Clowns Without Borders - USA

This winter France, Belgium, Sweden and the US CWB groups are sending performances to Myanmar. Moshe Cohen will focus on working in Children’s Training Schools (residential institutions), in Yangon and in Mandalay. He will be offering performances and furthering last year’s training with Activity Facilitators.

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.