This December Clown Lab is a 6-hour workshop across two days.
Saturday Nov 30, 2024, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM & Sunday Dec 1, 2024, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
This performance lab is designed for any and all clowns regardless of experience, if you are a seasoned performer or petrified about walking out on stage in front of people. This intensive will heighten your sense of play and find what it is that makes your joy so enjoyable to watch.
In an effort to make this workshop accessible, we are offering a sliding scale.
$60: All clowns welcome
$100: Average Joey
$150: Pay it fool-ward
You can choose the scale at which you’d be most comfortable paying when you register for the in the link below.
Prerequisite: None!
About the Clown Lab
In this two-day lab, clown, and physical theatre artist extraordinaire’s Ashley Jones and Katherine Marino will help you shed your self-consciousness and heighten your natural sense of play. Using their extensively honed and utilised practice in clowning and improvisation, these two days will sharpen your skills as a performer and give you the tools to create your own original work. Be ready to move, have fun, and majorly mess around.
This intensive equips you with the tools to take your material from early conception through to production.
Along the way, you will learn how to:
Create material from the smallest seed of an idea
Spot our greatest ideas, which are often right under our noses (if only we know how to look)
Keep the work fresh in performance.
We will investigate the fundamentals, entrances, exits and existing on stage, finding joy in the game, maintaining dynamic with a scene partner and then we will explore more advanced concepts, such as writing tools, devising games, group dynamics, dramatic structure, physicality, and music.
These classes attract a wide range of artists—actors, directors, clowns, comedians, aerialists, and more. Regardless of your professional practice, you can apply the skills learned in this workshop in any kind of performance space, from purpose-built theatre’s and cabarets to variety stages, circus tents, and street corners.
About Clown
Clowning is a performance tradition which has developed over the last few hundred years. Over the last century, ‘theatre’ or ‘character’ clowning developed alongside circus clowning. In recent decades, theatre clowning has been linked with the development of other art forms, such as physical theatre and mime. Its focus is character, feelings, meanings, and ways of seeing the world, alongside the more familiar slapstick or ‘gags’. Clowning is a rich tool for actors and performers of any discipline. Come ready to stretch your imagination, connect with your silly side and celebrate your mistakes.
About the Teachers
Katherine Marino
Katherine Marino is a physical theater artist based in Rochester, NY where she creates original multi-disciplinary performances incorporating contemporary dance, clowning, and theater. She is known and loved in her community for her big hair, her unique movement style, and her hat juggling and clowning work, including her solo clown show titled A Show with Cookies. In addition to writing and performing, Marino finds great joy in teaching classes and workshops in contact improvisation, physical theater, and clown.
@katherine.dances
Ashley Jones
Ashley is an award winning physical performer, clown, teacher and director. Having trained across Europe at clown schools in Switzerland, France and his home country of England he has spent years honing and continues to develop his theatrical clown practice based on the principles of creative provocation and play. He has taught for renowned drama schools in the UK and on college campuses across North America.