Hi, I'm Annabelle. I teach clown and physical comedy at Curious Comedy Theater in Portland. My background is in circus arts and juggling, not the traditional theater pedigree, so my approach is skill-based: students bring a real technical practice (juggling, dance, an instrument, anything) and we work on letting it go playfully wrong together.
My pedagogy is built around a few specific commitments. I named the broader framework The Queer Clowning Framework, but you don't have to be queer to take any of my classes. The framework is about using the social discomfort of being publicly perceived as a particular kind of person as the raw material for comedy. That originated from my experience as a trans woman, and it lands for queer students in a specific way, but the underlying principles work for anyone willing to look at the awkwardness they carry around with them.
A few things that show up across all my classes:
Four weeks working through The Queer Clowning Framework. Voice, movement, social dynamics, expression, the flop, skill-based clowning, vulnerability, and the full audience-relationship arc. No clown experience required. Open to all identities and experience levels.
Check back soon for upcoming classes!
A 2.5-hour standalone workshop covering the basics. Peek behind the fourth wall and into the soul of your audience. Get out of your brain and into your body.
What happens when you bring an object on stage with you? A workshop on how clowns interact with objects, what makes a prop bit land, and how to make even the most mundane object weirdly important.
Going from "I have a few clown bits" to "I have a clown set." Structure, transitions, the shape of a piece, the question of where the set is going. For people who've done some clown work and want to start building toward a performance.
I'm a variety performer, funny woman, and comedy teacher based in Portland. My comedy comes out of a background in circus arts and physical comedy, with a long parallel practice in contact juggling. I'm a trans woman, and my work is shaped by that: I'm interested in the awkward intimacy of being publicly perceived as a particular kind of person, and the comedic potential of that awkwardness when you stop apologizing for it.
I call myself a no-jokes absurdist. The comedy I'm interested in is the kind that comes from a person being fully themselves in a room, not from setups and punchlines.
On paper: a BA in Linguistics and an MS in Recreation, Event, and Sports Management. It sounds like a strange pair until you notice it adds up to someone who studies how people communicate and designs structured play for groups. That's the job.
By day I'm a software engineer. My weirder internet self (games, pixel worlds, a blog) lives at annabelle.online.
For classes at Curious Comedy: enroll through curiouscomedy.org/classes.
For private workshops, performance bookings, solo show booking, or anything else: email me at [email protected].
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