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This class will explore the technique of theatre clown and is designed specifically for the actor. With the help of the tiny mask of the red nose, we will work to find our vulnerability and truthful reactions to the world around us and explore our foibles and follies. We will learn to enjoy and learn from our failures. The work will involve both solo and partner work exploring relationships to the audience, to your partner, status, pleasure, and failure. The exercises are designed to discover a true sense of pleasure and joy in play.

Listen to great comics, and analyze their style. Explore joke-writing, your own comic persona. Learn the basics of comic timing. Create material and learn how to edit it into a lean comic routine. In individual coaching sessions, explore performance techniques that enhance your delivery and increase the comic value of your material.

This class will explore physical play from a comic point of view in both character and group work. We will play with eccentric physical characters and character traits, slapstick trips, slaps and running into walls, eccentric movement with music, comic timing and accidents. What makes it funny and what makes it repeatable are 2 questions we will tackle.

Whether you are working on autobiographical or fictional material, this workshop will offer you ways to develop and structure your show. Find out how to deal with issues important to the solo show, such as social relevance, maintenance of tension, and dramatic arc. Come to clarity about the essential question in your show. There will be group discussion, writing exercises, and performance coaching. We will deal with issues such as how to choose a director, development of your script, improv as writing tool, workshop performances, and how to produce your own show.

Using jazz dance exercise, visualization, acting, sensuality and improv exercises, Cheryl can help you enhance and develop your ability to communicate. In The Body Language Workshop, we uncover hidden self-judgments that keep us from sensual self-expression, and replace them with joyful acceptance of our true voluptuous natures. Learn how to separate intimate from personal. Find new comfort and confidence in your own body signals. (All Levels)

Cheryl King began her show business career in 1978, when she was cast in a burlesque show produced by Will B. Able of Baggy Pants and Company. She studied mime, trained in dance and in 1981 became a solo mime artist and taught at City Center Dance Theatre, Emory University and Backstage Performing Arts in Atlanta. In the ensuing years, she traveled and performed with Great American Mime Experiment and taught at schools across the country. She became a stand-up comic in 1982 and worked full-time at that profession until 1995, performing nationally in clubs and colleges. She appeared on Rascal's Comedy Hour and served on the Board of Directors of the Professional Comedians Association headquartered in New York City. In 1996, she premiered her solo show, "not a nice girl," at 78th Street Theatre Lab in New York City. Gary Austin, founder of the Groundlings in LA in 1972, directed the show for the first few years. In 2002, Rod Menzies came on board as director. She has performed the show in NYC at the Sanford Meisner Theater and Center Stage/NY; in Los Angeles at Third Stage and the American Renegade, and at Bas Bleu in Ft. Collins, CO. Cheryl is a member of the Dramatists Guild and has studied playwriting in New York in the Writer's Wing and with Jeffrey Sweet. She created and teaches three workshops, Body Language, an acting workshop, Writing Your Heart Out, a playwriting workshop, and a Stand-up Comedy Workshop series, in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. She offers these workshops annually at the Funny Women Fest in Chicago. In 2002, she co-produced the East Coast Funny Women Fest in NYC.

Hilary Chaplain has worked internationally as both an actress and a clown since the mid-1980s. Since 1987, she has entertained children in NYC hospitals as "Nurse Nice" of the renowned Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit. A member of the New York Goofs clown troupe since its founding in June 1998, Hilary has appeared with them at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Avery Fisher Hall, the Wolfe Trap Family Farm. She was an original cast member of Bill Irwin's Largely/New York, and appeared on Broadway and at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park as the Goddess Ceres in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest directed by George C. Wolfe. Her regional work includes the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, and she played a featured role in the movie Forrest Gump. Hilary has studied with such notable clowns as Avner The Eccentric, Philippe Gaulier, Dick Monday, David Shiner, Bill Irwin, and Bob Berky, and she is currently an adjunct Professor of Clowning at NYU's Tisch School of Drama.