Weekend Clown Workshops

Weekend Workshop in Brixton, London

25th - 26th September 2021

Time: 10am-5pm Sat and Sun

Venue: The Bureau of Silly Ideas

18 Valentia Place, London SW9 8PG

https://www.bureauofsillyideas.com/

Cost: £130

For full details and how to book, email info@jondavison.net

We're back!
The first in-person workshop after a year and a half online!

The weekend is aimed at both those who have done a workshop with Jon Davison and those new to his teaching.

This workshop dives into the fundamental dynamics of clowning, how to make yourself and your friends look stupid so we will love and laugh at you.

Converting our habitual fear of ridicule into the pleasure of laughing at ourselves, we can use it to make others laugh and experience the freedom of the clown. How do clowns do what they do, how does your stupidity make you a success, and how does the unthinkably ridiculous come about?

When you really look, most things are ridiculous: our bodies, our movements, our ideas, our emotions, our words, our relationships, the universe. The only aim in clowning is to turn failure into success, fear into laughter, suffering into joy. We don’t need to change ourselves, just look at everything from another perspective. It’s a human thing to do, so anyone can do it.

Clowning is sometimes shrouded in mystery but in reality it's a very simple mode of performance. This workshop uses simple exercises rooted in laughter response in order to access clowning in the most direct manner possible.

Clown Foundation

This workshop will look at the fundamentals of clowning, learning to feel and enjoy our own ridiculousness. Converting our habitual fear of ridicule into the pleasure of laughing at ourselves, we can use it to make others laugh and experience the freedom of the clown.

When you really look, most things are ridiculous: our bodies, our movements, our ideas, our emotions, our words, our relationships, the universe. The only aim in clowning is to turn failure into success, fear into laughter, suffering into joy. We don’t need to change ourselves, just look at everything from another perspective. It’s a human thing to do, so anyone can do it.

The workshop will use simple and effective exercises that have been developed over many years teaching all kinds of people all over the world. These exercises have the sole aim of cultivating a dynamic relationship between us which is based on laughing at ourselves. When we share laughter, amazing things happen!

Devising for Clown Performance

How do we bring together your own particular way of clowning (your stupidity and craziness) with careful crafting and composition of performance material?

In this workshop we shall be looking at how to make sure the material you create really works for you. There are countless practical ways of devising material appropriate for your clowning. Awareness of and understanding of these is far preferable to just hoping the clown you ‘found’ or a single idea will survive the real stage situation.

This workshop fuses a personal approach to your clowning together with taking care to set up and structure your performance. Other kinds of comic performers habitually spend a lot of time and effort on ‘material’. Stand-up comedians worry over joke structure, sketch comedians search for strong premises for their ideas. Why should clowns be different? Just because clowns incarnate the chaotic, the inept and the disruptive, doesn’t mean that clowning is not, in part, a craft. Popular misconceptions suppose that clowns just get up there and are funny just by being true to their inner selves. But looking inside yourself won’t really save you if your number isn’t working for an audience.

This workshop is suitable for those with differing levels of experience, but who want to begin or have begun to create their own performances as clowns. You might be stuck and want to find a way to complete your creation, or want to revisit your material and improve it or change it, or find a way to make your ideas suit your own way of clowning more closely.

Payments

Please send an email to info@jondavison.net and I will send you details of how to pay.

Cancellations

I do not refund payments made (either whole or part payments) but I can offer you the chance to use your payment towards a course or workshop at a later date within one year of the original courser. This can only be done once and must be requested at least 48 hours before the start of a course or workshop. If you cancel within 24 hours or do not turn up without notification then you should pay any outstanding fee.

This policy is to protect the viability of courses, whose costs and numbers of participants need to be confirmed in advance.

I try to keep all prices as low as possible (I haven’t forgotten how difficult it can be to be a student). That’s why there is a single price, with no discounts or concessionary rates.