Workshops 2024
Our workshops for 2024 have concluded. Stay tuned for our 2025 program!
Mask and Clown Intensive
(Baby Clown)
with John Turner
16 days (100 + hrs.) Participants should be prepared for extra hours of evening homework and preparation outside of class time.
Applicants must be 19+
Workshop only: $1450.00 + HST (16 days)
Add Residence: $ 680.00 + HST (17 nights)
About the Mask and Clown Intensive (Baby Clown)
This intensive begins with a focus on exercises used to awaken and encourage a sense of pleasure, awareness of the audience, and an honest physical and emotional response to internal impulses and external events. Many exercises are done with eyes closed to help develop and expand the student’s experience of perception and focus. Through physical exercises rooted in colour work, the body is approached as a source of creative visualization and physicalization for developing character or story elements through improvisations.
Once the colour work is done students are ready for the making and wearing of six masks. The masks become the guideposts to the student’s creative playground and to their own personal clown. With each mask the student prepares a short turn (sketch) to express the essence of the mask. Through these turns, along with the exercises of the entire intensive, the rules of clown emerge giving the student a fundamental understanding of clown.
This workshop is an intense blast and furnishes the student with multiple characters and a malleable structure for continued creative exploration with limitless applications. It is not necessary to be a performer to take this course. All are welcome, from all experiences of life.
Clown Boot Camp
with John Turner
6 days (30 hrs.) Participants should be prepared for extra hours of evening homework and preparation outside of class time. (Some evening classes possible)
Applicants must be 19+
Prerequisite: Mask and Clown Intensive (Baby Clown)
Workshop only: $ 700.00 + HST (6 days)
Add Residence: $ 280.00 + HST (7 nights)
About Clown Boot Camp
This workshop is perfect for those coming fresh out of The Mask and Clown Intensive (Baby Clown) or for those who seek to reacquaint themselves with the foundations of this style.
Using various writing and physical exercises to evoke both left and right brain involvement, the participants develop their own unique approach to the creation of material for performance. The mask and colour work is expanded upon, including the development of the gesture work, deepening the student’s relationship with gestures as both a source for material and as character for performance.
The 6 days will begin with an emphasis on exploration and creation but will move towards the development of pieces for performance. While it is not necessary to bring a prepared piece, students are welcome and encouraged to do so.
Queens, Clowns, and Fools
(Gender Play)
with Justin Miller
4 days (24 hrs.) Participants should be prepared for extra hours of evening homework and preparation outside of class time.
Applicants must be 19+
Prerequisite: Mask and Clown Intensive (Baby Clown) highly encouraged.
Workshop only: $400.00 + HST (4 days)
Add Residence: $ 200.00 + HST (5 nights)
About Queens, Clowns, and Fools
From Shakespeare to Noh to vaudeville to Taylor Mac to Drag Race, we can't stop playing with gender.
Queens, Clowns, and Fools is an introduction to subverting, honouring, parodying, and loving your gender expression in performance, as taught by multi-award winning drag clown Pearle Harbour (aka Justin Miller).
Using tenets of Pochinko clown, bouffon, direct address, cabaret, butoh, and contemporary drag, participants will tap into a presentational form that is both utterly ancient and entirely in the moment.
This course is geared to drag queens, drag kings, and drag things, clowns, comedians, storytellers, solo- and -interdisciplinary performers, trans-, non-binary, and cis-creators of all ages and stripes; anyone who has the courage to stand in front another person and entertain with their wit, their heart, and their gender at play.
Advanced Clown Boot Camp
Reintroducing Your Editor
with Jed Tomlinson
6 days (36 hrs.) Participants should be prepared for extra hours of evening homework and preparation outside of class time. (Some evening classes possible)
Applicants must be 19+
Prerequisite: Mask and Clown Intensive (Baby Clown), Clown Boot Camp or equivalent professional experience.
Workshop only: $ 700.00 + HST (6 days)
Add Residence: $ 280.00 + HST (7 nights)
About Advanced Clown Boot Camp
Reintroducing your Editor
This workshop will continue the work begun in Boot Camp 1 with a stronger emphasis on the development and execution of professional work. Participants should be prepared to be extremely challenged by this workshop.
This workshop will focus on structure and specificity to bring the initial impulse and creation work explored in Boot Camp 1 to the stage. Participants will explore how and when to reintroduce their editors while respecting the material developed through the physical exercises of the Pochinko canon. Clarity, storytelling, and clown script development will be at the forefront.
The workshop will be split between creation and performance and will broaden participants understanding of Pochinko creation technique, while introducing new ways of generating material and flexing the creative muscles. Participants will be encouraged to explore a broader application of the clown work including but not limited to spoken text, song, dance, bouffon, Joey and Auguste, and a synthesis of any of the above. If participants have any specific desires for this workshop they should feel free to begin a conversation on the subject matter at any point after the application.
Participants should have a strong idea for a turn, performance, style, or topic that they wish to explore during the workshop. Participants should bring a short prepared piece in addition to other work to be discussed after registration.
Ultimately, this workshop is about creating a solid springboard into the chaos of clown with a focus on developing the structure needed to find the freedom in performance.
Emotionally Integrated Voice
With Fides Krucker
6 days (30 hrs.)
Participants must bring a song they know well and the sheet music for it.
Applicants must be 19+
Prerequisite: None
Workshop only: $ 700.00 + HST (6 days)
Add Residence: $ 280.00 + HST (7 nights)
About Emotionally Integrated Voice
Breath and voice are seated deep within the autonomic nervous system. The human animal is designed to reveal feeling in a flash through bursts of non-verbal vocal sound. Our complex survival needs, social abilities and linguistic gifts don’t always align with this transparency and can lead an individual to alter their voice or silence it completely.
Emotionally Integrated Voice is an approach to sung and extended voice that reclaims a sustainable conversation between breath and sound through consciously weaving fight or flight with rest and digest. It messes around in the impoliteness of singing while looking for an integrated economy of effort.
The work is physically active, elemental and creative. The expansiveness of breath is revealed through yawns and sighs. Pitch and resonance are rediscovered through a radical exploration of non-verbal expression. The exercises are accessible and draw from Fides’s thirty-five year relationship with mentor Richard Armstrong (Roy Hart Theatre), two decades of creation with Toronto based collective URGE, Fides’s teacher training practice and forty year’s of interdisciplinary performance.
This week long course is for singers and non singers alike and I’d like each of you to bring a song. It should be something that you love – that when you listen to it or sing it the experience makes you want to weep, or jump for joy, or honour your desires. I would like sheet music for it as well. We can have email conversation to sort out these details in the weeks leading up to our time north. You need to know one verse and one chorus by heart. Get ready to be surprised!
Neo-Bouffon
With Karen Hines
6 days (30 hrs.) Participants should be prepared for extra hours of evening homework and preparation outside of class time.
Applicants must be 19+
Prerequisite: Although not a prerequisite, those who have taken the Mask and Clown Intensive (Baby Clown) and Boot Camp 1 (or equivalent), or those with previous bouffon experience may be given first consideration.
Workshop only: $ 775.00 + HST (6 days)
Add Residence: $ 280.00 + HST (7 nights)
About Neo-Bouffon
Due to the unique challenges of this course, enrollment is very limited: selected applicants should expect to have an interview / further inquiry into their aims with this work.
This popular workshop is inspired by Karen Hines’ brilliant and provocative approach to Bouffon.
In Paris and London and around the world, master teacher Philippe Gaulier teaches a style of performance known as “bouffon”, characterized by the use of physical affliction (humps, etc.) in combination with parody to achieve a highly theatrical effect. This performance style finds its roots in medieval Europe, though the lore stretches into timeless and universal territory.
“NEO-BOUFFON” is Karen Hines’s Canadian response to the work: firmly rooted in the lessons of Parisian master Gaulier, but focused on finding new ways to apply the essential elements of bouffon within the context of contemporary North American culture.
Through the exploration of the basic foundations of bouffon, plus in-class creation, the work encourages a comedically-oriented dissection of societal maladies and afflictions. This course aims to wring laughter from unsettling aspects of contemporary culture, in the name of timely, responsible, thoughtful approaches to parody, high performance, great entertainment and killer content.
This course is designed for writers, designers and directors as much as it is for performers: much of the course is geared toward strategies for creation and development of material. Course content and exercises are challenging, often involving the realms of religion, sex and politics, and are not for the faint of heart. The work entails an unflinching look at the darker side of the human potential.
6 days (30 hrs.) Participants should be prepared for extra hours of evening homework and preparation outside of class time.
Applicants must be 19+
Prerequisite: Applicants with 3+ years of professional experience will be given first consideration.
Workshop only: $ 700.00 + HST (6 days)
Add Residence: $ 280.00 + HST (7 nights)
Developing New Work Without Killing it…
with Karen Hines
About Developing New Work Without Killing it…
DEVELOPING NEW WORK WITHOUT KILLING IT walks you through practical, effective, and powerful exercises to begin writing, break through blocks, or focus and deepen your work if you are close to completion. Work at any stage is welcome: the desire to write is more important than having a full production in mind. (But we may help you to imagine a full production.)
The writing exercises we’ll use are proven over time by people you may know or whose work you may have seen. From horror clowning to high performance literary artists, they all started somewhere, and we will take a look at how those things began. We will also take a deep dive into the power of values (respect, perseverance) in a healthy creative room
Maybe you have a show in mind, or maybe you have a tiny idea just beginning. In all cases, we will catalyze its development, your focus, and test the work in gentle “production simulations.” There will be micro readings, micro stagings, micro-dramaturgy - even micro casting sessions. These sessions will be guided and executed with the mantra "first do no harm”, tactics for continuing, and success beyond the course.
Whether you are making a bright comedy or an immersive horror; a serious docudrama or some stylish wild theatre, DNWWKI promises to catalyze you, build you a body of work that is original to you, and send you away with tactics for its safe travels into the future.
Participants will be invited to bring something they are working on, or dream of working on: as simple as a compelling concept, as elaborate as a production plan for work done so far. This is not essential: blank slates are equally as welcome.
Fool Bodied
with Jacqueline Russell
7 days (42 hrs.)
Applicants must be 19+
Prerequisite: Mask and Clown Intensive (Baby Clown) or equivalent
Workshop only: $ 700.00 + HST (7 days)
Add Residence: $ 320.00 + HST (8 nights)
About Fool Bodied
Clowning is a practice that lives in the wilderness of the body. This course is an expedition into that wilderness, a trek through the imaginative worlds and landscapes of the body. It is an invitation to move towards deeper awareness of our bodies though re-storying narratives we have subconsciously ingested.
We will playfully investigate reclaiming rest, desire, connection, refuge, and pleasure. Our explorations will create space for witnessing and cultivating curiosity about the secrets in our blood, and the wisdom in our bones. Fool Bodied is a creative inquiry into embodiment through a clown lens.
This course will investigate a daily movement practice, somatic release work, clown rituals, witnessing, playful embodiment, dance parties, and body as land.
The movement practices that are explored in this course are accessible to all bodies. No prior movement experience is required.
Creative Lineage: This work is inspired and informed by the work of Janet Adler, adrienne maree brown, Fiona Griffiths, Tricia Hersey, Tomson Highway, Jacques Lecoq, Elsie Loehnen, Nicola Mosley, Sonya Renee Taylor, and John Turner.