Tag: class

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

REGISTER HERE

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.

World Building for Choreographers

Your boots scuff across gravel as you begin to see lights coming from a compound behind a metal fence. The gate is open. There is a shipping container with tables full of science equipment emerging from it. In one corner of the compound, you see what you assume was the kitchenette although the dishes are rusty and whatever food was here has long since been removed. By people? Animals? As you explore the main container you understand it used to be a Climate Research Station but has since been abandoned — seemingly in a rush: papers, tools, vials and beakers filled with liquids and questionable materials, even pictures of those who used to work here still populate the station but are covered with spiderwebs and the dust of time.

You can almost imagine the life that was here long ago; their voices seem loud in your ears as you rifle through their work, trying to piece together any evidence you can that would shed light on their evident demise. As the night falls and the winds pick up, you hear footsteps against the gravel and the clanging of pots and pans. A new source of light makes its way into the compound and a hooded figure enters the site, a large pack on his back. It’s almost as if he doesn’t see you as he begins to search through the contents of this mysterious site. What is he searching for?

These were the opening moments of Frog in Hand’s 2021 performance Stories in the Woods, a site-specific, promenade dance-theatre piece set in a mysterious post-post-apocalyptic reality. The world we created helped us channel our thoughts about the themes of climate anxiety, the uncertainty of the future and the resilience of both nature and humanity into a container (quite literally) to house the piece’s dances.

Stories in the Woods, 2021

World Building can be an integral tool to elevate your show.

It can be a method for you to collect your thoughts into a cohesive whole.

It can be a way for you to make sense of those themes you want to approach and display to your audience.

And it can be a way to entice your audience to want to meaningfully engage with your piece.

World Building for Choreographers, a 4-week online class

I’m happy to be joining Colleen Snell to co-lead a 4-week online class about worldbuilding in performance. In it, we’ll talk about character design, setting, story vs. world and think about crafting immersive experiences and rich worlds for our audiences to inhabit, explore and experience.

Worldbuilding for Choreographers is a mix of lecture-style presentations with activities sprinkled throughout to help reinforce our approach and to get you to immediately apply the theory. You can join us live the night-of or catch up on your own time by watching that week’s recording.

We start tomorrow night, Oct. 20th and run to Nov 10th, but there’s still time to sign up! Just click the link and you’ll be taken to Eventbrite.

I hope to see you there!

Click the image to find all of Frog in Hand’s Fall class offerings!