadian performance, at least in the realms that I play in, that is a lot more open-hearted and has a lot more care for the audience without being saccharine and without being hand-holdy.
It comes back to the artistic lineage of the clown practice here in Canada. It came from a practitioner named Richard Pochinko, who studied the European clown style and then brought it back and worked.... He was a bit more of a 1970s hippie. The Canadian clown scene has grown up out of that practice, and it presents something really different from what you see, let's say, at the Edinburgh Fringe and other clown performances, which tend to be a lot more ironic. Our work is dark, but it's not hopeless. I think there is a hope that we try to bring.
My clown teacher would often say, “What is the gift for the audience? What is the gift you're giving them?” In the work we make, for us, it's giving our audiences—who tend to be a lot of younger, poorer, queer folks—a sense of catharsis and a sense of feeling that they're not alone. Particularly in the work we make and in the work that a lot of the other folks here make, we're aiming for things that you could only create there in that moment that's interactive with the audience. We're all here in a special shared space, as “hippie woo-woo” as that sounds.
That's the thing that is so needed right now, and we're seeing that from audiences. There's a show called Every Brilliant Thing that's on Broadway right now that is just completely selling out, and I think it is because it is interactive. It is asking something of the audience, which is to be a participant in the art.
That is something we do really well here, and it doesn't often get an opportunity to be seen internationally.