This workshop uses clowning to create physical comedy. Throughout the week, artists will expand their comedic toolkit by learning techniques of slapstick, games, improvisation, partnership, comic timing, and accidents. These exercises deepen your understanding of clown and set the stage for you to create your own original material. The evening sessions, in particular, provide ample opportunities for everyone to share and get feedback on what they are making.

In the process, this workshop explores:

How do we approach writing comedy?
What makes it funny?
What makes it repeatable?

By combining exercises and creation, you will have the opportunity to hone specific skills that you can immediately apply to your own work and, in the process, find your voice as an artist.

This workshop welcomes all kinds of performers and theater artists. It speaks the language of clown, but it is an extraordinary opportunity for clowns, actors, circus artists, puppeteers, burlesque performers, pretty much any kind of performer who wants to bring comedy, physicality, and honesty into their work.

ABOUT HILARY CHAPLAIN

Hilary Chaplain has blended clown theater, movement, and puppetry in her solo and ensemble work for over forty years, performing in over twenty countries, on Broadway, and in film and television. Hilary has worked with Tony Montanaro, George C. Wolfe, Aitor Basauri, Bill Irwin, Avner Eisenberg and Julie Goell, Shannan Calcutt, Angela de Castro, the Big Apple Circus, and the American Repertory Theatre. She has been touring with her award-winning original show A Life in Her Day, directed by Avner Eisenberg, since 2005. A solo physical comedy using puppetry and object theater, it tells the story of a lifetime in a day in an hour. Hilary has played varieté engagements with her short comedy pieces in Germany and worldwide in cabarets and festivals. Awards include the Arlekin Solo Puppet Festival (Grand Prize) and the XXI International Festival “Valise” (Acting Award) both in Poland, and in Havana, Cuba at the Aquelarre Festival 2006 (three Awards, including the Grand Prize).

Her newest show, The Last Rat of Theresienstadt, a puppet play with music and multimedia about a cabaret artist who meets a rat in a concentration camp kitchen, premiered in Poland in October 2018 at the Lalka Tez Cztowiek Puppet Fest and won four awards: Jury Grand Prize, Student Jury Prize, Audience Prize, and A Moment of Beauty in Puppetry. This show was developed in part at a residency at Celebration Barn.

As an actress, Hilary was an original cast member in Bill Irwin's Largely/New York and appeared on Broadway and at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park as the Goddess Ceres in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest, directed by George C. Wolfe. She played a featured role in the 1994 Oscar-winning movie Forrest Gump, a lawyer on Law & Order: Criminal Intent and made a special appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. She spent six years working with the American Repertory Theatre in the production of The King Stag and was seen as God #2 in The Good Woman of Setzuan and Jacquanetta in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Hilary is a founding member of the New York Goofs (est.1998) appearing with them in prestigious New York venues, such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Avery Fisher Hall. As "Nurse Nice", she entertained children in New York City hospitals as part of the renowned Big Apple Circus Hospital Clown Program for twenty-four years and has resumed this work with the Laughter League in New York City. She was an adjunct professor of clowning at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts for eight years and continues to teach physical comedy, clown theater, movement and hospital clown internationally.

Contact the host of Physical Comedy with Hilary Chaplain

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