frog in hand – a field of crowns

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.

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!

Fall Writing Circle (2022)

As the air gets chilly and the leaves take their rest after a long summer of absorbing the sun’s rays kinda nonstop, I invite you to join me online on Tuesday evenings with your computer and the writing implement of your choice to throw down some words.

Back together with Frog in Hand (who are up to a wide array of things this fall, including a touring dance photography exhibit, a Worldbuilding for Choreographers class and a new class collab with onUP Productions called Dance on Film), Writing Circle is a weekly class to get you writing by exploring prompts and trying your hands at a variety of mediums.

FALL WRITING CIRCLE

About the Class

“This class is a must for anyone who fears the blank page (as I did).”
Writing Circle Participant

This 8-week writing class will be led by Andrew Gaboury from 7pm-9pm (EST) on Tuesdays, October 25th to December 13th.

The purpose of this course is simply to put pen to paper, or fingers to keys. You will embrace stream of consciousness and write with abandon to escape the clutches of your inner critic. You will acknowledge and discover your natural creativity. As you define a healthy writing practice, you will explore various writing forms to help widen your creative vision. This class will touch upon fiction, poetry and playwriting. As the course progresses there will be time set aside for sharing and feedback.

Each class will be a combination of writing prompts, a guided “lecture” facilitated by Andrew, group or solo writing time, and sharing circles.

What you will need:

+Zoom access & a webcam
+A Google account (the class work will be posted to a Google Classroom site)
+Writing implements
+Books (of any kind) close by
+Paper or a notebook or a napkin or the back of a receipt

Section 1: Fiction

Stream of consciousness, self-reflection, narrative styles, genre & world building.

Section 2: Poetry

Metaphor & the senses, free verse, beat & spoken word.

Section 3: Playwriting

Playwriting features, narrative structure, character voice & dialogue.

Testimonials from past participants!

“I would say that the Circle helped me to put a pen to a page in all the best ways. With so many different mediums of writing to discover, the 8 weeks provided me the accountability to write! And write some more! That can be the hardest part but with other writers to inspire me, I learned how to develop a consistent writing practice.”

“Andrew made it totally comfortable and easy to engage at any level. Strongly recommend.”

“Writing circle is a great opportunity to develop your creative writing and to gain feedback from others on your work.”

War of the Worlds, Reimagined, pt. ii

Half a year ago I wrote about the radio play we made with Frog in Hand which reimagined H. G. Wells’ classic tale of horror and survival in the face of something wholly unknown and beyond our immediate understanding. The War of the Worlds has inspired us as artists; its themes resonated with us as we read and listened and as we rewrote and created. Its themes almost seem prescient for its time, especially as we reemerge from an unforeseeable worldwide calamity and as our country continues to unearth its terrible imperialistic history. Or maybe that frame of mind is too naïve. Not prescient, but present. Maybe the fact that we are dealing with such similar things over a hundred years later is the real calamity.

These thoughts have brought us around.

We are now in the summer of 2022, and for 5 weeks have been back in-person, with a new company of dancers and actors who are reimagining, once again, this tale that we told, this tale that we became so inspired by. These tales that are so interesting that Colleen has mashed them altogether into one tale that spans time, distance, language and movement.

The War of the Worlds Reimagined has finally become the dancetheatre piece it was originally intended to be. But with two extra years behind it, and many more brains and bodies attached to it. It is going to be big. To have 16 dancers, an arena, scaffolding and an overpowering soundtrack, this piece is BIG.

I now sit in an interesting seat, going from writer to actor to dramaturg. It has been enjoyable to watch people interpret my story into movement, and emotional to watch my voice move another body through the space. It is exciting to cut between past, present and future and to see how they all comment on one another, how the voices of the past are very similar to those of today, whether that is a consoling thought or a worrying one. Regardless of which it is, I can’t wait to sit in the audience with you and experience it together. I wonder what new inspiration and conversation it will bring this time.

War of the Worlds Reimagined runs July 8th & 9th, 15th & 16th.

Tickets are available through Eventbrite.