Gardi Hutter

Thursday, 26 July, 2007 2 comments

Gardi Hutter is one of the most well-known female clowns in the world. Based in Switzerland, she has been performing her shows since 1981 on stages across the world. At Carnevale, people dress as her- and her washerwoman character has cleaned the floors of the Swiss Parliament. She’s won at least five international prizes for her work, and has written three best-selling children’s books. She teaches clowning at two prestigious clown schools in Switzerland & Germany. Despite all this, she is little known in the United States.

Here’s what the Philadelphia Inquirer had to say about her show (performed a number of years ago)

With a rat’s nest for hair and dressed in dirty long-johns and a raggedy dress, Hutter walks into a grungy laundry room and promptly plops herself down on a heap of rags to read a book titled “Joan of Arc and Other Heroines.”

It soon becomes apparent, however, that this laundress doesn’t need books to enter adventure-land. She does quite well on her own. Every object around her – a clothesline, a wash basin, a washing machine, a bowl of spaghetti – becomes a vehicle for heroic deeds.

Hutter’s character loves getting out of fixes, but she loves getting into them even more. So having finnally figured out how to get out of the washing machine, she joyfully dives back in again. She not only believes in her own catastrophic fantasies, she loves them. So when a paper doll falls to the floor she screams bloody murder, as if it were a real body. Yet so much does she enjoy screaming, she sends another doll to its death.

Gardi will be performing her show Jeanne D’ArpPo at the NY Fringe Festival Make sure to catch it if you can!