This class is limited to 12 students.

You’ve started getting laughs as a clown but now how do you do it 6 days a week and twice on Saturdays for an audience that’s never even heard of clowning? In this class we’ll take the skills you learned in Clown 1 and 2 honing your clown persona and learn to create working acts as part of a fully realized show, collaboratively created by the ensemble.

How does your clown solve a problem? How do you work as a company? What's the world you're going to set up with lots of clowns?

You will further build your clown character by finding a costume that makes you look and feel stupid and start creating material by finding your own stupid clown logic. We’ll also explore “le jeu” and status in clown duos and trios, as well as building a thematic world that ties the whole show together. Come to class with ideas, costumes, props or anything that ignites your imagination. Students should be prepared to rehearse as they would in a professional ensemble process - with homework prepped outside of class and attending classes and the tech rehearsal on-time and present.

This class culminates in two class shows on the Eris MainStage

Prerequisite: Clown Level 2 at BCC or similar experience.

7-Week Class: Mondays, 7:00 - 10:00 PM, September 4th - October 16th

• Note: Class may end between 9:30-10:00 PM depending on the number of enrollments.

Where: The BCC Pig Pen, Studio B (130 Graham Ave)

• Tech Rehearsal: Sunday, October 19th. 4:00pm - 6:00pm. Eris MainStage.

• Class Show: Sunday, October 19th. 7:00pm. Eris MainStage.

• Class Show: Sunday, October 26th. 7:00pm. Eris MainStage.

Teacher: Jeff Seal

Bio:

Jeff Seal is a graduate of the Clown Conservatory at the San Francisco Circus Center and studied Decroux-based corporeal mime at the Hippocampe Project in Paris. He performs regularly with his two-man clown act, Jeff and Buttons, makes comedy videos with Bankrukt Productions and is one of the founding artistic directors of Cloud City Theater and Art space. His films and documentaries have been published by The New York Times, The Discovery Channel, AJ+, gothamist.com and screened at The Tribeca Film Festival.

Testimonials:

Jeff is an incredible coach and director. I loved Jeff's pragmatic teaching style, which really lends itself to the Level 3 Clown course. I think his best strength as a teacher was meeting us where we were with whatever ideas/bits we brought in and helping us figure out what was working or not (and how it would be different performing in front of the audience than in front of the rest of the class). Jeff put us in position to learn how the skills we had picked up in the earlier levels could be applied to an act that would work in front of an audience.

Jeff is really good at helping people find the game in their bits - this class is a great next step after Chris’ level 2.

Jeff's an inspiring director with tons of funny and creative ideas. He helped us develop our ideas into much stronger and tighter bits, with many more games than we would have thought to include, while helping us think about structure so that all those games came together in a cohesive way without getting confusing or going all over the place. He also has a great mind for comedic possibility and guided us to discover entire bits from even the smallest seeds of ideas.