Anne Zander is bringing a new kind of theater and comedy to Olympia through a show all about the vulnerable time period after one gives birth. Zander describes her postpartum show “Anne Zander is MOTHER” as heavy on body fluids, mess and the sexy truth.
The show will be at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 25, at Wild Child, also known as Wild Man Brewing Gastropub. Tickets are on a sliding scale from $5 to $25, and pregnant and postpartum folks can attend for free. Tickets are available on Zander’s website .
Zander is also teaching a Fundamentals of Physical Comedy workshop from 1 to 5 p.m. that Saturday and Sunday. Those who register to attend also get to attend the Friday show for free. The cost for the workshop is on a sliding scale from $120 to $200.
A background in clowning
Zander grew up in Vancouver, Washington. After attending school in Minnesota, she moved to Europe and spent some years in France and Ireland before settling in England.
While in England, Zander received a master’s degree from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’s theater lab program. There, she said she learned how to create ensemble-devised theater, or scenes without a script.
“How do you kind of create from scratch, without starting with the writing process, so kind of starting in the body, starting in research as well,” she said. “But rather than going straight to, ‘We’re going to write a script,’ how do we kind of experientially approach this process in making something new?”
Zander was introduced to clowning in the theater lab program under performer Peta Lily. Zander said she hated clowning at first because she was bad at it.
“I really wanted to be good at this, and it’s really hard because it requires this sort of dual shutting off your brain, just dropping into the body, but also remembering instructions, or listening to instructions,” Zander said. “It’s sort of relearning how to move in your body in a very specific way, while kind of just turning off the normal operating system, so it’s really challenging.”
Zander had done a number of solo sketch comedy routines and solo character work, but never had she layered clowning on top of it. When she did, she said it opened up a new world for her and allowed her to connect more with her audience.
“Anything that happens in the audience is hopefully acknowledged by the clown, it is noticed and kind of integrated,” she said. “And that kind of aliveness just really, really excited me, and it started to kind of open up the kind of work that I wanted to do.”
Zander and her husband moved back to the U.S. about seven years ago to be closer to her family, and they ended up in Portland. She started performing improv, and over the years has shifted her focus back into clown work.
She even began teaching out of a local improv theater and had a solo tour planned. But then she got pregnant with twins, who are now 2 1/2.
Shifting focus
Zander said she wanted to make a show about the postpartum experience because she was living in it, and she felt alone.
She said having kids was something she really wanted and had prepared for, but she still felt completely knocked down by the experience of having twins. It was a difficult birthing experience and her babies were immediately sent to the neonatal intensive care unit.
Zander said her shows always draw from big life experiences, and this one is no different.
“This is so present in me. It’s so present in my body and my experience that it really just poured out of me,” she said.
She said clowning allows her to build community around these shared life experiences and laughter. She said she loves playing with people’s emotions in a show, bringing them to tears and then right back to laughter.
“I think there’s a real value in finding catharsis together through laughter around an experience that has been really hard,” Zander said.
She said postpartum is defined as the first 12 months after giving birth. She felt a shift in herself after she got through that period with her twins, and she was able to reflect on the last year. She put together a show focused on her experiences in about two months and it hit the stage for the first time in September last year.
Zander said returning to the show after more time has allowed her to explore her feelings deeper.
“It’s kind of interesting coming back into the show with a little bit more distance and reconnecting to those feelings that the first time I did it were just so raw and at the surface that it almost took no effort to get them there, and to retune into those things, because things are still wonderful, still challenging, but in just in different ways,” she said.
The show
Zander said her postpartum show will always be about that first year with her twins, and you can expect a lot of fluids, some from the body and some not, when you attend.
“Man, postpartum is so messy. It’s so messy,” she said. “You’ll never not be messy when you’re, well, I was never not messy.”
She said the show will be sexy and fun and will involve dancing. She didn’t want to give away too much else, except there will be breast milk pumping and all types of movement in mesh underwear.
Overall, she said it’s mostly the truth in a clown package. She recommends the show for those 16 and older, but it’s up to the discretion of parents.
“I think the thing about parenthood, especially new parenthood and postpartum and being a birthing parent and a breastfeeding parent is, it’s so hard to describe to people,” Zander said. “So this is kind of my way of showing it in this very ridiculous way. But mostly, I hope people come and just laugh really hard, because it’s a very fun, funny show.”
She said Olympia is going to be the first stop for her small tour because she has a number of connections in the area already. She took a clowning class in Olympia earlier this year and met Eugene Ryser, the event organizer. Zander said Ryser came to see her show in Portland and then decided to help her organize her upcoming show and class.
Zander has seen some success already with her solo comedy shows. Her first one, titled “Juicebox,” was selected for HBO’s 2020 Women in Comedy Festival. She didn’t get to attend due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She’s hoping “Anne Zander is MOTHER” gets the same attention, if not more.
She said she’s working on a mini Pacific Northwest tour but being the primary caregiver to her twins makes that difficult. So it’s going to be a slow tour, she said. She’s hoping it will reach Eugene and Bend, Oregon, soon, and she’s applying to festivals including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.
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