Site Title
SOCIAL ART VENTURES
THE ASSEMBLY
I founded an all women’s clown collective in Vancouver, BC in 2014 because I wanted people to play with.
The ASSEMBLY is an all-women clown collective made up of 10 human creatures that aren’t your stereotypical clowns. The Vancouver based group meets weekly to play and laugh and generate performance material in an organic and flexible feminist mode. Each member brings a diversity of skills to the group. When they aren’t clowns on stage, some of their day jobs include being a nurse, a teacher, a carpenter, a somatic therapist, a métis dancer, a storyteller, an actor, a shadow puppeteer and a hospital clown.
“I laughed until I cried my contact lens out.” -Jenny Ritter
“Incredible show! Great Laughs. You’re so great for this town.” –Aaron Malkin
“I can’t believe how much I’m liking this.” -Initially skeptical audience member
I'M FINE WHO ARE YOU?
A Back Alley Extravaganza including brass bands, trumpets playing out of upstairs windows and theatre on rooftops.
The clowns in this event explored the comings and goings of neighbours, the junk in our backyards, and what we hide and seek. It used verbal language as well as the languages of gesture, music and movement.
The hope in creating this event was to engage the community and invite them to consider ways of connecting to others that are vital to thriving multicultural and diverse communities.
It was the story of neighbourhood interactions; sometimes pleasant and sometimes a little uncomfortable. Throughout the course of the show an Egyptian immigrant (he’s really an Egyptian immigrant who grew up partially in India) floats between characters and situations with fresh innocence and naivety asking some of the harder questions. https://imfinewhoareyou.wordpress.com/
THE MISSING SOCK PROJECT
What we’ve lost and what we’ve found. A community art project where a couple hundred people made socks.
They wrote or drew something they’d lost on one side and something they’d found on the other.
LAS MUJERES DE MATAGALPA
The Woman of Matagalpa is an inspiring NGO I worked at in Matagalpa, Nicaragua.
They had three areas they covered: education, human rights, and medicine. My participation included teaching clown, making props, teaching poi and stilts to children and facilitating the creation of a gigantona, a giant dancing women puppet, in a small rural community.
The gigantona was created to represent all the aspects in their community they were most proud of.
PROYECTO PAYASO
I worked as the artistic director in the “Clown Project,” a collective from Guatemala that works in HIV/AIDS and sexual health education.
This is done through clown shows and workshops that they tour throughout the country. One thing that makes them unique is that they are committed to translating the information and the shows into the 26 indigenous languages spoken in Guatemala so everyone has access.
Along with this primary work we worked with youth to build their own theatre shows in order to educate their communities and we created a show to tour with after the country was devastated by a hurricane and floods.
