I have been attending clown school over the past 2 months with a man named David McMurray Smith at a place called Fantastic Space and it’s AMAZING! It keeps me very busy as the classes are every second day from 4 or 6 hours. These classes are not your red-nose-wearing clown classes, I do not learn how to fall or be funny, specifically. What we are learning in these classes is character work.
Each day we start with warm ups which includes working your diaphragm through laughing or crying (depending on what you sense in your body) and personal play time. It’s like being 5 again where you play by yourself in an imaginary world of your own creation and impulse! Then we have been creating 6 masks, molded from clay, paper-mâché, then worn only to find whom the character is, and embellishing this character to it’s largest and most ridiculous form possible.
This is hard work, I can’t lie. I enjoy the class, but bringing out some of these emotions that I have judged as “negative” to these huge degrees is a stretch of my boundaries. Of course, that is why I am in the course and I can’t wait to see all of these strange characters I have made to their largest degree, on stage, in my clown birthing on June 26th!
Recent Comments