The Actors Instrument 3: Celebrating Your Clown’s Triumphs and Disasters
(intermediate clown)
Now that you got your clown nose, you know how to play fully, and you know when your body needs a tantrum (or a hug). Full on clown show time is upon us, dear friends!!
In Instrument 3, once we find your clown name (we kinda already knew from Clown 2!), we will embark immediately on the express train to begin to the bumpy and exhilarating worlds of the triumph and the flop!!! The core principles of clown, now they we are open for business and know how to play with each other!
*This class is for those who have taken our Clown 1&2 unlike our craft series, so we will keep it short as you know the deal already. If you don’t yet know what’s up, and would like to, reach out! We are more than happy to chat!
Dates: April 6th-10th
Time: 6-10:30pm on weekdays and 10:30-5:30 on the weekend
Location: 863 Broadview Ave. 2nd Floor. Toronto, ON. M4K 2P9
Cost: $510 all-inclusive
To Sign-Up: email manager@performanceatelier.ca with
A recent photo / or an actor headshot
CV / or a Brief Bio / or a Creative Resume
We’ll get back to you ASAP and move forward from there.
Eugene and his students from Columbia University, New York
The Actor’s Instrument 1: Visceral Imagination, Physical Impulses and Rigorous Play aka Pre-Clown
The Actors Instrument 2: CLOWN MUSCLES for the Actor (Discovering YOUR Clown: The beautifully ferocious and the vulnerably open. ) Pre-req: Pre-Clown.
This is an intensive week combining both 1 and 2.
with Eugene Ma
Founder of Performance Atelier & former faculty member at Columbia University’s Graduate Acting Program, Yale School of Drama, and Dome Studio in Beijing.
Dates: TBD
Time: TBD
Location: 863 Broadview Ave. 2nd Floor. Toronto, ON. M4K 2P9
Cost: $510 all-inclusive (Sign up for both 1/2 and 3 Intensive for $925)
To Sign-Up: email manager@performanceatelier.ca with
A recent photo / or an actor headshot
CV / or a Brief Bio / or a Creative Resume
We’ll get back to you ASAP and move forward from there.
There are simply habits and inhibitions that a scene study or acting class can’t solve when we have to intersect with a text or a scene partner. An actors job is to believe (easier said than done)! And this takes a level of naïveté, trust and flow that may no longer be familiar to our survival brains and tight bodies — and these are what we attempt to access in this work.
This workshop starts with precursor pre-clown exercises to the pursuit of our uniquely individual childlike wonder down the road, as we necessarily and rigorously welcome a sense of physical play and imagination back into our work. We will attempt to begin melting that top layer of the iceberg that is your socially-conditioned selves. We will invite your generous openness, ferocious abandon, insistent honesty and gleeful mischief to make a larger footprint in your work. These muscles will be responsible to making dents to your scene partner, and your audiences eventually! In the way we wish to be changed when we watch a movie or pay a hundred bucks for a live performance. But first, the actor has to desire to be affected and changed by their own imaginations!
Largely sprung from the clown pedagogy of master teacher Christopher Bayes (whose Clown and Commedia classes hold the secret sauce for the X-factor, playful, alive presence and transformation of actors from Yale and Juilliard) we will soften our brains, open up our hearts and shake up our bodies (and emotions)!
Perhaps you will sweat. Perhaps you will make songs. Perhaps you will listen deeper and harder. Perhaps you will release some glorious laughters and cathartic tears into the ether. Perhaps this all will be silly. Perhaps this requires you to breathe and believe. Perhaps you will make something disastrous and messy. Perhaps you will make something wonderful and surprising. Though hopefully you can reignite a teeny-weeny sparkly inkling to lead from the bravery, integrity and generosity of your child within so that muscle of freshness, vulnerability and ferociousness can show up in your scenes to come.
This sequence is the secret sauce in actor training at institutions such as Yale School of Drama and Juilliard for many years. The exploration and liberation of the uncensored self and rigorous play, as we get into our bodies and open up like a beautiful flower, will see you shine in more openness, vulnerability, awareness, bouncing impulses and fierce ferocity.
This is for actors who wish to be less “in their heads” and more “in their bodies”, and want to be able to have physical and emotional impulses flowing so freely before you go to a text, in our ideal sequencing for maximal muscle memory in the intensive format from Christopher Bayes’ pedagogy, ending with the discovery of your own singular and unique clown.
THE ACTOR’S INSTRUMENT 1-2-3-4-S
In the INSTRUMENT series, we focus on the actor’s instrument: YOU! Your physical connection, your visceral imagination, your voice and breath, your ways of parsing text, how to cope with your instrument’s tensions… things teachers tell you to work on in the next rehearsal during scene study, but usually remains an unsolved mystery and you go into overthinking and judgement… and so on. Let’s understand solve those from the ground up!
PRE-CLOWN MUSCLES for the ACTOR (Visceral Imagination, Physical Impulses and Rigorous Play)
CLOWN MUSCLES for the Actor (Discovering YOUR Clown: The beautifully ferocious and the vulnerably open. ) Pre-req: Pre-Clown.
Embodied Voice and Speech
Tuning-in with your instrument: Alexander / Feldenkrais
S. Special topics in Instrument will include guest teachers in various techniques and traditions (such as MASK, COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE, BUTOH, TAICHI, WEST-AFRICAN DANCE, VERNACULAR JAZZ) that can ground and release your body as you find the most effective ways for YOU to get in tune with your instrument. We do not prescribe a practice to actors, but provide them with a range of ways that we have seen working for many. Putting your ultimate go-to craft toolbox is a very personal process, ultimately.