Clown Me In La Playa!

No really, that was the name of our 2019 Barcelona show!

We were invited – along with many other great Lebanese artists and performers – to put on our shows for a totally new audience, alongside other local and international acts. Which is why we also took this opportunity to finally get ourselves some new costumes, designed by Zeina Boueiry, and it must be said, in all modesty, we look faaaaahbulous.

You see, La Mercè festival happens in the streets of Barcelona, with the festival choosing a guest city to represent each year, and for the 2019 edition was Beirut’s turn! Besides being a huge honor for us, it was the first time we ever traveled together as a team to perform outside of Lebanon!

We performed 3 shows that were fully packed with kids and adults. Each of these shows was challenging in its own way, with rain pouring down on what was supposed to be our first performance. We made up for it in full force later on though, with packed audiences that gave us a huge boost of energy through their enthusiasm and interactions with us. We got to meet and perform with our friends and collaborators from Clowns Without Borders in Spain (incidentally, where CWB was originally launched) and got to see how they work with their style of clowning.

One of the main things we learned is that, at the end of the day, kids are really the same everywhere; whether they live in mansions or camps, their ability to laugh and have fun overcomes their backgrounds and environments more than anything (though it’s nice to see that some adults manage to hold on to this magical quality, too!). Being in a different environment also helped us see what makes us stand out as a troupe, like the way we function as one, even though we’re a big team, and the Arab touch to our kind of humor (which seems to carry over to the rest of the world pretty well, so we should add that to our visa applications from now on).  

Thankfully, clowning is universal, so we can safely say there were no language barriers between us and the audience! So now we know we’re ready to clown the whole world in!