Home for the unexpected.

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 the hole-y sweater and forget to brush your teeth. This is the trickster space, where we take the undesirable by the hand and play a game with it.

A person dressed as a clown sitting on a wooden bench against a yellow brick wall. They wear a black bowler hat, red shirt, beige pants, red clown nose, colorful striped socks, and yellow and red clown shoes. They hold a small bouquet of yellow and purple flowers and have a slight smirk on their face.

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.

more about Nicole

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. 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.

Learn more
A woman dressed as a clown with a red nose, striped jacket, and colorful clown shoes is sitting on outdoor stairs, clutching several baby dolls and making a distressed facial expression. The stairs are rusty and metal, and a toy doll with brown hair and a pink outfit lies on the ground below.
A person with dark hair, wearing a red shirt, with a red clown nose, is singing or shouting with eyes wide open and mouth open, showing facial expression of anger or excitement, in a dark environment with purple lighting.
A clown with a red nose and face paint, interacting with a young boy in a dark room with blue and purple lighting, other people in the background.

“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