La Pinede Bldg, First floor, Bloc A,
Beirut Hall Street, Sin el Fil
Beirut
Lebanon
- Arts
Awrad-Clown Me In consists of 8 part-time staff members and 25 volunteers, with a yearly budget range between $200,000 to $300,000. The main sources of funding come from grants and donations and partner organisations, such as UNICEF, Drosos Foundation, Sesam Foundation, IOM and others. We also partner with local organisations and groups in different regions across Lebanon to implement our projects, since many of them involve large groups and audiences. These partners and funders help us to implement our main projects, which are focused on street theatre and the arts as tools for social change. We also offer many workshops, and more recently opened a school (The International Institute for Very Very Serious Studies) to create a more in-depth and sustainable teaching environment.
Awrad-Clown Me In’s main objective is to provide relief to disadvantaged communities and remote areas in Lebanon and abroad. We use humour, clowning, street theatre and social therapy to shed light on important social, environmental and humanitarian issues. We aim to create direct and lasting social impact through our projects, whether they are immersive street theatre performances or intensive workshops, by addressing difficult themes like migration, human rights, and social responsibility. We also create viral video and social media campaigns on topics like consumption, waste, anti-discrimination and racism (among others) to reach a wider audience. Within Lebanon, we aim to make arts and culture accessible to a wider public by taking our projects outside the capital to rural and/or disadvantaged communities and building bridges between communities through them. Clown Me In has also worked around the world, in Mexican, Lebanese, Palestinian, Indian, Brazilian, Moroccan, Jordanian, Syrian, Greek and British communities.
IIVVSS (The International Institute for Very Very Serious Studies) – A 7-month training program to develop the skills of experienced artists and send them out to engage with local communities through their field projects.
- CATCH (Creative Arts for CHange) - or CAPE (Creative Arts for Peace and Equality) as it was called last year, for the training of artists/facilitators to give workshops in clowning, puppetry, social therapy and improvisation.
- Clown Tours: yearly tours in which the clowns go to different locations around the country to put on free shows, mostly in rural/disadvantaged communities.
- CRC (Celebrating the Rights of Children) – a touring project around Lebanon, involving a performance and a series of activities at games in the form of different stations centered around the themes of the rights of the child.
- Workshops - short-term workshops in clowning and street theatre
- The Caravan - a project that puts voices of people at the heart of a street theatre performance, through the use of recorded storytelling audio. A touring, participatory street performance dealing with human and children’s rights, built collaboratively by professional theatre makers and non-professionals refugee artists which incorporates recorded interviews conducted with Lebanese people, Palestinian and Syrian refugee populations living in Lebanon.
Awrad-Clown Me In has 12 years of experience in the field, having worked on a multitude of projects, mainly focused on performance and skills-based training.
We are very invested in working with young and vibrant people from different communities. We have given in-depth training in clowning, performance, and storytelling to over 300 people, some of whom are now doing their own projects with our support, or performing to support themselves. Many of these participants have worked to break down barriers within their own communities.
In the course of our performance projects, we have recorded more than 250 personal stories from around Lebanon and beyond and produced ten different performances, including street theater, clown, and storytelling shows that deal with issues such as the importance of education, the dangers of discrimination, and the rights of the child. These shows have been performed more than 500 times in Lebanon, Jordan, and the Balkans, Greece, Germany and other places. Because of this, we have grown our capacity for mobilising large groups of people and uniting them through storytelling and performance, while giving the arts a social and humanitarian role within our work.
As we have worked consistently with transparency, authenticity, and honesty, we have found great appreciation for our ability to affect communities in a positive manner and have formed numerous partnerships and networks within Lebanon and beyond, and believe we can add our skills to the ALF network in this capacity.
Because of ALF’s commitment to inclusive community-building across the EUROMED region through the use of narrative, exchange and empathy, we believe that these principles are perfectly in line with Awrad-Clown Me In’s mission. Being part of such a network is important to us, not only to expand our outreach capabilities, but also to give us a chance to broaden the scope of what our work can bring to the table in terms of cultural exchange and dialogue. We would like to benefit from ALF’s wide network of people and organisations that are working in similar or complementary fields to ours for potential collaborations.