Clown aesthetics: floppy shoes, red nose, green wig, red-and-yellow nylon suit. All surprisingly recent. Clown-like figures already appeared in antiquity. Yet, nylon was only invented in 1935. So what came before?
Before our time, clowns wore white. Delicate fabrics. Vulnerable materials. Faces painted white, each with a personal drawing: one melancholy, another foolish.
Perhaps that old aesthetic still lingers. Or perhaps it will return. One can hope. A vintage Pierrot or August carries a different charge than those horror-clown descendants. For one, it would be increasingly pleasant to see a clown move in a fabric that allows for comfortable sweating. A breathable fabric, one that doesn’t cling and stink the way nylon tends to.
Now I’m venturing onto slippery ground, that of Belgian theatre aesthetics. There is a theatrical aesthetic found in Belgium where things look as though plastic was never invented. As if polyester, polyamide, acrylic, and nylon never came along to shake things up. As if people were always confined to canvas, wool, leather, and wood. An aesthetic of carefully tended dullness. Think slate grey with a hint of nocturnal blue.
Perhaps Salomé Mooij and Geert Belpaeme will bring us such vintage clowns in Anatomie van een struikel (Anatomy of a Stumble). Perhaps they will show us softly stimulating, low-sensory beings. Perhaps. No promises. First, they enter three residencies: January 5–16 at de Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), January 19–23 at KAAP (Bruges), and January 26–30 at CC Menen (Menen).
Worth noting already: the performance premieres on March 21, 2026, during the World Clown Symposium at De Grote Post in Ostend.