How to Fill a Clown Car (Lessons from Julia Proctor’s Clown Gym)

Foreword

New York City, 2021. Isolated, over-snacked, and starved for a creative community, I joined a virtual playwriting group. I was writing an existential dark comedy (as one does during a pandemic-induced lockdown) and thought, this play has clowns. Where do I find those?

Once things opened up, an online search led me to something called “Clown Gym.” One Google Form and $15 later, I was tiptoeing into a studio, debating whether I should run back to Brooklyn, when I met a pair of kind and curious eyes peering over an N95 mask. “Welcome! I’m Julia. What’s your name?” She was dressed in brightly-colored overalls that matched her vibrant presence.

After sixteen months of isolation, those two hours of games and improvisations revived my spirit. The weekly ritual of play at Clown Gym was transformative and eventually propelled me to the Pig Iron School for Devised Performance.

Maybe clown is not only a form, but also a call to action.

Clown has existed since the first breaths of humanity, but in recent years, it has been revitalized as a movement in United States theatre. Clown Gym has served a vital role bringing people to the form, especially on the east coast (shoutout to the Los Angeles clown scene). But, more than a training ground, it was a special community nourished by Julia Proctor’s mission to make this work consistently available and financially accessible in a space that prioritizes people. Clown Gym modeled how to operate an organization based on the values it teaches by always adapting to meet the needs of the room.

Maybe clown is not only a form, but also a call to action. What can the ethos of clown offer when building other kinds of brave, inclusive, and joyful communities and organizations?

To be part of a movement, we need a vehicle. So…

How To Fill a Clown Car: An Instructional Guide

Step One: Figure Out What “Clown” Is so You Can Figure out How to Fill a Car with Them.

For most humans, the word “clown” conjures the following images:

• A smiling stranger with tumultuous makeup honking incessantly at Jimmy’s birthday party
• Hamburgers
• An unwelcome invitation to a sewer

Not to yuck anybody’s yum, but that’s not what we’re trying to fill a car with today. When we discuss clown in relation to theatre, there’s not a universal definition. However there are nuggets of insight, passed down through history and shared by contemporary clown teachers, that help us sense the territory: 

Clown is:

• “Who you would be if you were never told ‘no’ and never betrayed your enthusiasm.” —Christopher Bayes
• “The dissolution of the fourth wall.”
• “The parts about you that your best friends laugh at behind your back.” —Aitor Basauri
• “A state of play.”
• “A poet who is also an orangutan.” —John Towsen
• “A discovery of how ‘personal weakness’ can be transformed into dramatic strength.” —Jacques Lecoq
• “To process with humor the tragedy of life.” —Giovanni Fusetti

For a concept rooted in stupidity, it becomes quite philosophical. The clown elders suggest that it’s not just fart jokes and hamburgers. But—

Clown is:

• Actually also fart jokes and hamburgers.

Step Two: Find a Whole Bunch of Clowns.

…Where?

Step Negative One: Find One Clown Who Organizes Clowns to Lead You to a Whole Bunch of Clowns Who You Can Fill a Clown Car With.

Enter Julia Proctor, the founder and director of Clown Gym—the bedrock of clown development in New York City. She also sometimes goes by “Icky Shirley Dangle.”

*****

Data crunch break: Over the past ten years, Clown Gym has produced four hundred drop-in workshops, twenty workshop intensive series, twenty virtual clown shows, seven Clown Flexes, seven open mics/clown parties, three devised shows, the Examining Clown Lab, a teaching cohort, and thousands of students.

*****

That’s a packed car mainly driven by Julia’s blood, sweat, tears, and joy. How did she find herself here? As she told me,

Many years ago, living in Washington, DC, I was a… super serious actor. I took myself very seriously. I had my heart set on New York University (NYU) for graduate school, and I didn’t get in. They told me, “Your technique is strong, but we want more mess.”

“I know that’s why I want to come here!”

And they said, “You should study clown with this guy Chris Bayes.”

The first time I had “success” in his class was so disorienting and confusing because I didn’t know why they were laughing at me, and I was getting more and more upset, and they kept laughing harder and harder. As this Type A person that likes being in control, that success came when I was out of control. And I got hooked.

After a couple of summers training with Bayes, Julia spent the next year apprenticing with him at Yale, Juilliard, and the Funny School of Good Acting, now known as The Pandemonium Studio. After one workshop, participants approached Julia wondering how they could keep this group training going. One student worked at Shetler Studios, and he used his staff credits to donate space, so the group began meeting regularly to trade leading games and exercises. Clown Gym was born in 2014 as a “collaborative member-sourced experiment in play.”

At first, no one was in charge. They desired a collaborative spirit, but they found that time and organization was becoming unfocused. The group asked Julia to take on more of a leadership role.

“Clowns need organizing, and I was happy to step into that role,” she told me.

Julia led the group, developing a culture that was collaborative but also organized and focused.

A Clown Gym session is physical, but not intimidatingly so, and low stakes yet incredibly energized. It’s efficient but makes time to follow interesting tangents. It celebrates success and failure equally. It invites boldness and experimentation while cultivating safety and clear communication. It welcomes stupidity, vulnerability, and it overflows with intoxicating laughter. Participants are free to be versions of themselves that may not be accepted elsewhere.

Word spread outside of the original clown cluster. Participants brought curious friends, and eventually the gym opened to the public.

Maybe part of an organization’s success is that new people step into a culture that has been nurtured over time. How that culture continues to evolve depends on who enters the clown car.

A guiding principle of clown performance is not to sweep messes under the rug, but to acknowledge and share them with the audience, using those messes as opportunities to create something new.

Step Two Minus Two: Determine Which Clowns Get a Seat

Julia Proctor has put in an astonishing amount of work and energy into shaping a culture grounded in the same joy this performance strives to create—a more inclusive, safer, and accessible space for curious humans to be open, connect, and play together. But Clown Gym does not prescribe a singular approach to clown training. Over Clown Gym’s first ten years, Julia has hired ninety-two different teaching artists to lead workshop sessions, offering a rich diversity of perspectives.

“A goal has been to hire as many different teachers as possible,” Julia explains. “If you see yourself reflected in the teacher, you might feel more comfortable being vulnerable with that person.” She shares that power dynamics must be considered, as well. “As a clown, if you are lowering your status and the audience laughs at you, there are power dynamics at play. Who is laughing at you? Are you punching up or punching down? We always want to punch up.”

By 2021, after seven years of growth, Clown Gym wasn’t content to coast. Committed to its mission, it joined a broader conversation around equity in the clown world. A core tenet of clowning is disruption—and the status quo of the clown community itself needs disrupting to become more equitable. Clown Gym initiated the Examining Clown Lab to interrogate the discipline and how it could be made more equitable. The participants acknowledged the challenges transparently.

“The lab was really hard, really messy,” Julia says. “That was the big takeaway—that it’s really hard, but let’s keep trying. And that it’s not necessarily the craft but the people. It’s always the people.”

This led to two initiatives: the Clown Teaching Cohort and the devised show Today’s Mess.

The Lab acknowledged a lack of diversity among clown teachers. The Clown Teaching Cohort was a yearlong mentorship program led by Julia and Ania Upstill for aspiring teachers from diverse backgrounds. Participants had free access to all Clown Gym programming, met twice a month to discuss pedagogy and lesson plans, were supported by Clown Gym’s diverse teacher roster, and received a financial stipend.

In 2023, many from the Lab and Clown Gym devised Today’s Mess—a show inspired by their explorations. Their tagline was “A group of clowns try… and keep trying to build community.”

A guiding principle of clown performance is not to sweep messes under the rug, but to acknowledge and share them with the audience, using those messes as opportunities to create something new. Imagine what glorious creations might emerge from the messes organizations have tucked away or spun.

Step Ten: Become a Vehicle for Revolution.

Julia has discovered how to use the tenets of clown performance to model a values-driven organization. What can we learn from this story to build better communities?

When asked for her definition of clown, Julia said, “Clown is your most open, playful, and free creature, and it is willing to share your experience of that with an audience with curiosity and an open heart. Period (for now). It’s always evolving.”

That openness is the key. Like a clown onstage, Clown Gym listens to the room, adapts, and evolves. This kind of success requires true care.

Step **: Take a Break from the Clown Car.

In June 2024, Clown Gym went on hiatus to rest, reflect, and plan for the future.

Note: a clown car driven by one clown forever is probably going to go into a swamp at some point. Rest is part of the revolution. It takes a village. Sustaining a community requires a community to sustain you.

In late 2025, Julia announced that Clown Gym is returning in a scaled-back way, starting with workshops led by Julia.

Clown is your most open, playful, and free creature, and it is willing to share your experience of that with an audience with curiosity and an open heart.

Step Thirty-Six: Acknowledge That There Is No Perfect Method to Any of This.

The point is to try. And keep trying to—

Turn page

Several pages missing

One page has been dunked in coffee, another is the second half of a term paper from Texas State University

One is a drawing of a snail

Therest of the instructional guide flies away

*****

Many steps are missing—maybe to provide space for others to fill in. Maybe it’s best that a guide is constantly changing based on its environment. But the truth is that those pages were stolen by a smiling stranger with tumultuous makeup honking incessantly at Jimmy’s birthday party.

I once heard a clown teacher say, “you’ll never truly find your clown—because the moment you think you have, it slips away in a mad dash.” Maybe that’s the key to building community, sustaining organizations, and inspiring change: Never assume mastery. Keep listening. Keep disrupting. Keep pursuing.

Learn more at clowngym.com. 

Learn how to write an instructional guide to filling a clown car by reading “How To Write an Instructional Guide to Filling a Clown Car: An Instructional Guide.”

Step One: Figure Out What an Instructional Guide Is so You Can—