As part of the Shavuot Festival
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Walls define spaces, enclose, protect and give privacy; they
enclose sanctuaries, holy shrines and intimate gardens; they appear as
holy walls and walls of remembrance. On the other hand we know walls
which separate, exclude, divide, repel, intimidate and threaten; walls
which tear apart landscapes and people, inhibit movement and human
communication.
Walls are only one of the many forms of human involvement in the
landscape and in places. Each form or line, with which we intervene in a
given place, for instance by putting a few humble stones in a row,
causes a profound change. Its impact on the life of the place and its
inhabitants is determined by our intentions, our sensitivity to the
given situation, by the material, the form, its scale and orientation
and many other aspects of our intervention.
How does the clown, with his\her curious, investigating and
unconditioned mind, with open senses and an ability to identify with and
feel empathy for anything – even a stone – meet such forms and interact
with them? Will he/she take them seriously? Play with them? Change them?
Interpret them? Give them new meanings?
In this workshop we shall try to slip into both set of shoes, the
shoes of the creator of shapes in the landscape, and the shoes (or nose)
of the clown, who, through his interactions with these forms and the
place, may reveal some of the deeper levels of our interventions in the
landscape; and he may even find "walls", which, instead of dividing and
separating, connect and unite places and people.
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VIVIAN GLADWELL founding member of Nose to Nose and Fool View, the social clowning group, Vivian Gladwell trained in France with the Bataclown working as a modern day Court Jester and teaching clowning internationally since 1988. He taught English at the University of Social Sciences in Toulouse for 16 years. His research into the applications of clowning to training teachers, doctors and carers regularly takes him to: Emerson College, Forest Row, UK; Blackthorn Medical Centre, Maidstone, UK; Pedagogik Institute in Witten Annen, Germany; Perceval Fondation, in Switzerland. For more info about the Vivian's clowning work see www.nosetonose.info |
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AXEL EWALD is an environmental sculptor and designer. He studied sculpture at Alanus School of Art, Germany. Since 1984 he teaches sculpture, drawing and history of art in various parts of the world. Since 1994 Axel lives in Kibbutz Harduf, Israel, where he founded the "Artways" artistic training course. Axel exhibited his work and participated in environmental sculpture projects in Germany, Belgium, the United States and Israel. For more info about Axel Ewald’s work see www.axelewald.com |
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