Where the unexpected occurs.
Whoever you are, no matter how self-important, a trickster will find you.
Bring your tears and spit, your rage and despair. Let your dirty socks hang out of your suitcase while you run through the train station. Wear that old sweater and there is no need to brush your teeth. This is the trickster space, where we take the undesirable by the hand and play a game with it.
And here is your host: some lady.
The Trickster Space is home to the performance art of Nicole Medema— clown, actor, writer, and excitable person. Nicole’s foundational work is based in narrative clown pieces, in which she portrays the vulnerable and stupid aspects of humanity with compassion and hope.
Why a trickster space?
Too often, humans strategize their well-being by denying the difficult and unsightly. They fall under the tempting spell of Perfection. This causes an incredible amount of avoidable suffering on top of the standard regulation dose of unavoidable suffering in a human life. Not to mention, an unreasonable amount of fiendish, subconscious reactivity. Trickster Space normalizes— and at times, celebrates— the difficulties that define our humanity on planet Earth. Here, our shortcomings are a part of the puzzle.
“Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth.”
—Byrd Gibbens, Historian