This year’s Fringe sees the debut of Hank Curry’s latest clown offering, “A Short History of Fun”, the artist’s seventh original work and the first to play in the United Kingdom.
“A Short History of Fun” takes classic clown routines dating back to antiquity and reinterprets them for a modern audience. Employing comedy styles from Lecoq Technique, the circus, and vaudeville/music hall, the show follows in the tradition of Jacques Tati, Bill Irwin, and Rowan Atkinson as Curry’s clown desperately tries to entertain the audience with disastrous results. This is classic, no-frills clowning from one of Philadelphia’s leading practitioners of slapstick.
This is the latest culmination in Hank Curry’s ongoing evolution as a live comedy performer, a journey that began ten years ago at the Philadelphia SoLow Fest with “Enjoy.”. This simple mime show, done in the sketch format, set the framework for Curry’s subsequent three solo efforts, each of which explored different characters within a silent comedy style and used transitions to increasingly blur the lines between sketches and characters, exploring notions of identity while mining everyday circumstances for comedy.
Hank Curry is a genderqueer actor, writer, director, and clown. She is a graduate of Temple University with a B.A. in Theatre and Communications. She has had work commissioned by The Manayunk Theatre Company, Fairmount Park Conservancy in Philadelphia, and New City Stage Company. Hank has self-produced seven original works, including “The Fortress”, an official selection of the Buster Keaton Centennial Celebration in 2017. She has performed off-Broadway at the United Solo Festival; at the Fringearts and SoLow Festivals in Philadelphia; at the Rochester Fringe Festival in Rochester, NY; and at the Hollywood Fringe in Los Angeles. In 2016 she was an artist in residence for the Philadelphia School for Circus Arts.
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