Angels can Fly - A Modern Clown User Guide
Angels can Fly includes a mix of fiction which follows the adventures of ten clown characters, personal clown anecdotes from clowns from around the world, a total of 50 practical clown exercises, and some theory on the nature of modern clown. The book is available on order through bookshops and online stores in New Zealand, Australia, America and England.
On this page you will find excerpts from the book. Check back often for new excerpts from Angels can Fly.
And while you are here, why not check out Alan Clay's short clown film,
, staring Annette Devick from Canada and Mark Hudson from Australia which was shot in New Zealand in October 2006.
And also the new comming of age romantic comedy, Courting Chaos, shot in Los Angeles in 2013, in which a Beverly Hills girl falls for a Venice Beach street clown named Chaos and she must overcome her inhibitions and become a clown herself for the relationship to survive.
Chapter 26. Anecdote: Celebrate AbandonmentAndrew Cory, Australia
When I first was studying clown in London there was a student from Spain called Marta. When we all arrived at class she was by herself and very quiet and it soon turned out that she spoke almost no English. This meant that each time she got up to do an exercise she only had a very precarious grasp on what she was meant to do, and no way in which to communicate her intentions other than through her actions.In the words of my teacher she was 'always in the shit', which is a good thing for someone learning clown, by the way.
At any rate, to watch Marta do an exercise was a celebration of abandonment, imagination and impulse, she didn't know what she was supposed to do, we didn't know what she was doing and because of that the possibilities were endless.
She could only respond from the heart and her sense of play to the chaos that she was always in, up on stage. Her presence was electric because she was sharing her humanity and having fun.Furthermore, to get up on stage with Marta and do an exercise was to abandon all hope of rationality and linear narrative, you simply entered the lunacy and learned to fly to wherever the spirit was blowing. I learned so much from watching and participating in her chaos.
Andrew Cory
Over the last ten years, Andrew Cory has worked professionally in Australia, Asia and in Europe as an actor, a movement director, a clown and a puppeteer.
He has worked with a number of independent and professional companies in Australia including Zen Zen Zo, the Queensland Ballet, the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, the State Theatre Company of South Australia, the Queensland Theatre Company and studied at Ecole Philippe Gaulier (London), Centre Selavy Mask School (France), Todo Performance Academy (Denmark) and the School for Mime Theatre (USA).
In 2002 Andrew received a professional Development grant from Arts Queensland to study clown at Bont's International Clown School (Spain). Andrew is a movement tutor for the Acting Department at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), has taught movement and acting at the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts (ACPA) and tutored in theatre studies at Shafston University.
In 2003 he formed Red Spoon, a theatre company dedicated to new performance based on clown, movement and/or new text. Red Spoon has produced one full clown show, Mud (2003) and has co-produced two international collaborations, Incubating Juice (2003), and Moving Afterlife (for 2004 Queensland Poetry Festival), in Brisbane: both with Singaporean artists based on the theatrical exploration of poetry. He is a co-founder of The Angry Mime Collective in Brisbane.
Red Spoon Clown IntensiveRed Spoon runs a yearly, two week, clown theatre intensive in Brisbane every January. The course focuses on the theatre clown and discovering your unique expression of this wonderful form of human comedy.It's about finding a unique character within yourself who delights in laughter and play, whose reality is elastic but whose experience is deeply human. We combine playfulness and laughter with a quest for honesty.
Clown invites our individual and unique imagination, naivete and humour to the stage as well as our capacity to share these qualities with an audience and our fellow performers.
The pleasure of being stupid, the honesty of being joyful and the excitement of altering reality to suit the game. Critical devising skills and slapstick choreography are included in the course.
Find more information on Andrew's teaching at: www.redspoon.com.au
Angels can Fly is available on order through bookshops and online stores in New Zealand, Australia, America and England. Order your copy today. Find it on Amazon by following this link: http://tinyurl.com/9nrwj
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Last updated 01 November 2013
