Monday October 21st – Friday October 25th : 10:30AM – 5:30PM

Monday October 28th – Friday November 1st : 10:00AM – 5:00PM*

*Please note, the second week of class BEGINS AT 10AM. PLEASE keep 5PM-6PM clear THAT WEEK, as class / rehearsal may CONTINUE PAST 5PM

*CLASS IS LIMITED TO 22 PARTICIPANTS

Sharing of work to invited audience: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1st @ 7PM

The course is aimed at emerging and professional performers who would like to build on their clown and physical comedy work, and who want to take it to the next level of production and performance. It will be led by Spymonkey artistic directors Aitor Basauri and Toby Park.

We aim to build a strong ensemble dynamic, to encourage participants to go further and deeper into the work to explore new areas of comedic investigation; to inspire and initiate new creative material, and examine how then to work on that new material to move towards performance; to develop participants’ experience of writing, directing and designing for clown and comedy work; and to nurture new performing partnerships that we hope will go on to flourish into the full glory of performance!

We believe that we have learnt the most about performing by embracing the challenge and discipline of working towards a performance. So we will use this as an impetus to creativity, by working towards a presentation of new work generated in the Theatre of the Funny Creation School, for an invited audience, on the last day of the workshop.

The course is aimed at emerging and professional performers of intermediate and advanced levels of experience, 18+. Previous participation in a Spymonkey course will be an advantage but is not a requirement of the course.

Aitor and Toby will lead the course together, giving practical tools for making physical comedy work in a range of performance contexts: theatre, cabaret, variety, musical comedy acts, circus, dance.

The first week of class will be dedicated to establishing a Spymonkey Theatre of the Funny vocabulary, ensemble building and the exploration of games, play, and failure: glorious failure, painful failure, messy failure, risky failure, tearful failure, hilarious failure, and big, huge flop failure.

In the mornings of week 2 we will continue to explore techniques for creating Theatre of the Funny, including elements of melodrama (the pleasure of great acting), Bouffon (the pleasure of parody and the grotesque), physical theatre (the pleasure of physical impulse and movement qualities) and musicality (the pleasure of singing and making music together).

In the afternoons of week 2, the ensemble will begin to devise short clown and comedic pieces. Spymonkey will direct the pieces, and lead each performer through the process of developing work, leading up to the invited sharing on the last day of the workshop. There will be time set aside for this devising work in small groups, guided by Aitor and Toby. Each actor will uncover their own personal process and should leave this phase of the workshop with a foundation for creating comedic material, plus a rich arsenal of material that has the potential to continue to develop as well as a group of generous collaborators.

This is a very special offering at the New York Drama Center. We have received an overwhelming amount of interest. If you are interested in class, don’t wait to sign up!