Thom’s foolery
How a guy from South Taranaki's childhood ambitions to be a clown gained him an international artistic career based in Helsinki.
How a guy from South Taranaki’s childhood ambitions to be a clown gained him an international artistic career based in Helsinki.
Thom Monckton stood out when he rode to his school in Patea. There was his orange hair blazing behind him, for one thing. Then there was his unicycle. He made for an unusual sight in the South Taranaki town of 1100 people in the 1990s, and, now overseas, he continues to, having landed up as a performance artist based in the Finnish capital of Helsinki, the centre of Europe’s physical theatre and contemporary circus scene.
“I didn’t really fit in in Patea. But I’ve always enjoyed being an enigma and, actually, that has really helped my career, because I’m very used to putting myself in the context where I’m the only one who does that kind of thing,’’ he says.
The 34-year-old takes his clowning seriously: he’s turned his rubber-faced geekiness and gymnastic prowess into an international career. Monckton is performing his latest solo show, The Artist, in Wellington during the NZ Fringe Festival. It borrows from his hobby as a painter and is being produced by Circo Aereo, one of two Finnish performance companies he works with.
Monckton wanted to explore a question he is often asked about his own work: where does an artist’s inspiration come from? So he set out to unpick the process an artist follows.
“With any art, an audience is presented with the end result. And yet the process is often not what you expect,’’ he says.
As a performer, Monckton doesn’t use narrative – instead, his comedic stories are told through non-verbal and physical communication. He employs acrobatic prowess and skilled theatrics to play a range of accident-prone characters. In The Artist, 1.79m-tall Monckton is a painter who turns up with an easel, struggles to succeed at something and eventually overcomes the challenge.
There is a bit of Mr Bean in Monckton’s physicality and performance style, and indeed, Rowan Atkinson was one of his inspirations. Growing up in Patea as one of five boys, he decided at age 11 that he wanted to work as a clown. It was an unorthodox career choice in small-town New Zealand,
even in the home of the Patea Māori Club, which put the place on the cultural map in 1983-84 with hit song Poi E.
Monckton was a physical child who threw himself into sport at
school and climbed on to a unicycle at the tender age of eight.
There were a few pivotal moments that led him from Patea to Helsinki: his parents taking him to Auckland to see a show by French mime artist Marcel Marceau and a relative’s gift of a set of juggling balls that Monckton taught himself to use.
He is the youngest son – his oldest brother is 13 years his senior – and got a lot of attention. “My childhood home was adventurous and entertaining. They set me on a very probable path of being a performer … As the youngest, I still sit and watch and absorb.’’
He left Patea “sheltered and naive” at the end of Year 12 and spent two years studying for a diploma in circus arts at CircoArts in Christchurch. “It was the first time I had found people like me. Until then, I hadn’t known the arts existed, so it was a total revelation. I spent two years there and it was absolute bliss.’’
When he graduated 15 years ago, he realised the impossibility of being a freelance circus performer in New Zealand. After being cast in the role of the back end of a zebra in a Christchurch performance, he decided to head overseas. “I just couldn’t see any future. I was young and full of energy but there was nothing here to do.’’
In his mid-twenties, he went to Paris to study at École internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, a school of physical theatre. It was a major culture shock.
His first few nights were spent in a sleeping bag behind a bush on the Champs-Élysées, famed for luxury stores such as Hermès and Chanel.
House-hunting wasn’t quite what he was familiar with from Christchurch. “There, I walked into a flat straight away. Paris was different. You could write a whole story about my time there,’’ he says.
The payoff was his meeting at the school with Finnish performers Jenni Kallo and Sampo Kurppa, who helped him get his first contract with a dance and physical theatre company, Hurjaruuth, in Helsinki. In 2011, the trio founded performance company Kallo Collective, of which Monckton is artistic director.
However, Monckton’s preference is for solo work. “It’s a lot faster and more efficient to work alone and it’s easier for festivals to manage. I like the challenge – I love to create work.’’
The Artist follows on from his previous solo New Zealand appearance in The Pianist, which had two popular seasons in 2014 and 2015. Since it premiered in 2013, Monckton has staged it 306 times, including for the Finnish President and the Dutch Queen.
He shies away from the temptation of becoming a television performer. Approached by talent scouts about entering Italy’s Got Talent, with the same opportunity dangled in France and the
US, he turned them all down.
“I like the process of creating work. It would be lovely to be rich and famous, but when I examine it, that is not the goal. I want to be credible and stay true to what I enjoy and that’s not the path that would lead me to that.’’
The Artist, Circa Theatre, Wellington, March 25 to April 11.
There is a bit of Mr Bean in Monckton’s physicality and performance style, and indeed, Rowan Atkinson was one of his inspirations.