past workshops...

October-December 2009

We concentrated on preparing short numbers, both devised and already existing texts from Tristan Rémy's Entrées Clownesques, using what we had discovered in the first two years of the project, which means maintaining the clown whilst devising. The real exploration is about how we put all this knowledge together to make convincing clown performance. See here for full report.

September 2009

Sept 24th-26th "An Encyclopaedia of Clown" at CSSD was a performance designed to test, compare and demonstrate the wide variety of forms and structures in clown performance using the long list of ways of devising we have worked on in workshops this year to create between 25 and 50 short gags.

I also presented a paper "The Dramaturgy of Clown", illustrating the theoretical underpinning of this year's work on "What Clowns Do".

July 2009

Workshop at CSSD, 21st-24th July.
We concentrated on clarifying the elements or categories of how clown works. At the moment we have some 55 ways of devising clown, each way with 20 or so examples and video clips illustrating the principles. This will form the basis for the show "An Encyclopaedia of Clown", to be premiered in Sptember 2009.

Devising Clown Workshop, or "1001 ways to create clown numbers", at Escola de Clown de Barcelona, 12th-18th July.
Have you begun to discover clown and want to start making your own material? Have you been working on numbers for a while, but would like to improve your creative process? Do you want to create clown material that works, for you and your audience? Do you want to perform rehearsed numbers without losing the freshness of clown?
We looked at “1001 ways” to devise gags and numbers. As sources of inspiration we drew on the knowledge of gag construction that we have inherited from past and present masters of clowning.

Clown Workshop at Escola de Clown de Barcelona, 6th-11th July.
How can we get to the clown-state in the most direct way possible? This course used radically simple exercises to experience clown at an honest, immediate and gut level.

January - March 2009

Monday 16th - Friday 20th February 2009, 10am-1pm, workshop at CSSD, London. "What do clowns do?" We spent a week looking at a whole range of ways of creating clown material, the external work of form, structure, composition, and how it relates to the internal work of presence-through-failure. I wanted to see if we could usefully create work by drawing inspiration from Chaplin, Tati, Rowan Atkinson, Steve Martin and others. Full report will be online soon...

July - September 2008

September: workshops at Escola de Clown de Barcelona. We began to ponder how our new-found freshness in being present as clowns would hold up in the face of having to perform prepared numbers. Full report online soon...

July: workshops in London. We revisited the exercises we had found useful throughout the year, moulding them into a form that we could perform in front of a live audience, leading to group and solo performances at Chisenhale Dance in July, and at the Festival Of Emergent Art at CSSD in September. See performance videos here...

April - June 2008

May: Workshops in London; Mondays and Wednesdays 6.30-8.30pm; Central School of Speech and Drama. We plunged headlong into vertiginous play, in an attempt to generate a kind of play-energy that would be appropriate to clowning, i.e. one that doesn't involve rules. Report coming soon...

January - March 2008

26th-30th March: Workshops at Escola de Clown de Barcelona. What kind of preparation could we use for clowning if we dispense with rule-bound games?

4th-27th Feb: Workshops in London; Mondays and Wednesdays 6.30-8.30pm; Central School of Speech and Drama. We worked on the paradox of emotional expression, i.e. how can it be that in clowning both real and fake emotions are interesting?

October - December 2007

26th Oct-21st Nov: Workshops in London; Mondays and Wednesdays 6.30-8.30pm; Central School of Speech and Drama - Studio 1 What exercises are truly useful in order to feel, understand and learn the basic state of clown? We revisited some familiar territory but with a critical eye.

Also, read report here...

12th-16th Dec: Workshops at Escola de Clown de Barcelona. Are there only a handful of truly clown exercises? What do they say about clown as a technique in itself, rather than as a function of theatrre, mask or improvisation?