Clowns Without Borders - USA

November

Volunteers: Tim Cunningham, Elisa Lane, Sarah Liane Foster

“Ou fou!” a girl’s voice calls through the twilight as we walk back from a circus skills workshop session down the road. “Ou fou”: “you’re crazy” in Haitian creole, has become the refrain of the clown show that we performed all over the rural, impoverished town of Torbeck, Haiti. “Ou fou,” our clowns said to each other. “Li fou” (“he/she’s crazy”), we explained to the audience. “Ou fou. Li fou. M pa fou! Ou fou.  Tout moun fou!” Tout moun fou: everyone is crazy.  Our show provided audiences with 45 minutes of craziness which, judging from the shouts as we walk down this rocky dirt road, they carried with them back to their lives after the show ended. The voice in question this time belongs to a girl who looks about 12. She is sitting outside her corrugated tin house with her hands in a bucket of laundry. “Ou fou,” I call back, “bon jou fou!” “No, ou fou,” she says, smiling and waving as we continue down the road.

From November 2nd through 15th, Tim Cunningham, Elisa Lane and I performed clown shows, taught theatre and circus skills workshops, and did walkaround performances on a Clowns Without Borders expedition to Haiti. Our goal was to spread joy, laughter and play among people, particularly children, who face hardship and trauma in their daily lives.

In Haiti, thepoorest country in the western hemisphere, paralyzed by corruption and political unrest, and plagued by malaria, AIDS, and malnutrition, hardship is indeed a daily reality. Often the kind of government infrastructure that we take for granted – navigable roads, electricity, drinkable water – does not exist there. When we performed in hospitals we saw children dying preventable deaths and sick people starving in their beds. But we also saw sick people and their families look up and smile at a disappearing/ reappearing handkerchief, or a song strummed on the ukelele. We constantly encountered amazing children and adults who were strong, proud, and open to joy.

Journal

Monday, November 6th, Cayes:

The head of a community technical college has asked us to perform for his students. We start playing with the audience as we set up and they trickle in. The women tend to cast their eyes down; the men sit back with their arms crossed, waiting to see what we “blancs” (whites) will do. Then the show begins and the laughter starts.  Tim dropping the suitcase and all the props on his feet. A chase on stilts. An acrobatic sequence as Elisa chases an invisible bird through the air…

I brought a mask with me to Haiti and this is the first time we’re using it in the show: I dive into a suitcase and emerge as a hungry donkey. Tim and Elisa try to tie me up with a rope while I search the stage and then the audience for something to eat. “Mwen grangou!” (I’m hungry!), I yell. “Mwen grangou” is a phrase we hear from everywhere we go – at schools, in hospitals, in the street. Money and food are scarce.  To put these words in the mouth of a white person in a donkey costume is potentially risky. We are hoping that the imminent reality of hunger in here will make this bit hilarious, rather than sad or anger-provoking. The donkey runs through the audience in search of food, finally sitting on a man’s lap while eating out of a woman’s purse. Hilarity wins. We have incorporated two doctor bits into the show to empower audiences and provide a context for people to laugh at the reality of disease. An enthusiastic audience volunteer doctor helps me perform “surgery” on Elisa. We pull numerous objects out of her belly, including a shower cap, latex gloves, and funny glasses, all of which he happily puts on. When Elisa finally jumps up, cured, Tim turns on music for a final dance. Our volunteer jumps in and dances with us with no prompting, much to the audience’s delight. After the show we bring out stilts and people line up to try. Most learn amazingly fast, letting go of my hands and walking by themselves as quickly as they can. The last man who tries has the most trouble – he is very shaky on his tall legs, but refuses to give up. He finally lets go and takes off across the floor. We start clapping rhythm. Tall man starts singing, and everyone joins in. There are about 25 of us singing “pilé pilé pilé, n’ap pilé tet satan.”  Someone translates: “We are stepping on the head of the devil.” I imagine hunger, disease, poverty, violence rearing their ugly heads, and this man on stilts stepping, crushing them down.

Saturday, November 11th, Port-au-Prince:

Where Torbeck was rural and relatively quiet, Port-au-Prince is crowded, dirty, and more dangerous. Haiti is less violent and treacherous than the US media makes it out to be: I have never witnessed violence here or felt endangered. We hear stories here of foreign reporters roaming Port-au-Prince, searching for gun violence so they can take interesting photos for their papers. Still, when we are in Port-au-Prince it is best for us not to go around alone. When we go out to do shows and workshops in Port-au-Prince, Fanfan, our contact, always picks us up and drives us.  We drive past piles of garbage that line and clog the torn-up streets – pushed to the sides or piled in the middle or heaped down the banks of a river. Goods for sale spread out on cloths: secondhand American shirts, bottles of bath products, buckets of charcoal, live chickens with tied feet. Cement buildings with corrugated tin roofs stand side by side by side.  Every cement wall sports spray-painted writing advertising political candidates, protesting rising prices. Trucks and brightly painted taptaps packed with people cut each other off and drive fast over bumps and mud puddles, through a traffic light with no light. Thick polluted air pours in the window as we ride, giving the city a sleepy sheen.

Monday, November 13th, Port-au-Prince:

Fanfan picks us up early in the morning for four shows in the Carrefour neighborhood. But when we reach the road to Carrefour he turns the car in the opposite direction. “Change of plans,” he tells us. It’s then we notice that the road we were about to turn down, devoid of the usual traffic, is flowing with hundreds of people walking away from the Carrefour area. There is a protest: we need to avoid that part of town for a while. We pull into a high school yard and Fanfan goes to speak with the teachers. He comes back and says “Okay, they’re on break now. You go down to that gazebo – see there? You have fifteen minutes.” We have a quick planning meeting and go: Tim picks up our props and parades through throngs of highschoolers with his hat over his eyes, tripping and dropping things on his feet. Elisa runs ahead blowing bubbles. I come through on stilts, feigning instability, grabbing heads and shoulders for support. Before we know it we have a raucous, excited crowd of about 1000 kids. What follows is what Tim later describes as bone-shaking, powerful laughter.  Completely, absolutely fou.

May you all be well and fou.
-Sarah 

Tout Moun Fou!: Clowns Tribo Babo (Clowns Without Borders) in Haiti
Hello from Ayiti!

I am here with Tim Cunningham and Elisa Lane for two weeks of clown shows and workshops, beginning in Torbek and Okay in the south of Haiti, and finishing up with five days in Port-au-Prince.  Here’s a little about our expedition so far - more will follow when we get back to the states later this week.  We leave 40-something degree weather in the states and step off the plane in Port-au-Prince into air that was about 95 degrees but felt like 107 with the humidity.  Extreme heat, great joy and sorrow, hope and desperation: Haiti sometimes seems like a collection of extremes.  When we arrive in Torbek we are met by a mass of children. They remember the group from CWB who visited last April, and we are greeted with smiles and shouts of “Tim! Tim!” and “Nou pedi!” which means “We’re lost!” - the theme of the April clown show.  Kids come and watch as we prepare for our performances around the area; an outdoor rehearsal ends in a long improvised clown show with a bunch of local kids.

Angelo begins directing us, making up funny bits with Tim’s battered hat. Fabi creates a playful scene with my black umbrella. Jojo finds a big clown nose and puts it on his small face, then picks up some bubbles, lifting the nose with one hand to expose his mouth so he can blow the bubbles up to the sky. We begin a playful banter with our limited creole. “Li fou!” (he’s crazy) I say, pointing to Tim. “Ou fou!” (you’re crazy) he replies. “Li fou!” “No, li fou!” “Ou fou!” “Mwen fou? no, m pa fou!” In the end the children help us find the theme to our clown show that we’ve been searching for: “Tout moun fou” (we are all crazy). In the coming days our work is to help these kids, and all the others we meet, to play and laugh and act fou, despite the hardships of daily life.

On Saturday we travel to a hospital in Okay to perform for kids in the pediatric ward. As we enter, a mother leads her small daughter up to us and lifts up her shirt. The girl’s head and limbs are small and thin, but her belly is enormous, swollen with infection.  She moans. Tim takes out his ukelele. We begin to play and sing softly and the girl focuses her eyes on us for a moment to listen. Dr. Stan, our host who brought us to the hospital, quietly explains to the hospital doctors that they should stop giving the mother hope - the girl’s case is hopeless. The pediatric ward is packed and stuffy: rows of children in beds, surrounded by families. Many parents here tell us they are hungry: the hospital provides care, but the families must buy their own medical supplies and food, and many can’t afford it. We play quietly around the room - songs, little dances, a disappearing handkerchief - and people gather around us to watch, laughing. We do our best to distract them from their sorrows.

There is so much to tell about our time in Torbek and about the work we have just begun in Port-au-Prince, but now it is time to go get ready for our next show… more to come. May you be well and a little bit fou.