Chapter 17. Transforming Failure into Joyful Resilience: Discovering Fun in Failure through the Play of Theatrical Clowning

Abstract

This chapter aims to establish the possibility and necessity of the high-impact practice of theatrical clowning to be used as a tool for developing failure resiliency in undergraduate researchers. The author shows how theatrical clowning directly engages with failure stimuli through an authentic engagement with fear, play, and laughter. Pulling from theory, pedagogy, and student auto-ethnographic analysis of two case studies from the author’s course, the chapter demonstrates how clowning can be used to develop an awareness of a playful response to fear and confront failure with more resiliency.