www.nakedempirebouffon.com
Artistic Director, Nathaniel Justiniano, is offering his weekend-long Bouffon Intensive May 13-15, 2011.
First off, thank you so much for the invitation to post on this blog. Any opportunity to cross pollinate via skill-sharing helps to strengthen our field of work. Very honored.
It has been said that while the audience laughs at the clown, the bouffon laughs at the audience. This form is often considered an off-shoot of clown work, but I find that it asks for a set of skills and sensibilities that overlap and diverge from a clowns skills quite a bit. Ensemble in nature and taking a higher status than the audience, the band of bouffons create laughter out of disturbing their onlookers. And they disturb by playing hilarious games with the truths we try to hide. Read on, ask questions, and join us if this work interests you.
(What the heck is this work? Check out this recent feature column from the San Francisco Bay Guardian)
The work of bouffon satisfies my greatest desires of the theatre. As a performer it demands an intense athleticism and availability to one's wildest imagination. As audience to it I have found a way to both laugh at myself and check my apathy at the door. As a citizen I am consistently impressed by how much of the 'unsayable' the bouffon is allowed to say and by how well people hear it. The space is electrified by the presence of the bouffon, making each moment potentially and hilariously explosive or deadly silent. No one is safe.
This intensive is a crash course in bouffon performance with the only company this side of the Mississippi exclusively dedicated to the research and performance of bouffon.
What you'll be learning and practicing:
* Finding your personal bouffon
* Entering into and creating within a state of ecstatic play
* Choral, movement-based improvization
* Mercurial acting techniques for shape-shifting between characters of heightened text and grace to those of base, groveling goblin prophets
* Audacious and confrontational status play with the audience
* Wielding stillness and silence like a scapel
* Parodying social maladies and hypocrisies
* Ramshackle techniques for on-the-fly costume creation
You do not need to have previous experience in this form of theatre, nor in performance at all. This is, however, an athletic, intensely physical form of theatre that demands the in-the-moment engagement of your intellect and perverse imagination. If this resonates with you, we would love to see you here.
Bouffon Intensive with Nathaniel Justiniano
Friday, May 13th 6p - 10p
Saturday, May 14th 10a - 10p
Sunday, May 15th 12p - 6p
Price: $175 (before May 1st), $200 (after May 1st).
Location:
(5 minutes from: Balboa Park BART, Muni J, K, 14, 49)
About the Teacher:
Nathaniel Justiniano has been a professional actor and director for over 10 years. In 2007, under the direction of master teacher, Giovanni Fusetti, he co-created Pax Americana, a satire of war as seen through the lens of United States history and EUOI!, a bouffon experiment in ecstatic ritual, inspired by the research of anthropologist, Barbara Ehrenreich. He has performed with The Thrillpeddlers in their mega-hit, Pearls Over Shanghai, as well as with the SF Buffoons in their productions of The Hasheesh Eater and Spunk, a satire of gold rush-era San Francisco. In 2009 he led the creation of Naked Empire's debut production, Shame! as a DIY Artist-in-Residence at the recently-closed Mama Calizo's Voice Factory, formerly one of San Francisco's most popular centers for queer and activist performance. His most recent work, Cousin Cruelty's Compulsion, addresses violence in society and was the subject of a feature column in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He teaches workshops in bouffon, commedia dell'arte, and mask performance and serves as the Director of Physical Comedy for the Sacramento Shakespeare Festival as well as a guest teacher of physical theatre at Sacramento City College. He holds an MFA in Ensemble-Based Physical Theatre from Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre.
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