Shameless Plug is a new series where we turn things over to creatives. In exchange for plugging their project, they have to spill their guilty pleasure, biggest inspiration, personal motto and a few other secrets. Today a clown shares the crazy idea that scared away two members of a project.

Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin is a clown from Wellington who has recently returned from Ecole Philippe Gaulier, France, where he learned to love cheese. His art centres around the bickering twin forces of chaos and joy. During school hours, you can find him teaching algebra to teenagers, which allows him the energy and financial independence to clown.

Sean was nominated five times at the 2024 NZ Fringe Festival for a solo non-clown show about incels, blackpill. Due to the snub of not winning, he has turned his back on earnest performance forever and his clown has been in chaotic performances like the MILK saga, the award-winning ratKing, THE DEVILS ARE COMING and DOGS IN THE HOLE.

Here's Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin’s Shameless Plug.

My personal motto is keep it light! Life is tough enough and you only make it harder for yourself if you sweat every little thing. I’m not perfect about it, and some things do still bug me, but I do remind myself often to shake it off and find a joke in it. It’s something I pass on to my students, as well as a core tenet of the training I received for clowning: keep a joke in your head (you don’t always have to tell it) because it’ll help you drift through life easier.

The best advice I’ve received was: It’s good to have some distance. When creating stuff it’s easy to think “Oh, I’ll just go online and read about/follow a lot of other creatives who do what I am trying to do.” But inspiration can quickly turn into comparison, which is the DEATH OF JOY! Creating a clown show, I immediately felt lacking when I would look at videos or tiktoks of clown shows, thinking “could I do something like that? It was funny when they did it…”

Having distance from sources you can compare yourself with means that your inspiration can arrive safely, without comparison. For my newest show, some large pieces of inspiration are Nesian Mystik’s music, the TV show Atlanta, and how I run a maths classroom.

The moment I knew I wanted to be an artist was in high school (shoutout Mahurangi College MAHUHU KI TE RANGI REACH FOR THE STARS). My mixed year 12 and 13 drama class, with a total of 14 students, was performing UNABRIDGED, FULL-LENGTH Romeo and Juliet to a crowd of parents (tough).

Around the same time, I was doing extra-curricular drama in the town over. It ended in a one-night-only production of Steven Berkoff’s East (rough around the edges, quite physical theatre from East London in the 1960s) at the Sawmill Brewery in Leigh. It was very exciting – we weren’t technically old enough to be in the bar and our teacher lied about our age to get us in.

The crowd for East were local workers who had finished their shifts and gone to the pub for a couple of pints. It was there, after a dud performance of Shakespeare, on stage in a bar, having the audience yell at us and us at them, when I realised that THIS was for me. It told me that I wanted to perform, and informed the kind of performer I wanted to be.

The place I feel most creative is weirdly enough on my drive to work. I often don’t play any music in the car, and the car itself is electric, so it’s a pretty silent drive. My clowns occur to me in dreams/daydreams (for some people these would be NIGHTMARES). They come as flashes of images or moments or scenes. They happen when I’m sleeping, or on my morning commute with not much else but me, the road, and my thoughts. It must be to do with removing outside stimulus and just letting yourself be clear-headed. It can bring out the weird stuff that’s too shy to leave the cave with all the other noise going on. 

I keep myself accountable by having people around me who will tell me the truth even though it makes me A LITTLE STROPPY. I’m very blessed to have friends that do this.

At the beginning of each devising process I try to suggest something so outlandish that it invites people to shut me down. My goal with this is to be challenged in front of everyone, and to show them that I CAN BE TOLD TO STOP. It breaks the ice and helps everyone see each other as equals in the devising space.

My hot take on clowning is that everyone loves it but NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THEY’RE DOING IT. The success I found at the course at Ecole Philippe Gaulier was a consequence of the cheeky, comedic nature stitched into my DNA by just being from Aotearoa. We are such a funny, charming bunch which is why we’re quite well-regarded overseas. To this end, some of the funniest people I’ve ever met have never set foot on a stage – they’re just regular people doing their job!

My most embarrassing career moment was years ago. I was devising a new piece of work (MILK, which has now ended up having six successful seasons, wahoo!). It eventually became a show where audiences threw waterballoons at the performers, but once upon a time, we didn’t know what it was yet.

Sometimes when you’re making something new, you have to suggest crazy ideas in order to figure out where The Line is. So I suggested an idea called “swat the fly”. At points during the show, I would take my pants and underwear off, walk around backwards with my buttcheeks painted like the eyes of a fly, and other performers had to spank me in order to swat the fly away.

The mere suggestion of the idea made two members of the devising team leave the project. My friends still bring it up.

My hottest career hack is the person at the top has to be chill. Not laid back to a problematic extent, but relaxed enough to listen to everyone on the team and respond to anything that comes their way without getting too emotional. I’ve been project lead for a few devising processes and the person at the top always has to 1) Have a plan, and 2) Be ready to throw it in the bin. The only person in the room that can’t lose their cool is you.

My hottest hack is to have an external outlet for safe decompression, because as soon as the person in charge of a room starts to spiral, everyone else starts to look for the door.

My shameless plug is BUCK SCOURGE: LIVING NIGHTMARE

*thunder cracks, a clown horn honks in the distance*

55 minutes of clowning, jokes, skits, and live music, with several featured characters that I’ve developed over a few years. This is a show for people who are quite happy not to understand what’s going on and those keen to yell at a stranger.

The show is on for ONE NIGHT ONLY at the Hannah Playhouse Theatre in Wellington, 8pm, 1 November 2025! Tickets can be purchased via Humanitix, and we’d love to see as many strangers in the audience as possible!