Clowns Without Borders - USA

Moshe Cohen was the US artist in this project. Afterwards, he stayed on in Yangon to do 5 shows with the Belgian-Myanmar group.
At the same time he offered training sessions to Activity Facilitators who work with children in Training Schools and Child Friendly Spaces of disadvantaged areas. The training was similar to the delta workshops in focus, taking the work further by Moshe’s participation in AF activities in the field, thus providing hands on training.
This winter the international CWB push as all of last years groups are sending performances to Myanmar. Moshe Cohen will focus on working in the Training Schools, in Yangon and in Mandalay. He will be offering performances and furthering last year’s training with Activity Facilitators with more workshops and field trainings.

In a few words (for those without time to read it all), the project proved very successful in many ways: spreading large amounts of laughter, creating humorful performances in collaboration with Myanmar artists, and empowering local educators and activity leaders with new skills to increase the humor, joy and laughter component in their daily activities with children. In addition, the project brought skilled artists from numerous countries, disciplines and cultures together to reach out to a population that welcomes more laughter into their lives. The project was managed with fiscal efficiency and frugality, the collaboration with local partners was very dynamic. The total numbers are not yet in (Belgian and French project), however in the activities I was involved in we reached 6500 people in 20 shows, the great majority of them children. 50 plus educators and activity trainers participated in workshops as did a little over 100 children. The ‘French’ and Belgian projects are having/had (the Belgians are active until the end of February) similar impacts.. In addition, the Swedes have an active parallel project in Yangun with the Eden (Disabled) Center offering workshops and creating performance. The French Clowns Sans Frontieres started coming to Myanmar in 2004, and Clowns Without Borders looks forwards to more projects in years to come.