Naked Empire Bouffon Workshop May 13-15 (San Francisco)

Naked Empire Bouffon Company

Artistic Director of the Naked Empire Bouffon Company,  Nathaniel Justiniano, is offering his weekend long Bouffon Intensive May 13-15, 2011.

Register HERE.

A photo from SHAME, a Naked Empire Bouffon Show

“The work of bouffon satisfies my greatest desires of the theatre.  As a performer it demands an intense athleticism and availability to one’s wildest imagination.  As audience to it I have found a way to both laugh at myself and check my apathy at the door.  As a citizen I am consistently impressed by how much of the ‘unsayable’ the bouffon is allowed to say and by how well people hear it.  The space is electrified by the presence of the bouffon, making each moment potentially and hilariously explosive or deadly silent.  No one is safe.”

This intensive is a crash course in bouffon performance with the only company this side of the Mississippi exclusively dedicated to the research and performance of bouffon.

What you’ll be learning and practicing:

• Finding your personal bouffon
• Entering into and creating within a state of ecstatic play
• Choral, movement-based improvization
• Mercurial acting techniques for shape-shifting between characters of heightened text and grace to those of base, groveling goblin prophets
• Audacious and confrontational status play with the audience
• Wielding stillness and silence like a scapel
• Parodying social maladies and hypocrisies
• Ramshackle techniques for on-the-fly costume creation

The Naked Empire Bouffon Company

You do not need to have previous experience in this form of theatre, nor in performance at all.  This is, however, an athletic, intensely physical form of theatre that demands the in-the-moment engagement of your intellect and perverse imagination.  If this resonates with you, we would love to see you here.