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winnipeg women
a voice for and about Manitoba women
fall 2000 - issue 3, volume 1
clowning around canada
By Kirsten Andrews
It's me, Only Better!, the title of Shannan Calcutt's latest work, is in every way an apt description of the 25-year-old entertainer, her clown Izzy, and her craft.
"My clown, Izzy, is me times a million." says Shannan, who's becoming increasingly familiar with the Trans Canada Highway as she does the festival circuit in her cherry-coloured Chevy Sprint. "She is me at my most extreme."
Theatre buffs may first have met Izzy at Shannan's debut solo show BURNT
TONGUE, which played at last year's Fringe Festival in Winnipeg. In the play,
Izzy shows up for a blind date, set up over the internet, in a wedding gown. Yet she insists she's not a "planner."
After feeling utterly rejected when her blind date is a no-show, Izzy decides to join the Order in It's me, Only Better! Seeking acceptance through the convent seems a perfectly logical step for Izzy.
Each show-goer's heart rides an emotional tidal wave with Izzy as she shares her angst and aspirations. The laughs Izzy elicits come from the core of your very being - the way a minister might evoke a heartfelt guffaw at a funeral by sharing a humourous memory of the dearly departed.
In one scene of It's me, Only Better!, Izzy coaxes an audience member on stage to revisit the perfunctory exercise of confession.
It is here that live theatre really takes full effect. During one performance, even Shannan was stupefied. The gentleman that came up on stage admitted to having had an affair with the best man at this wedding - post nuptials!
"Well! That's letting the cat out of the bag, isn't it?" Izzy asked incredulously.
With a voice that falls somewhere between an aging Katherine Hepburn, a
nasally Cyndi Lauper and a spun-out Valley Girl, Izzy works the stage, the aisles, and the audience with deft precision. Cheers and jeers feed her performance. Little can throw her off.
"As a clown you have to follow every impulse. When Izzy is waiting for her blind
date to show, and the door opens and a late comer walks in, we're all wondering… is that HIM? A clown lives between laughter and crying. It's always there. The stakes are high."
Despite the endearing "let it all hang out" approach, Shannan takes to her performance, she's still a little surprised with the reception her clown receives.
Last year in Winnipeg an older couple came up to her after a show and grasped both her hands. "We want you to know it will happen for you. We met on a blind date and we've been married for 60 years."
"I really am blown away by how people respond to Izzy, by how much people care for this character," she commented.
As special as Izzy is, clowning is not the career Shannan's parents dreamed of for their daughter.
They are very proud, but it took them a long time. My mom is more the fan - very supportive. She saw all five of my Fringe shows in Saskatoon. My dad's more into the business end. He's always asking me what I'm going to do next," she says with a wry smile, adding that she lives with her father in Arborg, Manitoba when she's not on the road or building a new show.
Coming from the small town of Indian Head in Saskatchewan, which tags itself as a Progressive Prairie Town, Shannan says she isn't sure what it is about clowning that drew her to the art form initially. Always a fan of physical humour - she grew up admiring actors like Lucille Ball - she likens clowning to an expression of our universal insecurities and spirituality through laughter.
"I don't know if you choose this field. I think it chooses you. People ask me what it is about Izzy that makes people like her. I think it's her vulnerability, her honesty. A clown reminds us that we're all human, reminds us of our weaknesses, our own ridiculousness," says Shannan who studied clowning at the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre in California. Shannan also graduated from the University of Victoria with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, where she focused on acting with a more dramatic bent.
Opportunities for a life-long career are promising. Shannan says she has no worries about being a woman clown or even aging in an industry that has typically turned its back on mature women.
"Izzy will be even funnier and wiser when she's 90, just think of all the experiences she'll have had to draw upon. It's not like actresses who hit a wall when they turn 40 or 50. Plus, I create my own work."
The differences between Shannan and her clown are vast. Shannan looks like a Noxzema girl off stage, her blonde hair straight and sitting just above her shoulders. You would never know this diminutive woman is the clown with mile-high hair, yellow ears, red nose and frantic gestures.
"Izzy is both innocent and extreme. I would never do the things that Izzy does, like where a wedding dress on a blind date she's made with someone she's met over the Internet. I probably wouldn't even go on a blind date!" she reveals.
Case in point.
Early in her run of performances in Winnipeg this past summer, Shannan's car was towed from the Exchange District. Hardly the welcome you'd wish from our city officials. Shannan high-tailed it down to the compound where her car would be found, without having a chance to take off her make-up, tame her wild hair or change from her tattered wedding gown and life preserver prop. Izzy was on a rampage.
"I got there and demanded to see the manager," said the soft spoken Shannan, admittedly jumping a line of 12 other irate drivers. "At first they said there wasn't one there. I pushed ahead and said, "Look. Tell'em Izzy's here and she's really pissy!"
Before long, the tow-lot manager and drivers were eating humble pie by the shovel-full. And, with a little coercion, and several free tickets to Izzy's next performance, the tow was reduced to a reasonable fee.
"Had I not been in costume, had I not been Izzy at that moment, I never would have said or done those things. Being a clown gives you the opportunity to do things you're not supposed to do. It allows you to say things you're not really allowed to say without being punished."
And of course, Izzy had the last laugh.
"He asked me which car was mine. I mean, duh! The little red one!" she says with a belly laugh.
Shannan Calcutt returns to Winnipeg with BURNT TONGUE and It's me, Only Better! October 19 - 21 at the Gas Station Theatre. Visit her website at www.shannanc.com
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