Biography:
Barnaby King is a performer, scholar and teacher, with a special interest in clown, humor, and popular performance and their relationships to social, economic, and political realities. His work currently focuses on Latin America, and in particular Colombia, where he conducts ethnographic field work with clown performers that seeks to better understand how they are using clowning as a socially transformative tactic to facilitate agency and playfully negotiate tensions and stresses in Colombian society. His PhD, completed in 2013 at Northwestern University, revolved around clowning in Colombia as a transformative social practice. He completed his MA in Theatre Studies in 1999 at Leeds University and subsequently worked as a director and facilitator of theatre for young audiences in the UK. H
more...Barnaby King is a performer, scholar and teacher, with a special interest in clown, humor, and popular performance and their relationships to social, economic, and political realities. His work currently focuses on Latin America, and in particular Colombia, where he conducts ethnographic field work with clown performers that seeks to better understand how they are using clowning as a socially transformative tactic to facilitate agency and playfully negotiate tensions and stresses in Colombian society. His PhD, completed in 2013 at Northwestern University, revolved around clowning in Colombia as a transformative social practice. He completed his MA in Theatre Studies in 1999 at Leeds University and subsequently worked as a director and facilitator of theatre for young audiences in the UK. He is a regular solo performer and director, and is co-founder of the “Clown Encuentro,” an annual international conference and festival of clowning. Publications include "Acts of Violence: Resistance and Relief in the Colombian War Zone" in TDR (Spring 2008), "Carnivalesque Economies: Clowning and the Neoliberal Impasse" in Kritika Kultura (Aug 2013), ad "Close/Clown Encounters with History: From Mimesis to Kinesis in Practice as Research" in Theatre Topics (September 2013). He is currently a Lecturer in Performance at Edge Hill University.
