CANCELLED: Celebration Barn’s Happenstance Theater & Playshop

***Sadly, due to a risk of thunderstorms, this event has been cancelled.***

PREPOSTEROUS! is Happenstance Theater’s sophisticated, family-friendly, pocket-sized theatrical clown circus!

These charming vintage clowns play circus animals sing as a human calliope, do the classic circus mirror routine, invent a number of ridiculous “entrées”, perform live music, and execute a very satisfying slow motion number involving a pie!

The show premiered in the summer of 2017 at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and has been performed at The National Theater as part of their Saturday Morning family series.

Following the hour-long performance, clowns will offer a playshop in physical theater/mime for audience members who want to learn how these fantastic performers do what they do!

CELEBRATION BARN:
Celebration Barn is an immersive physical theater center that annually draws over 200 artists from around the world who are seeking to train and create their own works. The Barn’s mission is to inspire creativity and community by harnessing the power of live performance.

Located in South Paris, Celebration Barn’s restored horse barn in the woods of Maine provides an inspiring natural setting away. Celebration Barn’s 46-year history fuels a super-charged atmosphere that encourages artists to play at their creative edge–nurtured and provoked by a community of collaborators–and launch performance in new directions.

Our alumni are currently performing on broadway, on television, and in internationally touring shows including Cirque du Soleil.

HAPPENSTANCE THEATER:
The Washington City Paper says, “Happenstance Theater’s ensemble comedy is a gut-busting kind of funny.” The Washington Post describes our work as “visually striking and whimsical without being precious” and calls Happenstance Theater “DC’s leading peddler of whimsy.”

HAPPENSTANCE THEATER, founded in 2006, is a professional company committed to devising, producing and touring original, performer-created visual, poetic Theatre. Our ensemble has been developing work together since 2012. We are multi-talented performers who craft all aspects of our pieces from concept to realization. Under the Artistic co-Direction of Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell, we harvest imagery from the past and re-contextualize it in performances that address eternal themes of life, death, and the ephemeral. With the simplest means – movement, silence, theatrical clown, music, text, physical comedy and beauty – we seek to elevate the moment when the performers and audience meet, to lift the encounter beyond the daily and pedestrian into the realms of dreams, poetry, and art. Meaning is often discovered by happenstance.

In 2016 Happenstance received three Helen Hayes Awards for Outstanding Ensemble, Outstanding Costume Design and Outstanding Lead Actor. In 2017 Happenstance received two Helen Hayes Awards for Outstanding Costume Design and Outstanding Musical Direction.