Speakers

• Jason Jammer

  Workshop Instructor, Prop & Object Work

  Jason Jammer did not grow up around theatre. He grew up around a CVS in Ewing, New Jersey, where he worked the overnight register at nineteen and where the store manager, a man named Gus, dressed up as a clown every October for the Halloween promotion. Gus was not, by any professional standard, a good clown. The makeup was uneven, the wig was from a bin, and the routine consisted almost entirely of him losing an argument with a stack of shopping baskets.

  But Jason watched a woman in the pharmacy line — visibly exhausted, forty minutes into a wait for a prescription — laugh so hard she had to sit down on the floor. He has described that moment as the most impressive thing he has ever seen a person do. He asked Gus how he'd learned it. Gus said he hadn't; he just thought the baskets were funny and committed to the position.

  That turned out to be a more or less complete education. Jason spent the next decade building routines around ordinary objects — grocery carts, extension cords, one lawn chair he has toured with since 2016 and refers to exclusively as "my colleague." He has performed at regional comedy festivals, corporate events he describes as "hostile," and a great many children's hospitals, which he considers the real work. He teaches object work with no vocabulary and no lineage behind it, just an insistence that the thing in your hands wants something and you have to find out what.

  Gus died in the spring of 2019. The store has not run the Halloween promotion since. Jason drives up every October anyway. He teaches the folding chair unit every term, always tells the story, and has never once gotten through it cleanly. He dedicates his half of this program to Gus, who never called himself a clown and was one.

• Marguerite "Margo" Delacroix-Bell

  Lead Instructor - The Bellwether Physical Theatre

  Marguerite "Margo" Delacroix-Bell has spent thirty-one years falling over professionally, and has the knees to prove it. She trained at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, where she was told in her first month that she was "technically excellent and completely unwatchable" — a note she describes as the most useful sentence anyone has ever said to her.

  She spent the following decade touring with Cirque Bellwether, performing in eleven countries and roughly four hundred venues, ranging from a national opera house to a supermarket parking lot in Rotterdam where the entire audience was six people and a dog. She maintains that the parking lot was the harder room and that she learned more there than in the opera house.

  Since 2009 she has been the artistic director of the Bellwether Physical Theatre Collective, where her students have gone on to work in circus, film, commercial improv, corporate training, and — in one case she brings up more often than is strictly necessary — competitive mascot performance. She has taught workshops for the Big Apple Circus education program, guest-lectured on physical comedy at two universities, and consulted on movement for three feature films she is contractually not permitted to name.

  She is a firm believer that clowning is not a performance style but a form of honesty, and that most people are funniest about four seconds after they stop trying to be. She lives in Asheville with a partner who has never once laughed at her onstage and two dogs who laugh constantly.