Clown / Performance Workshop with Visiting Artist Amica Hunter

Join veteran Washington-based performing artist Amica Hunter (they/them) for two days of clown/performance workshops!
Whether you're a seasoned performer, or aspiring to your stage debut, this is an opportunity to work on developing authentic connections and tools for creating work through a clown lens. We will work with play, presence, props, and practicality and at the end of it all, you're invited to perform a short act in a show (only if you want) on Friday 3/27th!

Day 1: Wednesday 3/25th 3-6pm at Sly Grog Lounge
WHO IS THIS CLOWN? There Is Something Funny About You: A playful on-your-feet performance oriented workshop on finding humor in showing your unique authentic freaky funny self. Drop the mask and tune into the natural comedy of being honestly YOU onstage. Through group games and fundamental clown exercises, participants in this workshop will first get to know each other as a small collaborative group, creating resilience, buoyancy, and trust before diving into individual expression. Core concepts include tapping into a deep sense of play, creating an honest and engaging stage presence, partnering with the audience, and reacting authetically in each moment. We will practice peering through the fourth wall to really SEE your audience, and allowing them to see you in return. A mere toe-dip into the infinitely deep performance genre that is clown! All levels of interest and experience welcome.

Day 2: Thursday 3/26th 3-6pm at Sly Grog Lounge
MORE PROPS TO YA! Physical Objects As Creative Partners: A clown workshop about STUFF & THINGS. How props, costumes, and set elements can anchor and inform character, world-building, and play. Whether acknowledged or not, the things performers wear, carry, and sit on, are the silent co-stars of any production. Using objects is powerful choice, and one that you can harness to do more than just support. We will explore games, writing exercises, and devising activities oriented around our relationships to the physical, tangible items that we choose to bring onstage with us. For performers of all types who want to explore dynamic performance, act/show creation, and play through the gateway of physical items. Whether you are trying to refine props & costume elements in an existing act/show, or you are looking to build something new, this workshop will offer jumping off points that you can use to approach the creative process through the sometimes unwieldy yet glorious magic of GARMENTS and OBJECTS. Each participant should bring 1-2 costume pieces and 1-2 props that they would like to explore and work with.

The Small Print:
- $160 for the full 2 day workshop, or $90 for a single day
- Message Amica for Fringe Artist discount!
- Open to adults of any experience level
- Wear active clothing and be propared to move around within your limits
- Thursday Only: Please bring several props and costume pieces to work with
- Participants who attend both days are invited to perform in an opening act cabaret show Friday 3/27
- Limited Spots, Reserve early!

Instagram: @meatymeekers 

Website: www.amicahunter.com

Upcoming Shows: https://linktr.ee/meatymeekers 

About Amica:

Amica Hunter (they/them)is your basic multi-layered mammalian organism - a creaking calcium scaffolding, wrapped in wet pulsing blood tubes and layers of raw meat, all dipped in a skin coating and rolled in hair, like some sort of effed up, sentient, caramel apple. They are also a multidisciplinary artist and performer who has been devising, performing, producing, and touring original work since 2012. Amica grew up in the high desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they spent their adolescence mostly barefoot, training in equestrian vaulting (gymnastics on horseback), acting in school plays, painting, sculpting, swing dancing, climbing trees, and wrestling a vague teenage angst while getting a ton of nosebleeds from the dry air. 

Seeking moss and moisture, Amica moved to Portland, Oregon in 2010, where they genuinely tried to focus on their university studies, but the pull of the performing arts was too strong… Amica dropped out of college to attend the San Francisco Circus Center’s Clown Conservatory Program under director Joe Dieffenbacher (Nakupelle Physical Theatre), co-taught by Dan Griffiths (Church of Clown) and Nathaniel Justiniano (Naked Empire Bouffon). During Clown School, Amica met David Cantor, and the two co-founded the critically-acclaimed acrobatic clown duo, A Little Bit Off, which toured the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand for over a decade. Known for their slapstick stylings and strong vintage aesthetics, ALBO won over two dozen awards, created five full-length shows (Bilgewater, Beau & Aero, Bella Culpa, Bad Habits, & A Grave Mistake). Amica and David also performed countless variety acts, and produced and hosted a local monthly cabaret show for several years. Though the company is largely retired, A Little Bit Off still occasionally performs shows here and there. 

Amica's first solo show, ANATOMICA debuted in 2023 with a successful tour of the US and Canada, a 5 star review, a slew of sold out shows, festival holdover encore performances, and several awards. Hot on the heels of their first solo tour, Amica teamed up with fellow Fringe artist Bruce Ryan Costella to create two new original collaborative productions - seaMAN, and The COWbaret: An UDDERly Unhinged Bovine Variety Show, both of which are rowdy and chaotic prop-heavy comedies that have been hits on the tour circuit. 

In between shows, Amica works in medical education as a standardized patient, portraying cases and giving feedback during mock encounters, and as a Sensitive Exam Teaching Associate, instructing medical students in learning technical and trauma-informed approaches to giving chest and pelvic exams. Amica is a co-founder of Portland’s Stage Fright Festival, an annual queer horror theatre festival that showcases original works by independent queer and trans artists in the horror genre. They also run Funerals For Life, an immersive event service offering “fake funerals” (complete with ASMR spa embalming), to living customers, for celebrations such as birthdays and anniversary parties. 

Sometimes known as “Stinky Lil’ Ratman,” Amica has a great love of rats, and has kept them as cherished pets on and off throughout their life. Their current crop of rodents are The Cheese Brothers: Monsieur Poirot, Shredder, and Monica II, and they are spoiled as hell.