CLOWN, a free workshop with Jean Taylor

Join us for an evening at the theater on Thursday, November 9th.

Teaching Artist and Education Director Jean Taylor is partnering with Playwrights Horizons to present Clown, a FREE workshop on theatrical clowning.

To RSVP NOW for First Come First Served Complimentary Tickets, email community@phnyc.org or call 929-299-4379

Where: Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036

Time: 5:00-6:30PM

Workshop Description: Clown requires us to embrace, through openness and humor, our unique ridiculousness. Accepting the less than perfect brings our humanity to the forefront, transforms restrictive habits into freer expression, and allows us to be fully present. We experience vulnerability and resilience in playful balance. We are “experts” and “know nothing” simultaneously.

Clown essentials (such as isolating actions, interrupting your own pattern, singularity of focus, and building complicité with the publique) are foundational and reveal new possibilities about ourselves as artists and collaborators. The workshop begins with a physical warm-up and a series of movement games (Le Jeu). This is followed by a progression of solo and group activities designed to identify and explore, in clown language, dilemmas. Clowns solve dilemmas, big and small, humorous and poignant in non-traditional ways. One thing we know for sure, clowns are never undone by dilemma.

Our underlying goal is to develop a relentless urge to reach beyond the literal, beyond right answers, standard solutions, existing opinions and judgments, to see the world as if it could be otherwise; and to bring new, sometimes ridiculous, possibilities into being.

Following the workshop, enjoy special complimentary access to Sad Boys in Harpy Land, a play created and performed by Alexandra Tatarsky and directed by Iris McCloughan.

Showtime: 7:00pm 

Play Synopsis: Alexandra Tatarsky collages narratives of artmaking and despair into a semi-autobiographical tour-de-farce, as told by a young Jewish woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree. Equal parts sad clown, demented cabaret, and extended crisis of meaning, this unhinged solo performance takes place in the hellscape of the mind.

***Complimentary Food and Beverages included***

To RSVP NOW for First Come First Served Complimentary Tickets, email community@phnyc.org or call 929-299-4379.

Jean E. Taylor is a teaching artist for Lincoln Center Education, working extensively in their local programs and international consultancies. She received Lincoln Center’s Directors Emeriti Award in 2012. Jean teaches Theatrical Clown for The New School for Drama’s BFA and MFA programs and most recently taught Clown for the World Economic Forum Global Leadership program at Columbia University. She presented at the International Teaching Artist Conferences in Oslo, Norway in 2012 and Brisbane, Australia in 2014.

Her most recent performance work with director Eric Nightengale, True Hazards of Childhood, premiered at The Barrow Group in 2013. A trilogy of her theatre work is scheduled for January 2016. Additional performing work includes The Reclamation with Hilary Easton + Company and Snatches, a play begun at the 78th Street Theatre Lab, performed at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, London’s New End Theatre, and presented on BBC Radio 4.

Jean studied clown/movement with Philippe Gaulier, Ronlin Foreman, David Shiner and Merry Conway, among others. Her approach to theatrical clown has been published in Movement for Actors, Allworth Press. She is a member of The Teaching Artist Journal’s editorial board and a board member of The Maxine Greene Center for Aesthetic Education and Social Imagination.