Gaby Munoz, a performer in Mexico City known as Chula the Clown, uses humor and clowning to explore significant issues like loss, aging, and femininity in a male-centric tradition. Preparing for her upcoming tour, Munoz reflects on her initial struggles with traditional female beauty standards but finds empowerment in her clown persona. Historically, clowns have served as social commentators, highlighting truths across cultures and eras. Munoz's comedic style, rooted in these traditions, challenges societal norms and aims to create connections through laughter among diverse audiences.
As Chula her round face washed white, her lips a tiny red heart, her eyebrows painted into inquisitive asymmetry… she has played a jilted bride and a doddering old lady.
For Munoz, laughter isn't an end in itself but rather, she says, a way to connect.
The emblematic sad clown that we know today evolved from the melancholic, talc-dusted Pedrolino of 16th-century Italian commedia dell'arte.
Though ritually and physically distinct, clowns have always been, as the heyoka John Fire Lame Deer writes, sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous, holy, shameful, visionary.
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