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info@escoladeclown.eu
tel. +34 933 042 486
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Desde un fin de semana hasta un curso completo de dos meses, la Escola de Clown ofrece cursos con una gran variedad de profesores. La Escola es un Project Partner en el Proyecto Internacional de Investigación de Clown.
jon davison
Jon Davison lleva 25 años como clown, profesor, director, actor y escritor, los últimos 15 en Barcelona.
Desde 1993 actúa con Clara Cenoz, como Companyia d’Idiotes y Hop! en festivales, teatros, carpas, calles y bares por Europa – Londres, Amsterdam, Hamburgo, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Sicilia, Rusia...
Enseñaba el clown, la improvisación y la interpretación en el Institut del Teatre de Barcelona entre 1996-2006, además de ser profesor regular en el Col.legi del Teatre, El Timbal, Co and Co., etc. En 2007 colaboró con Clara Cenoz en la fundación de la Escola de Clown de Barcelona. Es ahora investigador de clown en la Central School of Speech and Drama en Londres.
Londres...del 20 al 24 de Julio 2009
En la CSSD, este es un taller de investigación, de una semana, mirando como crear actuaciones de clown más complejas.
Lunes a viernes, 10h-13h
Barcelona... Julio 2009
toda la información aqui : www.escoladeclown.eu
Taller de Clown
del 6 al 11 de Julio, 6 horas/día (residencial)
¿Cómo podemos llegar al estado clown por el camino más directo posible? En este taller utilizaremos ejercicios de una sencillez radical para llevarte a experimentar el clown de forma honesta, inmediata y visceral. Está pensado para los que no tienen experiencia previa y también para los que buscan revisitar la esencia del clown.
Clown y Creación,
o "1001 formas de crear números de clown"
del 13 al 18 de Julio, 6 horas/día (residencial)¿Has empezado de encontrar el clown y quieres comenzar la creación de tus propios números? ¿Llevas un tiempo creando números, pero te gustaría mejorar tu proceso creativo? ¿Quieres crear material de clown que realmente funciona, para ti y para tu público? ¿Quieres presentar números ensayados sin perder la frescura del clown?
Si respondes que “sí” a cualquiera de estas preguntas, entonces este es un curso para ti. Miraremos 1001 formas de crear gags y números. Como fuentes de inspiración aprovecharemos no sólo tu propio clown sino también los conocimientos de construcción de gags que heredamos de los maestros del pasado y presente. Al final del taller cada uno debería tener bastante material para poder seguir trabajando en el futuro sus números.
Talleres semanales y laboratorio en Londres ... 2009-2010
Empezando en septiembre 2009, ofreceré dos talleres, cada uno de un día a la semana, durante todo el año. Detalles por confirmar...
talleres anteriores...
Enero - Marzo 2009
16 - 20 Febrero 2009, 10-13h, taller en la CSSD, Londres. "¿Qué hacen los clowns?" Pasamos una semana explorando una gran variedad de formas de crear material de clown, que es un trabajo externo sobre la forma, la estructura, la composición, y como se relaciona con el trabajo interno de la presencia a través del fracaso. Quería ver si podríamos crear gags inspirándonos en Chaplin, Tati, Rowan Atkinson, Steve Martin y otros. Se colgará aqui un informe completo próximamente..
Julio - Septiembre 2008
Septiembre: talleres en la Escola de Clown de Barcelona. Empezamos de considerar como mantener lla frescura de la presencia del clown cuando hay que interpretar números preparados. Se colgará aqui un informe completo próximamente..
Julio: talleres en Londres. Volimos a los ejercicios que habíamos encontrado como útiles a lo largo del año, manipulándolos para poder presentarlos ante un público en directo. Nos llevó a actuaciones en grupo en en solitario en Chisenhale Dance en Juio, y en el Festival Of Emergent Art en la CSSD en Septiembre.
ver aqui videos de actuaciones ...
Abril - Junio 2008
Mayo: Talleres en Londres; Lunes y Miércoles 18h30-20h30; Central School of Speech and Drama. Nos lanzamos a jugar casi sin reglas, el juego vertiginoso, en un intento de generar un tipo de energía de juego que fuera apropriado para el clown. Se colgará aqui un informe completo próximamente..
Enero - Marzo 2008
26-30 Marzo: Taller en la Escola de Clown de Barcelona. ¿Qué tipo de preparación podríamos utilizar para el clown, si prescindimos de los juegos con normas?
ver aqui video del taller...
4-27 Febrero: Tallers en Londres ; Lunes y Miércoles 18h30-20h30; Central School of Speech and Drama. Trabajamos la paradoja de la expresión emocional, o sea ¿cómo puede ser que en el clown tanto las emociones verdaderas como las falsas sean igualmente interesantes?
ver aqui video del taller...
Octuber - Diciembre 2007
26 Oct-21 Nov: Talleres en Londres; Lunes y Miércoles 18h30-20h30; Central School of Speech and Drama - Studio 1 ¿Cuáles son los ejercicios realmente útiles para poder sentir, comprender y aprender el estado básico del clown? Volvimos a visitar territorio conocido pero con una visión muy crítica.
12-16 Diciembrec: Talleres en la Escola de Clown de Barcelona. ¿Sólo hay un puñado de ejercicios realmente clown? ¿Qué dicen del clown como una técnica en si, en vez de como una función del teatro, de la máscara o de la improvisación?
proyecto internacional de investigación de clown
En octubre del 2007 comenzó el Proyecto Internacional de Investigación de Clown. El proyecto estás ubvencionado por el Arts and Humanities Research Council como un Creative Fellowship en Central School of Speech and Drama (Universidad de Londres), con la Escola de Clown de Barcelona como el Project Partner. Es una investigación de tres años de duración sobre el clown y la enseñanza del clown, con talleres, actuaciones y presentaciones en Londres, Barcelona y otros lugares.
artículos, discusiones, críticas y más...
La investigación produce documentación en las formas de videos, imagenes, artículos y otros escritos...
El Clown Contemporáneo
Solicitud al AHRC, Abril 2007
This project begins by asking an age-old question in a new context. The question concerns how an actor is to be convincing. It has vexed and provoked actor training since at least Stanislavsky, and has been around since at least Diderot. The new context is that of clown training and performance. While the celebrated actor-trainer, Jacques Lecoq, was partly concerned with the same question, the project planned here will take the investigation into new territory and aim to produce recommendations for the clown actor of the future. The overarching question, then, is: How is a clown convincing? (seguir leyendo...)
El Fracaso
Documentación, Octubre-Diciembre 2007
In this introduction I shall give an overview of the organisation of the project and its first term, as well as discussing some of the issues that have arisen, particularly in relation to the legacy of Lecoq. I then go on to describe the workshops in detail. Lastly, I give a summary of the work that is imminent. The project got under way unofficially in September through canvassing for participants. (seguir leyendo...)
Jon Davison entrevistado por Demian Reis, estudiante de doctorado de clown
June 2008
partes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Entrevista completa (sólo audio)
Improvisación y Clown
Discusión, Julio 2008
La introducción a una discusión, facilitado por Chris Johnston, entre público e improvisadores, después de "Present and Incorrect", una muestra de actuaciones de improvisación, en Chisenhale Dance.
La Fenomenología del Clown
Conferencia , Septiembre 2008
I am a research fellow at CSSD, funded for three years by the AHRC to research the contemporary clown. I would like to take this opportunity to present some of the principle findings so far, one year into this project... ...By the end of this year I have arrived at a vision (or rather, a feeling) of clown that is highly personal, in the sense that it depends on seeing (or rather, on feeling) things at a personal level. This “what clown feels like” is what, in retrospect, I have spent the last year searching for. We might call this “the phenomenology of clown”.
What does it feel like to clown? What does it depend on? A loss of ego? An acceptance of failure? High self-esteem? Contradictory behaviour? A sense of difference? Feeling like when you fall in love? This is what we could call “being clown”, and is what I have also attempted to demonstrate in my new solo performance, “from jontxu…to be”. In this performance I set myself the task of simply being with the chair, rather than looking to improvise actions that might follow clown rules. My focus was thus on feeling what it’s like to be clown. I found that it is entirely possible to entertain an audience in this manner, at least for ten minutes. (continue reading...)
Fenómena Clown
Exposición Fotográfica, Noviembre 2008
Sentir
Documentación, Enero-Septiembre 2008
...próximamente...
How can we talk about clown? These reviews of performances are intended to introduce into the world of performance criticism some criteria based on clown. So they mainly prioritise clown matters over and above general performance issues, my aim being to contribute to the quality of clowning and clown debate generally. (All reviews can be commented on at the ClownBlog)
Serious Play
written by Louise Peacock, (Intellect Books 2009)
As a specialist in the field of clown (as a practitioner and an academic), I was excited when I recently learned of this book's imminent publication. There are so few rigorously written studies of clown that I was ready to welcome any contributions to the serious study of this complex art form.
Having read the book, I am astounded and appalled that such a shoddy piece of work could get past the publisher's checks. The published text is based on the author's PhD thesis, but the writing would hardly bear up to scrutiny at undergraduate level.
Apart from being very poorly written from a point of view of style and clarity of thought, the text contains several factual errors, such as the lumping of Chaplin into the category of Hobo Clowns, a form which the author rightly states was born in the 1920s. Chaplin's tramp character (NOT the same as a Hobo), as everyone knows, had been appearing in films throughout the previous decade.
The author devotes a large section to discussing the clown activist work of CIRCA, but neglects to mention that the founders of CIRCA have long ago abandoned this project, declaring it to be an untenable position.
The basic assumption of the book, that clown is equivalent to play, is never justified, and ignores the large amount of clown work done in recent years that rejects the usefulness of play theory to clowning.
If this had been published some 20 or more years ago, it might have had some resonance, but today it reads as a poorly researched personal reaction to a handful of shows rather than a rigorous study.
I do not understand how someone with apparently very limited knowledge or experience of clown (the author has done a workshop with Angela da Castro, seen Slava's Snowshow a number of times, and very little else) has managed to get such a misleading work into the marketplace.
El Pallasso i el Führer
2007, directed by Eduard Cortés
I confess to only having seen a little less than an hour of this film. Firstly, I chanced upon it on TV last night, so missed the beginning, and secondly, tedium got the better of me and I switched off before it finished dragging itself towards the end. In my view, that doesn’t disqualify me from reviewing the film, however.
As a clown and a clown historian, I should have been delighted to be contemplating a film based on a historical occurence of Charlie Rivel’s performance for the Fuhrer on his birthday but, alas! no.
First there is the astounding fact that it was broadcast in a dubbed-to-Spanish version, the original being in Catalan. I was watching in Catalonia: why wasn’t it broadcast in the original version? Is it really so hard for the poor Spanish public to do a tiny bit of work and read some subtitles? Not even when the original language is one that is official in the country and not really so difficult to get the gist of even if you don’t know it. And so, as with all dubbed films, the atmosphere evaporates, and in this case a heaviness takes over which is exacerbated by the denseness of the dialogue, a text which never for one second escapes from a turgid literariness.
Ferran Rañé‘s protrayal of Rivel bears some likeness to the man himself in his bearing and manner. He’s obviously watched his appearance in Fellini’s “I Clowns” and done a fair imitation, although that’s as far as it goes and it can’t be called a full characterisation. But when it comes to the scenes where he is called upon to actually perform as a clown, he unfortunately joins the rest of the cast in an embarrassing parody of what actors might think clowns do. A very disappointing film indeed.
Pierre Pilatte, “Dans ma philosophie”
Antic Teatre, Barcelona,
31st January 2009
Like all great absurdists, Pierre Pilatte’s starting point is the mundane, that most ordinary kind of reality that we encounter in semi-private every day of our lives, and that seems to be the basis for our inner worlds, and hence our contact with the outer world of objects and the people that surround us.
Pilatte is an expert exponent of what we might call “clown du quotidien”. In this clown world we find the ridiculous in the most inconsequential of actions, deeds that normally go unnoticed by our own consciousness, mini-tragedies that surely should have no significance. Pilatte looks for a lighter... dozens of large boxes are thrown aside in the search, eventually he decides upon a trunk... it’s full of lamps... no matter! there is a pile of plastic cups, which he then removes one by one from the stack, thus revealing a key in very last one... the key to a box... and there it is, the lighter. Ordinary? Absurd? Not as crazy as using the lighter to smoke a chair. But the prime act of clown stupidity is then, only afterwards, to take out a packet of normal cigarettes!
“Dans ma philosophie” is a show that walks the line between madness and normality with exhilarating ease, its actions and language rivalling Ionesco at his best.
La Cleta i la Mandarina
Teatre Riereta, Barcelona,
2nd March 2009
This is a little gem of a kids’ show that manages to bring together some lovely clowning and some very neat magic. Magicians have a tendency to be clever folk, as the skill of misdirecting the audience’s attention is usually allied to a well-developed intellect. And that doesn’t bode well for clowning, which as we all know relies on a well-developed stupidity.
However, La Cleta achieves a marvellous unification of her two brain hemishperes, remaining utterly silly whilst completely foxing her audience... and herself! Instead of using magic to fool us and impress us with her superior skill, she uses it against herself, the joke almost always being on her.
The clowning is simple yet to the point, such as La Cleta’s exclamation of “I did it wrong!” every time she makes a mistake, or her habit of asking an audience member’s name and then claiming she is called the same: “Same as me! We’re the same!” And a wonderful example of how to be negative as a clown: whilst the two clowns do impressions that are easy to guess, La Cleta repsonds to the audience’s correct suggestions every time with a “no!” that is so innocently addressed to us that, despite it being grammatically negative, comes across as a complete affirmation.
Licedei, La Familia (Semianyki)
Hackney Empire, Londres,
27 de septiembre 2008
Licedei are still notable for being a company that has a relatively large number of clowns onstage, compared with most exponents of clowning. “The Family” is performed by 6 performers. I have two main problems with this, despite enjoying the show immensely.
The first problem is that it is rare that clowns can remain being clowns in the company of so many. The contrasts between them become inevitably less stark, and contrast is an essential element in clowning. They begin to resemble each other too much, and a couple of the daughter characters could easily be merged or dispensed with. The second problem is with the clowning, or lack of it.
Most of what happens in "The Family" is based more on character-driven comedy or street theatre, rather than true clowning. The great exception is the youngest child, whose simple energy and joy in her own foolishness is what gives the show its heart. The brother mostly plays a lively foil, a trickster-ish prankster in constant tension with his younger sister’s innocence. But although his orchestra conductor number is particularly accomplished, it falls into the oft-seen trap of making the audience into the clowns, and the clown into the director. Fine for an average street theatre show, and entertaining enough, but clowning can aim much higher.
The weakest link is the father, whose gestures seem empty, external, with no sense of self-ridicule. And no contact with the audience. As a result he seems to have no insides, no inner world.
The mother is an altogether warmer, stronger presence, but most of what works for her is again from the realm of street comedy rather than true clowning. Her management of the audience member on the phone after the interval is perfect, but lacking innocence. Her use of dance and supposedly sexy moves quickly tires.
Of the other two daughters, I did like the still, almost autistic presence of one of them. But autism is not enough. She lacks objectives (except in the moment when she wants to answer the phone), remaining in a state of flop.
But, as I have said, although you won’t find the best clowning in the world in this show it is nonetheless extremely enjoyable, full of surprises and generally performed with a positive elan that sends you home happy.
Próximamente... Una selección de libros, imagenes y otros recursos.
Clown Theory
In 2006 at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona we began developing a course of studies entitled "Clown Theory, Analysis and History", forming an integral part of the full-time course, and also open to outside students to attend. As far as I know, it is the only programme of its kind in the world.
Clown theory falls into several distinct areas:
Firstly, there is the thought that we may address to performing as clowns, whether our own or others' work. This talks about how clown works, what criteria we can judge clown performance by, and so on. There are many overlaps with dramatic theory, critical theory and performance theory here, but there are many criteria unique to clown. This is a field that remains relatively unmapped until now.
Secondly, there is the social role and function of clowning. This covers the role of clown doctors, clown humanitarian expeditions. Underlying this sociology of clowning is the social history of the art, which investigates the postion of clowning across periods and cultures.
Thirdly, there is the question of clown philosophy. Many are taking up clown thought or the clown mind as a way of addressing situations in other fields. In fact, the possibilities here are endless. At ECB we have had a biology teacher researching the clown-teacher. This new kind of teacher would not appear to be clownish, but to be informed by the criteria of the clown mind. The use of play in the corporate world is now well-known, but clowning goes several steps further, and some make claims that it is capable of solving the most pressing questions of all: water shortage, war, religious collapse, etc. The World Parliament of Clowns has set its sights on altering the mindset of our politicians.
I have always mixed performing, rehearsing, teaching, researching and living without worrying much about the frontiers between them, but began to formalise my research by taking an MA Practice as Research at Kent University in 2006. The thesis can be found here:
"Clown Prosthetics and Amputations"
for pdf version: Clown Prosthetics and Amputations.pdf
Aside from my present research into clown teaching, I am interested in the following fields:
Naturalism and Supernaturalism; Clown History. I am also preparing to edit a Clown Reader, my own book entitled "Clown Theory", and a translation into English of Tristan Rémy's "Les Clowns"
otras noticias de Clown de alrededor del mundo...
Utilizaré este espacio para dar a conocer el trabajo de otros, en las formas de video, textos, blogs, fotos, etc.
Blogs:
Circo Méliès - lleno de artículos informativos sobre el cine y el clown, el circo y las variedades, con enlaces excelentes de video (en castellano).
My Nose is Blogged - noticias regulares de Gladys Tonsils, primera payasa terapéutica y primera mujer payasa de la India (en inglés).
Clownlink - una variedad de noticias de clown desde una perspectiva norte-americana (en inglés).
Clown Brasil - noticias de clown desde Brasil (en portugués).
Videos
Baks - una colección maravillosa de películas de payasos: Yengibarov, Popov, Beby, Karandash, Grock, etc. (en ruso).
Fotografía de clowns, de Jim Moore: http://www.moorepics.com/gallery.php
Algunos videos favoritos...
