19 September 2005: Send in the Clowns, Part Two

I am making an extraordinarily fast recovery from the flu. Kensei made me Magical Healing Soup, which was delivered to my door by a Magical Healing Oz.

Yesterday I presided over an afternoon of Aikido Shusekai belt tests - two 5th kyu tests (including the Magical Healing Soup-Delivering Oz) and four 4th kyu tests (including the Magical Healing Soupmaking Kensei). All six tests were magnificent - easily among the best 5th and 4th kyu tests I've ever seen in any dojo.

One of our magnificent new blue belts (4th kyus, that is) is twelve years old. Twelve. Wow. I love that. I didn't get my blue belt until I was fifteen.

And then, in the evening, I went to the first session of the latest Paratheatrical Research project, the Two-Faced Clowns Lab.

I hope to be able to find enough journalling time to chronicle the progress of the Clown Lab as I did the Initiations Lab, but I'm not sure whether I will. For now, I don't have time to write more than a few basic notes - I'm still working on that Personal Statement for my college application, and I have school today and the second Clown Lab session in the evening. The flu put me behind schedule on schoolwork, housework, and all kinds of other things.

There are eleven participants in the Clown Lab, including Sherpa. Six men, five women. Three newbies; everyone else I've been in at least one lab with before. It's a really good group.

First session, we mostly worked with the polarity of Truth and Falsity, which will probably remain a major theme.

Autism has been a major theme in my recent paratheatrical work. In retrospect, it was a theme for me in Crux, even though I didn't know it at the time because I didn't yet know I was Autistic. I now realize that the betrayal and scapegoating issues I was dealing with in Crux were primarily about the traumas resulting from the standard Neurotypical misunderstanding and persecution of Autistic people - for instance, the dishonesty and evasiveness ("slipperiness") that I developed as a result of being perpetually accused of dishonesty and evasiveness because of my Autistic avoidance of eye contact.

More recently and enjoyably, I intentionally explored Autism in the Song as Vehicle Lab, and I tapped into my Autism as a movement resource in the Requiem for a Friend performances, with excellent results.

I didn’t have any expectation of working with Autism in the Clown Lab. What could Autism have to do with being two-faced?

But of course, all of us so-called “high-functioning” Autistics deal with a certain sort of two-facedness in a very big way, in dealing with the pressure to modify our natural behavior in order to “pass” in the NT world, the way that some light-skinned black people in the days of segregation took great pains to try to pass for white. This turned out, to my complete surprise, to be the most powerful theme that came up for me in this first Clown Lab session.

In one ritual the room was divided into three zones, and we walked back and forth across the room, traversing all three zones. One zone was Truth, one was Falsity, and there was a zone of Resistance in between them – if one was moving from Truth to Falsity, then the Resistance zone was Resistance to Falsity; if one was moving from Falsity to Truth, it was Resistance to Truth. Resistance to Falsity manifested for me as the resistance of an Autistic child to being pressured to conform to NT behavior. Resistance to Truth manifested as fear of the rejection and persecution that most Autistic people encounter if they don’t try to “pass.”

In the final ritual, we got to use Falsity as a source for creating a character (this is probably a big part of how we will eventually create our clown characters for the public performances at the end of the lab). I created an “Uber-NT” character, who swaggered around making aggressively friendly eye contact with everyone else, ignoring personal boundaries, making cheerful “small talk” in nonsense syllables, and jovially shaking hands with people and slapping them on the back. It was immensely fun and cathartic.

This is going to be a really fun lab.