Make your comedy more physical! Make your physicality funnier!
This is more than just a clown workshop — not that there’s anything wrong with that. Instead, we take a broader approach to physical comedy that will be of use to actors, stand-up comics, mimes and, yes, clowns. You will be exposed to a wide physical comedy vocabulary that is news to most comedic performers today because, frankly, nobody teaches what I teach. It is work that immerses us in the world of inanimate objects and animated partners. It is work that thinks visually; that involves the whole body; that takes inspiration from the great comedians of yesteryear but insists on our ability to invent and reimagine our own physical comedy world. Amazing stuff, yet it’s more than mere tricks, more than silly slapstick. It’s all about making your new vocabulary work within character-oriented gags and scenarios. Physical comedy is intrinsic to the story we are telling because the physical comedy moments we depict, far from being mere comic relief, define who we are and how we act.
Open to anyone 16 and above, it will be an ideal opportunity for any actors, performers and comics looking to enhance their funny bones.
Over two days you will get the chance to explore and practice many classic bits and gags before using them as jumping off points to create your own material.
Throughout the course participants will have the opportunity to present both rehearsed and improvised work to the rest of the group.
[The recommended minimum age for this class is 16. If anyone under 16 would like to attend, we are happy to assess this on an individual basis; please contact us before booking.]
Concession for students, seniors, unemployed, Equity, Members of The Comedy School
JOHN TOWSEN has worked throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, training hospital clowns, theatre clowns, actors, circus performers, stand-up comics and everything in between. He has taught full-semester physical comedy courses at the Juilliard School, Princeton University, and Ohio University, as well as workshops for Circus Harmony, Zirkus Mond, Ringling Brothers Clown College, Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit, and for Cirque de Soleil performers in Las Vegas. Former students include film stars Laura Linney, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Andre Braugher, and Michael Stuhlbarg, plus hundreds of professional clowns. He began his performance career as a childhood television actor in New York City, including appearances with Red Skelton, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Julie Andrews, and Robert Preston He spent most of his 20s and 30s touring as a clown in schools, festivals, circuses and theatres, from his native New York to the sands of Saudia Arabia, mostly with partner Fred Yockers. He is the author of Clowns: A Panoramic History (1976), still considered the authoritative work on the subject, and has a popular physical comedy blog, All Fall Down, which you can find at physicalcomedy.blogspoot.com. In addition to teaching and writing, he directs short pieces and full-length shows, including Angela Delfini Explains It All for You (Italy), Ria Corcoran’s I’m Not Dead Yet (Ireland), and Deborah Kaufmann’s Veni, Vidi, Vici (New York). Before covid, he created and for seven years ran the New York City Physical Comedy Lab. During covid, he and a few clown-carpenter friends built from scratch a glorious clown-circus rehearsal space, Falling Coyote Studios, in Greenwood Lake, NY. Come visit!
The Comedy School,
15 Gloucester Gate,
London, NW1 4HG.
