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Alex Tatarsky and Max Guy



xx



Max Guy: I have my own questions for you but I have a friend who probably should have done this interview; she loves clowns. So, I have a couple of questions from her, and maybe I can start there. What is your relationship to bombing?
Alex Tatarsky: Tortured? No. It feels like death. Death—it’s terrifying. Of course, you learn the most in those moments because it’s such a brutal lesson you can never forget. It’s kind of mysterious, too. There’s always the chance of bombing, right? So that really keeps you on your toes. That chance never goes away. 

It’s very common to have a bunch of great shows and then bomb because you got too confident. You stopped listening to the actual room that you’re in, and you started living in the past, like when you killed it the past few times. And then the audience is like, “Huh? You’re not performing for us.” They can feel that you’re not listening to them. And every audience is different. They have their own personalities. Like we saw in the historically career-ending bombing of Kramer, whatever his name is—
MG: Michael Richards.
AT: That is a horrible, dangerous zone where you’re bombing and then you get angry at your audience. Like what the fuck is happening, what’s wrong with you all? Because you’re not present to the actual room. You’re living in some other realm. It’s really painful. 

I also think it’s interesting that comedians use the word “bomb.” You either bomb or you kill. Those are your options. So the whole situation is a kind of violent dynamic. I don’t know where those phrases came from, I should probably dig into it. But I guess bombing feels like mass destruction. Everything gets kind of contaminated by that feeling. And killing—in the comedic sense—there’s a precision to it. It’s like you really aimed and you hit your target.
MG: What is your relationship to crowd work in the same sense? 

I ask because in your performance, Sad Boys in Harpy Land at the Museum of Contemporary Art, you initiated us, the seated audience, into a trance of our own by a rhythmic chant as we walked from our seats to the theater stage. So that we can enter into your world, which is the world of the stage or the world behind the curtain, where that almost seems a preventative measure to bombing in my mind, and I see that happening all the time, at least in standup, which is adjacent but not the same as clowning. There seems to be a kind of proliferation of crowd work right now, both at clubs and then just watching things online.
AT: In part, the proliferation of crowd work is people not wanting to give away their best jokes online. They only post clips of improvised crowd work so they’re not spoiling their best material. But it has led to a resurgence of crowd work, as a genre, which is really special. I grew up in Greenwich Village and went to hear comics all the time on MacDougal Street. It’s so beautiful watching someone who’s really good at crowd work bring a room together and kind of make you love humanity. Stand-ups and street performers, like in Washington Square Park, who are really adept at managing a crowd and responding to different life experiences in the moment have always moved me. 

This is the kind of deep listening that is not present when you’re bombing. Bombing is a failure to listen and respond, and so really beautiful crowd work is just excellent listening and responding—that is so beautiful. Oh God, I’m just moved thinking about it!

But also I was listening just before we got on this call to another canceled man. I’m sorry, I’m bringing up all these problematic male comedians, but Louis C.K. on Rick Rubin’s podcast.

MG: Oh my god!
AT: His many problems aside, he is such an analyst of the form of the joke and the rhythm of comedy, and he talks a lot about silence and the space of not-laughter as this zone of opportunity. The silence in and of itself is not the failure because the task is: how do you ride that? What’s the next moment? What’s the most satisfying shape you can make for an audience over an hour? Constant laughter may not be what you want. You want to play with the rhythm of silence and laughter, and how long can you bring an audience through a period of uncomfortable silence until you give them the laughter that then has a different quality because it’s like a relief or a surprise from the sonic and emotional experience that you’ve built up to that point. 
MG: I still think about Sad Boys in Harpy Land, because that was, if not the first performance that I’ve seen of yours, it was the first I’ve seen in a long time. Do you do that often, do you frequently bring [the audience] onto the stage? 
AT: I often respond to audiences in a pretty involved or participatory way, but this was a really specific compositional urge. For a long time, I had wanted to let the audience take over the show and maneuver a situation where I could leave because they were doing the show. So that’s where the impulse came from.

This show, Sad Boys in Harpy Land, is all springing from a scene in a Goethe novel about a little boy who wants to be a theater artist. The character, Wilhelm Meister, spends months writing his great play and then it’s opening night and nothing happens; the actors are all looking at him and he’s like, “Do the play” and they’re like, “You didn’t write it.” So it’s this amazing nightmare of nothingness that just really haunted me. Sad Boys came out of thinking about that moment and like, well, what if you just stayed there in the failure and were curious about it? And I had this idea that it would be fun to trick the audience into making the play for me. So bringing them all on stage is, for me, how I get to leave and watch you all continue the play. And at the very last beat of the show, the curtains open again, and the audience is all on stage looking out at the empty seats.

So whether or not that clicked for people—I don’t think it did, like, I don’t think the audience was thinking, “Wow, we’re now on stage performing”—that’s what’s behind the composition of that moment for me. I get to exit the theater and take one last look at you guys and be like, “My work is done. You take over from here. You have been transformed by the theater.”

MG: It seems like a great solution to filling in that silence. As a clown, do you ever feel competitive?
AT: Wow, fascinating question. Not really. I talk about this with people sometimes. Of all the scenes, I feel like the clown scene is by far the least competitive. There are some publications that are trying to kind of manufacture competition, which I find so wild and annoying because, weirdly, clown performance has come into vogue or something in the last year or so. People will call me and ask for my comment on the West Coast clowns or whatever, truly trying to manufacture East-Coast-West-Coast clown beef. I’m not even kidding. This is happening! Which is really sad because I think the clown is so rooted in humility. 

It’s a practice of humbling yourself, humiliating yourself, making a fool of yourself, debasing yourself, being an idiot, right? A practice of becoming comfortable with, or curious about, the low status. I think that’s really special and exciting. It ideally allows the audience to also get in touch with their own vulnerability and folly.

So people who are drawn to this…it’s not really the same vibe as visual artists or poets who, I’ve found, can be very competitive haha. I don’t think clowns feel like that. Clown is a practice of being present to your own embarrassment. 



MG: Well, now I’m just imagining “shiny suit clowns” versus the G-funk clowns; the East Coast/West Coast thing is lodged in my brain now. I also wonder: How is clowning in front of an audience different from what you learn in clown school or as an amateur clown?

AT: The audience is so crucial. You really learn with the audience, so training is preparation for that. It’s like preparing the vessel, preparing the instrument. Tuning, figuring out how to get in tune, how to stay loose, remembering to breathe, truly expanding your capacity in terms of what your physical form can express.

The clown nose is considered the smallest of masks, and mask performance is a way of turning your entire body into your face—meaning, you turn your entire body into an expressive instrument and communicative tool. You learn how to move by studying the mask’s shape, so clown training starts with many different kinds of mask as training tools. Like a neutral mask covers your entire face and it’s supposedly neutral. Or, another word is “harmonious” or “balanced.” You see what that’s like to move with no psychology, no past, pure presence. 

Then you move on to character masks. There are also things like larval masks, which cover your entire face. You almost develop a psychic capacity because you have to have an awareness of space without being able to see, and you have to listen.

The audience is the crucial element. You’re not really doing clown unless you have an audience, which is freaky and special.

Actually, recently I met someone at a party who was like, “Oh yeah, I hear you teach clown. I’ve been really wanting to do that because I’m getting into this spiritual growth journey, and I was thinking clown would be really good for my spiritual journey.” And I have to tell you, Max, it made me kind of annoyed. And I’ve been thinking about why it annoyed me so much. Like duh, clowning is a spiritual practice. I’ve also been reading a lot about tantra, and there’s so much overlap in terms of breath and energy and attention and focus and transformation, everything. But to get into it for the sake of spiritual journey is not clown, because the clown isn’t on stage being like I’m here for my spiritual journey. The clown is there to entertain the audience. So I just was like, man, no, that’s not why you come to a clown class. It’s sort of a bit backwards. Probably that person would end up being a really funny clown! But only if they were able to make fun of themselves for their desire to take a clown class in order to help their own spiritual evolution.
MG: I’ve been rereading about Nō theater, and I have this book that’s a collection of the nine treatises of Zeami, a major figure in the history of the form. But the more I read about the method, which is another form of mask theater, I realize it also resembles the mobilizing of certain archetypes through bodily movements.

I had the opportunity to train in it one summer, and with the Kita Nō school, or a branch of the school. There was so much thinking about how one trains the body and how training certain regions of your body can exaggerate certain things. It can actually be very physically painful, and the way I would rehearse and practice is largely with my eyes closed because you can’t see through that mask—that one that covers your entire face with only very small holes for the eyes.

I  bring it up because it’s a lot of externalizing, not necessarily a spirit of psyche… it's almost the opposite. It’s kind of an act of externalizing being possessed by something else. Yet you’re not really asked to embody the character of a jūroku, which is a sixteen-year-old soldier who died in battle. You’re not meant to get into some kind of character development or psychoanalyze them. It’s not like a Stanislavsky method or something.

And so, in that way, I don’t know if I believe it to be spiritual, to go back to this person at a party. But there is something there, something a little occult or what have you about it. I want to describe it as viral or something. You start picking up certain habits, or it feels like a syndrome, when you’re acting as opposed to discovering something about yourself. I’ve been trying to think that through.
AT: One of the things that I’ve taken as a core lesson of this work is the outside in as opposed to inside out—like what you were saying about it being a non-psychological approach; it’s a way of seeing and listening. The gaze is so important, especially in a full face mask. To me, it feels like you’re drinking in the world and breathing in the world, and that is the practice. 

The audience is able to see because they see you seeing. It’s like you spend ten-hour days for weeks practicing in this full face mask, seeing a waterfall, and breathing with its particular rhythm, and finding the quality of waterfall in your body, so that an audience can see you seeing a waterfall, and they then can see the waterfall.

One of the most magical parts of theater is that it’s working so much with constraint; you don’t have the capacity to conjure images the way that you can in cinema. Often there’s also the constraint of inadequate resources. So the mask practice is one in which you don’t actually need anything besides your physical instrument and your imagination. If you really see a desert, a mountain peak, or a dirty puddle, and you reflect that in the quality of your breath and gaze and movement, the audience sees it too. They can see what you’re looking at. It’s amazing. It’s beautiful. It’s magic. It’s truly magical.
MG: Do you think you would have to have ever seen a waterfall?
AT: I think it would help to have specificity. If you’re imagining something you’ve never actually seen, I think you can do it, but it probably stays a little vague. If you’re looking at something you’ve really seen before, then you can get specific, which to me is the key to all art, is how specific and precise can you go. In clown school, for example, we go to the ocean and just spend a day observing and seeing what it’s like to breathe with the same rhythm of the ocean, because that experience helps you create a more specific image for the audience to imagine.
MG: I think about Lars von Trier who hadn’t visited America for many of his films set there, or Brecht who hadn’t been to Chicago when he did his plays about the city. What can that invoke, even if you’ve never been to a place? Is it really about said place, then, or something else? Then just allowing a setting to be a kind of symbolic conduit.
AT: That can also be so great. The strangeness of imagining and depicting something that you don’t actually have experience with. I saw this production by this Oslo-based theater company Susie Wang. They did a piece called Burnt Toast in New York that I saw, and I was like, this is so bizarre. They’re depicting an American hotel lobby, but it’s a kind of abstracted, absurd idea of an American hotel lobby.

That’s kind of Brechtian, right? There’s this alienation effect or estrangement that allows you to really take a look at the thing that you typically gloss over because it’s been rendered strange. So I do think there’s something, of course, to be said for this distance that allows you to depict something with a peculiar quality that actually makes the audience take a closer look with you.
MG: So I read that you studied with Stanley Sherman.
AT: Do you know him?
MG: Yeah, he did the Mankind mask for Mick Foley from the WWE.
AT: Oh my God! I’m so happy that you know Stanley Sherman.
MG: That’s kind of crazy.
AT: He was my first mask teacher, and I just went because I saw his postcards, like his flyers. He had them in the lobby of La MaMa, the theater on East Fourth Street where I was performing, and they looked cool because his postcards had images of Italian Commedia masks. I was like, “Oh, I’ll go do a commedia mask intensive. This sounds awesome.” And then we connected through that and have been working together ever since. I’m a big believer in flyers.
MG: They do work. It was through a radio show interview that I found out about Kita Nō school and Theatre Nohgaku.
AT: Stuff that comes in through non-social media, where you’re not just getting this super weird corporate tailored bullshit. I like encountering things through being in the world and seeing what comes your way. It can lead to some special places.
MG: I’m still thinking about the Commedia as one particular mask form. 
AT: What’s on your mind about it, or what’s intriguing you? What have you been thinking about?
MG: I know less about Commedia as a genre. I think the most I know of it is from Giandomenico Tiepolo, actually; he had done a series of drawings of the stock characters Pulcinello or Pulcinelli who represented workers doing different jobs, basically. I’ve been kind of curious about the way that those mask forms, first of all, don’t necessarily need to be one at a time. At least in Tiepolo’s world, Pulcinella can stand in as a crew of construction workers or one person, like a circus performer, for example…I made two masks of my own, just carved them. I can share those with you at some point. Where did you study Commedia?
AT: I studied with Stanley. He used to do these roving Commedia dell’arte schools, so he would just pop up somewhere for a few weeks and teach. That was my first point of entry. Later, I went to Philly for the first time to study Commedia with Pig Iron, a theater company there, when they had just started a school. I went for the summer and ended up staying basically for two more years, and now here I still am. So, Commedia kind of brought me into this life in a way.

Even though we don’t really have that tradition of Italian mask performance in the U.S., there are strong traces of it. Commedia dell’arte archetypes are everywhere, especially in cartoons and sitcoms when the dynamic of power is being negotiated. The comedy comes from the little guy who is always trying to pull one over on his boss or whatever, and keeps getting in trouble, and the eternal cycles and all the plots and stories that come out of these tensions around hierarchy. 

I really feel like these archetypes are so contemporary. When I move through them with a room of students, they immediately get that Trump is a Pantalone, the greedy boss character who keeps his gold coins in a sack dangling by his dick, kind of like ball sacs that he’s always fondling. He’s obsessed with protecting his wealth and he’s also super paranoid and always exploiting everyone around him. So many of the guys that are running things right now are Pantalones! They have a perverted relationship to their wealth and their way of moving through a room is driven by the dick. Like I mentioned earlier, you let the shape of the mask teach you how to move. The shape of the mask conducts you.
MG: One of the things that I was teaching in my face and mask class were trends like looksmaxxing and body modification to fit a very specific standard or archetype. Having a young person named after a specific bone or body part on the face is one signifier, like Clavicular, or the Mar-a-Lago face, as a physical permanent kayfabe—this tacit understanding that we are all in the performative world and have to exist within it.
AT: The Mar-a-Lago face really looks like a mask; it’s so exaggerated—I would love to make one. And what I love about the Commedia masks is that they allow you to really take pleasure in mocking power, right? The Mar-a-Lago face would be so fun to embody and mock.
MG: One of my students was very interested in giving herself a Mar-a-Lago face via casting and modifying a mold of herself. It was dreadful. It was just a very dreadful mask. And she went through various iterations of it. So one mask was just the face post-op, like post-surgery, it was fascinating. 
AT: That’s so grotesque and good; it really gets at so much. Just the horror show that we’re in right now, and the complexity of what’s going on that these women are mutilating themselves to achieve a kind of uniformity, or something that telegraphs youth and wealth, but involves cutting themselves up and being bandaged. I’d love to see that; it sounds cool.
MG: It was one of the highlights of the semester.

Speaking of masks, I know you were very involved in the world of Andy Kaufman and his legacy, very literally, right? Did that start because of the aesthetic interests and resemblance between the two of you? Or, how did you initiate that?

AT: Trying to decide how much to share about my family, but—
MG: You have a family connection somehow?
AT: Well, I wasn’t raised by him, but Andy is my dad, which is only a fact I learned later in life. But then after I learned that, I became quite close with his brother and many of his close friends, everyone from big-time pimps to small-time radio hosts. He kept really interesting company. He loved hanging out at the legalized—I don’t want to say whorehouses—he loved hanging out with sex workers in Nevada. I got to know a lot of these folks, including maybe most relevant to our conversation, a Los Angeles wrestling promoter named Johnny Legend and his whole world, and these are guys who are totally, utterly committed to the bit till their dying breath. They’re committed to conjuring a feeling among the viewers of not quite knowing what’s true, and a kind of magic that comes from wrestling with disbelief. So I learned a lot from that crowd.
MG: Beautiful. Is there, in the way that a doctor has a Hippocratic oath, is there one for a clown or magician?
AT: Wow, great question. I’ve been thinking a lot about how a clown is in some ways opposite to a magician, but then there is a lot of overlap, so that binary collapses basically as soon as you assert it. But in the sense that the magician has to be very in control of the situation in order to manipulate an audience’s attention, and a clown does too, obviously, but I think a clown’s practice is more about improvisation and flexibility, and that’s where the magic is. Whatever happens, the clown can alchemize it into something beautiful and funny, whereas the magician has an obsessive practice of making sure things go the same way every time because the magic of the trick depends on that.

Although I have recently heard some magicians say that they despise the word “trick,” and they much prefer the word “game.” And “game” is really a clown word. We talk about le jeu, “the game,” like a sense of play. What’s the game that you’re playing with the audience? The contract with the audience is that you both agree to show up and play a game together.

There is something called the clown’s prayer that sometimes clowns like to read. It’s not really like an oath in quite the same way, but it’s about remembering that your job is to make people smile. Your job is to cheer people up, and it’s a true, deep commitment. Despite gloom and despair, your aim is to cheer people up because of the unpleasantness of life, not despite it, but alongside it.

So, I think about it in terms of the clown’s job, or something, that it’s to be reminding us of death and decay, and maybe death as transformation, going back to that whole celebration of the low. The clown puts us back in contact with the low that we try to push away in ourselves and societally and physically. We’re always trying and failing to push our shit, literally and metaphorically, out of sight.
MG: A “horse womb” is the word that alchemists would use when they put a glass jar full of some material into a mound of horse shit or cow dung, really. And they would do that to keep something warm. It was just a way of preserving. Which is just to say that all of the ingredients are laid out. Everything is put on the table because there just has to be a belief in the fact that all of the things will work together, as opposed to the distraction or the idea that you don’t know how things are interconnected.
AT: Wow! This is really blowing my mind. This horse dung thing.
MG: Yeah, the horse womb.
AT: Because my other main obsession in life is the compost heap, and I guess it’s the same thing basically. The particular reactions between elements create the heat that is necessary for transformation to occur. You need the element of heat. Wow, this is amazing! This is going to really help me. Thank you for turning me on to the horse womb as a concept.
MG: There’s an alchemist from, let’s see, I think probably sixteenth century. A guy named Paracelsus, and he was very interested in the idea of making people like homunculi. And one of the ingredients, or one of the steps in the process, was putting a bunch of material in a beaker and then letting it sit in horse shit.
AT: Makes so much sense.
MG: Your interest in rot, how related is it to your theorizing? Alchemy and clowning.
AT: It’s kind of the same thing. Like the attention to process and thinking about what you put in the heap, and how different elements affect each other, and how to be present to something that’s always changing, even when it makes us uncomfortable. 

Like, I’m so upset by toilets. You just wouldn’t believe. I’m so angry at toilets. It’s so stupid that we think we’re keeping everything clean by flushing our piss and shit down the toilet, but we’re really just pissing and shitting in our drinking water! It’s disgusting. And then we have to expend all this resource to filter it when it’s the best fertilizer there is! Piss and shit! But we so cannot deal with our piss and shit that we create all these elaborate, expensive, and stupid systems to whisk it away. But, of course, away is a myth. There is no away. Away is just here for someone else, somewhere else. So I guess clowning is about acknowledging that stuff together. The piss and the shit and the rot.
MG: I think about how you vomited. In Sad Boys in Harpy Land, you were on stage and you vomited an old Jewish man, like an old wandering Jew, into existence, effectively vomiting up a mask, right? I think you threw up, and then suddenly you had a beard instead, and you were a new person.
AT: Wow, you have a really good memory.
MG: I think about that all the time. Actually, I’m like, dang, that’s like a person, literally just a new person out. That person was a vomit.
AT: Thank you for saying that.
MG: I don’t have a question related to it, but—
AT: I think this is a really nice place that you brought us to: a vomit person. But also that there’s endless masks. I think what draws me to this work is that I have so much suspicion of there being a true, authentic self underneath it all. I don’t think there is some stable self! The self is constantly shifting and being affected and informed by circumstances and also just physically, like, breathing in all kinds of particles and changing in relation to the air, just to take one simple, undeniable example. The excitement of performance is the chance to play with the many masks that we all wear all the time, just trying to survive the day. We’re always taking off and putting on different masks depending on what the moment requires. But I just don’t think there’s a real self underneath it. I think life is one long mask play.





Alex Tatarsky makes performances in the uncomfortable in-between zone of comedy, dance-theater, performance art, and deluded rant – sometimes with songs. Tatarsky experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt.
Playing with language and narrative structure, their live performances are highly responsive to context and audience, often breaking the fourth wall and embracing humor to dissect the construction of community and self in real time. Solo works include DIRT TRIP (MoMA PS1), Untitled Freakout (The Kitchen), Buttplug Gnome (Gibney Dance), Americana Psychobabble (La Mama, Jacob’s Pillow), MATERIAL (Whitney Biennial), and Sad Boys in Harpy Land (Abrons, Playwrights Horizons - Best of 2024 New Yorker, NYTimes, Art Forum). @tartar.biz


Max Guy lives in Chicago. Across paper, video, performance, and installation he uses fast, ergonomic ways to make poetry of the world, filtering it through personal effects. He currently lectures at Northwestern University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.