Healthcare clowning means bringing the art of clowning to very specific environments, where our audience hasn’t paid a ticket and is most often in delicate life conditions, physically or psychologically, where there has been an interruption in normality.
Examples are children in hospital wards, the elderly in homes, special needs individuals in support/rehabilitation centres, spaces of populations psychologically vulnerable, among so many others.
The role of the healthcare clown is to deeply connect to the space and our audiences in it, adapting to play to their condition, and be a very active agent in the release of tension and transformation of the space, in the direction of levity, joy or emotional expression.
Why are clowns so suited to play this role? Because clowns are the creatures of impermanence, fragility and failure, and of celebration of this predicament. The clown lives in state of emergency, in continuous and direct contact with difficulty and conflict, and the clown brings relief to it.
There are great clowns who have a hard time adapting to this environment, as there are great healthcare clowns who are not particularly remarkable on a theatre or circus stage.
This is so because there are specific skills and requirements to this job.
In this 20 hours introduction, we will touch on the pillars of these skills and requirements, namely listening, mirroring, accepting, adapting, redirecting focus, engaging, empowering, transforming and surprising.
We will explore these skills one by one and progressively we will add them up in small improvised scenes of growing complexity, ending in role plays of healthcare settings where each participant will rely on their already developed strengths and have space to be challenged to grow in their improvement areas.
We will also start by paying attention to your individual presence as a performer in sensitive spaces and towards the second half we will learn how to improvise in a clown couple relationship.
Also check out other Arts events in Mount Royal, Performances in Mount Royal, Theatre events in Mount Royal.
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