Clowning around

Clowning is, in Kiva’s words, “a pure sense of play, or unadulterated naivety”. She counts Mr. Bean as her favourite mainstream clown, but Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin as close contenders. 

“Clown College is hardcore. Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris [where I attended] is very expensive, which unfortunately means you only get a certain type of person, and it’s very competitive. The course is two years long and starts in September. Half the participants get shown the door at Christmas and half again at the end of first year. They teach you everything except how to produce a show and how to sell a show, two areas that are critically lacking from the programme.”

But Kiva has a business mind. She owns a clowning agency based in London (Alakazam Clowns) that provides a stable, steady income to support her theatre company, Ducks Can Fly. It’s through the latter that she produces her shows, which she takes on tour to fringe festivals globally. Spotting a Judges Choice Award from the 2016 Canadian Fringe, I stumble upon a reason why there might be so many telephones in my immediate vicinity.

“Alpha Delta is a show I made with a Portuguese friend of mine. It’s about two clowns during the Cold War whose job it is to listen in on people’s phone calls. They’re supposed to find people who are in love and then detain them.” Following up on this line of questioning, I learn about a show she’s co-producing about death—“The absurdity that surrounds buying a coffin and scattering ashes, all the while grieving, is darkly comic”—and another about love throughout the ages. I have to wonder about how the process works.

“I start with a vague idea of what I want to do. For Alpha Delta, I knew I wanted to do something with telephones, partly inspired by the phone tapping scandal. Once I get that, I rent out a space with some people and we just play. Each day someone different leads the session. My director will pop these giant sheets on the wall and if we like something we draw it. When the week is done, we connect the idea drawings and that forms the basis for what we’ll do.”

For Kiva, clown doctoring was not simply her gateway but continues to be her guiding light, and she makes regular trips to hospitals to share her joy with patients. She recounts a trip she took to rural Romania: “So many of the kids had never seen a clown, or magic, or even a violin, and they just sat there with no idea what was going to happen.”

I ask her about how they compared to a more jaded audience of the iPad era: “Coulrophobia [the fear of clowns] has become such a hip thing—I blame Stephen King—but when it gets down to it [...] everyone wants to play. I remember one night in New York, we were doing Alpha Delta. We had a guy on stage and we were running an old wind-up radio up and down his body like a metal detector, testing for love. We got to a ring and we said ‘you’re definitely in love’ and he played along and denied it and denied it, and all of a sudden his wife stood up and threw a ring at the ground and yelled ‘What the f%£&?!’ Moments like that are to me the real success—when everyone’s getting into it and playing along with this whole world that I’ve created.”

Kiva will be putting on a show about love in Barcelona—her first in the city—at some point in the next year. Keep your eyes peeled.