The Feast of The Clowns Event is 21 years old this year. The Feast of the Clowns is a community-based festival, a celebration of the city, its diversity, and God’s presence in the city – run by the community and for the community. This celebration provides an awareness-raising platform for various social justice issues, and a peaceful playful protest, reclaiming the city as a larger community transformation process towards healthy communities and spaces.

It’s all about celebration:

• Celebrating the diversity of the people and the vibe of the city
• Celebrating joy and the ability to have fun as a community
• Building community through facilitating interaction and play
• Celebrating the city and its beautiful space

It is about art:

• Celebrating the beauty of all art forms and allowing it to heal communities
• Providing access for inner-city communities to experience live performances and art
• Creating opportunities for established artists to invest in communities
• Creating platforms for upcoming talent in the local communities to be showcased

The Feast engages in playful protest with issues of social justice:

• Creating awareness and mobilising action for social and economic justice
• Providing an inclusive and accessible festival for the most vulnerable people
• Contributing to the healing and empowerment of vulnerable individuals through skills transfer
• Contributing to inner-city regeneration through the creation of social and cultural infrastructure
• Creating awareness for the work of various community-based organizations

Through clowning we consider, the foolishness of downward journeys such as; investing in vulnerable parts of our cities; the foolishness of upholding children as custodians; the foolishness of becoming humbled in order to take leadership; the foolishness of those who dare to imagine alternatives to the dominance of market and empire; the foolishness of searching for compassion in the stranger and the outcast; the foolishness of the clown who mirrors our own feeble folly.

It is for this reason that we participate as CLOWNS to foster citisenship for social justice and we will consider the clown/jester/harlequin/fool as a metaphor for exploring relationships between the University, the city, faith, and communities in the vulnerability of our city.

The clown helps us be more playful to interact in a new way; the jester can tell the truth to a naked emperor, and the harlequin can lead the parade of protest towards a better tomorrow.

The Feast is not an event only but embedded in a much larger community transformation process, happening year in and year out, creating psycho-social, housing, economic, spiritual, and institutional infrastructure, with some of the most vulnerable populations of the inner city.

For more information on this year’s Feast of the Clowns > Please have a look at our EVENTS page. 
or contact info@tlf.org.za