Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Last May, a man dressed in climbing gear prepared to scale Richard Cobden’s statue. Having checked his ropes and boots, he positioned himself in front of the plinth of the Victorian manufacturer that stands near Mornington Crescent Tube station. A small crowd watched. “Please do not follow,” the climber, who was called Tom, told them. “This is very dangerous.”Then, instead of beginning the ascent, he laid down on the pavement. Along with a dozen or so others from the London-based group Laugh in the Face of Extinction (LiFE), Tom wanted to make a point. He had decided to try as hard as he could not to climb the statue, in an effort to ridicule politicians’ plans to criminalise climbing statues. So he struggled along the rope he had laid on the ground, while other members of the group, dressed as council reps, cleaners and a TikTok influencer, broke into an improvised performance around the monument, poking fun at what they perceived as authoritarian legislation.The performers were part of a movement known as rebel clowning. Their aim was to parody the British reverence for statues, a prompt for heated cultural battles in recent years. At one point, a woman dressed as a spiritualist took out an oversized pipette and began to measure the statue’s mystic energy. Another performer, dressed as a construction worker, approached a startled family sitting on a bench and launched into a tirade against his fellow clowns, who he claimed were getting in the way of vital works.Protest is becoming increasingly polarised and politicised. In the UK, the Public Order Act 2023 gave authorities greater power to prevent “disruptive” campaigners, with prison sentences subsequently handed to protesters who’ve blocked traffic or thrown soup at paintings. While LiFE’s members often agree with movements such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, for them the act of clowning comes above any single political or environmental campaign. Their performances make the case for insubordination and dissent. But is clowning a meaningful way to do this?At the Cobden statue, not everyone seemed convinced. A group of men walked past in the direction of Camden’s pubs. One of them, apparently baffled, shouted at the performers: “What the f**k are you doing?”The clown has long been a costumed symbol of truth. In the middle ages, clowns could speak truth to power and get away with it. They became the epitome of a Rabelaisian carnival spirit, as well as a source of wisdom in Shakespeare’s plays. But the role of a clown is a means to an end, not a cause in itself. “Instead of resisting, the clown collaborates; instead of obeying, the clown misunderstands,” wrote activist and performer Hilary Ramsden in the European Journal of Humour Research.As such, rebel clowning is not about gluing yourself to things or lying down in front of traffic — not inherently, anyway. Instead, the mission is to blur the boundary between protester and police, de-escalate tension using humour and play a small but humanising part in dismantling power structures. So the theory goes.In November 2021, a group of rebel clowns took to the centre of Glasgow dressed as construction workers. Armed with a wheelbarrow, a plastic road barrier, a plank of wood and a flask of tea, their aim was to cause confusion and divert the attention of as many police as possible from the COP26 climate march taking place nearby. They were so successful that they soon had a police tail and their plank was confiscated. At one point, 15 police officers appeared to be tasked with guarding the plastic barrier.The purpose of the Glasgow performance, explained Robyn Hambrook, an activist who was present that day and is the founder of Bristol Clown School, was to confuse authority. “We’re using up police time while other things could happen,” she said.It was a Hambrook-led workshop that inspired the creation of LiFE in 2023. A few hours before they confronted Cobden’s statue, LiFE members assembled in a nearby hall. There’s no single organiser of the group, a varied bunch consisting of more women than men, ranging in age from their twenties to their sixties. Performers, whose names have been changed for this article, are encouraged to bring their own ideas to foster improvisation when they later take to the streets. Asked to describe their energy on this particular day, group members responded disparately: “ravenous for play”; “like the frothy waves on a beach”; “premenstrual”.For Linda, a retiree who used to work in the performing arts, the warm-ups are a way of making people feel safe and “playful”, as well as helping performers get to know each other. She joined LiFE through a messaging app, after deciding it wasn’t fair to her family to risk arrest at Extinction Rebellion demonstrations. “I was interested in finding out what would not only de-escalate, but make me feel less afraid,” she said.The exercises began. In one, the task was to create a human chain between one end of the hall and the other, while one performer took the role of police officer, inventing increasingly draconian laws to disrupt them: no linking hands, no touching the floor, a minimum separation distance. Soon, a sense of malicious compliance began to pervade the group, which was forced into increasingly creative ways to get around the laws, sometimes less than successfully. “It’s about community,” Linda said afterwards. “You’re always there trying to support each other.”There followed a discussion about the location of that afternoon’s performance. Another demonstration had put police on alert around Trafalgar Square, where the group had planned to go. The statue of Amy Winehouse, close to the hall in Camden Town, was rejected in case protesting a female figure was deemed misogynist. Eventually the group arrived at Richard Cobden — male, relatively unknown and politically inoffensive in 2024.At the heart of the discussions lay a tension between disruption, which the clown must embrace, and public perception, which the humans behind the clown noses must live with. It meant thinking contentiously, but also predicting how the court of public opinion would judge their actions. As Linda put it: “You have to keep finding new ways of getting your message across.”Many LiFE members were previously part of environmental or social-issue campaigns and their targets overlap: government, law enforcement, big business. The clowns I spoke to were aware that the farcical aspects of what they were doing risked confusing the urgency of their message. But all agreed on the inadequacies of existing protest tactics and the need to adapt to changes in policing, public perception and social media.For Jay Jordan, normal modes of protest only achieve so much. An artist and co-founder of the creative activist group Reclaim the Streets, Jordan witnessed too many traditional campaigns burn out and break up due to poor group dynamics and internal fighting. So, in 2003, they were part of a group that founded the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, or Circa.Circa’s members saw clowning as a way of changing conventional forms of protest and also the lives of the activists involved. The playfulness of its methods was intended to counteract the burnout that can afflict volunteer-led groups, according to Jordan. Its clowns assumed military ranks — General Confusion, Colonel Oftruth — at odds with its anti-authoritarian inclinations.Circa’s first operation was responding to George W Bush’s state visit to Buckingham Palace in November 2003. Larry Bogad, another co-founder and now a professor of theatre and dance at UC Davis in California, recalled crawling under the shade of the trees in Green Park with a colander helmet and fluorescent camouflage as he pretended to sneak up on the palace and secure it. “A police helicopter flew overhead,” he said. “I put a single leaf over my head so it wouldn’t see me.” The group’s actions immediately caught the eye of the media. When asked by a reporter why they were protesting against Bush, Bogad replied: “He’s the wrong kind of clown.”If it goes on Instagram that you just hit a clown, it’s going to be more of a thingCirca’s influence grew. In the run-up to the G8 Summit in Gleneagles in 2005, the group toured a performance piece on clowns and activism across nine UK cities thanks to funding from governmental body Arts Council England. At the G8 protests, they persuaded the police to play Goblins, Wizards and Giants with them — a kind of wholebody Rock, Paper, Scissors. If both teams chose the same character, they hugged, so the police had to hug the clowns. When things weren’t so amicable, the clowns filled their pockets with so many odds and ends that their detention was rendered impractical by the volume of paperwork that would ensue.Circa disbanded after only a few years. “Folk were not taking the deeper, longer, harder work of training to be a good clown seriously enough,” said Jordan. But by that point the group had trained as many as 700 clowns in the UK, with gaggles also appearing in the US, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain and Israel.In the 1970s, the Brazilian dramatist and theorist Augusto Boal founded Theatre of the Oppressed, a format in which audience members become participants as well as observers. His book Games For Actors and Non-Actors contains hundreds of exercises to help break down this boundary. In one, the Circle of Knots, a group holds hands, moving apart until only their fingers are touching but their bodies are as far from one another as possible. After a few moments, they must do the opposite, flooding into the circle and trying to occupy as little space as possible.Playing with the “elasticity” of a situation is the clown’s role, Hambrook said. The day after their antics at the 2021 Glasgow COP, the same clowns lined up alongside police outside the defence company BAE Systems, protesting against the government spending more money on arms than on solutions to climate change. Wearing all black with caps, they might have been mistaken for the officers were it not for their conspicuous red noses. Instead they offered to conduct uniform inspections for the police, before getting between them and the assembled press corps and gradually stripping off in a nod to rising temperatures.Hambrook likened the manoeuvres to walking a tightrope. A convincing performance requires clowns to throw themselves into it utterly; but they have to remain aware of the limits of what can be achieved without fully falling foul of police or pedestrians. “It’s theatre,” she said. “It’s not total anarchy.”Arrest is not inconceivable. In the 1970s, a Danish theatre dressed 70 actors as Santa Claus to protest a capitalist Christmas. First, they handed out sweets to passers-by, but gradually their actions grew more radical, according to Andrew Boyd in his book Beautiful Trouble. Eventually, the Santas were picking gifts off the shelves of a department store and handing them to customers. When the police showed up it wasn’t immediately obvious what crime had been committed, but the violence subsequently employed by officers made it hard for people not to sympathise with the Santas.Bogad called this phenomenon “clubbing a clown”, a reference to the political risk of physically harassing a protester dressed in such a non-threatening way. In a social media age, it’s a bigger risk than ever for those in law and order. “Everyone knows on some level that if it goes around on Instagram that you just hit a clown, it’s going to be more of a thing,” said Bogad.Surreal as their interactions were, the presence of the LiFE performers around Cobden’s statue caught the attention of passers-by. The fact the clowns appeared to be having fun, rather than protesting, aroused curiosity. Several onlookers approached the group to ask what was happening — no mean feat in a city where the default mode is to ignore as much of what is happening as possible.The performer dressed as a construction worker eventually gave up on his proposed works and retreated. Clowns, like good fictional characters, aren’t supposed to get their way. To gain resolution would give them no further reason to complain and no further obstacles to overcome. As both performer and protester, this is unthinkable. Rebel clowning doesn’t simply reject the idea of “no”, it makes the best of its inevitability.Some months later, Linda told me she had used clowning skills in other protests since but now spent much of her time writing letters to secretaries of state instead. Her professional instincts had, she said, made it challenging for her to look past the quality of the end performance. “I found it very, very difficult to do things without proper rehearsal,” she said. But she was in a minority.For most rebel clowns, the end goal is about embracing failure alongside success. “There are no bad ideas,” Bogad told me, before correcting himself: “There are totally bad ideas, by the way, but we’re very excited about them.”Chris Allnutt is a subeditor on HTSIFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram
