Eccentric Principles
- The body tells the story.
- Be interested, not interesting.
- The work happens on stage. The effect happens in the minds and bodies of the audience.
- We paint a picture in the minds of the audience using their paint and their canvas; we are the brush.
- The most basic technique of the clown is to create and maintain rapport.
- Everything can be seen as a problem to be solved, a knot to be unravelled.
- Everyone needs to breathe all the time, even when on stage. The audience unconsciously breathes with you.
- Don’t tell or show the audience or your partners what to think, do, or feel.
- Have an emotional reaction and invite the audience to join in your experience.
- Tension without release undermines your performance.
- The clown enters the stage to accomplish a task, not to get laughs. If there are laughs it is an interruption.
- Find simple ways to accomplish complicated tasks, and complicated ways to accomplish simple tasks.
- Don't leave your comfort zone. Make your comfort zone bigger.
- Clowning is a verb.
© 2020 Avner Eisenberg
The Eccentric Principles have been recently revised. An older version is available in Catalan, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. If you are a native speaker of any of these languages, would you be so kind as to revise the priciples and email the new list to Avner.