By: Stanley Allan Sherman
© copyright September 10, 2012
The Spymonkey workshop was led by Aitro Basauri of Spain along with other members of the company. This was a five-day workshop from 10 AM to 4 PM from September 5th through 9th. If you are unfamiliar with Spymonkey there are several youtube videos you can see. The goals of the workshop was to discover, “what makes you funny, hone your skills and practice making an audience belly laugh.” It looked like there were about 20 people in the class for the presentation. Some people in their costume I did not even recognize. Bottom line. Yes Aitro’s students where funny. Yes I even had a few belly laughs. It was good to see some people pushing their envelopes, maybe going where they have always wanted to go but never did. There were ongoing Shakespeare takeoffs dealing with Macbeth, fun break out dancing to music, surprises you would not expect. One piece did not achieve good laughs. There were mostly good laughs from the audience from start to finish. One member of Spymonkey mentioned to me afterwards, “it is great to have them go before a live audience because it give a real boost of energy to the students.”
The NY Clown theater festival continues to bring teachers like this in for the clown and performance community to take advantage of and to give their creativity a boost. Next for Spymonkey they go to Los Vegas to teach another workshop. If you have never seen them perform, I do urge you to take a peek at youtube search Spymonkey or go to their website is http://www.spymonkey.co.uk.
There are two more workshops coming up at The New York Clown Theater Festival: Clown Intuition lead by the very talented Denni Dennis from Wales and a few other places in the world. This workshop is September 15th & 16th from 10 AM to 4 PM.
One of US! A Bouffon Emersion led by NY Clown Theater Festival director Audrey Crabtree of NYC takes place September 22nd & 23rd from 10 AM to 4 PM.
For more information about these workshops go to http://www.bricktheater.com