Street Buffoon

Taught by Eric Wilcox

Wednesdays 7 - 9PM

Jan 14 - March 18

Student Showcase Fri March 20 & Sat March 21

Join master teacher Eric Wilcox for a ten-week journey into the delirious, sharp-edged, and oddly joyful world of Street Buffoon. This session explores the grotesque body, derisive mockery, and public intervention as tools of sacred irreverence.

What does it mean to laugh in a collapsing world? What happens when the fool bites back?

In the lineage of European buffoon and American protest theater, this class brings participants into direct physical and imaginative engagement with the absurdity of contemporary life. We train not only to perform but to interfere—to rupture the everyday with beauty, ridicule, and unholy delight.

Areas of Focus: exaggeration, inversion, ensemble rhythm, satire, provocation, ecstatic failure, and the poetry of deformity.

Highlights:

• Grotesque Body Training: Activate the unstable, layered, and mutating form of the buffoon body—distorted, celebratory, and impossible to ignore.

• World-Inversion & Satire: Learn to reflect, deform, and hurl back the image of power, using ancient techniques of mockery, mimicry, and joyful cruelty.

• Tableaux & Street Interventions: Compose and perform striking group images and provocations that disrupt public space and draw crowds.

• Ritual Performance & Public Climax: Culminate the series with a devised flash-mob-style ritual in a San Francisco park—a public ceremony of absurd resistance.

Who Should Attend:

Performers, street artists, clowns, dancers, queers, elders, weirdos, and anyone brave enough to laugh at power and survive the joke. No prior experience is required, but a willingness to leap, play, and get dirty is essential.

Come reclaim the art of buffoonery—part movement laboratory, part social exorcism, part unholy communion.

Instructor Bio

Eric Wilcox is a San Francisco-based performance artist known for his bold, wordless storytelling and irreverent street work. As a mime actor, he’s performed hundreds of silent shows in schools and theaters around the world. With the street performance crew SF Buffoons, he’s gleefully insulted the masses, crafting wild hybrid theater experiences that blur the line between satire and spectacle. In Germany, he co-produced the MIME>BERLIN festival and led summer intensives that pushed the boundaries of physical theater.

His work dives into identity, memory, time, desire—and the radical act of deprogramming the body. Eric believes in theater’s power to break down social walls and bring people together, one gasp or laugh at a time.

*Classes will be held on holidays that fall within the session

$750 per session - Early Bird Price $675 per session until Dec. 7!

Scholarships and Payment Plans Available

Bundle classes for a discount! 

           2 classes - $1300 (Save $200)

           3 classes -$ 1900 (Save $350) 

Email Programs@ChurchOfClown.org for code after registering for your first class, or for scholarship/payment inquiries.