Clown to the depths. Devise your way up. Make your show!
Create personal shows with a transformational process of devising and embodiment. Make them raw and vulnerable, unhinged comedy, transcendent drama, performance art with poetic text and physicality, interdisciplinary with media and music, or sacred ritual acts.
We’ll use Chris Bayes physical theater clown impulse work with devising methods to access truths in the body hidden by social masks.
We’ll structure that material with established narrative forms or discover your own. Mash or blow them up.
Embody the work using physical acting methods from rigorous lineages such as Lecoq.
“I call Kenny my Solo-Show Birth Doula. If you have a desire to make work that is meaningful, that comes from a messy and raw place, that feels daunting to mold and shape, go spend time with Kenny. He will help you give birth to that piece. He works with the body, with the heart, and mind…with all of you….and you will find what’s yours.
He’s super smart, incredibly kind and deeply intuitive. He also has a deep passion for crafting personal stories that bring a universal truth to light.”
– Wendy Allegaert Off-Broadway actor & clown
Kenny Yun is an award winning Bay Area solo theater maker and director. He was one of the three long term instructors at The Marsh theater, and the first Asian American to teach solo theater in San Francisco.
He has coached solo performers such as Echo Brown whose hit show Black Virgins Are Not For Hipsters launched her career as a Young Adult author earning praise from the NY Times.
After physical theater training on the East Coast with Pig Iron theater and maestro teachers such as Chris Bayes and Budi Miller, he is also a devisor for Lecoq based clown, performance art, and solo / ensemble theater in New York and San Francisco.
– Returning to acting in plays. My first New York play reading is in April!
2025
– I completed the Pandemonium Studio clown teacher training program with Chris Bayes, head of physical acting at the Yale School of Drama.
– As part of the Stanford Humanities Fellowship Program 2025, I mentored a Bay Area MD in playwriting on his first script that was about anesthesia induced dreams.
– With brilliant Bay Area solo theater teacher Joyful Raven of Berkeley Rep, we taught solo performance at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference and then with Mark Kenward at the AWP Los Angeles Writer’s Conference.
I collaborate with solo performers to transform their shows into embodied, theatricalized plays using craft from established theatrical lineages and experimental devising techniques.
I devise with solo performers, clowns, performance artists, and theater makers to create new material or further develop shows.
The book I remember most from childhood is D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Reading mythology led me to major in English Literature at UC Berkeley.
I am fortunate to have studied with professors in the Pacific Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies department and at the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies.
