When cellist Karen Hall began accompanying two clowns in their performances, she initially struggled to escape the relative stiffness of her classical training, and share the same playful zone. Then she started taking clown classes, herself. “They were life changing,” she says. “‘Clown’ is such a safe space: you get to be wrong!”
Since then, Hall, who hails from Los Angeles, has devised a solo show she’s bringing to Sydney Fringe Festival called Delusions and Grandeur: a cross between a solo cello recital and a clown performance. Where many clowns who play musical instruments make comedy from their modest prowess, Hall does the same with her accomplishment.
With both her parents being pianists, she was playing their instrument at three and reading music at four, before taking up cello in third grade. She played her first wedding five years later, and has been gigging ever since, from the Glee TV show to orchestras. Often she has sought out more off-beat contexts, however, in which she knows the audience is engaged rather than being left wondering.
“I love string quartets and symphonic music a lot,” she says, “but I didn’t love the presentation of it. I guess it’s very disconnected. It’s beautiful to create with others, and it’s beautiful to collaborate. But then when I did my first improv show and I heard the audience laugh – the audience tells you what the show is about. In classical music we tell the audience what the show is about. I just started thinking, ‘Why doesn’t this world of classical music – which I love – care about its audience the same way that this comedy world does?’ Any performer on stage ought to be the guide and the emotional barometer for the room.”
Hall makes her instrument an interactive character (“Cello”), which she even dresses up and has improvised conversations with. She explains that the fact that musicians respond to their instruments with the same brain patterns as people respond to living creatures accounts for “this character in my life that has so much sway over me”. “That’s such a subconscious thing,” she continues, “you don’t even know that it’s happening. It’s just from the years of being together. Then, because of all the comedy training, I started to be like, ‘Well, let’s lean into it. Let’s laugh about it. Let’s put it on full display that I’m a little crazy.’”
Along with humour comes a sad-clown side to Hall’s show that can switch audience members from laughter to tears. “I love that sense of giving other people permission to feel, in whatever capacity,” she says. “It’s so beautiful, and it’s so temporary, but I think one of my hopes in being a sad clown always is that everybody can take that permission with them when they leave the theatre.”
The classical piece underpinning this show, Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, is recontextualised and personalised, and she imagines a critic declaring she “murders the minuets”, to which her response would be: “That’s a bit of the point. To not be able to say, ‘Oh, that’s how the artist is feeling – and we heard it in the music!’ I think is a misstep. It strips us of our artistry. Then we’re just technicians trying to carry out somebody else’s idea.”
Now, despite lingering ambitions in classical music, she can’t imagine a world without being a clown. “Even if I was going to walk out and play Dvorak,” she says, “I would be like, ‘Can I just talk to the audience first?’ One, it makes me feel a lot more comfortable. It humanises me. And the clown in the circus was always there to be the human. The acrobats were doing the fantastical, superhuman things. Also, the clown gets to fail, and the classical music professional is not ever supposed to fail. It’s important to me to play the music to the top of my ability, but I’m not going to lie: I’ve missed notes, I’ve made mistakes – and the clown always gets to save it in those moments and be human about it.”
Delusions and Grandeur: New Theatre, September 24-28.