A new year, and an intensified schedule awaits us. We are now working in a more focused way, intent more on devising and rehearsing 4 or 5 of the clown numbers that Tristan Rémy collected. They are: The Bottles, William Tell, The Cake in the Hat, The Broken Plates and The Hidden Apple. We also agreed to present a private showcase on 4th March at CSSD.
We also decided to re-incorporate the key elements of clown training that we developed over the first two years of the project. And as we now have a three hour session every Thursday, we have time to spend an hour or so on preparation for rehearsing proper. Our warm-up is based on vertiginous play, play with virtually no rules. I have written extensively on this elsewhere, so I won’t go nto details now. We follow this with some fundamental clown exercises, such as step-per-laugh or ball-clap.
In this first session of the year we sped through all five main numbers, and opted to concentrate on two of them for the coming week: William Tell and The Bottles.
As well as some regular and long-standing members of the group, we welcomed the addition of a dramaturg, Hary, who will be shadowing us over a 6-week period as part of his studies into clown and circus dramaturgy and direction. This is an exciting and very pertinent moment to have him with us, as his interests and experience coincide with where we are at this stage.
I have also put out requests for a props-maker, a costume-designer and a lighting designer to work with us.
Works cited:
Rémy, Tristan (1962) Entrées clownesques, Paris: L’Arche.
