Clowning around: Gelsone ’96 makes living in comedy

While all of her roommates became doctors and many of her friends entered finance after graduating from Princeton, Christina Gelsone ’96 headed to clown school. From Feb. 28 to March 17, she will return to New Jersey to perform with the Big Apple Circus as part of the Acrobuffs clown duo with her husband.

Though Bridgewater, the town where the circus will be held, is only 20 miles away from Princeton, Gelsone’s journey from graduation to the circus has spanned more than a decade and 28 countries. She has been everywhere from Afghanistan to Kosovo and Macedonia, working jobs in construction, education, street performances, birthday parties and parades.

Gelsone arrived at Princeton with professional training in ballet and immediately took as many theater and dance classes as she could. She said the inspiration for her career was a moment in theater class when she first saw a picture of commedia dell’arte, a form of Italian theater known for its improvisation, physicality and colorful characters.

“I just saw this one picture and I thought, ‘Yep, that’s what I want to do,’ ” she said.

Gelsone’s love for performance and physical activity strongly influenced her choice of activities. She performed as part of campus performance groups Theatre Intime, Triangle, and the Princeton University Players, as well as many departmental shows in theater and dance. An English major with a certificate in theater, she staged an all-female production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” as her senior thesis.

Shanna Sykes Hill ’96, Gelsone’s roommate for three years, said she remembered her as a very “physical” person, always active and energetic.

“She was always doing things like scaling the outside of our dorm to get to the third floor,” Hill said. “It just makes sense that she would do something that would make people smile and make people laugh.”

Offstage, Gelsone channeled her active nature into Outdoor Action, working as a trip leader and at the University’s climbing wall. OA director Rick Curtis remembered her for her “unbelievable energy.”

“The idea of a clown is to lift someone else’s spirits, and that’s very much, I think, her personality,” Curtis said.

After graduation, Gelsone was accepted to the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theater in Blue Lake, Calif. She paid tuition by installing radio antennas on top of cell phone towers. By graduation, she was again “out of money” when a friend offered her a room in her New York City apartment for $300 a month.

In New York, Gelsone supported herself as an adjunct professor at Adelphi University and through performances at holiday parties, schools and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 2001, she joined the Bond Street Theater, where she learned juggling and acrobatics.

“You have to struggle a lot,” Gelsone said about the early years of her career. “Never knowing when the next paycheck is coming in, never knowing whether your career is turning into something, not even knowing if it is a career.”

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While her parents were unable to support her financially, they were emotionally supportive of her choices. Gelsone also remembered receiving phone calls every now and then from her close friends in the years following graduation, often asking if she was eating and whether she had a place to stay.

“They would check on me because they knew it was very, very difficult, but at the same time, they were very supportive,” she said.

One of Gelsone’s biggest challenges came after joining Bond Street. Through the company’s international outreach programs, she performed in numerous post-conflict regions such as Afghanistan and the Balkans. In 2003, she met her husband, professional clown Seth Bloom, while touring schools and orphanages in Afghanistan. In Kabul, Bloom started a theater-based educational program that trains children — especially girls — to perform in theaters, with the aim to provide an outlet for creative physical expression. Gelsone teaches acrobatics to girls, as Afghani culture prevents males from working closely with females. She has returned five or six times since her initial stay.

“We really saw the transformation of Afghanistan over the course of 10 years,” Gelsone said. “Afghanistan did change me. It was such a completely different experience from the world I’ve come from.”

Since commedia dell’arte is a largely nonverbal form of comedy, Gelsone said she didn’t consider the lack of spoken language disadvantageous for communicating with her audience. “Not using language onstage has been a real plus because I don’t have a language barrier,” she said.

Gelsone’s specialty, she explained, is the use of volunteers from the audience — a practice that encountered hurdles in post-conflict areas such as Afghanistan. “In any place that has actually witnessed violence, if you’re picked out of a crowd, you’re going to die,” Gelsone said. Gelsone’s challenge was to build trust with a reluctant volunteer without the use of language.

“My goal is to make them feel safe and make them feel comfortable in the space, to make them feel like heroes by the time they leave the stage,” Gelsone said. Through her interactions with the audience and her students, Gelsone said she learned to be very careful and empathetic with her audience. “If you get someone to laugh, to move their diaphragm and those emotions are starting to come, then you’re starting to share a humanity.”

Gelsone’s work with the Big Apple Circus is her first time performing for an American audience, and it is also the first time her friends — and their children — have seen her perform.

“All these years of hard work make me a good performer because I can work under any circumstances,” Gelsone said. At the Big Apple Circus, she will be in the center of the ring performing to a live band, a far cry from the sidewalks and Afghani theaters of her past. “Magic can really happen there, and it’s just amazing to get to do that every day.”