WORKSHOP FOR PERFORMERS
Clowning and Dance
To book a workshop please contact grete.smitaite@gmail.com
The workshop offers tools to work with clowning and dance for opening the fragility of the dancer and revealing connection between the dancer and the audience.
Clowning is used as a practice of daring to say what is normally feared to speak about in a way that is honest to the performer and that may appear “ridiculous” to the outside viewer. This workshop seeks to master this bravery and “ridiculousness” in order to enable the performer to speak one’s way, while laughing and sharing it with the audience. Clowning combined with dance - poetic act of sweatiness - offers to "view the world differently". It offers to perform in a way that awakens the connection between the audience and performer as real and, therefore, fragile and worth to sweat for.
The base of this workshop is Šmitaitė’s research Humor and Dance. The workshop participants will learn a set of clowning and mime exercises and engage into rigorous analysis, mimicry and creation of choreographies that awaken laughter.
Exercises used in this workshop are based on method of Ira Seidenstein.
Previous Workshops of Clowning and Dance
Maison des artistes Fribourg. 2023. 1 week, 2 hours/day.
Urgent Paradise Gallery, Lausanne. 2023. 1 day, 6 hours/day.
Lithuanian Academy for Theater and Music. BA of Dance students. 2023. 2 weeks, 3 hours/day.
Berlin Practice Sharing. 2022. 2 days, 4 hours/day.
Theater for Dramatic Arts, Kaunas. 2018. 4 days, 4 hours/day.
Centre national de la danse, Paris. 2016. 1 day, 3 hours/day.