I fly to Sydney to meet Ati Citron on one of the last truly warm days of autumn. The sky has that golden-syrup look it sometimes gets, seeping through the cracks of the shuttered plane windows. It’s the day of the Royal Wedding, and though I’m engrossed in an article Ati’s sent me about medical shamanism, newsprint Wills and Kates flicker madly in my peripheral vision like paper dolls caught in a breeze.

“It just goes to show you,” Ati says, as we shake our heads over Royal-Wedding-mania in the car, “the importance of ritual in people’s lives.” Privately, driving towards the prop warehouse for our photo shoot, I think it probably goes to show the importance of spectacle to network executives, but I bite my tongue. After all, nobody knows ritual and spectacle like Ati Citron. A performer by training, he’s recently come to occupy a unique niche: teacher of medical clowns. Under his guidance, Israel’s aspiring clown doctors learn the ins and outs of humour-based healing; new to the West, immeasurably ancient elsewhere in the world.

A natural raconteur, Ati keeps Toby and me in stitches throughout our shoot, never so much as when recounting a Korean initiation rite in which he fell prey to the lecherous attentions of a spirit-channelling shaman. Beneath the joking—and this is the secret of the clown doctors too—is a wealth of knowledge and specialisation that buoys up the lightest touch. Though Ati’s clown troops provide comic relief, each wisecrack and gesture is underpinned by invisible, sometimes gruelling work—a tremendous amount of energy, empathy, and patience goes into the production of a laugh, sometimes only a smile.

I think about this later in the airport bar, as I catch a glimpse of the Wedding. Passengers and bar staff—strangers to each other—focus their attention as one, riveted as Kate emerges from her limousine. For a brief moment, we come together—a small community that dissolves only as we dash towards our gates.

I realise then just how right Ati is—not just intellectually, but deep in my core. Ritual, spectacle, performance—the magic tools of shamans and wedding planners—are not forces to be taken lightly, but have the capacity to evoke remarkable connections, between strangers in a bar, between doctors and patients, patients and clowns.

Ati Citron gives clowns the tools to create these connections, these monumentally healing moments of warmth and compassion. I am beginning to suspect he is something of a shaman himself.

“By making faces and gestures and telling weird stories all together, you can change people’s lives. And that’s beautiful.”