Clown Yourself

Book excerpt: CLOWN YOURSELF is a useful manual for both clown students and facilitators. Within its pages Caroline shares what she has been exploring with her students since publishing her first book, The Clown In You. The first part is packed with valuable information, exercises and examples, whilst the second offers ideas on how to practice different aspects of the art of clowning in your daily life. Clown Yourself aims to reinforce and broaden your understanding of clown technique, as well as encourage you to think and behave in clown-like ways in your daily life. Part 1 is full of useful and interesting information such as: why it's so important to keep digging into the depths of our stupidity, the clown games that never fail to work, how having problems can enhance the comedy, why telling lies is so vital to creativity, what strategies to apply when things aren't going as planned, etc. All, of course, peppered with exercises, examples and quotes. Part 2 offers four weeks of "clown practices", fun experiments you can make in your everyday life. They are designed for you to maximize your clown creativity during the week so as not to lose momentum between courses or performances. PART 1 Chapter 1 gives you an overall view of the book's content and an explanation of how the daily life clown practices came into being. Chapter 2 contains a whole stack of persuasive reasons why to clown and keep practising regularly. Chapter 3 tackles the thorny issue of identity and explains in depth why maintaining a concrete idea of "who you think you are" will only limit your clown's ability to be generous with who you really are. Chapters 4 to 7 cover specific areas of clown technique . Each chapter contains explanations of the reasons for, and reasoning behind, each element of the technique, plus exercises and examples of how it all works on a practical level. Chapter 8 details the many challenges you face when improvising and offers a series of blueprints to facilitate your ability to make better, bolder and more comic choices. PART 2 Four weeks of Monday to Friday clown practice options to keep you homing in on your clown skills and throwing yourself into the comic fray... day after day. ____FAQ_____IS IT FOR ME? This book is for clown and theatre students, clown teachers, voluntary hospital clowns, professional clowns, comedians, actors, laughter therapists, anyone interested in clowns or clowning and anyone looking to understand in greater depth the techniques, games and practices contemporary clowns are using to, win over their audiences and create laughter. WHY BUY IT? Caroline has worked with clowning from the inside out and the outside in. She writes from the perspective of a life spent investigating her art, both as a professional clown and as an international clown teacher. After writing her first clowning manual, she created many new courses offering students different chunks of information regarding technique. The insights she gleaned from leading these courses and the students who took them proved too compelling not to be documented. This manual took six years to write and it may take you the same amount of time to assimilate all that it contains!CREDITSFirst edition, November 2020Barcelona, Spain(c) Caroline Dream, 2020Published by Ediciones Clownplanetwww.clownplanet.com/edicioneswww.theclowninyou.comGeneral Editor: Álex NavarroLayout & design: Álex NavarroText Revision: Richard LesliePrinted by AmazonISBN-13: 978-84-09-24848-3MAYBE YOU'RE ALSO INTERESTED IN CAROLINE DREAM'S FIRST BOOK: THE CLOWN IN YOU