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BORDER CROSSINGS
A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS
Volume 20, Number 3, Issue 79, 2001
Holding a Mirror Up to Laughter
By Robert Enright
Watching Shannan Calcutt's trilogy featuring Izzy the Clown over the last three years was like watching a good friend mature. At her first Winnipeg Fringe Festival appearance in 1999, she won over large audiences with her signature question, "Do you think I'm pretty?" The answer was never in doubt, since the clown who posed it was so endearing that your reaction would be to give anyone who said no a red nose of their own. Part of her appeal is the voice (it has variously been described as Valley Girl, Roger Rabbit on speed or - and this is Calcutt's favorite - Katherine Hepburn set on squeak) and, as a self-admitted "complete chatterbox," Izzy uses it to full advantage. Her evolution from the waif in a wedding dress waiting for a blind date who never appears (Burnt Tongue), to an aggressive would-be nun and potential stalker (It's Me, Only Better), was radical enough. But in Out of My Skin, the third play in the trilogy, she pulls out all the stops. "In the second show," Calcutt argues, "she's still vulnerable but she has an edge and in the third show she's got a whole new attitude. She's not waiting any longer." Part of what
provoked the change was the theft of her trademark wedding dress in Winnipeg on a tour last year. "In clown you wear one thing, and it was gone. I was afraid that I'd lost my clown, and myself as well." Her response was to build the absence of the dress into the show, which meant appearing nude from the waist up. "Last year was absolute hell because there was so much humility involved in working in a studio with a wall of mirrors. I'd be creating and I'd see myself in the mirror with these bags filled with fish taped onto my breasts, and my gut would be hanging out and we'd be talking about the perfect body." The sequence involves Izzy making do-it-yourself breast implants, and it generated sold-out shows at this years Winnipeg Fringe Festival. The response pleased Calcutt, although not only for the obvious economic reasons. "The thing with Izzy is she always wants acceptance and feels completely inadequate - and this feeling of inadequacy comes from me." What works against that feeling is the intense relationship Izzy develops with her audience. When she first began working solo, she was nervous
until she realized that "the audience is my partner." They are as visible as she is. "You have the house lights up, you welcome them into your world and you want to transform them." Izzy has done that. In Cowichan, British Columbia, she was performing Burnt Tongue and in explaining the non-appearance of her blind date, she speculated that he might have been in an accident. "Just then an ambulance went by and I started bawling.
I had my contacts in and when I finally could see, everyone in the crowd was crying along with me. I considered it a gift from the clown gods." Calcutt says you can't fake being a clown. "It's not like your acting, you don't have an intention, you're just in it. The clown nose is the smallest mask you wear; you don't hide behind the mask, you reveal through it."
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