Richard Dent IV is an actor, teacher and director based in New York City. He studied acting at the Juilliard School, where he discovered the world of clown and masks from Orlando Pabotoy and Christopher Bayes. Last summer, Richard led a seminar on clowning at SoRA. He sat down with our managing editor, Czarina Ramos, for a conversation on attention, performance, and making space for the clown.
CR: It’s nice to have you, Richard. You are an actor and a teacher of physical acting and clowning, and you’re currently directing at Juilliard. Do you have a history of thinking about attention?
RD: The things that I’ve done in my life and my work very much center attention. Specifically, training as an actor, you develop skills that are simply about making “you” as present as you possibly can be. That is intense attention-work. So, in a way, that’s been incorporated in my study as a person. It’s been wonderful to hear that it’s studied at SoRA.
CR: I can imagine that acting demands a special awareness towards attention. The seminar you taught for SoRA was about clowning – on “making space for the clown.” Where did the clown go, and why do we need to make space for it?
RD: It’s a lot of work to make space for the clown. My former teacher, Christopher Bayes, who is the head of physical acting at Yale, liked to say that the clown is rooted in the little one of yourself – the self before you were ever told no, where things are only terrifying, beautiful, and awful. As a child, we’re always in this pursuit of joy – and this constant wanting to share the joy we’ve just discovered: “Oh, look at this, I can touch my foot!”
To bring that pursuit into a state of your being – in your personal life, as an actor – is an extremely vulnerable thing to call upon. So, to make space for the clown is essentially to make space for your vulnerability to share joy. Granting oneself the permission to be vulnerable becomes very freeing.
“It’s a lot about asking people to go to the extremes of their emotions to exercise the muscle … To encourage those muscles to be exercised is extremely vulnerable, but as they continue to be exercised, you can jump into play much quicker and start to seek the pleasure in the emotion.”
CR: What are the kinds of things that we need to attend to when making space for the clown?
RD: Oh boy – I think very simple things. Very, very simple things that strike you, like, “Oh wow, the clouds look great today.” Or when you see something that’s just so shocking. In general, it’s turning up the volume of the little things. It’s leaves shimmering in the wind and the light. If you stare long enough, you’re like, “Oh my God! That’s incredible!” It’s almost like simplifying what you’re taking in without judgment, without any kind assumption, and people become more beautiful. Rain starts to smell better.
You turn the volume up – which can also go the other way. You can start to see things as, like, “Oh, it’s disgusting,” Part of simplifying is taking something for what it is rather than putting your narrative on it. You return to the center, rather than tipping into an analysis of everything that’s wrong. And as you turn the volume up, you have to be sensitive not to overdo it – but in a way, overdoing it is necessary to understand the line for yourself. That’s the challenge.
CR: How do you teach people to unlearn the tendency to jump into analysis and to center emotion instead?
RD: It’s a lot about asking people to go to the extremes of their emotions to exercise the muscle. We don’t often just rev the muscle; usually, something needs to happen to expose ourselves to a particular feeling. One of the exercises in the class was laughing; people tend to find that once the muscle of laughter gets going, it wants to keep going – much like the crying muscle. To encourage those muscles to be exercised is extremely vulnerable, but as they continue to be exercised, you can jump into play much quicker and start to seek the pleasure in the emotion.
It’s rewarding to watch students struggle with their analytical mind, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch someone go up and just fall on their face. Everyone else witnesses a student getting in their own way, and they relate to that experience. The student goes through a physical experience in which they can’t talk their way out of the problem. They choose to try something different based on what they know about the discomfort. And then a new thing emerges only because this uncomfortable failure occurred first.
What escapes everyone, actor or not, or clowning-curious, is that all we want to do is watch you have a good time up there. Often, people will start in a place that is simply not about joy – they often start in fear, understandably. To nurture an environment where people feel safe to cross the threshold from their fear into joy – that’s my whole life’s career, in that moment. Now we’re having a good time because you took the fear and turned it into play somehow.
“How do you actually let yourself be affected by the thing that’s outside of you, instead of focusing on showing something happening to you?”
CR: Your seminar also incorporated ensembles – tell me about the interpersonal nature of clowning. How do interactions with other people help with arriving at the joy-seeking self?
RD: In an ensemble, the question is often, “How do you make the other person look phenomenal? How do you make them shine?” We can also ask: How do you actually let yourself be affected by the thing that’s outside of you, instead of focusing on showing something happening to you? You can sense the difference when you’re watching a generous performance. Working together is sharing the self, and opening the self up to other people. Ensemble exercises specifically are about support.
CR: It sounds like this practice of generosity towards another actor can inform life in the world beyond acting.
RD: Absolutely. You get to have a richer life when you are interested in what’s outside of you. When you actually experience it and are affected by it, you get to have so much more. It’s very cyclical in that way. A few years ago, when I was teaching, it started to become very clear to me that the person I am as a teacher must now be the person I am when I’m outside of the classroom. I’m teaching people and I’m noticing that I’m very generous and I’m so outside myself. All that I wanted to be as an actor is coming about as I’m teaching in this space. It’s not just a class where I punch in and punch out.
CR: It can be very difficult to see outside of yourself in a culture where self-optimization is so prioritized, where we’re so encouraged to focus on the betterment of ourselves. And I think what you propose, acting with generosity towards what’s outside of yourself, is a form of resistance to that culture.
RD: Yeah, absolutely. I think it is one of the hardest truths to embrace — that you already are the person you want to be. We learn ourselves through experience; we learn ourselves through living. I mean, just to exist and let go of a need to pursue the knowledge of yourself – you can just be a constant skin bag affected by life, and the self is then taken care of.
One of the things I start with in class is something from one of my first directors, Orlando Pabotoy, who said, “Just make an agreement that nothing needs to change in you in order for you to do your work.” And it just gave me a lot of grace within myself.
“You become so present that you can let go of your plan. And you start having opportunities to surprise yourself, by letting go of preconceived ideas of what you’re supposed to be, and you develop the ability to convey your surprise.”
CR: How is this sense of enoughness translated in performance? Is there a relationship between affirming the self and being able to step into characters and act with others?
RD: Once you’re able to trust that enoughness, you can start to exercise that trust with action, and you can begin to exercise the ability to change, to be affected. That trust lets you show up as an actor to each moment not knowing what’s going to happen – so that when something truly affects you, you have the space to be affected and react.
You become so present that you can let go of your plan. And you start having opportunities to surprise yourself, by letting go of preconceived ideas of what you’re supposed to be, and you develop the ability to convey your surprise. For an audience to watch someone be surprised – that’s terribly effective. As an audience, we know when we’re seeing something genuine.
CR: Say I wanted to try this out – maybe with a group of people. In your classes, how do you begin?
RD: The warm-up, as I’ve gone about it, starts by walking. You see each other in a space, and you start to invite in the energy of your physical bodies. Maybe anxiety, just allowing everything in the room to freak you out, and then you can choose to let that go and say “Thank you for entering.” Then you invite in your anger and your rage – not not putting it on anyone, but just letting it physically and vocally enter. And then you say, “Thank you, you can leave the space.” And then despair, which can get really interesting for people, because it can open a lot of doors.
And after that, I ask my students to soften because there’s often exhaustion. And the softening leads to seeing things for the first time. I ask the students to find where a very small chuckle begins in them. And as the chuckle grows, they can start inviting joy into the room, physically and vocally. And then the joy lives there for a little bit and we can now see how beautiful things are. Then great, we’re open. And now we begin the work.
I loved reading this so much. I have read it several times. Thank you for this generous interview and for the beautiful questions.