Silly behavior gets serious about our environment in VSAA play

Mining the depths of your personality for quirks and oddities that make you different from your peers isn’t a teenager’s usual jam — let alone rehearsing those idiosyncracies and exposing them onstage so the whole world can laugh at you.

“Especially at our age, it’s hard to make yourself vulnerable” in front of your friends, senior Kate Campbell said. School is usually about trying to fit in, not sticking out like a clown.

But fix a squishy red bulb to the middle of your face and hop into super-wide pants or other ridiculous costume, and you’re equipped to engage in some truly clownish behavior. That’s what happens in “This is Not My Home,” an original play developed by a small student ensemble at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, under the direction of theater teacher Annie Averre and artist-in-residence Arturo Martinini.

It’s the latest in a string of startlingly unorthodox, historically oriented performances Averre has guided to the VSAA stage in recent years — including a couple of sweetly chaotic exercises in Italian Renaissance commedia dell’arte clowning — and it’s also going to be her swan song as a faculty member. Averre, a founding planner and original faculty member of the Vancouver Public Schools’ arts-magnet school, which opened its doors in 1996, plans to retire at the end of this year and focus on her own artistic pursuits — chiefly, singing jazz, she said.

But she’ll keep coming back to work with VSAA students on her trademark “nonlinear” productions, she promised.

“It’s a very special home to me,” she said. “After this many years, I’m pretty invested in this place.”

Born losers

“This is Not My Home” is a clown show, but it doesn’t feature mischievous (that is, scary) circus-style clowns. As befits VSAA’s academic study of performance through history, these are “theatrical clowns” drawn from European tradition; they’re like babies being born and discovering a fresh, delightful world with each new scene.

“Everything is new to them,” senior Gracie Martin said. “They are in the mode of constant discovery.”

Of course their delights and discoveries quickly become challenges, which happen to be the same global challenges we all face at this juncture in history — but don’t tell these clowns. They have no idea that the underlying theme of “This is Not My Home,” developed by the students themselves, is environmental stewardship and the fate of our world. That’s much too huge a topic for these simple souls, who don’t keep up with the news.

“Clowns don’t know anything about global warming. They’re just trying to figure out what’s right in front of them,” Averre said.

“Clowns are not good at political activism,” quipped student director Murphy Bradshaw. Frankly, they’re not much good at anything. “They’re not clever,” Bradshaw said.

But that’s why we can’t help loving them, Averre said — because they’re flawed in ways we recognize.

“Clowning is beautiful because clowning is the art of failure,” she said. “Clowning is where we are at our most inept. Everybody has experienced what that’s like.”

Be honest

To begin your transformation from kid into clown, eighth-grader Ella Kuepfer said to find something funny about yourself that’s prone to exaggeration. (Could you be as honest with yourself about your own idiosyncracies as these students have been?)

Kuepfer is an incurably cheerful person who tends to “bop up and down” while she walks, she laughed. So that’s how her clown behaves: grinning and bouncing. Eighth-grader Eva Daltoso confessed that she’s a little dreamy and distractible so her clown’s eye is constantly drawn off by the unexpected; “she’s a total airhead,” Daltoso confessed. And, eighth-grader Joseph Edmundson said he’s always reminding others about rules so his clown became “authoritarian.” (Which doesn’t seem to help getting his peers organized.)

This style of clowning, seemingly so spontaneous and carefree, is more difficult than it looks, the cast of “This is Not My Home” agreed. Clowning means shedding every shred of worldliness, every hint of cool, and wilfully regressing to that state of open-hearted innocence. Averre said her small group of eighth-grade students took to it more naturally than her high schoolers, whose emotional armor has already thickened.

When clowning stays innocent and simple, Averre said, it also goes universal. “It speaks to the human condition,” she said.

And that’s been the whole point of her tenure at VSAA, Averre added: helping her students “better understand who they are and the significance of art to humanity. It has been my greatest joy to teach and collaborate with so many  incredible young artists” as they have built confidence and awareness of “how beautiful they are.”