New names for our workshops
The beady-eyed amongst you may have notice that we’ve done a little bit of re-branding for our workshops to make it a bit easier to navigate between the different kind of workshops Spymonkey offer. We thought it might be helpful to delve into that a bit further to give a bit more insight into what to expect at each level:
Introduction to Funny
These short courses give you a glimpse inside Spymonkey’s clowning practice and how you might begin to apply it to your own. They are usually 1-3 days long, don’t require any experience in clowning or performance in general as we start from the basics. The workshops are sometimes delivered by Spymonkey associates and are suitable for anyone from schools, collages, amateur performers or those dipping their toes into funny theatre.
The Foundations of Funny
Our entry-level introduction to Spymonkey’s Theatre of the Funny methodology. These workshops usually run for 5 days and are currently delivered by either Aitor Basauri and Toby Park in the UK, USA and various places in Europe. You can attend as a complete novice to clowning, with some experience, or as an advanced idiot. Many people attend these workshops more than once to build on their skills from one workshop to the next, or to re-charge their Clown practice.
Funny / Music | Writing Funny | Design Funny
Created with specific specialisms in mind, these more ad-hoc workshops shine a spotlight on different areas of how Spymonkey make work, whether that be exploring how to combine music, songwriting and Clown, to the process behind writing scripts based on material generated from a devising process. These 2-5 day workshops are the newest offer to our training programme and might be delivered with or by an associate. They are perfect if you have a cross-discipline practice or are interested in delving deeper into a new way of creating funny material.
School of Funny
Our 2 and 3 week intensive courses are most suitable for those who have some experience in clowning and/or have taken a Spymonkey Foundations or specialism workshop before. They only run in London and NYC once a year. The focus of these courses are for participants to go deeper into their own Clown identity and find new areas of inspiration and exploration. Toby Park and Aitor Basauri co-teach these weeks with emphasis on different areas and we sometimes invite associates or guest teachers too. There tends to be a showing of new material at the end of the workshop for invited friends and peers.
Funny Bursaries
Spymonkey are committed to the diversification of clowning to make it a more equitable and inclusive artform. We do this in different ways across our organisation but part of this work within our training programme is to offer 2 x bursaries in the UK or part-funded scholarships places in the USA for each workshop. For more information about our bursary please see info here or check out our partners details for the offer in New York and Los Angeles.