What Twenty Years of Therapy Training Never Taught Me That Clowning Did
Alexia Elliott Hypnotherapy- Shamanic Practitioner -Alchemist -Clown
Leicester UK
“Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged. This is because they accept all offers made — which is something no normal person would do.” — Keith Johnstone
I stumbled into clowning, It was 2015 and I had recently got into studying reading fairy tales. I looked up a term online and somehow ended up on the Emerson College website and nearly signed up for a storytelling course, and then I saw it. Clowning. I read about it quickly and I booked a place.
I had absolutely no idea what I was walking into but went anyway and I loved it.
It is not easy, clowning. Except that it is, completely, the moment you stop trying. That paradox is the whole thing, really. The entire teaching is folded inside it. One of the first improvisations I did was the empty space exercise. You stand on a stage with one object a piece of cloth and you go with what happens, and something always happens. No plan, no script, no character.
I was terrified with a busy mind of ideas to begin with, and then something shifted. I got into my flow and something happened in that space, something conjured itself out of practically nothing, and it was fun. So much silly fun. I kept going back to clown school with Nose to Nose and eventually trained with Vivian Gladwell to be a facilitator in clowning. Clowning has ripped at my vulnerability in ways I was not always prepared for. I learnt to use this process as a sacred mirror for personal inner work. There were times I felt like a slug rolling in salt. I kept going anyway. Something in me knew it was important, even when I could not have told you why.
What I understand now is that the stage was teaching me things the therapy room never quite could. Not because therapy training is inadequate I have spent long enough in this field and I know what good training looks like. Certain things cannot be learned from a manual or a lecture or even a supervision session. They have to be learned in the body, under pressure, in relationship, in real time.
Sensory acuity.
The ability to read another person not through what they say but through the thousand tiny signals the body offers before speech arrives.
The quality of breath. The direction of gaze.
The almost imperceptible shift in weight.
A clown learns this because a clown has no choice. You are on a stage with another person and you are making something together out of nothing, and if you are not tracking every offer they make you will miss the moment and the moment will be gone.
Rapport. Pacing and leading. Being so genuinely present that the other person feels met before you have done anything that could be described as a technique. These are the foundations of what I do in Sacred Alchemy, the things that make the difference between a session that works and one that merely proceeds. And I learned them, in my body, under stage lights, holding a piece of cloth.
Keith Johnstone’s insight is a precise description of what happens in a good session. Everything looks pre-arranged. The practitioner seems to know exactly what was needed, seems to have planned for this particular moment, this exact turn in the work. But they didn’t plan for it. They were simply present enough to accept the offer when it came.
That is the whole of it, really accepting all offers. Not the ones you expected or the ones that fit your model or the ones your training prepared you for. All of them. The awkward silence that wants to be sat in rather than filled. The image that arrives sideways. The thing the client says that sounds like a digression but is actually the centre of everything.
This is what I mean when I talk about Sacred Alchemy as an embodied practice. It is not a set of techniques applied to a person. It is a quality of presence brought into a space, and that space becomes generative because both people are genuinely in it together. The practitioner is not managing the session from a safe clinical distance. They are in the room, in their body, tracking, responding, accepting offers, making something.
Clowning taught me that the space of nothing is not empty at all. It is full of everything that wants to happen if you are willing to let it.
I am still amazed by the power of it. The purity and simplicity of standing in a space with another person and trusting what arises. The way it moves people. The way it moves me.
The best therapy training I ever had was on a stage with a piece of cloth.