Four figures had emerged on a roof across the plaza. They wore breechcloths and their bodies were zebra-striped in black and white, their faces daubed whith a huge black smiles painted around theirs mouths, their hair jutting upward in two long conical horns, each horn surmounted with a brush of what seemed to be corn shucks. Koshares. The sacred clowns of Pueblo people. Chee had first seen similar clowns perform at a Hopi ceremonial at Moenkopi when he was a child, and since then at other Hopi dances. These seemed to be much the same.
    Two of them now stood at the parapet of the building, pointing downward at the line of kachinas, gesturing wildy. The other two, a fat man and a youth with a weightlifter's body, were carrying a ladder. They swung it recklessly, knocking first one and the other of their partners head over heels, to the delight of the audience. They managed to get the ladder over the side, with the wrong, narrow, end down. A mock battle ensued, with much falling and general clumsiness, to determine who would go down first. The fat man won. He started down headfirst. One of the others, a skinny fellow, climbed over him, also headfirst. Their legs entangled. they started to fall, were caught by one of the two partners still on the roof. The weightlifter had managed to get off the roof and was climbing down the underside of the ladder beneath the tangle-also upside down.
    The crowd was laughing, shouting encouragement. The drums kept their steady rhythm. The kachinas danced on, sublime spirits oblivious of such human imperfection.
    "Somebody's going to get killed," Janet Pete said. "They'll break their necks."
    A fall probably would break something Chee thought. It would be a two-story drop onto the earth packed as hard as concrete.
    "They've been doing that a thousand years," Cowboy said. "Nobody ever gets hurt." But he was frowning. "These guys are just fair", he said". "You ought to see 'em at Shongopovi, or Hotevilla, or Walpi, or..."
    "Or any Hopi village," Chee said. "That's Cowboy's slogan. Hopis do it better."
    Cowboy was shaking his head. "Chee always gets that wrong," he said. "It 's Hopis do it best."
    "Do they always do it like that?" Janet sounded both disbelieving and disapproving. "They're disrupting the ceremonial".
    "Not disrupting. It's a part of the ritual. It's all symbolic. They represent humanity. Clowns. Doing everything wrong while the spirits do everything right."
    p.15-16

    I used to know a Hopi who was a koshare at Moenkopi. He would say to me:" Compare to what our Creatore wanted us to be, all men are clowns. And that's what we koshare do. We act funny to remind the people. To make the people laugh at themselves. We are the sacred clowns,"
he said. He is dead now, a long time, but I remember that. And now you have told me that this teacher at Thoreau was funny, too. A good man and he made the children laugh.
p.164

"In our pueblo, and in some of the others, men who have jobs in towns and live away from us cant'be members of the most sacred  societies, the katchina societies. They can't spend enough time in the kivas,. So they become koshares, and that is sacred too, but in different way". He paused, seeking a way to explain. 'To outsiders, they look like clowns and what they do looks like clowning. Like foolishness but it is more than that. The koshare have another role. I guess you could say they are our ethical police. It 's their job to remind us when we drift away from the way that was taught us. They show us how far short we humans are of the perfection of the spirits.
    He paused, an opportunity for a question. Leaphorn said, "An old friend of mine, a Hopi, told me their koshares are like policemen who use laughter, instead of guns and scorn instead of jails."
    Sayesva nodded.
    "You've been to kachina ceremonials", he said. "Lots of Navajos like to come to them".
    "Sure," Leaphorn agreed. "We are taught to respect your religion."
    "Then you've seen the koshare doing everything wrong, everything backward, being greedy, reminding us of how badly we behave. That's the purpose. If you had been to this last one, you would have seen the clowns come in. They work with the clown team, to help teach the lesson. This time one of the clowns pulled in a wagon, and one of my cousins was there with the big billfold and the big dollards play-acting, pretending to buy sacred things.
p.208


   

Michael Chekhov's text about clowning