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Laughter Per Kilometre: Clowning glory

Actor Rupesh Tillu talks about the month-long celebration of spreading laughter in the country

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Rupesh Tillu (centre) with other clowns
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For the past couple of days, the quiet little hill-station of Matheran has been seeing a lot of clowning around! There are group sessions, theatre exercises and laughter. That’s because a bunch of artistes are participating in a theatre residency to create a unique initiative called Laughter Per Kilometre. The first ever-month-long celebration of clowning in India is being made possible by Clowns without Borders Sweden (CWE-SE) and Red Nose Entertainment (RNE). Their aim? To promote the hitherto neglected art form in India and secondly, to use it as a tool to lend psychosocial aid to less fortunate children/people. And as Rupesh Tillu, actor and founder of RNE puts it, “We want to make India funny again, kilometre by kilometre.” 

A HEIGHTENED STATE

Say ‘clown’ and you’re bound to think of a person wearing a colourful wig, with a painted face and wearing funny shoes. But that’s not what Rupesh considers it to be. “The clown’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. It’s not to solve problems, but to show society their problems. Their job is not to make people laugh, but to take them to an emotional, heightened state, where laughter is a sort of catharsis,” he says.

The four-part project has taken Rupesh two years to conceive and bring to fruition. “The idea was to  get local artistes to bring clowning to people here,” he states.  

At the theatre residency in Matheran, 15 clowns from Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai had the opportunity to train with five international Master Clowns from Clowns without Borders. A trio from each city will create a show directed by the Master Clown. The residency itself is just one of the four part activities planned for the initiative. The works created by the artistes as well as talks with some renowned theatre personalities forms part two of the project — The International Clown Festival of India — which will be open to audiences. Once they reach their respective cities, they will perform those shows at different venues for children belonging to vulnerable communities. The fourth and final step will see Clown Popo (Rupesh Tillu) and Clown Loco (Vijay Sharma) travel to these cities to conduct evaluation workshops and seminars with people who work with these children and empower them with play tools to create a better engagement with kids. 

CHANGING MINDSETS

Rupesh Tillu, who is a part of CWB-SE for the past 10 years, has been working with the children of sex workers in Kamatipura, using theatre and clowning as a powerful tool to help change their societal context. “We just happened to perform for the young ones in 2012 and from thereon, we have been entertaining them every year. The kids enjoyed it so much that they asked us to do a show specially for their mothers, which we did in 2015. From the next year onward, we started teaching theatre skills to the girls,” Rupesh tells us. In June this year, six of the girls were selected to perform at the Brave Kids Festival in Poland. They also visited Sweden and toured the country. “Their world view changed after that and the other girls in the group are also inspired by them now,” he shares. Rupesh believes that theatre and arts changes people’s mindsets. “It makes them creative, gives them imagination and when they imagine, they will have hope for the future because they can imagine the future,” he adds.

The International Clown Festival of India will take place today and tomorrow at Harkat Studios, Andheri.

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