CLOWNS OF PERU

This work forms a four year research project conducted with Murdoch University Australia and in collaboration with The University of Lima, Peru. 

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The project will culminate in a doctoral thesis and the development of a docomentary film project, which will draw fro material filmed over a year and a half in Peru.

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ABSTRACT

 

This project examines the art of clowning in Lima, Peru, exploring it as both a product of, and response to, the tensions of modernity, as expressed across street performance, theatre, television, clown pedagogy, circus, and humanitarian applications. Through an examination of key historical moments alongside extended ethnographic fieldwork, the study situates clowning and its practitioners within the social, political, and cultural conditions in which the art form has taken shape, with particular attention to processes of migration and urban concentration, and their consequences, including informality, class tension, and political conflict.

 

Clowning’s engagement with these conditions reveals a dynamic art form that operates in multiple ways, including symbolic reproduction, social critique, and practices of care and community engagement. The clown emerges as a flexible and adaptive cultural figure through which social tensions are expressed, negotiated, and, at times, alleviated. By situating clowning within specific moments of Peru’s modern history, the research utilises the art form as a lens through which to understand the country, its people, and the lived experience of modernity.

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