One of the exercises in clown school was to take the stage with others and spontaneously create a game. The first initiated action functions as a proposal that is then collaboratively developed through improvisation. When I performed this exercise, one of the actors onstage with me lifted his shirt and another spontaneously slapped his belly. We then created a game of shirt-lifting and belly—slapping.
However, as anyone who has participated in a group project knows, there is invariably an alpha participant, who, believing they have an idea superior to the one at hand, directs their energy toward changing course, switching from shirt-lifting and belly-slapping to some other game that has been proposed by them that is more in line with how they would like to be perceived.
One of the most meaningful lessons I learned in clown school was offered by Bayes in the moment when one of the actors onstage with me tried to do just that. “There’s no better game,” he admonished, “than the one you’re playing.”
In girls’ hand-clapping games there are no winners. You may be chided for missing a beat, or for forgetting one of the lyrics, but there is no victory that lies ahead for just one of the participants. Hand-clapping games exist only in a state of play, or a state of rest. However, they are not free of competitiveness. There is a pressure exerted by young girls upon one another to continue to clap, to chant the tongue-tied lewd nursery rhymes for as long as possible. This competitiveness lies in the clapping pair’s desire for maximum endurance. The lyrics of girls’ hand-clapping games are endless. Their choruses always circle black on themselves so that the game is played on loop, begun again by the same lyric that signals the game’s end.
