in the hospital
INTERVIEW
it's all about
The Medical Clown Project:
An Interview with Jeff Raz
Lisa/
How did you first get involved with circus, and with clowning, in
particular?
Jeff/
I learned to juggle when I was fourteen at the Renaissance Faire
in northern California. It was the first thing I could do that felt
good. I think a lot of circus folks describe that, a trapeze or a handst and or
other piece of equipment that just felt right. When I was fifteen, I started
performing professionally, working on the streets here. I was not that
interested in clowning because it wasn’t “cool.” But Bill Irwin, Geoff Hoyle,
Larry Pisoni, that was the world I was around—the San Francisco mime troupe,
Joan Mankin—so I regularly got to see fabulous clowns and I then began to
move in that direction.
L/
J/
So what was the impetus behind the medical clown project? How did it
get started?
I had done a couple of workshops with the Big Apple Circus Clown
Care Unit, which is now Healthy Humor. At that time, each city did their
own trainings every month, so the New York group brought me out to do a
workshop. I was teaching them clowning, but at lunch, I also got to say, “So
what do you guys do? What’s the difference between what I do and what you
do?” Then they invited me to teach at their national convention and all the
medical clowns from all over the country were there.
When I was running The Clown Conservatory, I always had a section on social
circus because it was not responsible to think about clowning as separate
from social circus. One of my earliest experiences with theater was the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, watching them do political theater. At The Clown
Conservatory, we partnered with San Francisco General Hospital.
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them.
you give
power to a patient.
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