Michael Jay Garner has made a career out of clowning around.
Michael Jay Garner has made a career out of clowning around.
When Michael Jay Garner, psychology graduate, former Coca- Cola employee and, now, clown, bounds across the stage laughter from the audience neatly mirrors his goofball antics.
But the reflection goes both ways.
Garner's a good clown, one of the best — he's been in the business more than 14 years, including 11 as hospital clown Dr Smarty Pants, touring with Britney Spears on her Circus World Tour and, since March 2016, as the handyman clown on Cirque du Soleil's Kooza, which opens for a limited season at Auckland's Alexandra Park on February 15.
The American knows the eyes of the audience are on him as he and his fellow Court Clown, along with their hapless leader The King (of fools), provide much-needed levity to the stomach-clenching aerial capers of the famous circus' acrobats.
But while they're looking at him — he's hard to miss in oversized deep-red dungarees, stripey socks and silly hat — they're seeing themselves, Garner says.
When the clowns fail, the audience loves it. And when the clowns succeed, well, the audience loves that too, he says.
That goes for everyone under the bright lights in wildly popular circus' travelling 20m-high blue and yellow Big Top, from the lean and muscled somersaulting high into the air off the teeterboard to the delicate and beautiful mastery of the Chinese chairs.
"Whenever there's a mistakes, but then they can go back and hit it, maybe it takes a couple of times, but they hit it — that's what everyone in the audience always wants to see," Garner says.
"[They're thinking] I want to believe that if I fail at this thing that I do in my life, whether it's a job or a specific task, that I can keep at it and one day I'll succeed, and I won't necessarily have 2500 people who will witness it, but it will feel as impactful as that moment when 2500 people just roar because you hit the trick."
Cirque du Soleil's Kooza will hit Auckland in February.
The trick for the Kooza clowns is to, quite literally, give the audience a breather between the most heart-stopping of acts, among them the Wheel of Death, where two performers not only balance but jump, skip and somersault on a rotating 725kg apparatus high above the gasps of the audience below.
The clowns were all about "just coming in there and saying, 'We know everyone's a little bit tense, but everything went well, just breathe with us a second. And laugh,'" Garner says.
"I've often called clowns the pickled ginger of a sushi course of circus. If you just have the amazing brilliant acts the show is filled with, you may not even realise it, but you're just wound up so tight. It's all about tension and release ... that's what we're there to do, provide a little bit of balance.
"If you're eating a meal, you don't just want the same thing all the time. You want variety and taste."
The audience can thank Kooza writer and director David Shiner for that dish, the show's current artistic director Dean Harvey says.
"He was a clown himself and he knew where we needed the humour."
And despite the clowns, like all the performers, following a set act they make look effortless, they can never cruise their way through a show.
Two audience members are taken on to the stage every performance - and the amateur additions can be unpredictable, Harvey says.
The clowns most important task is making sure their on-stage guest doesn't end up unexpectedly off-stage — a risk in the excitement of finding yourself in an unfamiliar place before cheering thousands.
Add to that following the cues of someone who's not in on the act and might do anything — including one who startled an off-stage Harvey by dramatically falling down as TimeOut watched Kooza in Seoul.
"I was like, 'Oh my God, is he okay?' But that's the beauty of live theatre and I'll give credit to our clowns; we have a built-in act but whatever's going on, whatever person they have, they have to stay in that moment and go with that character."
More predictable is the fallout from a worldwide rise in scary clown pranks, with the frightening stunts prompting the already wary to give clowns a wide berth.
Garner gets it — added to the scary clown hoaxes, many people simply don't like the comic performers because it's "too easy to be a bad clown.
"I think a lot of a people have experienced non-professional, not good clowning. It's easy to get a rainbow wig and throw some bad make up on, get a honky horn and people think that's clowning. It's completely the opposite.
"For me, the best clowns are the ones that don't even dress up, instead they're the friend in the group that always cracks jokes and has the best timing."
And on stage, in slick productions such as Kooza, clowning works the way it should — allowing the audience to see their own image in the flawed, funny-looking knucklehead peering back.
"Among all the characters in the circus, the clowns are the ones people can relate to the most, because we've all cracked a joke or someone laughed at a joke we said, or we've felt a little uncomfortable, a little bit vulnerable. That's the world where the clown lives.
"I think clowns are such a metaphor for life, all the things we experience in life - laughter, joy, sadness, fear, excitement."
LOWDOWN Who: Michael Jay Garner What: Cirque du Soleil: Kooza When: From February 15 Where: Alexandra Park
