Payaseando at the Loisaida Center
Born in Queens, New York, to an Ecuadorian mother and a Dominican father, Bryan Fernandez was a shy child, but pretending let him make sense of the world. Unintentionally, it helped prepare him for his career as a clown.
Bryan Fernandez on a NYC subway. Photo coursesy of Bryan Fernandez.
Three decades later, Fernandez is a physical theatre artist, mime, and current artist resident at the Loisaida Center. He currently hosts the Performer’s Tinker Shop Den, a weekly workshop series combining physical theatre and content creation. This is the beginning of his overall goal of running the proposed Street Theatre Performing Company and Training School. This initiative would provide free and accessible classes and workshops, particularly focusing on youth and young adults of color impacted by the justice system, and other underprivileged individuals in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
As he works toward his dream, Fernandez takes every opportunity to elevate his collaborators, frequently crediting his many teachers and boosting the peers that have helped him over the last 20 years as he performed in subway stations, bars, theatres, and music venues.
Recently, I met up with Fernandez to talk about his career, his answer to loneliness, and his hopes for the future.
Intervenxions staff edited this interview for clarity and concision.
How did you first get involved with the Loisaida Center?
I'm an artist resident here. It's a great community center that provides information, workshops, and assistance to the people of Alphabet City.
I got involved in 2017 because of a clown puppeteer, and we made puppets—big giant puppet heads out of recycled material. We were honoring the activists of the Lower East Side who helped fight the developers who wanted to take over community spots and put up buildings for business. These activists, some of whom are no longer with us, fought for what is now the 9th Street Community Garden and Park.
Your proposal for the residency is called the Street Theater Performing Company and Training School. If someone walks in and wants to be part of this school, how would you introduce the work you do with your residency?
My actual artist residency began last year in the summer with me teaching a mime workshop. This year, my idea was to have a weekly meetup on Fridays from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. where we brainstorm or write for the first hour and a half. Then, for the other half, we record and shoot the content. Ideally, I wanted to produce the content that same day. That doesn’t take into account the editing. For me, it's an homage to The Show of Shows.
Every week, we try to come up with content on expressing yourself, like SNL. We come together, channel our madness, and create this stuff. So that was the ideal idea.
I also gave them a proposal where if I were to have a masterclass, each day of the week would be dedicated to something. So for me it was like:
Mondays would be mime.
Tuesdays would be clown, juggling, and prop manipulation.
Wednesdays would be taking what we've learned the previous days and doing street performance.
Thursdays would be improv puppet building.
Fridays were creating stuff that same day and then recording it.
Saturdays would be using everything. Hopefully, you’ve developed an act and can perform at an established venue.
You already built the confidence up that week. And at the end of the workshop, we would do a variety show or a theme show.
What lessons have you learned from this project or clowning in general?
I am always reminded of another clown, Maggie Tulley. She's like, “Bryan, you're the king of the flop.”
Flop is a compliment in clown. You're always failing, but how do you do it? How do you handle the failure? How do you stand there without actually being completely broken? Or do you play with the brokenness and turn into silly putty? That's what I like to be. I play with the darkness that's within me or what I've absorbed.
These are just little things that I've done. And I don't know if it'll formulate itself anytime soon or when it will coalesce to what my vision was.
It's good to dream big. The Artist Way says you’re “filling the form.” And I think your workshop is filling the form in that you're starting, you're doing part of it, and people seem to be attracted to it. Can you tell us how you define clown?
For me, the clown plays in failure; he represents the child in us who is free to play. He is tapped in. The clown is almost like the Buddha.
But then also a clown can be like a shaman, where their feet are both in the underworld, the darkness and up into the skies. Their head is up in the skies. And then the middle ground is where we are on this earth. So the clown’s role is to say, “the audience has to play with the different levels [underworld, skies, and middle ground].” The audience doesn't want to. And what you need is heart. You need heart to keep you going. And that's what a real clown does. They're like the mirror. It's an old trope quote that people talk about: The clown mirrors the human flaw in its conditions.
It was always silent acting, the use of your physical body to tell the story. The body has to be the communicator. There are punctuations. There's a certain phrase you have to communicate with your body that is understood by the audience.
You're very passionate about clowning, and you've been at it for a while. You've had numerous projects. You said you brought circus and clowning to Queens in 2023. Was it a show? Was it another workshop like this?
Oh, that was a show; 2023 in December. The way that came about was that I already had done my solo show. I asked myself, “What am I doing any of this for?” I thought this was going to make me happy, performing; yet something's missing. And I was like, “Oh, where's my woman? I need my love. What am I doing this for?” So that's why I did a circus show, because of a woman. I was bringing everyone that I had met on my journey.
I'm fortunate that I've met these people. And so I cast people who were great at various circus disciplines: a diabolo artist - Archie, and there was a flow artist -Angela Selma. She was doing hoops. Also, a juggler who, because of him, I got to be in the party scenes during the pandemic. I felt like we were the underground scene trying to bring New York back to life.
Speaking of the pandemic and love, the New York City Health Commission reported that 57% of people feel either isolated or alone. I think clown is a great way to start to combat that. How do you combat loneliness?
I grew up a very shy and introverted child. So for me, my world is always drawing stuff and playing around with toys and ideas. And that was my way of trying to make sense of this world or make my own world.
For me, I'm trying to become that tree, being firmly rooted in something deep that's ancient and fully grounded. Like the tree analogy or plants, you have to water yourself to then provide the fruit or the shade to your loved ones.
If you're lucky, you get good parents, or sometimes you have to find the people who give you that nourishment you didn't get. And you can then develop those tools within yourself to be okay being alone. Because again, isolation: we came into this planet by ourselves, and as we die, we're going to go back alone. And so the in-between is: who are the people who are going to make this story beautiful? Who do I want to invest in if I do hang out with negative people? Well, I have to be strong enough to see that they're struggling and to not get sucked in by their negativity. To see that they've just created this dark shell around them. And to help them break through, to kind of get that inner light and love and extrapolate and remind them of the love that is within us and that light that we carry.
In Maxine Klein’s book Theatre for the 98%, she argued that theater should not be limited to the person on stage, that even the audience is a part of the theater. What are your thoughts on that?
It's the same thing. It ties into the great avatar, as I mentioned, the Buddha, the finger pointing up to the sky and the other finger pointing to the ground. We're the doormen. It's like the analogy, the story of leading the horse to water, but you can't make 'em drink. And so the clown is like, listen, if I can do this…It’s up to you to go through now. It's going to be quite a ride. If you're going to go in there, you're going to probably fall…You’re going to float up. And that's where you could have the heart that keeps you going up, but then you could fall and have the crocodiles eat you. So if you're lucky, you get to fly, or you can learn how to make crocodile shoes.
But once you learn how to fly, you have to come back through the door and help others learn to jump and skydive into our world of ideas to combat the heaviness that a lot of us have within our souls.
How has your culture influenced your clowning?
I do struggle with my identity as a Latinx individual. I spoke Spanish at home, and in second grade, I was in English as a Second Language. So I always say my Spanish speaking was kicked out of me.
While I saw mostly white comedians, there were a few Latin American ones I saw on Telemundo and Univision, like El Chavo. But I didn’t relate to their style of comedy.
But I’ve worked at Loisaida because of a Jewish clown puppeteer who hangs out with a lot of talented Puerto Rican artists. So I get to work and collaborate with a lot of talented Latine performers, and it helps me feel more connected to my culture.
