Spymonkey : FUNNY/MUSIC

About

Date: Saturday October 18th – Saturday October 19th Time: 10.00am-4.00pm Cost: $275 Capacity: 20 Venue: Manhattan Theatre Club Led by : Toby Park, Spymonkey Co-Artistic Director The course is aimed at musicians, opera singers and musical th... more Date: Saturday October 18th – Saturday October 19th
Time: 10.00am-4.00pm
Cost: $275
Capacity: 20
Venue: Manhattan Theatre Club
Led by : Toby Park, Spymonkey Co-Artistic Director

The course is aimed at musicians, opera singers and musical theatre performers who want to explore music and Clown, and discover their unique comedic selves, we welcome musicians and performers of all disciplines, from opera singers and triple threat musical theatre perfomers to cabarettists, variety acts, concert violinists, dub poets and street musicians. And everything in between…

About the course:
Music has always played a huge part in the Spymonkey creative process – we think early on in our writing about what the show might offer in the way of deliciously unconventional original songs, musical theatre genres that we want to explore, unlikely cover versions of existing songs, speciality variety acts, original music in a range of genres and styles to inspire us to new choreographic heights, sound effects that establish their own theatrical conventions.

In this 2 day workshop we will explore how music and comedy co-exist, and how having a sense of both can lead us into new, unexpected and totally original comedic and musical territory. We will explore Pleasure: the clown’s pleasure of being ridiculous on stage, the generous pleasure of playing with our friends, the pleasure of performing music together, the pleasure of pursuing grand ambitions, of unlikely choices, of aiming high, of making terrible mistakes and failing woefully!

And the pleasure of making an audience laugh their socks off.

How do you go about building a musical speciality act? How do you create a brilliant dance routine? How do you write a song that will make people piss their pants? How can music unite a disparate group of performers into one vibrantly harmonic unit? (And then have it all fall apart again catastrophically?)

Using the principles of clown that will be familiar to students of Spymonkey’s training programme – playfulness, generosity, pleasure, optimism, complicity – we will explore all these things and more.

If you play an instrument we’ll ask you to bring it with you.