FAREWELL MY FOOL
A JOYBOY DA CLOWN SHOW

RUNTIME: 60 minutes with no intermission.
Portions of the show contain the use of water based haze, and some strobing lights.


Part fable, part manifesto, and part love letter to New York City’s working performers, Farewell My Fool follows JoyBoy da Clown as they spiral through an embarrassing audition that leads them to question their integrity and self esteem.

Based on true events, Farewell My Fool is a physical theater performance that utilizes clowning, humor, and audience participation to interrogate the legacy of exploitation in performance, the failures of ambition, respectability politics, and the power of self-realization.

Created, choreographed, written and performed by JOYBOY
Director: Christian Warner
Voice Actor: Owen Laheen
Original Music: Cleo Reed
Lighting: Connor Sale
Costumes: Atelier Abene
Costume and Wig Supervision: Emily Harmse

Photo by Caitlyn Gaurano

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

JOYBOY also known as Joy-Marie Thompson is a performing artist, writer, and educator from Pittsburgh, PA. As a performer, they have worked with choreographers such as Sidra Bell, Staycee Pearl, Shamel Pitts, Stephanie Batten Bland, Maxine Doyle, and Damani Pompey. They have appeared in The Mckittrick Hotel’s Sleep No More, The Public Theater for Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s shadow/land, The Metropolitan Opera’s El Niño and Aida and Geoff Sobelle’s HOME. Their commercial credits include performing in music videos for Chloe Flower and The Kills. Their alter ego, JOYBOY has performed dance comedy shows in night life venues throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan, NY. As a choreographer, they have presented work for PRISMA Festival, Derida Stage, PearlDiving Movement Residency, Arts on Site, The Brick Theater, and more. As an educator, JOYBOY teaches improvisation and contemporary dance as an adjunct lecturer at SUNY Purchase’s Conservatory of Dance. Their writing has been published by thINKingDANCE and Imagining: A Gibney Journal.

CHRISTIAN A. WARNER is an interdisciplinary performing artist, choreographer, and director. His choreography and direction has been commissioned by Triskelion Arts, Owen/Cox Dance Group, Trevor Jackson, McKoy Dance Project, Ballet Co-Laboratory, and the BlackLight Summit curated by Tariq O Meally. As a performer, Christian's dance company credits include Boca Tuya, NVA & Guests, Sidra Bell Dance New York, TU Dance, Owen/Cox Dance Group, Ponybox Dance Theatre and Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre. He has performed repertoire from creators Alvin Ailey, Bryan Arias, Alan Lucien Oyen, Kayla Farrish, Aszure Barton, Darius Barnes, Yoshito Sakuraba, Rena Butler, Stefanie Batten-Bland, and Slowdanger. Most recently, Christian was the recipient of a Heinz Creative Development Award with Attack Theatre.

OWEN LAHEEN (they/them) is an actor from Wicklow, Ireland. Their most recent credits include Drip Feed (wild project), Henry IV (TFANA), Translations (Irish Repertory Theatre, Lucille Lortel Award Winner for Outstanding Revival), The Wolves (McCarter Theater), Belfast Girls (Irish Rep). Screen: Mutt (Sundance 2023, Berlinale 2023); City On A Hill (Showtime). They have devised and developed new work in collaboration with LaMaMa Etc, Clubbed Thumb, Mercury Store, and others.They trained at UNCSA, BADA, and received a BFA from SUNY Purchase.

EMILY HARMSE is a local wig designer and costume professional who has been working in the industry for a decade. With an expertise in immersive theater and events, they have a wide arranged portfolio. Some previous works include "Sleep No More" "Interview With A Vampire" and "Cult of Love." They have been so excited to work with Joy Boy on "Farewell My Fool." As a member of the LGBTQIA+ they practice ethical, intentional work that align with their beliefs and vision. This piece is important to see and has been a privilege to work on. They are currently doing hair,makeup, and wigs for Eurydice at The Signature Theatre.

CLEO REED is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice uses participatory art, music composition, instrument-making, bandleading, installation and fabric arts. Under the alias Cleo Reed, they complete musical projects that are rooted in their ancestral & cultural lineage. In their practice, they are currently drawn to notions of tradition, dissolving the binary, making noise, and breaking the barrier between artist and audience. Cleo is a recipient of the 2024 Map Fund and currently a resident at Abrons Arts Center's 2024-2026 AIRspace Performance Residency.

JULI AND ALEX ABENE are New York based costume designers and stylists.They specialize in costumes for theater and live music & events but are also available for film, photoshoots, burlesque, or whatever idea you may have that needs to be brought to life. Clients include Jon Batiste, Disney Style, Punchdrunk International, AMC+, Amazon Prime Video, and more.

CONNOR SALE is a Brooklyn-based Lighting Designer and the Resident Lighting Designer of Triskelion Arts. Recent collaborations include: til infiniti, The Closties Variety Hour; The Suite; to begin with no end; ENUF; The Dybbuk Part Two (Triskelion Arts), Das Ersatz (The Brick), MEOW! (Exponential Festival), GOLEMATRIARK (Ars Nova), But, Soft (PAGEANT), the body || dust (Gibney), and Sea Change (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago). He tours internationally with Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (Sadler’s Wells/École des Sables), Akram Khan’s Gigenis, and Faye Driscoll’s Weathering. He’s interested in using the temporary nature of light to make people more active in space. More of his work can be found at connorsale.com and at @connorsalelight

ANNA WOTRING is a community-minded dance artist, designer, and production stage manager, dedicated to the practice of collaborative leadership. As the Director of Production at Triskelion Arts, Wotring shapes programming that makes production design accessible to movement artists, whether they're starting to explore an idea or deep in research. Trisk serves as a home, allowing artists to materialize their production vision and find imaginative pathways around and through tangible possibility. Wotring holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from the Five College Dance Department in Western Massachusetts. She has had the privilege of working with a wide range of dance artists and organizations, including Alvin Ailey Studios, Annie Heath, Attack Theater, Ballet Des Ameriques, BalletNext, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, the Dance Conservatory of Pittsburgh, Dance Place, H2O Contemporary Dance, Jennifer Nugent, Lauren Horn, Monica Bill Barnes & Company, New York Live Arts, the Pillow Project, Prayers of the People, RoseAnne Spradlin, Scapegoat Garden, slowdanger, Time Lapse Dance, and many others. Wotring is deeply grateful and honored to be working, imagining, and making magic with the Trisk team and community.

Special thanks to Jess Smith, Jay Delise, Alex Milan, Alan Libert, Rosemarie Albanese, Karsen Thompson, Jen Mazzio, and the team of Triskelion Arts for your considered support and letting me fool around. Thank you to my parents and family for always tending to and holding my dreams.

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

The Trisk Artist-in-Residence programming is made possible through the generous support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.


We respectfully acknowledge that the work of Triskelion Arts is situated on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape peoples. We pay our respects to their land, water, and ancestors, past, present, and future. This acknowledgment demonstrates a commitment to the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and to learning to be better stewards of this land.


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