A home for the actor-creator

The Clown Core is an exploration into the essential tools used to discover the unique clown that is already inside of each participant. Michelle will lead the group through a series of exercises and games that will reignite your impulse to play, find your pleasure of being present and expressing emotion, while taking clown action.

Clown Create is for those students who have some clowning experience and want to go deeper into the study by creating pieces in duos and trios. Do you have material you want to work on? Are you looking for more opportunities to create with other clowns? Use your ability to embrace the unknown, the vulnerable, and the ridiculous in order to create longer bits of clown performance. This is a generative intensive that will culminate in a showing in the Carlo Theatre for the final teacher, the audience. Be prepared to create and play ferociously! Participants can track directly from the Clown Core into Clown Create.

The Clown’s great capacity for buoyancy and presence through the unknown holds great power off the performance stage as well. In this 7-day intensive, participants can investigate how to use those skills for humanitarian purposes in places of healing.  Expect a skills-based focus with exercises around presence, listening and awareness. Participants will learn about how clowns engage in various care facilities (such as nursing homes and hospitals), as well as receive instruction about practicing emotional hygiene and self-care in this work.

Workshop on Radical Authenticity in Performance. This intensive is designed to dismantle the "performer" and reveal the human underneath. We move away from the artifice of acting and toward the vulnerability of being, merging the playfulness of the Clown with rigorous text analysis to treat every script not as a set of rules, but as a playground for honesty.

Are you a trained actor looking to refine your perspectives for immersive/interactive theatre? Join us at Dell'Arte International, School of Physical Theatre, for a Foundations of Interactive Performance course with Amanda Meyers, assisted by Jeff Wirth! You will learn a process of experiential character development, tools that transform audience participants into co-creators, tips for playing with difficult participants, and more! 

With over 30 years of experience performing in cabaret, circus and comedy festivals, Anne Goldmann and Jonathan Taylor of the comedy duo ‘Daredevil Chicken’ will help you refine and build acts that are bookable. Participants are encouraged to bring an already-formed act to work on or an idea, skill or character.  The focus will be to refine acts and make them ready to be booked or to create something new with strong building blocks. 

Many professional actors find themselves cast in puppetry roles with little more than good instincts to guide them.  Imagine having the skills and know-how to walk into any puppetry situation, make it work, and make it look good. This intensive gives you the foundational principles that turn capable into skilled. Over five days, participants will be introduced to four distinct forms of puppetry - object, bunraku-style, arm and rod, and marionette - build a basic puppet in each form, and then learn to bring an object to life.

Dell'Arte is thrilled to welcome alumna and legendary performer-creator Amy Saunders, AKA Miss Behave, back home for her first-ever public workshop. Across two days, ten lucky participants will work one-on-one with one of Variety's most respected creative minds to push their acts to the next level.

Introduction to interactive performance, audience participation within the realm of Clown: The clown's relationship to the audience is at the heart of what makes this theatrical style vibrant and powerful. Audience participation and interaction is rarely focused on in clown training and this element of performance is so valued when well done. Oftentimes audience engagement is under rehearsed because it is hard to simulate. In this workshop we will explore techniques, methodology and practical skills of working with audience participants, creating interactive characters and creating effective gags, games and bits that use the audience as partners in your performance.