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Manitoulin Summer Program

Teacher Bios

Mump & Smoot in Flux

Karen Hines as Pochsy

John Turner- Artistic Director

John began teaching the Pochinko style of clown in 1991 at Equity Showcase in Toronto. He taught there for 7 years before opening his own studio, The SPACE, with Michael Kennard where he continued to teach, direct, and work on Mump & Smoot shows for the next 6 years. He currently teaches primarily throughout the summer on his farm on Manitoulin Island. He also has had ongoing teaching gigs at Laurentian University in the Francophone drama programme (8 years), the Centre for Indigenous Theatre (6 years) and the De-ba-jeh-mu-jig Theatre Company (5 years). Other teaching stints have included the Yale School of Drama Graduate Program where he was an associate artist for seven years, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (Workman Theatre Project), the University of Tel Aviv, the University of Calgary, Bishops University, the University of Guelph, California State University, Michigan Tech, the Humber Comedy Centre and the Stratford Festival.

John is also the director of Karen Hines' Citizen Pochsy, one of the acclaimed trilogy of Pochsy Plays on which John has collaborated for over a decade, (recently nominated for the Governor General's Award for Drama). Other directing credits include Michael Kennard's Puzzle Me Red, Miriam Cusson and Mélissa Rockburn's Stuff, Diana Kolpak's Lionheart, Emelia Symington Fedy's Patti Fedy in Lovers Rock. For the De-ba-jeh-mu-jig Theatre Group, John directed the workshop and full production of The Gulch, as well as Tomson Highway's A Trickster Tale. John also directed Clown & Such... at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre, Louis Negin's The Boy Scouts' Manual, and Linda Brokenshire's The Lecture and The Hero.

Along with his long time partner and collaborator Michael Kennard, John has used his extensive performance and show creation experience to create more advanced workshops specifically designed for the student that wishes to use this work in a professional capacity. Some are performance oriented and some are creation oriented but there are as many reasons for taking them as there are students.

Fiona Griffiths - Guest Instructor

FIONA GRIFFITHS RN,MFA,MA is a teacher, coach, mover, actor, choreographer/creator, nurse and body worker. With a BFA in modern dance and choreography and an MFA in multi-media performing arts and creative process, Fiona has also studied many movement and acting techniques from Feldenkrais, Alexander, and Kinetic Awareness to clown, bouffon, Theatre of the Oppressed, and Suzuki and Grotowski work.

She has performed extensively in dance, theatre, clown and video. Fiona studied and taught with Richard Pochinko and Linda Putnam for many years.

She teaches and coaches actors, dancers and clowns in movement, acting and source work. Fiona has taught in the graduate theatre programs of York and Yale Universities and choreographed and coached for many professional theatre and dance companies.

In 2007/8, during a sabbatical year at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, England, she completed an MA in training and coaching actors. Her thesis titled Wired to Act, explored the neurobiology of training performers.

As well as running independent workshops and coaching performers, Fiona also teaches at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, Hart House, Equity Showcase and the Clown Farm.

Visit Fiona at www.fionagriffiths.com

Karen Hines - Guest Instructor

KAREN HINES is an award-winning performer, writer and director. Her acclaimed theatre company, Keep Frozen: Pochsy Productions, presents Hines’ highly theatrical, absurdist, satirical, neo-cabarets and comedies, including Pochsy’s Lips, Oh, baby (Pochsy’s Adventures by the Sea), and Citizen Pochsy (Head Movements of a Long-Haired Girl). These solo satires have been presented across Canada and in the U.S. at venues including One Yellow Rabbit, Factory Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Dallas Theatre Centre and Alice’s in New York. Now published together, The Pochsy Plays (published by Coach House Books) have received numerous production and literary awards and nominations, including the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Alberta Writer's Guild Award, and finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Drama.

Karen also wrote the musical play Hello ... Hello (A Romantic Satire), and co-composed it with her long-time collaborator Greg Morrison. Hello...Hello was presented at Factory Theatre and by the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, and has been nominated for six Dora Mavor Moore Awards, three Canadian Comedy Awards, and for the Chalmers Award for play writing.

Karen has been a long-time collaborator with Canadian horror clown duo Mump & Smoot, and is the Dora Award-winning director of all of their productions to date, including Caged, Ferno, Something Else and Flux; from the Fringe Festivals to CanStage, from Yale Rep to the La Jolla Playhouse. She has also taught clowning and bouffon across Canada, and has given seminars at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and at the Yale School of Drama.

Karen has been a series regular on Ken Finkleman’s acclaimed television series The Newsroom (CBC), she co-starred in his mini-series Foreign Objects (Rhombus) and in his teleplay Escape from the Newsroom (CBC). and starred in his cult hit Married Life (Comedy Central/Atlantis), for which her performance was nominated for CableAce and Gemini awards. Other credits include The Second City, Angels in America (Canadian Stage), Swollen Tongues (Necessary Angel), The Drowsy Chaperone (Mirvish Productions), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Killer Films), Man of the Year (Barry Levinson) and Douglas Coupland's September 10 (Royal Shakespeare Company).

Other directing credits include Linda Griffiths' Age of Arousal (ATP) and Darren O'Donnell's Over (Buddies, Toronto), as well as master classes and seminars at Yale University, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Queens University and at the Universities of York, Victoria, Toronto and others.

She wrote, directed, produced and performed in the short film, My Name is Pochsy: An Industrial Film (Bravo!FACT 2007), one in a series of short films in development featuring the character “Pochsy.” She is currently writing her first feature-length black comedy, Crazy Like a Girl.

For extra information on Karen please visit www.pochsy.org