Dates: March 1–5, 2027.
Hours: 10:00 AM–5:00 PM.
Price: $650.
Instructor: Pedro Fabião.

Joy. Fear. Sadness. Anger.

What happens when the clown stops trying to be funny and instead begins to let the full force of human emotion become visible, playable, ridiculous, tender, dangerous, and alive?

In this 5-day intensive, internationally recognized clown pedagogue Pedro Fabião invites participants to explore four essential human emotions: joy, fear, sadness, and anger. Each emotion has its own body, rhythm, voice, need, relationship with the audience, and unique comic potential.

Rather than approaching emotion as psychological material or as traditional dramatic acting, this workshop proposes meeting it as a living force that moves through the body and can become concrete clown play.

Participants will explore how emotion can become action, how vulnerability can become presence, and how intensity can become connection. Through breath, gaze, movement, sound, repetition, improvisation, solo and duo work, and the relationship with the audience, the workshop will help performers expand their emotional palette while remaining clear, available, playful, and connected.

This is not about playing an emotion from the outside. It is about learning to let emotion move through the clown body without becoming self-absorbed, overwhelmed, or cut off from the audience. Participants will explore emotional escalation, contrast, interruption, transformation, as well as the personal emotional masks and counter-masks that shape each clown’s unique comic universe.

Big Emotions is intended for clowns, performers, physical theatre artists, improvisers, relational or therapeutic clown practitioners, and serious students of presence and play who wish to become more emotionally available, more precise, more vulnerable, more generous, and more alive on stage or in relational performance contexts.

At Zani, we believe that clowning is not an escape from human complexity. It is one of the most direct, playful, and courageous ways to meet it.

In this workshop, participants will be invited to:

·        Explore joy, fear, sadness, and anger as distinct clown territories.

·        Develop greater emotional availability through breath, gaze, movement, sound, rhythm, and repetition.

·        Transform private feeling into action that is readable, shareable, and playable.

·        Discover which emotions are the most accessible, forbidden, immature, powerful, or surprising in their own clown.

·        Work with emotional escalation, interruption, contrast, contamination, and transformation.

·        Strengthen the ability to remain emotionally open while staying connected to the audience.

·        Use solo, duo, and group improvisations to transform emotion into play, relationship, and release.

·        Clarify the difference between playing an emotion, being possessed by an emotion, and playing with an emotion.

·        Expand the clown’s capacity to let laughter emerge not only from joy, but also from fear, rage, tenderness, shame, desire, grief, and surprise.

Big Emotions is a workshop for performers ready to meet the great human energies that make audiences laugh, soften, recognize themselves, and breathe.

Day-by-Day Summary

Day 1 — Opening the Emotional Body: Presence, Safety, and Play

The first day establishes the foundations for the week: presence before performance, emotion as playable material, and the difference between forcing an emotion and allowing it to move through the clown body. Participants begin with breath, gaze, movement, rhythm, and simple improvisational structures that help them observe how emotions live physically. The day introduces the central question of the workshop: how can emotion become clear, visible, playful, and shareable without becoming heavy or self-centered?

Focus: emotional availability, body awareness, contact with the audience, and the clown’s relationship to vulnerability.

Day 2 — Joy: Expansion, Pleasure, Appetite, and Contagion

Joy is explored not as general happiness, but as a precise physical and relational force. Participants explore its rhythm, voice, appetite, generosity, excess, and comic danger. Joy can be light, absurd, explosive, innocent, demanding, or even unbearable. Through solo and collective play, participants discover how joy spreads, how it becomes ridiculous, and how it can open the audience to connection.

Focus: pleasure, openness, laughter, celebration, rhythm, appetite, and emotional contagion.

Day 3 — Fear: Fragility, Alertness, Imagination, and Comic Survival

Fear is approached as one of the clown’s richest territories. The clown is always exposed, always at risk, always one step away from failure. Participants explore fear through breath, hesitation, gaze, sound, interruption, and relationship to the unknown. Rather than hiding fear, the clown makes it visible, concrete, playable, and often hilarious. The work emphasizes how fear can sharpen presence, deepen audience empathy, and create powerful comic tension.

Focus: vulnerability, suspense, danger, hesitation, imagination, and the comedy of survival.

Day 4 — Sadness: Tenderness, Loss, Desire, and Beauty

Sadness is explored as a doorway into softness, dignity, absurdity, and human recognition. Participants examine the body of sadness, the rhythm of longing, the voice of loss, and the delicate line between emotional truth and theatrical heaviness. The clown does not exploit sadness; the clown reveals it with simplicity, precision, and play. This day supports participants in discovering a sadness that can become tender, beautiful, awkward, ridiculous, and deeply relational.

Focus: tenderness, desire, stillness, emotional simplicity, audience recognition, and poetic vulnerability.

Day 5 — Anger and Transformation: Power, Boundaries, Release, and Integration

The final day explores anger as energy, boundary, force, resistance, and comic combustion. Participants observe how anger moves, speaks, rises, breaks, transforms, and reveals a need. The day also integrates the full emotional palette: joy, fear, sadness, and anger in contrast, interruption, contamination, and transformation. Participants work through solo and duo improvisations to discover how emotions can shift, collide, and become a shared release with the audience.

Focus: power, boundaries, emotional escalation, transformation, integration, and expansion of the clown’s emotional range.