the LEAF

Decades of dreaming come true,
Jen will be teaching at her all time favorite festival
the Lake Eden Arts Festival
a joyous 4-day celebration of the arts
with dancing, poetry slamming, drum circling, circus arts, puppetry, zip-lining, parades, contra-dancing and other joyous celebrations

In between dancing to Balkan Beat Box, Beats Antique, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Rising Appalachia, get your Fool on with Jen!

http://www.theleaf.org/the-festival

Stepping into Student Roles

Andy and Jen have been taking the summer months (or winter, depending which hemisphere that you're in) off from teaching to step back into student role.  

Andy just finished up a Theater of the Oppressed facilitator training with Marc Weinblatt at the Mandala Center for Change.  He's incredible, they're incredible, and they work using applied theater, anti-oppression education, grassroots community workshops, mask work, movements arts, ritual and play. 
www.mandalaforchange.com

Then he joined forces with the the maestro Giovanni Fusetti, who was teaching Bouffon and the Ecstasy of Mocking at the Celebration Barn in Maine, USA.  Both Jen and Andy have studied The Red Nose with him, which he introduces as.... "Welcome to a unique adventure, in which poetry meets healing and your personal clown will reveal some aspects of your own crazy wisdom.
A human being, alone in front of the audience, a Red Nose, the smallest mask in the world. 

www.GiovanniFusetti.com

Meanwhile, Jen headed to NYC to work with TOPLAB, taking a Theater of the Oppressed Workshop "Looking at Class Consciousness, Class Struggle and Self-Organizing Using Image Theater" facilitated by Janet Gerson and Marie-Claire Picher.

www.toplab.org

Next week she heads back to Glover, VT, to play in the open field and under the wide sky with Bread and Puppet Theater. Donation run, for over 50 years, Bread and Puppet uses cardboard and cornstarch to create political absurdity and dreamscapes.  According the the founder/orchestrator Peter Schumann, "Puppet theater is the theater of all means. Puppets and masks should be played in the street. They are louder than the traffic. They don’t teach problems, but they scream and dance and display life in its clearest terms. Puppet theater is of action rather than dialogue. The action is reduced to the simplest dance-like and specialized gestures. A puppet may be a hand only, or it may be a complicated body of many heads, hands, rods and fabric. We have two types of puppet shows: good ones and bad ones, but all of them are for good and against evil. ” -Peter Schumann

www.breadandpuppet.org

And she's planning to round out the season with the Manitoulin Clown Conservatory in Canada.

http://www.manitoulinconservatory.com

We're soaking up all the inspiration and insight to bring into our work and out to all of you!

          

a Clown Farewell in Pictures

What a gorgeous intergenerational gathering of clowns!!

Such an honor that you all came to share your joy, your vulnerability, and innocence with us!

Thank You Thank You Thank You

a Clown Farewell

As I gets ready to hop continents and say goodbye to Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud, New Zealand, I want to give you a taste of clowning before I go, and let y'all meet the innocent, curious, committed, engaged, and playful clown inside of you waiting to be born!

May Monday, June 6th, the Queen's birthday, forevermore be known as the birthday of your clown.  Noon, up in the treetop retreat I've been calling home.

Tākarokaro with you soon!

     

Gonna Miss These Girls

Gonna miss these girls. So grateful to have had the opportunity to play and coach them. 

Look how incredible they are!  

www.kapitiequestrian.com/

Honoring Peace

Our celebration in honor of the Day of the Conscientious Objector was a beautiful success. Several generations present, we sang war resistor songs, heard stories from Obie about his great grandfather who was a conscientious objector and went to jail for it, honored New Zealand's most famous conscientious objector, Archibald Baxter, and playing Theater of Liberation games to question our own resolve to stand up for what we believe in and collaborated on tactics.  Then we finished it up planting a feijoa tree, which will hopefully feed many generations to come!

A look back in time... Prana 2011

A look back in time...
Performing aerial silks just before the clock struck midnight on New Years, 2010 turning into 2011, in front of main stage at Prana (http://www.prana.nz/) was definitely a peak experience!!