Tuesday 9 February 2016

Clown Devising Workshop

Every Thursday 6.30-8.30pm
at Apiary Studios
Coming soon! - please let me know if you are interested in coming to this. We will start soon: once we have enough people.
Jon Davison
London Clown School

Following on from the popular success of the weekly clown workshop on Mondays (we've only missed one Monday since starting in April last year) I am happy to announce a new opportunity for all to develop their clowning.

The Monday class has been covering everything from discovering the joy of being stupid in front of others to the work of coming up with workable ideas for performing in public.
There's so much to do in such a short time that I've decided to open up a new class to focus on the devising aspects of clowning, leaving Mondays freer to work on the dynamics of clowning and enjoying your own stupidity and thereby making others laugh. That doesn't mean there will be no devising at all on Mondays, nor that Thursdays will ignore the essential need to actually perform your material as stupidly and funnily as possible. But it will allow for some more in depth work to take place in both areas.

The need for training in devising clown material

It’s all very well experiencing clowning in a workshop situation, where the teacher sets up the frame and conditions, but quite another matter when you come to perform in front of audiences out there in public. Learning the dynamics of clowning won’t be enough. Something else is required. 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? 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.

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’ will survive the real stage situation. These forms and structures of clown material also derive from simple notions of what clowns actually do. At the moment, my favourite terms for what clowns do are ‘wrongness’, the ‘unthinkable’, the ‘unexpected’ and the ‘obvious’.

This workshop is ongoing, drop in, continuous, unending - basically every week - so you can come regularly or occasionally or just once. It works for different kinds of people: you might have just started clowning and want to try performing in public; you might want to get back to it after a time away, or revisit your material and improve it or change it.

So now you will be able to dedicate even more time to clowning. Come to both days or just one. It's up to you.

Time: Thursdays 6.30 – 8.30pm
Venue: Apiary Studios, 458 Hackney Road, London E2 9EG 
http://www.apiarystudios.org/
Cost: Single class £15; or £50 for four classes paid in advance; or £60 for five classes paid in advance; or £110 for ten classes paid in advance