Latest news with #clown
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Red noses and big shoes fill Lima's streets for Clown Day
Dozens of clowns in oversized shoes, painted faces, and colourful costumes marched through Lima's streets on Sunday for Peru's annual Clown Day. View on euronews
CBC
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Srutika Sabu graduated medical school. Then she became a clown
Srutika Sabu didn't set out to be a performer. Originally, she set out to be a doctor. The Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist describes herself as a "generation 1.5" immigrant. Born in South India, her family immigrated to Canada when she was a child, landing in Brampton, Ont., before relocating again to the United States when she was in high school. "My parents decided the 2008 financial crisis was the right time to move to New Jersey to work in banking," she says. "I graduated high school there, I went to undergrad there, I went to med school there. I kind of followed this, like, very typical, very model minority, very South Asian excellence sort of path." In November 2019, shortly after finishing medical school, she felt like she needed a year off to "find herself" before starting her residency. So she moved back to Toronto temporarily to decompress. Then COVID hit — which she says, caused her to have "an existential crisis, like, I need to do something else in my life." By the time COVID restrictions had lifted, Sabu found herself stuck in Toronto, away from her family, with an expired U.S. visa and in need of some friends. So she took an improv course. From there, things quickly snowballed. In 2023, she took a clown class. Then she took a drag king class with performer Deanna Fleysher. She started working with Sweet Action Theatre Company, which she describes as "basically a clown cult," but also a place where "people from all backgrounds and all points in their artistic journey come and, like, incubate shows and ideas." And by the summer of 2024, she had a show in the Toronto Fringe Festival. She says that while she found performing therapeutic in a lot of ways, clown wasn't an immediate fit for her. "It was going against a lot of my programming," she says. "If you grew up in a certain, specific type of Asian household, you have to do things the right way. You can't fail. You have to keep up appearances. And what's so liberating about clown, in particular for me, was that literally the whole point of it is to fail, acknowledge the failure, and that's how you bring joy to the audience. And I was really bad at it for that reason." Her first show, 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go: Tosh Finds His Groove, starred her drag king/clown alter ego, Santosh Santosh — a self-proclaimed "tech bro, thought leader and second-hand Tesla owner." Sabu describes the character as a "beautiful love letter to South Asian masculinity." "He's a drunk uncle at a wedding, and also at the same time, he's incredibly optimistic, [always with] a bunch of business ideas," she says. Despite her medical education, Sabu says she was always an artist at heart. As a kid, she loved drawing and writing and music. Her parents encouraged her pursuits — but only up to a point. Once she started trying to make it a career, they were less enthused. "The reason my sister and I are the artsy kids we are is because my mom gave us so much free time, indulged us [in] any sort of artistic pursuit that we wanted, encouraged us, had so much feedback for us, and paid for piano lessons and all this sort of stuff," she says. "But I think it got too real for her, where, you know, she's like, 'Oh, I think I gave my children too much freedom, because now they're making a decision that I cannot imagine making.'" In addition to getting ready to do a remount of 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go in Vancouver, Sabu is also about to debut a new show Neptune's with a Fish, a musical comedy which she describes as "a semi-autobiographical journey told through magical realism and a talking egg." "[It's about] trying to interrogate who's allowed to be an artist and what does being an artist mean, philosophically and spiritually. Also, like, how is that connected to our migration history?" Sabu says that the children of immigrants are often discouraged from pursuing artistic careers, in part because their parents were "traumatized by the points-based immigration system." Her parents were allowed to immigrate to Canada, and subsequently to the United States, because they had chosen particular career paths and "studied the right thing at the right time." If they had been artists, she adds, they probably wouldn't have been allowed to come. That said, in some ways, it was her parents' practicality which allowed her to walk away from a career in medicine to pursue one in clown, she points out. "They sort of attribute their ability to provide their children with a sense of safety and options [to having] made certain choices at the expense of what they might have wanted to do," she says. "But those choices allowed the future generation to have more options than they did."
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Clown in a Cornfield' director Eli Craig: Comedy isn't 'respected' in show business
Based on the novel by Adam Cesare, Clown in a Cornfield (now in theatres) has all the elements of a classic horror movie setup, including scared teens in a small town and a creepy clown. Directed by Eli Craig, starring Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac and Kevin Durand, it feels like we're leaning into the 1980s slash flick aesthetic. The story begins as Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her dad, played by Aaron Abrams, move to the small town of Kettle Springs. The community is facing a particularly hard time after the Baypen Corn Syrup factory burned down, which provided several jobs for the town's residents. When Quinn arrives she becomes friends with the local teen rebels who tell her the tale of Frendo the clown, the town mascot who's believed to haunt the cornfields surrounded the old corn syrup factory. But the threat of Frendo quickly becomes a very real fear. While Craig is largely known for his horror-comedy films, like Little Evil, he took Clown in a Cornfield as his opportunity to step into a more classic horror format. "I did have something to prove, I'm not gonna lie. I had something to prove to the world, because a lot of times people would be like, 'Oh, you just know how to do comedy,' and it's a belittling thing in show business," Craig told Yahoo. "Whereas I think it should be respected, because comedy is hard, but it's not [respected] in show business." "I've done this for a long time and I wanted to just take a bite out of horror and create a world, and have some big set pieces that are action-packed, really create the grittiness of a present day throwback, kind of '80s slasher movie. But then keep some of my tone, which has elements of comedy, where you give people a release valve after mayhem ... and destruction and horror." The first relationship that's really established in the film is between Quinn and her dad, with Douglas and Abrams dealing with father-teen daughter tensions after the death of Quinn's mother, which led to their move. Admittedly, sometimes Quinn can be quite rude to her dad, but there's also a lot of sarcasm between the two. "The chemistry came very naturally to us, because he honestly kind of reminds me of my own dad, and it's a sense of humour that I have with my own dad," Douglas said. "In the script, it's the two of them against the world. They're kind of all each other has at the moment where we meet them." "So it's obviously a very heavy, loaded situation, but I think those are some of my favourite scenes, because they also incorporate humour in a really raw way, in a really relatable way." Quinn also has a crush, Carson MacCormac's Cole, whose father, Arthur Hill (Kevin Durand), is the town's mayor. As we've seen in all of Durand's previous work, from Dark Angel to Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, he's just an actor that completely immerses himself, and the audience, into his character. "I'm really attracted to opportunities where I can just set myself free and just go and play something different than me, because I get bored with me easily," Durand said. "There was a spectrum that I got to cover with this and in a short amount of time. It was a lot of bang for my buck in terms of the time that I was allotted in there, and the amount of play that I got to involve myself in. ... It was a really great, big, delicious meal. I love that challenge of, when I get into my obsessive realm and I won't leave a room until it starts to really make sense and sink in to my body." But a significant question for Clown in a Cornfield is how did Craig craft his version of a creepy clown, starting with what was provided in Cesare's writing. "Clown horror is basically a genre now, which makes me feel good, because if there was only one other great clown horror movie then I'd feel like I was pitted just against that," Craig said. "But I wanted this to be a unique clown, and so Adam Cesare, who wrote the book, gave us a lot of that backstory where he's this mascot ... for the whole town and that the town loves Frendo, and he's everywhere." "The one job everybody has at the factory, those jobs are gone, the factory is burned and decimated, and the American dream has become an American nightmare. And so that's the evolution I wanted Frendo to have, that he was this happy-go-lucky guy that now looks like it's he's not so happy or lucky anymore. And now he's this sort of washed up, angry, no longer hopeful ... villain." There's an added element in Clown in a Cornfield that links to youth and social media. While yes, a killer clown is certainly the big terror, the concept of being focused on social media and YouTube popularity becomes an interesting element in this horror story. "I think a lot of the movie is about youth and a generational divide, and I think the characters really encapsulate ... what it feels like to be a youth right now, and all the anxiety that comes along with having social media, and all the anxiety that comes along with just living in today's world," Douglas said. "I'm definitely one of those people that wants to tell a story that doesn't involve social media and stays away from cell phones and all those things, but this was just a problem that I had to embrace, because it's so much a part of the story, and it's a part of what these kids do," Craig added. "I don't like it when it's a part of the backdrop, I like it when it's a part of the storyline. And in this case, it's a part of the storyline that then has a great reversal moment, and I could use it to kind of elevate some humour and some comedy about people not getting what really happens."
