As we drove to our final performance of the tour, I thought, “I’m tired.” I’d spent the break between shows packing and worrying about CWB’s end-of-year fundraising campaign. We were all quiet in the van, taking in our last views of Myitkyina, Myanmar.

Our show format includes a steady parade of volunteers joining us onstage. Anytime a child volunteer comes up, the audience gets more excited. I can feel a little bit of tension, feel the audience wonder, “Will these people make fun of the child?” That’s a fair concern. It’s our job to make sure the child feels supported and validated. It’s our job to make them the star of the show. We have to be worthy of their trust. We invite a chorus of kids onstage for the finale of each show in Myanmar. Together, we say and act out the “Safety Signs.” It’s the moment where the clowns turn the show over to the kids and the kids become the experts.

In our final audience in Myanmar, there’s a young boy with a disability that impacts his motor skills and speech. Throughout the show, he breaks away from the audience and into the circle, momentarily joining us onstage. Sometimes an adult leads him offstage, and sometimes he leaves on his own. There are whole scenes in which he provides the fourth counterpoint to our action. As I approach a section of the audience in search of my final volunteer, the crowd parts to reveal the little boy. He claps his hands and steps forward, but his caregiver holds him back. She’s protective: The earlier volunteers did challenging acts, like holding spinning plates, climbing on shoulders and making foam balls disappear. I make eye contact with her and she looks a little nervous. I feel a little nervous too. I can tell she doesn’t want to set him up for failure. “What if he can’t do it,” we both think.

I kneel down toward his eye level and hold out my hand for a high-five. The whole section of audience is watching the two of us. He eagerly taps my hands, giggling and grinning. We do it again, and the audience applauds.

I know that Leah, Andres, Hla Mo, and a whole crew of volunteers are carrying the show for the rest of the audience, but for me, it’s just about this kid. The section of audience where he had been standing is watching and laughing, acting out the “Safety Signs” along with us. When we take a bow with the rest of the volunteers, that little boy receives a huge cheer.

The Right to Play

Yes, the right to play. Just as everyone is entitled to freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion, and the right to food, everyone is also entitled to the right to play. Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the Right to Play.

Clowns Without Borders – Sweden received feedback from a project partner that sums up the importance of play: “Before the clowns came, the children played war. Now they play clown.”

Universal Children’s Day

On November 20, 1959, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Thirty years later, the UN adopted the Convention of the Rights of the Child. In addition to special protections for children, it’s the first international treaty that explicitly extends human rights to children.

Today, Universal Children’s Day 2018, we celebrate the children who had the idea for Clowns Without Borders. That’s right, the idea for CWB came from children! Children in a Balkan-region refugee camp wrote to children in Spain, “We’re okay. We have food. We have shelter. We have medicine. But what we miss is laughter.” Long story short, the kids in Spain found a clown (Tortell Poltrona) and suggested that he offer a free performance to their new friends. Voila, Clowns Without Borders was born.

Clowns Without Borders exists because Tortell trusted the wisdom and creativity of children. To this day, CWB seeks to emulate and reinforce that trust in each performance. When we train new artists, we emphasize an ethos of “lifting up the child” (often literally!). This means that it’s the child, not the clown, who’s the star of the show. It’s the child, not the clown, who sets the pace and discovers many of the punchlines.

Lift The Child

Lift the child up—you can see this in pictures of kids on shoulders, kids on buckets, kids on stage. Some of our best performance moments, spontaneous and planned, happen when we invite our young audience members onstage and let them have the spotlight.

For children, play is education. Join us as we promote this right.