Conversations about Clown, Aziz

Interview: Moshe and Aziz (Mexico) in a noisy restaurant in Rio de Janeiro. Interview conducted in Spanish in December, 2006; during the Anjos Do Picadeiro festival, translated by Moshe into English.

Aziz performs as a traditional circus clown, and then in a surprising twist ends his show by sitting down and taking off his make-up in front of the audience, taking off the mask so to speak, to reveal the human being that becomes this clown.

M: What is clown?

A: Clown is an individuality, is an unique person who could not be the same as another. It is encountering and discovery of yourself. The clown is to meet your own person and to share it. It is a way to open yourself up, to accept your virtues, and your failures, your positive and negative sides, and your circumstances. Clown is what is in this moment within the current circumstances. It is nothing more than the experience of a human being in one moment in a given circumstance he or she is in with the desire to share a dialogue about that.

M: For you, Is there a spiritual connection to clown?

A: Absolutely. When one talks about ‘being’, one is talking about a spiritual connection. The clown is a form of discovering your spirituality, and a way of living the encounter and communion with yourself and others. Spirituality, like life is not all the time. Like happiness, it is not present all the time, but sometimes. The clown’s lives with one, but the part of playfulness and performance is not present all the time. It lives and then it dies; and then it lives again. It is circular. It is born and then in dies, and then it is born again, completely linked to the spirit.

M: would you agree that clown is a language of the heart?

A: Completely. The heart and the communication of feeling, and not of thinking. The clown communicates feelings, not thoughts. The clown develops emotional intelligence through the heart which is completely connected to spirituality; they (heart and the spirituality) are together.

For that reason I am not interested in what the clown says. Language is a limitation of the head. The heart, feelings are not limited. To communicate via the emotional intelligence, with the intensity of emotion that is here (pointing to his heart). When you communicate with the heart, there is no reason why a Turk and Chinese person shouldn’t understand you.