Clown Dynamics with Jon Davison in Newcastle

Name: Clown Dynamics with Jon Davison in Newcastle
Start: 2024-04-27T10:30:00+01:00
End: 2024-04-28T04:30:00+01:00
Location: The Cumberland Arms

Schedule

Sat Apr 27 2024 at 10:30 am to Sun Apr 28 2024 at 04:30 am

UTC+01:00

Location

The Cumberland Arms | Newcastle Upon Tyne, EN

Clown Workshop in Newcastle with Jon Davison
27th-28th April 2024: Clown Dynamics
Times: 10.30am-4.30pm, Saturday-Sunday
Cost:
£130
Venue: The Cumberland Arms, James Place Street, off Byker Bank, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 1LD
To book your place, email [email protected] for details on how to enrol
Maximum: 18 participants per workshop
Clown Dynamics
This workshop dives into the dynamics of clowning, when we present ourselves as ridiculous for each other’s own amusement, and when we laugh (or don’t laugh) at each other.
What is the relation between this in-the-moment interaction between clowns/spectators and the content we create for performance?
The week is aimed at all students, teachers, and practitioners of the performing arts whether or not you specialise in clowning.
Our explorations will be concerned with laughter, and the unique relationship the clown performer has with it - when it is present and when it is absent. But it is not concerned directly with the question of HOW to be funny. Nor is it concerned with the question of WHY something is funny. These are not inane questions but they are dealt with amply by others elsewhere.
Laughter is the fulcrum upon which clowning balances. Laughter does amazing things to us, physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually. Whilst we are immersed in it, it seems to relieve us of the burdens of norms, expectations and even meaning itself. What a relief!
But it is never under our control. To pursue such domination is a pointless task. But neither is it advisable to discard it, out of fear of not attaining it. Clowns who MUST be funny and clowns who DON’T HAVE to be funny are a turn off.
When you really look, most things are ridiculous: our bodies, our movements, our ideas, our emotions, our words, our relationships, the universe. We don’t need to change ourselves, just look at everything from another perspective. It’s a human thing to do, so anyone can do it.
The exercises we will use are my ongoing explorations to condense the training into the simplest and most accessible form I can. My concern has always been to simplify. Clowning is sometimes spoken about in mysterious tones, with allusions to depths of meaning. Those may be valid conclusions to draw. But they don’t, in my experience, serve as starting points on the journey. We cannot aim directly for such grandiose or abstract goals.
The exercises might sometimes seem so simple as to appear mechanical. By focusing on the simple tasks, we can become more aware of our responses on all levels. Simple meditation techniques work in a similar way. Furthermore, these emotions, sensations and thoughts will make up much of the content of a clown performance, in the absence of an authored, fictional character or narrative (and I am mostly interested in clowning as inhabiting this ‘fiction-less’ world). Once we start to come to grips with this material, we can see how clowns can create many different kinds of dynamic relationships between themselves, and between themselves and the public.
We will experiment with how you, as a performer, respond to that response from the onlooker. How do you behave, feel or think when the spectator laughs, or does not laugh? Indeed, how do you behave, feel or think upon the mere appearing in front of that audience whose expectations are already formed? Such self-explorations are at the heart of any genre of performance. Focusing on how you, as a performer, respond to your own presence in front of a responding audience, can enrich your work in whatever direction, style or genre you choose, and enable a coming to terms with some of the common struggles that many performers will face throughout their careers.
This workshop is suitable for anyone interested in clowning, whatever your experience. Clowning is something many of have done throughout our lives in informal or social situations, and our experiences will differ widely according to our backgrounds, cultures, and identities. We already know a lot about clowning before we ever set foot in a class or on a stage. All of this knowledge is welcomed into the workshop, without the need for aesthetic unity or discipline.

Jon Davison has been a clown performer, teacher, director and writer for the last 40 years. He has performed at festivals, theatres, tents, streets and bars throughout Europe, and taught worldwide. Pre-pandemic he was the producer of the long-running monthly clown theatre show ‘Friday Flop’. He is currently working on a new solo show drawing on pre-modern European traditions of carnival.
He taught clown, improvisation and acting at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona from 1996-2006, when he became a co-founder of the Escola de Clown de Barcelona. From 2007-2010 he was a Research Fellow investigating contemporary clown/actor training at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where he obtained his PhD in Clown Performance Practice. He is now Lecturer in Clowning at London Metropolitan University. He has pioneered research and teaching of clown history and theory via his online Clown Studies Course and is now collaborating on an international research project exploring the decolonisation of clown pedagogy.
He has published three books, Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice (2013), Clown Training - a practical guide (2015), and The Clowning Workbook (2023).
Payments
Please send an email to [email protected] and I will send you details of how to pay.
Cancellations
I do not usually refund payments made (either whole or part payments) but I can offer you:
1. The chance to use your payment towards a course or workshop at a later date within one year of the original courser.
2. If the workshop fills up and there is a waiting list, you may receive a refund if your place is taken by someone on the waiting list.
These options can only be taken if requested at least 48 hours before the start of a course or workshop. If you cancel within 24 hours or do not turn up without notification then you should pay any outstanding fee. This policy is to protect the viability of courses, whose costs and numbers of participants need to be confirmed in advance.
I try to keep all prices as low as possible (I haven’t forgotten how difficult it can be to be a student). That’s why there is a single price, with no discounts or concessionary rates.

What are my intentions when I teach clown?
In a recent workshop I was saying that knowing your intention on stage changes how you impact an audience. Your intention might be to grab attention. To make laugh. Or to create a relationship between clowns.
Then someone asked me what my intentions were. So here are some of my answers:
To simplify clowning and understand how we can get there when we want to
To celebrate laughter and also to allow ourselves not to laugh, inviting us to find a kinder relationship with laughter
To explore how to play our feelings, our interactions with each other in real time
To explore both our honest feelings and responses, and also the fun we can have with faking, pretending and lying – and how the real and the fake play off each other
To honour and to give ourselves places to put our fakeness, our negative judgements, our blockages, our resistances, our failures, our shame
To explore the interaction between what we plan (our scripts: projecting into the future, wondering if people will respond how we want them to) and what actually happens (the performance event: the unpredictable live responses between spectators and performers)
And:
To open the gate to all forms of clowning regardless of ethnicity, culture, identity, family or personality
To challenge the dominant ideology in clowning that excludes and gatekeeps
To dispel mystification in how we speak and think about clown
To acknowledge the power structure already in the workshop between teacher and students
To acknowledge my privilege as a white cis het older male
To be an ally of minoritised identities in the workshop and beyond, using my power and privilege to challenge oppressive behaviour
To explore and share how clowning can reflect on, challenge, play with, or even dismantle our oppressive power structures of capitalism and patriarchy.
To acknowledge clown history and when it has been complicit in oppression

What they said recently
Thanks very much for the weekend, it was a lot of fun - I haven't laughed so much in ages. I found it really liberating to be able to choose not to go along with other people if I didn't feel like it.
You were really helpful in demystifying clowning, offering ways in to it that were clear, and easy to understand and remember, like it being fine to be real or fake, not always having to wait for it to feel real, and the difference between what an actor generally does and what a clown is doing.
(Georgie Steele, London 2024)
I learnt a lot about clowning and how to approach it - Jon gets the message across in a simple and understandable way. Clowning isn't a mysterious art form - the answer lies in just what we are feeling at the time. Priceless.
(Sally Mayhew, London 2024)
I want to share with you that for me personally, I experienced deep joy every day. I woke up crying with happiness and thankfulness Saturday morning. It has been decades since I’ve felt so much lightness and joy…. I am breaking out of my own mental prison. Yippeeeee! I hope to share the clown spirit with others. Thank you for being you.
Thank you Jon. Some takeaways and things I really appreciated and enjoyed: your honesty, practicing laugh and silence awareness, listening for laughter if my “funny idea” fails, moving when there is silence (dealing with on stage emotions), so many ways to clown, useful grounding tools, being less abstract or storyish, clowning within a script, the individual and group feedback was very useful.
I felt safe, curious and open to try things. It is great how you see the clown in us and genuinely desire to magnify it. Your honesty and interest in each of us is apparent. Jon you are full of life and experience and it is beautiful that you are teaching/sharing at such a reasonable rate. I would take your workshop again because I know I can get more out of it each time. I highly recommend. What a great group of folks you draw in, hope to have you in Reno one day soon. Cheers (Audry Townsell, Los Angeles, 2023)
Oh my goodness, Prof. Davison!!
Your class is really fucking hitting home… I understand the value of doing what’s real, responding to what’s real in the room!
Your class is the class that just keeps giving, even after its conclusion. I am very pleasantly surprised. Already in one day, I am applying so much to my “real” life. Fascinating!
(Mona Hanouni, Los Angeles 2023)
Jon is a brilliant teacher and is able to bring out courage in people by focusing on the tasks of exploration rather than getting something "right". Jon welcomes all human interactions, interruption, confusion, and questions. Play is not limited to simply saying "yes". There is an excellent introspectiveness set from the beginning without it becoming paralyzing. Where all feelings are correct. (Andy Ross, Bristol 2023)
Not having any previous experience in clowning or theatre, I was quite apprehensive and I really had no idea what to expect. Jon led the workshop through fun and engaging games which loosened me up and I managed to let go, and to just go for it quite quickly. Everyone was easy going and really nice to hang out with and you find yourself getting to know each other quickly. I found the workshop gave me a lot more than I had anticipated, giving me more confidence in my day to day life. I definitely recommend checking Jon's workshops out, it's a win-win situation. (Paul Gadd, Bristol 2023)
This was an active, fun, funny weekend. Lots of laughs and many varied stimulating activities to reveal the clown. Works well for experienced performers and brave beginners! (Helen Herman, Bristol 2023)
“It was wonderful! I'm still pretty new to performing, and I was worried about feeling too out of depth, but the whole thing felt so natural and logical (and novel in a massively exciting way)- which I think was very much down to the delicate way that you taught, (and how unified (most of) the group was). I was blown away by the line you managed to tread between letting us discover things and guidance. How open you were and the levels of honesty it felt like we reached, without being brutal.
It was certainly the most generous teaching I have had the pleasure to experience in my life. Within this environment, I felt safe (and compelled) to explore myself in places I had never known myself to be before. And I watched other people do the same. This felt like unlocking a new voice that had been dormant inside of me.
I have found within the ideas and philosophy of your teaching of clowning a new clarity in thinking around ideas I have been stuck with for a long time. Including ways of thinking about my own painting practice that has been in a consistent struggle with its relationship (or lack of) to an audience.” (Jessie, London, 2022)
“Your workshop (including your philosophical musings within) touched me in a deep way. For a while I have been feeling confused and wrongly accused by feedback about how I need to "think less and do more" or "follow my impulses", and also unhappy about my unpleasant experiences working in a group, and while of course you wouldn't know all of these going-ons and they are not "solved" or anything, I think my confidence took a hit from these experiences and in your workshop I felt a sense of relief, self-acceptance and an acceptance from others.
I felt so moved especially when you were talking about how we spend all this time trying to make people do things when each of us is our own person, but also your general approach of encouraging us to give observations (instead of judging statements) of each person's actions/words/expressions, and accepting our varied interpretations as valid.
I think this environment was also created when you told us to just chill when we have nothing we want to test for a reaction (it's so stressful to feel like we gotta do something all the time and the framing of "testing for a reaction" is really useful!), and when you encouraged us to try new ways of being in the space when we're just not feeling it.
I found the workshop to be an excellent introduction to a perspective on clowning that is freeing and clear. What I found to be the greatest strength was that the exercises were paced and scaffolded well such that they were do-able (really made the atmosphere encouraging instead of disappointing) and delivered the intended learning within the day itself (no need to wander and wonder until the day we mysteriously get 'it'). The language you used was clear and avoided misunderstandings/confusion, and the goals of the exercise were never hidden from us for no good reason (as in, you were clear on what we didn't need to do and what we needed to do, and there were no annoying surprises).
Oh, and I really felt so tickled by the idea of imaginary clowning which you classified someone’s clowning examples as -- it's been on my mind and a source of inspiration. I love it.” (Jia Min, Singapore)
“I find your teaching style is very concise and to the point, yet you are still sensitive to peoples emotions during the workshops. To kickstart was a rigorous name learning game, again, rigorous – I could name everyone in the room within two minutes. This is so important, I have been to other workshops that do not focus on this and it really does have an impact throughout the workshops so thank you. It is clear that your knowledge of Clowning is substantial and thorough, which guided us and gave factual information to back up the practice throughout. I also find it fascinating that you are able to join in with laughter in the audience- we are still funny to you! You are professional and clear, yet very much up for having a good time as well and this shows." (Beth, London, 2022)