Death Clowns in Guantanamo Bay, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (U of T), 2013

My friend Matt Jones asked me to direct Death Clowns, a theatrical exploration of his doctoral work, because I had both directorial experience and experience with devised theatre. Matt had begun building the script for the show in the fall of 2012 with several other people using documentary and devised theatre tactics. Rehearsals started in January of 2013 with weekend workshops were we used movement, song, mime and clowning to explore the themes of the show. We then applied these discoveries to the script. Matt and I worked closely with the set and prop designer to build cages, cells, force feeding machines and waterboarding devices. The sinister machines were made even more macabre when we choose mulitcoloured mini-marshmallows to force-feed prisoners with and choreographed clowns to run the waterboards. There was a floor to ceiling chain link fence that the ensemble had to run around, climb over and squeeze under in order to use the stage.

Audience engagment was also a goal for the this show. I collaborated with two computer engineers to create a AR app that people could download to their phones and use to interact with the set before the show. When someone scanned a Q code on the force feeding machine the screen would fill with sickly pink milkshake. If an audience member scanned Q codes on the cages the faces of the cast would fill them. Walking close to the rubber lizard that was placed in the middle of the stage would cause phones to vibrate and beep, reminding the audience that even though humans were beging detained and tortured the island’s lizards were endangered species and needed to be protected at all cost. These choices were made to make the audience feel complicite in the proceedings of the show.

“Death Clowns in Guantanamo Bay is a piece of postrdramtic theatre that examines the circumstances surrounding the deaths of three men in custody in the Guantanamo Bay camp facilities in 2006. Influenced by Tadeusz Kantor’s memory plays, the play uses mannequin doubles, readymade objects and morbid clowning to stage fragmented scenes that explore the problem in a non-narrative, non-language-based way. But where Kantor built his plays from his own memories, this play can only use documentary evidence of what happened. As a result, the play becomes a collage of other people’s memories filtered through public discourses, not a reconstruction of memories but a commentary on the obstacles to political remembering.”

Programme Notes, Matt Jones, 2013