A Word (and a few more)

Photo by Ben Whishaw (with permission)
The Almeida Stage before a performance of Bakkhai

To Anyone who has ever read the words on this blog, 


I started this blog for a few reasons:


1) To document my time at the Lecoq Drama school

2) To practise writing prose

3) To amuse my sister

4) To stay in touch with people at home when I lived in Paris

5) Because I was obsessed with the Diary's of Virginia Wolf 

6) Because I had just watched 'Julie and Julia' and fell in love with the film, the concept and Meryl Streep - again


The name was chosen by my sister. First I had a website called 'Make Hannah a clown' that was set up to help me raise the funds I needed to go to the Lecoq school, so when I decided to do the blog it made sense to take the name with one small change, now we were "making" me a 'clown' as I moved to Paris and started school. 


In the final term of Lecoq we do four weeks of clowning, not in the kids party sense but in the theatre sense, picture Charlie Chaplin. In our second and final year we explore all manor of Theatre style's and we end with the hardest of all, the Clown.


The Clown is difficult because it is completely open, responds directly to the audience and never lies. An audience cannot be fooled. A Clown lives and breathes in the spotlight and aims always to impress, whilst often getting things drastically wrong. 


Like everything at Lecoq, the Clown is not to be used just literally. Of course you can, but for the most part the school wants us to take all the elements we are taught and use them in our own way to create something new, interesting and honest. And thus, we end with the Clown. A perfect reminder to ALWAYS put an audience first, not least because they will know when you are lying to them.


So the name was always a joke I shared with my sister, I was not training to be a Clown, I was at Theatre school, learning acting techniques and theatre styles and how to create work with nothing but my body and words. A lot of people have taken it literally, to my sisters great amusement, and her amusement was one of the main reasons I started the blog, so I cannot complain about that.


Over time, the blog became a lot more to do with me practising writing for writing's sake and far less to do with becoming an actor, what I was learning in the process and the work I was creating, it became listless. I don't apologise for that because of course, even that is part of the overall journey. 


However, today, we start - not again but anew. 


I had stopped writing here as I had lost my motivation and direction, I had stopped even thinking about my readers and audience. 


This blog will continue in much the same vein, except now the focus is truly and only on 'Making Hannah a clown' and the journey of that. Insights, lessons, research, struggles, inspiration and everything in between and around and underneath. 


It is not really about me, but about everyone trying to create something, discover who they are, work for themselves, be the thing they want to be. It is also about how art is not just a theatre show once a year, or the film you watched two nights ago, it's everything in between, it's nature, an interesting light caught in an Instagram picture, an emotion felt towards a humanitarian crisis, a stranger offering his seat on the tube. It's everything and we're in it together. 


This is how I make Hannah a clown, a truly honest and open, human first, actor, writer, producer and Director second. But I hope sharing my journey, you will find resonance in your own journey.


"Great things are done by a series of small things bought together." - Vincent Van Gogh