All of the images and videos are related to fooling performances I have done.
An Unkind Reaction
Oh look here I am hating that I need to do this, dress up some corpse version of myself to dangle for a stranger in the hope they believe this ghostly puppet carries authority, is someone with a career, a past, accolades, a legitimised being worthy of funding. I don’t believe in this, the past is a dreary fog, the future a shimmering mirage, I only want this exact moment drawn out forever like pouring honey.
A plea for decorum
Take it seriously Edward.
Ok
What has fooling done for me?
fooling saved my life, so many times, saved it from being meaningless or short, saved it from tightening internal restrictions, from the weight of sadness, from boredom and delusional glory.
So what is it?
Whatever is true right now, shared.
It’s all the bits of me that want to express.
If the individual is that which cannot be divided then I in fooling I work with my dividual self, which only exists only as its many parts.
The experience had by this collection of voices, physical attitudes, tumbling stories and ways of being. I am 5 years old, 19, 25 (one of my favourites), 32, 44 (as I write this).
The cast within me is made up of everyone I have ever met: my parents, my wife, the skateboarder I hung out with in rural nowhere, the guy this morning at the gym making the whole squat rack shake, my best friend, some dead friends, half forgotten pen pals, fevered one night stands, the young guy behind the counter at the cornershop, my teachers, and so many circus artists and performers.
Then there are the intangibles, aspects of me that bubble in the background of life but arise on stage: the eternal artist, the critic, the sludge monster, the contortionist, the steel buddha, the dramaturg.
fooling gives me a way to play with all this constellation, to find what needs to be said and done for and with the audience who are right there and will never exist again.
An history lesson
Fooling isn’t even the name the person who came up with it likes anymore, she doesn’t say fool and fooling, she says player and playing. But that’s the thing, even it’s creator isn’t in charge.
The story I have heard which i don’t expect to be true is that one day Franki Anderson was performing as a clown, in her own way, she wasn’t doing it just to be funny, she was playing with how she really felt and thought.
The older clowns said to her after the show, "excuse me this is not clowning, you can't call yourself a clown, the rule of clowning is be funny"
Thinking on her feet Franki replied “well actually i’m not a clown, I’m a… fool, and the rule of fooling is be honest, so there, you can’t tell me what to do or how to do it ever again.”
So that was how it started, in the early 1980s perhaps, maybe late 70s, certainly before 1990 that’s for sure.
Why do we even need words?
Fooling is currently an oral tradition if you want to learn it or even learn about it you will need to find a fool and talk with them. This is great and means there is all kinds of variety, everyone fools differently, as they must because they live in a different body.
But it’s also a bit of a risk, because there aren’t so many fools and most of them aren’t immortal, so they keep getting older and when they die it becomes very hard to talk to them.
Thank goodness for those other clever, now long dead, humans who came up with writing, intergenerational knowledge, practically immortal ideas, what a great solution to this bothersome business where people keep ceasing to exist.
So I’m the fool who wants to write things down.
Oh dear.
Eternal honesty
How can i be honest forever? I have changed my mind several times writing this page over the last couple of weeks and once within the writing of this sentence.
I don’t have a clue how to do that. so I want to learn. Can there be a book about fooling which is fooled into existence and tells people about fooling?
I want to try doing that. I want to learn how to do that.
Having made the terrible mistake of being born without vast wealth I must contend with economic forces that compel me with threats of violence to earn enough tokens of exchange to survive.
I want just enough of these tokens so I can learn how to write about fooling without starving or becoming homeless again.
Get back on track, literally, you need to establish your track record, provenance, performance particulars, etc
Career Life
I encountered fooling via Holly Stoppit in 2007, she directed my first 3 solo shows and the creation process used fooling to find and develop the material. This was very good because the script I started with was awful rubbish. Just the most juvenile, pretentious, bad-poetic, drivel.
But when I was in the moment, playing as a fool plays, I found my voices, my bodies, I found the show.
The result was The Self Trilogy: 10 Ways to Die on Stage, The Middle Bit, and Who Knows Where.
They were great shows and each one of them lives on, I’ve been told, in the memories of the audiences who witnessed them.
What else?
Well I have used fooling in every single show I have directed or contributed to. Because it give such an incredible freedom to both performers and directors. Even within scripted work there is always room to find exactly the timing of the audience who has arrived for this show, and fooling teaches a kind of listening deep enough to do that.
Is this enough?
Oh I don’t know, that’s only partially for me to say.
Stay true to you own construction of meaning
Ok then yes, that’s enough I have enjoyed writing this and it has been a useful process. I let go of all outcomes and drift in this honied moment forever.