Kristin reflects on the clown’s existence, role, and possibilities in the world today. The clown as a playful, healing state—aligned and in tune with the small inner human. Not as a character, but as an amplified version of oneself—a human being squared!

In Divine Comedies, Ola Sigurdson writes: “Existence as a threshold creature is both a prerequisite for and a source of humor.” There we find the clown, struggling with all of life’s challenges! A manifestation of humor; a wavering threshold creature; porous, ticklish, playful, and eccentric; never fully coinciding with itself…

Kristin believes that many people today carry a need—unspoken, unconscious, urgent, desperate, deeply human—to embrace the fragile little person within. Or put differently: it is the little one who wants, who needs to be embraced, while we do everything we can to silence their voice. And here, she sees a possible path to a more playful and courageous way of being in life and in the world.

Kristin wants to open up new thoughts and ideas about what the clown can be. In 2022, she completed a master’s degree at the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg with the thesis The Clown Inside Out – an exploration into the world of clowns from a practitioner’s perspective. An artistic investigation that can be read here.

About Kristin Rode

Active as a hospital clown with Clownkliniken since 2001. She creates and performs shows in two different constellations for both children and adults: clownkonstNU and CLOWNfrekvenser. She leads workshops to discover/uncover each person’s unique clown, for both beginners and experienced practitioners.

Trained at The Commedia School in Copenhagen, she arrived in Gothenburg in 1988 as one of four members of Teater Kolibri. She creates and performs comic physical theatre for both children and adults—outdoors, indoors, on tour in Sweden and Europe, and on her own stage. She has worked repeatedly with Atalante stage, Lina Ekdahl, among others. After nearly fifteen years, the company’s ongoing operations ended, but Teater Kolibri still occasionally appears as a group in various contexts.

She has a background in contact improvisation and movement (since 1986) and also works as a director and “outside eye/sounding board.”