Clowns 2 1/2

Whereas old age used to be associated with dignity, wealth of experience and occasionally wisdom, demographic change in Western societies has altered our view of the later years of a person's life: Age has instead become a stigma, akin to a deformity, testifying primarily to weaknesses and limitations of physical and mental origin.

But what if one changes one's gaze in order to discover something different beyond the ingrained patterns. For example, if one looks at the world through the eyes of a clown, the image of age also changes.

It is not uncommon for the places where people often spend the last years of their lives to be governed by the same rules that applied at school and in boarding schools: It is important that the system of order is followed by the inmates in order to keep down the chaos that is assumed everywhere. The times are fixed: eating, sleeping, gymnastics are always done at the same hour, visits are received on certain days, regardless of whether one wants to eat, sleep or receive visits.

This is how the contradictions that the clownish gaze discovers arise: the visitors can become tormentors for the visited, so that he sits like a powerless red clown opposite these lecturing white clowns who believe they have leased reason. Subjected to the orderly dictates of the custodial institution, the individuals develop an anarchic stubbornness that also provokes the comical in everyday situations.

Roberto Ciulli, one of the few European theater makers who can be considered an expert on the modern but forgotten art of clowning, together with the ensemble of the Theater an der Ruhr, takes a liberating, tragicomic and highly musical look at the darkness of "decay": an explosive clowning of old age.

A co-production with Les Théâtres de la ville de Luxembourg