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Workshop: Physical Approach to Character

In this 3-hour workshop we will explore movement tools to help you give external and internal shapes to your characters.

Since 2018 the tools I’ve gravitated towards to create characters, or to approach performance in general, have become consistent. I keep revisiting my understanding of certain approaches, trying to form them to my own usage, be that for clown, puppetry or the character-driven dance pieces I often dramaturg for Frog in Hand. I’ve been curious about how these approaches can talk with one another, to build on our own understanding of our bodies and the way we move our instrument through space and time. I have taught some of the elements separately, and as I’ve done so have really noticed how each one complements the others. Which brings us to today, where I’m attempting to bring these elements together into a single workshop. This workshop will be part class, part solo exploration and part workshop with analytical prompts. And if that sounds too thinky, I assure you my approach is one of embodiment so expect to MOVE.

PHYSICAL APPROACH TO CHARACTER

November 2nd, 2024
2-5pm @ the Art Shelter

There are many approaches to character and most of them are intellectual and text-based. These approaches are wonderful for understanding your character’s story and empathizing with them, but often they don’t touch on a character’s physicality.

In this workshop we will explore character from the outside in, inspecting the body and defining its architecture while taking time to relax into our choices to allow the actor to live.

Together we will build a physical vocabulary inspired by Laban, Bogart & Landau and a variety of contemporary clown, puppetry and mask teachers.

The majority of this workshop will have you up on your feet, exploring through a series of exercises and prompts. The workshop will begin with a warm-up and will have breaks throughout.

Things to know:

Bring comfortable clothes and layers as the dome is warm on sunny days but cooler when it’s been overcast for longer periods of time.

The Art Shelter is an off-grid dance studio run by solar power. It is not heated nor does it have air conditioning. We have batteries onsite and it is quite comfortable but we are also in the middle of a field so plan accordingly (especially if it rains). We have water and a small kitchenette with some coolers to store foodstuffs and the ability to make coffee/tea and a microwave to reheat food.

Clown Training x Red Nose Remedy

It’s the summer of clown!

Alongside Red Nose Remedy, I’m hosting a series of 3 one-off clown workshops, each focused on a different set of tools the clown utilizes in performance. They are happening at Sweet Action Theatre and are on the 2nd Mondays of June – July – August.

In June we’re working on soft skills of the clown, including pointe-fixe, up and out, repetition, the puppetry of the body and more. In July we’re diving into our emotional landscapes and playing with articulating and crafting emotion as gesture. And in August we’re taking it all away and focusing on one-thing-at-a-time.

Check out the images below for more information and for registration:

Pre-registration is encouraged but Drop-ins are available as well!

Clown 1 – The Tenets of Clown

For absolute beginners, no previous experience necessary! Join us on a 5-week journey in Frog in Hand’s Art Shelter. Led by Andrew Gaboury.

NEW CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT

Before we put on a nose we start with ourselves. Beginning with presence, we will witness one another, learn and discover what naturally makes us and others funny. Each week will focus on a guiding principle of red nose clown through exercises, games and ‘turns’ on stage, all the while scaffolding in the ‘soft skills’ of the clown. By the end of the course you will find the beginnings of what will eventually become a clown persona.

This course is inspired by theatrical traditions of red nose clown as interpreted through a variety of contemporary artists and teachers through the ages and across continents. It is my attempt at balancing what I’ve found the most useful in my own clown practice in order to share the joy of clown with others.

No clown or performance experience necessary. Clown is one of those wonderfully transferable skills that can be applied to everyday situations, including public speaking, team work, project management and rekindling your own sense of play.

5 weeks

Thursdays, June 6, 13, 20, 27 & July 4 | 6 – 9pm

@ The Art Shelter (887 Hydro Rd, Mississauga, ON L5E 1E9)

$250

$200 early bird if registered before May 21st, 2024

For this class, I thought I’d write a clown-specific bio:

Andrew Gaboury is a performer, writer and educator based in Port Credit, Mississauga. Central to his practice is the desire to bring a sense of wonder and joy to the everyday. He initially found his clown in 2012 when he met Helen Donnelly and took her course, Discover Your Clown. Andrew has since been clowning theatrically for 12 years, performing at the Toronto Festival of Clowns, the Foolish Cabaret, the Red Nose Cabaret, HarbourKIDS Circus, for Common Boots Theatre with Luminato’s presentation of Walk With Amal, internationally at Ei! Marionettas (Portugal), and nationally at World Stage Design in Calgary, the University of Guelph and at various parks and promenades in the GTA. Andrew has been teaching clown since 2019 with the Frog in Hand Summer Company, Clay & Paper Theatre and through various workshops. In 2018 he began his journey into the world of therapeutic clown when his teacher, Helen Donnelly set up a training program with George Brown College. The nexus of clown, joy and wellness in difficult situations has become a place of passion for Andrew, who has travelled to the Netherlands to train with an international panel of artists for the 2022 Healthcare Clowning International Meeting (HCIM). This year, Andrew was part of the planning committee for the 2024 Meeting of the Noses presented by Fondation Dr Clown and the North American Federation of Healthcare Clowning Organizations (NAFHCO). Through the pandemic, Andrew worked with Derek Kwan and MABELLEarts to bring a practice of social therapeutic clowning to their community. Andrew is Acting Executive Director and a therapeutic clown practitioner with Red Nose Remedy – a company founded by award-winning clown Helen Donnelly, as well as one of Kathleen Le Roux’s therapeutic clown partner’s focusing on Long Term Care and rehabilitation hospitals.

War of the Worlds Reimagined

In 2020 while the world was pivoting to understand the new realities of life under a pandemic, Colleen Snell, Callahan Connor and I brainstormed a way to do the same with what was supposed to be the next show from Frog in Hand: a live Toronto Fringe dance-performance set to an audio version of H. G. Wells’ classic tale War of the Worlds.

All of a sudden, we didn’t have a deadline. The realities of live performance anytime soon seemed like a dream that disappears as soon as you wake up. So what’s a dance-theatre company to do? Probably many things, but we decided to turn to the world of audio dramas, having already been inspired by Orson Welles’ famous 1938 reimagining.

We didn’t want to just copy the brilliance of Orson Welles’s piece. We wanted to make something different. Something our own. And now, locked away in our homes because of a deadly bug, we had time to create.

The three of us decided to split the task so we would each have an opportunity to tell a portion of the story. Together we listened to the original book and collected images and narrative techniques that resonated with us.

What really stood out to me, listening to this story written in 1897, was the sense of awe the narrator in the first half showed in the face of the unknown and potentially unknowable. Everything seemed, on that listen, uncertain; details would change from paragraph to paragraph. The narrator would question their own senses. It reminds me of the same techniques Jeff Vandermeer uses so effectively in his weird fiction such as Annihilation and Borne. I talk about all this in a bit more detail here.

And so my story began: the story of Alix, a person wanting to escape it all and reconnect with the world around her. So she plans a trip with her friend Sam, a solo canoe trip in the heart of the Algonquin before convening at a meeting place to venture further into the woods as a duo.

Little do they know that while they are dealing with their own journeys, something much larger is about to change the world forever.

After months of joint writing time over Zoom accompanied by instrumental albums; workshopping with the Frog in Hand Summer Company; engaging audio genius Miquelon Rodriguez (@troysteel) who advised us how to set up recording studios in our closets surrounded by sweaters and blankets for optimal sound capture; rehearsing and then finally recording everything, we had something. By the end of the year we were able to hand it all over to Miquelon.

And what he sent us back was stunning. To imagine a world and write it on paper is one thing. To hear that world come to life in your ear holes is quite another.

My introduction to the War of the Worlds Reimagined project, The Algonquin Tapes, premiered at 2021’s Digital Toronto Fringe a received some wonderful reviews.

And now the entire trilogy is available online.

Each part takes a different angle and throws you into a new setting and cast of characters as the world deals with this new unknown.

Here’s an excerpt from part three: Back on the Air written by Callahan Connor.

I’m really proud of what the team has created here. Colleen’s piece, Last Day, is a visceral piece of writing and Callahan’s, Back on the Air, is this charming bit of hope and community.

If you’d like to get away from a screen for a bit and listen to a 3-part story about the world ending and then not ending, I’d be so happy to hear what you think.