Today was a day of mocking in Philippe's class - the exercise we spent the entire class on was having one person from class stand up and be interviewed by Philippe as themselves, while others from the class got up beside them and tried to have fun to mock that person through imitating and parodying what they did. Overall it was a pretty funny class.
The first person to go up was Kura, and she turned out to be quite good fodder for parodying. The first person to get up to parody her didn't last very long because they weren't having enough (or I would suggest any) fun with their mocking, and so Philippe asked them to sit down. From there though, a couple of people were very entertaining with Kura as their subject matter. One person was good fun to watch and was clearly having a good time, but their parody really had very little to do with Kura and what she was doing, so the success of her parody was limited, Philippe said: "You have good fun, and we like you. But what you do means nothing. Nothing! It is not parody. But we like you."
The other person mocking Kura was great. She had great fun with Kura's gestures and her voice, taking subtle little moments or habits and twisting them or exaggerating them until they became a sort of in-joke between us, and twisting Kura's words ever so slightly and taking a bit of liberty with what Kura really said to make it ridiculous. There were some absolutely hilarious moments. The key to it seemed to be the way that she really took it quite far and in some ways was quite nasty, but because of the pleasure she took in the mocking it never seemed mean-spirited or nasty. She made it look easy (which I soon found out it isn't).
So then I got up to mock the second person, an English woman called Sophie who I feel I know reasonably well and also is quite good for taking the piss out of (she wouldn't mind me saying that). But it was not as easy as I had thought it might be. I found that when I was up there I became too focused on imitating Sophie properly and doing a good job of the impersonation and generally getting it right. Dumb. I had no real fun or play in what I was doing and I didn't take joy to be nasty about her. The key ingredient and I just forgot it. And Philippe let me know. Suffice to say I was sitting down again relatively quickly.
The rest of the class passed in a similar fashion, with about six different people being mocked in the end and nearly everyone in the class having a go at the mocking. There were some good moments from quite a few people, but nobody that I felt really stood out -except the same girl who did Kura really well: she got up again to parody someone else and it was the same story again. She had everyone in hysterics and just seemed to find the pleasure in the exercise extremely easily while also doing a really good job of the impersonation. It was great to watch.
The relevance of this exercise to other Bouffon work was pretty clear I think (a nice contrast to Monday and Tuesday's classes). This parody is the same thing the Bouffon do to the bastards, just on a smaller scale. Philippe summed it up with: "Your parody is good, but we don't hate Kura so the nastiness only goes so far. With a bastard the parody is one hundred times more. When a Bouffon does parody of bastard, the bastard walks in and sees the parody of themself and dies of heart attack."
I spent the afternoon after class with my Auto Cours group locking down exactly what we're going to do on Friday and planning all the logistical side of our performance. What we're trying to do is really ambitious and I really like that. We're all committed to working hard on it though, and we all seem to have fun with our idea so I think it could be really good. We'll have another rehearsal tomorrow afternoon and then maybe Friday morning before we perform on Friday. Exciting. Even if we get banged off straight away by Philippe I don't mind so much, because at least this week I feel we've worked as hard as we could on it and it will be the best we can do in the time provided - work that at least we can be proud of doing even if it fails. Hopefully it won't though. Hopefully we'll be great. Time will tell.
Wednesday, 20 March 2013
Tuesday, 19 March 2013
Day Twelve
Another
somewhat confusing and difficult class with Philippe today, as we more or less
continued the work from yesterday. While some things got a bit clearer through
the work we did and through Philippe’s explanations, there was still a lot of
confusion for me about the purpose of the exercise. It was also the second day
in a row where I wasn’t able to get up and be worked (I did try today) and I
found that a bit frustrating too.
We all got
into our costumes before Philippe arrived today – I was ready and waiting in my
homeless guy ensemble that I had pulled together from the stuff I had at home
(didn’t actually look too bad I thought). Once we began class, Philippe asked
to have a group of all the ‘poot’ (his word for prostitute – is it actually
French? I don’t know) up on stage together. So that straight away meant I
couldn’t go up. Annoying. So there were a group of about seven or eight
prostitutes up on stage ready to be worked. And, out of a 135-minute class, we
spent the next 115 odd minutes working slowly (sometimes painfully so, I
thought) through this group one by one.
One of the
clarifications Philippe made early on for us was about what exactly this
exercise was, since we didn’t seem to be actively trying to mock anything and
nor were we playing a ‘bastard’. He explained to us that this was the ‘neutral
Bouffon’, where we try to get the actor to find the beauty of the Bouffon without any of the mocking. We as the audience have to love you as the Bouffon when you are not acting the bastard yet, and when you do mock the bastard you don't lose the Bouffon and we must still see you and your beauty. Still kind of getting my head around that. Another key clarification he made was that you should never be playing the ugliness of the Bouffon or how disgusting the Bouffon is, we always want to see the beauty: "If you say to me 'I am like this because my character is like this' I will kill you. You are killed. Forever."
So we saw a bunch of prostitutes trying in various ways to be 'beautiful', without much success. A couple of times someone would find something, but it didn't seem to me to really be in the realm of Bouffon - it was much more still and less funny and crazy than Bouffon. but I guess that ties in with Philippe's whole ethos of discovery and beauty over rules and form: as long as the actor is discovering something beautiful in their work then he doesn't really care if it follows his rules or not. One guy (playing a prostitute) managed to find something that was beautiful and much more in the realm of Bouffon. It was funny, it was charming, and it was mildly disturbing and we all really liked it. The only thing is I don't know why Philippe was able to guide him to this place and not anyone else, or even what this place is and how we are supposed to know how to find it for ourselves. Very confusing.
A couple of good quotes from today:
"I don't care what you do. You do whatever you want, only you must be fantastically beautiful."
"You did just what you did yesterday. It was a bit frozen food."
"If you play too much you are ugly. If you play exactly what we need in order to dream around you, you are beautiful."
"First we love your spirit. When we love you, it is because we love your spirit."
When this first group were finally done, we had a chance to have others get up for the last 15 minutes of class. About eight of us got up to work, but because of the limited time only about three people actually got to go (I wasn't one of them). Even if I had gotten a chance to work though I have no idea what I would have done. I just didn't have any clue about how to approach the exercise or what part of myself or what quality I should be trying to offer. Maybe that would've been a good thing though, maybe from this place I would've been able to find something beautiful. Who knows. Hopefully I'll get a chance to find out tomorrow.
Only three days left now - and really only one more class with Philippe, with his Garage Day on Thursday and the Auto Cours on Friday. Better get the most out of tomorrow, and hopefully crack this whole Bouffon thing.
Monday, 18 March 2013
Week Three
Back into it today with an extremely confusing and difficult class with Philippe where nobody who got up to work really experienced any great degree of success. Everybody seemed to really struggle with the exercises and not really know what they were meant to be doing. It was the first day I've been here that I haven't gotten up on the floor to work, but even just sitting and watching was confusing enough for me.
We'd been asked to bring in costume elements to work with today, but a bunch of people (myself included) had sort of misunderstood what we were supposed to be bringing and so couldn't really get up. What Philippe wanted us to have was a costume for a 'modern Bouffon': someone unemployed, or homeless, or a refugee, or a prostitute, or a transvestite, etc etc. The modern day equivalent of all the hunchbacks and whatnot - anyone at whom the finger of scorn has been pointed. A couple of people had brought the wrong kind of stuff (one guy was just dressed as a Muslim and another girl wanted to be a bear), so it wasn't really going to work and they had to sit down.
So Philippe started working people in groups of three. They would go and stand in a huddle right upstage while someone from the class kicked and hit them while the rest of the class threw tennis balls at them - this was very good fun - to get the whole outcast sort of thing going I suppose. Philippe would then put on some music, and very slowly they were to come out of their huddle and come towards us and then start into this piece of text that Philippe had us all memorise. The first group was pretty bad at this. Philippe said to them: "You start to break our balls with 'my character is so miserable, I am so sad' - the children of God they are happy. You look as if you apologise. You are not proud to be who you are. Horrible."
So after not too long they sat down and another group had a go, with pretty similar results. It seemed like nobody really knew what kind of qualities of performance we were supposed to be hitting, or what this particular Bouffon was all about. I think it made it hard that the subject matter and text that they had to use wasn't in and of itself funny, and also possibly just the mere act of having to use text might have tripped some people up. So much of the Bouffon work we've done up til now has been improvised and has been aimed at being very obviously funny, that this work was very confusing and I felt like we didn't really know how to do it.
I think it was all aimed at finding the beauty particular to each person within their Bouffon, but nobody really was able to find it because nobody could figure out what that meant within this particular exercise. There was one moment of a girl laughing as her Bouffon that everyone agreed was beautiful, and that we saw the beauty of the actor in this moment. It was a short moment though, and wasn't a funny or vulgar moment like I would normally associate with Bouffon either, so that was a bit confusing. Someone then asked of Philippe "When you laugh as a Bouffon, why are you laughing? Are you laughing at the audience or with us or at something else?" To which Philippe replied: "Why was she laughing? We don't know. As an audience when we don't know, we are happy." I think it makes sense to me but I'm still figuring it out.
All in all a very confusing day, and I'm hoping to find a costume for tomorrow that will mean I can get up and work and hopefully figure it out by doing (or at least try to).
Before class ended Philippe did offer what I thought was a wee gem when he critiqued someone's work for them being too self-conscious and worried about looking bad: "If you are a bit ashamed you cannot play on the stage. You have to be beautiful and happy in your shoes."
PS - we got our next Auto Cours text today as well: it's a scen between the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist's mother thirty years after their sons have died. On first reading I had no idea what we were going to do with it and was totally uninspired, but Taylor and I have teamed up with two other people and now have a pretty outrageous idea with lots of possible material to work on (it involves the two women undergoing various gynecological procedures at the hands of two priests - it's better than it sounds, I promise). We even did a couple of hours of rehearsal. Already feeling much better about this week's Auto Cours.
We'd been asked to bring in costume elements to work with today, but a bunch of people (myself included) had sort of misunderstood what we were supposed to be bringing and so couldn't really get up. What Philippe wanted us to have was a costume for a 'modern Bouffon': someone unemployed, or homeless, or a refugee, or a prostitute, or a transvestite, etc etc. The modern day equivalent of all the hunchbacks and whatnot - anyone at whom the finger of scorn has been pointed. A couple of people had brought the wrong kind of stuff (one guy was just dressed as a Muslim and another girl wanted to be a bear), so it wasn't really going to work and they had to sit down.
So Philippe started working people in groups of three. They would go and stand in a huddle right upstage while someone from the class kicked and hit them while the rest of the class threw tennis balls at them - this was very good fun - to get the whole outcast sort of thing going I suppose. Philippe would then put on some music, and very slowly they were to come out of their huddle and come towards us and then start into this piece of text that Philippe had us all memorise. The first group was pretty bad at this. Philippe said to them: "You start to break our balls with 'my character is so miserable, I am so sad' - the children of God they are happy. You look as if you apologise. You are not proud to be who you are. Horrible."
So after not too long they sat down and another group had a go, with pretty similar results. It seemed like nobody really knew what kind of qualities of performance we were supposed to be hitting, or what this particular Bouffon was all about. I think it made it hard that the subject matter and text that they had to use wasn't in and of itself funny, and also possibly just the mere act of having to use text might have tripped some people up. So much of the Bouffon work we've done up til now has been improvised and has been aimed at being very obviously funny, that this work was very confusing and I felt like we didn't really know how to do it.
I think it was all aimed at finding the beauty particular to each person within their Bouffon, but nobody really was able to find it because nobody could figure out what that meant within this particular exercise. There was one moment of a girl laughing as her Bouffon that everyone agreed was beautiful, and that we saw the beauty of the actor in this moment. It was a short moment though, and wasn't a funny or vulgar moment like I would normally associate with Bouffon either, so that was a bit confusing. Someone then asked of Philippe "When you laugh as a Bouffon, why are you laughing? Are you laughing at the audience or with us or at something else?" To which Philippe replied: "Why was she laughing? We don't know. As an audience when we don't know, we are happy." I think it makes sense to me but I'm still figuring it out.
All in all a very confusing day, and I'm hoping to find a costume for tomorrow that will mean I can get up and work and hopefully figure it out by doing (or at least try to).
Before class ended Philippe did offer what I thought was a wee gem when he critiqued someone's work for them being too self-conscious and worried about looking bad: "If you are a bit ashamed you cannot play on the stage. You have to be beautiful and happy in your shoes."
PS - we got our next Auto Cours text today as well: it's a scen between the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist's mother thirty years after their sons have died. On first reading I had no idea what we were going to do with it and was totally uninspired, but Taylor and I have teamed up with two other people and now have a pretty outrageous idea with lots of possible material to work on (it involves the two women undergoing various gynecological procedures at the hands of two priests - it's better than it sounds, I promise). We even did a couple of hours of rehearsal. Already feeling much better about this week's Auto Cours.
Friday, 15 March 2013
Day Ten - Auto Cours
So today was our Auto Cours presentations (mine and Taylor's first for Bouffon). I didn't really know how it was going to run or what to expect from it all so I went into it just a little bit nervous, especially since I really didn't know if what Taylor and I had come up with was going to work or not. And the nervousness was well warranted, because it was a complete train-wreck.
Somehow we drew the lucky first spot in the showing (which in hindsight is probably a bit of a blessing, because the audience had no good performances to compare our disaster with). So we got up in our stupid costumes with our stupid character choices and our stupid attempt at a scene, and we basically just died. It was really horrible. We got a few polite laughs from the audience but otherwise not much and got about halfway through our text before Philippe banged his drum to stop us. He didn't have much to say to us other than "Piece of shit. Goodbye."
And he was right. Our piece was under-rehearsed, had no clear target or anything it was really mocking, wasn't very fun, and had no point. It was just bad. Looking back, we had no idea how to interpret the exercise and how to make text work alongside the Bouffon work we've ben doing in class, which has all been improvisational. From watching other groups though I now realise that Taylor and I were nowhere near adventurous enough with the text and didn't let our imaginations go with it. We also decided that we would improvise our blocking etc and see what happened in the moment (because we thought that the improvisational side of things was where we'd been finding the fun in our Bouffon work), but we didn't put in place any structures at all for ourselves to play within and so it really just floundered. We pretty much had no idea what we were doing.
So we felt pretty crappy sitting down after that to watch everybody else present. But there were some other shockers, but also a couple of really good pieces and I learnt a lot from watching both failure and success. It seems that one of the basic principles, that I'm coming to see more and more, is just to GO FAR with whatever you do and don't hold back, no matter how bad or stupid you think it could be: "You have to be courageous to have such bad taste, but it is beautiful so we love you." There's nothing worse to watch than a half-assed and apologetic attempt. Also, the Bouffon must clearly be mocking something. If you are just on stage having a good time being nasty and vulgar and outrageous it can still be fun for an audience, but it isn't Bouffon. Bouffon must be intelligent, it must have a clear target, it must have an agenda. There were several groups today who were very entertaining but didn't really say anything or mock anything in particular.
There was only one group today who I would say were really excellent, and they got a massive round of applause from everyone, including Philippe. It was two guys who had this really well-rehearsed scene between God and Adam, where God was a sort of sexual-deviant-transvestite-priest and Adam was his slightly retarded alter boy assistant. Describing it here doesn't do it justice so I'm not going to bother with it too much. They were just a perfect example of going as far as you can (and being as disgusting as possible), picking a clear target, and having an enormous amount of fun doing it. You just watched it and were like "That's it! It's so obvious! How do I do that?" The imagination they showed in dreaming around the text and not being confined by it but using it to springboard onto bigger and better things was incredible. I suppose working with text in Bouffon should be almost completely unlike working with any other text, where you generally take maybe 90% of your clues from what is written for you. What this group showed today (and a couple of other groups, to a lesser extent) is that you use the text to say what you want to say and to have fun in any way that you want to have fun. Which is pretty cool. But is also something I do not know how to do...
At the end of class someone asked a question about whether some of the pieces performed today really fit into the form of "Bouffon". Sure they were funny, but were they really "Bouffon" in the sense we're aiming for? I'd been thinking about similar things. Philippe answered by letting us in on a 'secret':
"It is possible to not do the exercise I set and to still be good. You may not do what I tell you to do and still be good. To offer, to find freedom and discover; this is good. Bouffon has its own rules, like every other form, but you can completely ignore them and still discover something good. When I see this, then I am too happy watching something good to care whether it is Bouffon or Clown or Shakespeare or whatever. I want to watch what is good. I don't give a shit if you follow my rules, I give a shit if you discover something. I like you better than I like what I teach."
So overall it was a hard day, but a good day. And even the pain of absolute failure is not so bad in this place, it's relatively easy to laugh it off and soldier on which is nice. And we learnt some valuable lessons from today, so next week we've resolved to work about 1000 times harder on our Auto Cours and to come back and offer something hilarious and well-rehearsed full of vulgar and nasty, yet specifically-targeted and biting, parody all while having an outrageously good time. Sounds easy enough, right?
Somehow we drew the lucky first spot in the showing (which in hindsight is probably a bit of a blessing, because the audience had no good performances to compare our disaster with). So we got up in our stupid costumes with our stupid character choices and our stupid attempt at a scene, and we basically just died. It was really horrible. We got a few polite laughs from the audience but otherwise not much and got about halfway through our text before Philippe banged his drum to stop us. He didn't have much to say to us other than "Piece of shit. Goodbye."
And he was right. Our piece was under-rehearsed, had no clear target or anything it was really mocking, wasn't very fun, and had no point. It was just bad. Looking back, we had no idea how to interpret the exercise and how to make text work alongside the Bouffon work we've ben doing in class, which has all been improvisational. From watching other groups though I now realise that Taylor and I were nowhere near adventurous enough with the text and didn't let our imaginations go with it. We also decided that we would improvise our blocking etc and see what happened in the moment (because we thought that the improvisational side of things was where we'd been finding the fun in our Bouffon work), but we didn't put in place any structures at all for ourselves to play within and so it really just floundered. We pretty much had no idea what we were doing.
So we felt pretty crappy sitting down after that to watch everybody else present. But there were some other shockers, but also a couple of really good pieces and I learnt a lot from watching both failure and success. It seems that one of the basic principles, that I'm coming to see more and more, is just to GO FAR with whatever you do and don't hold back, no matter how bad or stupid you think it could be: "You have to be courageous to have such bad taste, but it is beautiful so we love you." There's nothing worse to watch than a half-assed and apologetic attempt. Also, the Bouffon must clearly be mocking something. If you are just on stage having a good time being nasty and vulgar and outrageous it can still be fun for an audience, but it isn't Bouffon. Bouffon must be intelligent, it must have a clear target, it must have an agenda. There were several groups today who were very entertaining but didn't really say anything or mock anything in particular.
There was only one group today who I would say were really excellent, and they got a massive round of applause from everyone, including Philippe. It was two guys who had this really well-rehearsed scene between God and Adam, where God was a sort of sexual-deviant-transvestite-priest and Adam was his slightly retarded alter boy assistant. Describing it here doesn't do it justice so I'm not going to bother with it too much. They were just a perfect example of going as far as you can (and being as disgusting as possible), picking a clear target, and having an enormous amount of fun doing it. You just watched it and were like "That's it! It's so obvious! How do I do that?" The imagination they showed in dreaming around the text and not being confined by it but using it to springboard onto bigger and better things was incredible. I suppose working with text in Bouffon should be almost completely unlike working with any other text, where you generally take maybe 90% of your clues from what is written for you. What this group showed today (and a couple of other groups, to a lesser extent) is that you use the text to say what you want to say and to have fun in any way that you want to have fun. Which is pretty cool. But is also something I do not know how to do...
At the end of class someone asked a question about whether some of the pieces performed today really fit into the form of "Bouffon". Sure they were funny, but were they really "Bouffon" in the sense we're aiming for? I'd been thinking about similar things. Philippe answered by letting us in on a 'secret':
"It is possible to not do the exercise I set and to still be good. You may not do what I tell you to do and still be good. To offer, to find freedom and discover; this is good. Bouffon has its own rules, like every other form, but you can completely ignore them and still discover something good. When I see this, then I am too happy watching something good to care whether it is Bouffon or Clown or Shakespeare or whatever. I want to watch what is good. I don't give a shit if you follow my rules, I give a shit if you discover something. I like you better than I like what I teach."
So overall it was a hard day, but a good day. And even the pain of absolute failure is not so bad in this place, it's relatively easy to laugh it off and soldier on which is nice. And we learnt some valuable lessons from today, so next week we've resolved to work about 1000 times harder on our Auto Cours and to come back and offer something hilarious and well-rehearsed full of vulgar and nasty, yet specifically-targeted and biting, parody all while having an outrageously good time. Sounds easy enough, right?
Thursday, 14 March 2013
Day Nine
No delays on the trains today! So Taylor and I arrived in Etampes even a bit early for Movement class - woah. Movement was fun again today, a slightly smaller class because of the earlier start on Thursday's but still good. We did some stretching, some moving, some dancing, some running, some jumping, some singing, and some games. I think more than anything what I'm getting out of these movement classes is the spirit of light and fun that Carlo encourages. It's not such a technical approach to Movement as I'm used to, but I find that it's far easier and makes a lot more sense when you have a bit of fun with it and just play. Especially when it comes to the games. I love games.
So then, being Thursday and Philippe's garage day, we had class with Tom Tom again. And today was an absolutely mental class. It kinda just felt like everybody was a little bit hysterical or something, and it was just crazy. Not in a bad way, just in a kind of weird way. But there were lots and lots and lots laughs to be had, and eventually I even got some of them myself which was nice.
First thing's first: we needed to take the opportunity to be nasty about the new Pope. So a group of five got up, deformed and costumed themselves however they wished, and then came out onto the stage as a group to some really religious music to one by one say a prayer for the new Pope. There was pretty limited success at this exercise on most fronts. Tom Tom kept encouraging people to be nastier with their prayers, but on the whole it was a bit safe and not that hilarious. There were a couple of really good moments, but mostly it was not great. The second group was much the same really (Taylor was particularly embarrassed about his contribution to the exercise, calling it "the worst thing he's ever done on stage").
So I got up with the third group, and for the vast majority of our time we really followed suit with the previous groups in how bad we were. We were up there kind of floundering in trying to make a funny prayer, and then confessing our sins and nothing was really working. I think that there wasn't really enough structure to this exercise to help it work properly - we didn't have any definite character or archetype to play, no specific deformity or costume, all we really had was knowing that we had to make a nasty prayer about the Pope, which wasn't a lot to go off. And it showed in everyone's performances and the way the audience received them.
So everything was going badly until Tom Tom asked for us to one by one tell some dirty jokes. I told a racist one that got some laughs, and so Tom Tom picked up on it and called me forward to tell more racist jokes. I had to think of all the racist jokes I knew as quick as I could and deliver them to the audience: the moment I finished one Tom Tom would yell "more!" I had to make them up. So there I am, on stage in an oversized Disney sweatshirt and no pants (coz that was my costume choice - good one, Jack) walking up and down and pulling racist jokes out of thin air. And when I ran out, I had to keep going, I had to make up my own racist jokes on the spot. I wasn't allowed time to think. I just had to do it. Most of them weren't clever or witty, sometimes they barely made sense. They were mostly very rude. And the audience loved it. Again, I was at the very edge of my brain's capabilities and garbage was just pouring out of my mouth, and it was offensive but apparently very funny. I probably was telling racist jokes for 2 minutes straight, just going with the flow of whatever came out of my mouth first and seeing where it would go. It was exhausting, but people seemed to really like it and I got a round of applause at the end of it.
That was the last group of people praying for the Pope and we moved onto a couple of groups of people being anorexic models before class finished. This had some better moments in it, as there was more of a structure to follow, more of a definite character or archetype to play, just generally more for a performer to work with I think. The clearer the framework around what you're doing and the better you know the material (or the more material there is), the freer you are to let go and to play around. When I was at my freest was when I had the framework of simply churning out racist joke after racist joke, and that was all I had to do. I didn't have to invent something clever or be amazing in any completely original way, I just had to completely commit myself to the task at hand which had a set of very clear rules.
A very very bizarre class all in all. But still really good. And there were some good lessons to come out of it.
Looking back at photos of the workshop so far is very very funny, and you have moments of a removed perspective of everything where you just go "what the hell are we doing?" But that's good. These classes are unlike anything I've ever done before. They are the strangest, most offensive, funniest, most bizarre, craziest place to be. When I stop and think that I've travelled halfway round the world and paid a small fortune to take this course I can't help but laugh. It's absolutely hilarious. But it's a completely unique environment and a unique way of learning that I am sure I won't ever find anywhere else. And in years to come, who knows, maybe it will all start to make sense in a deeply profound cosmic sort of way - maybe in 15 years I'll realise the secret of acting because of my crazy 3 week crash-course in Bouffon. Who knows. Even if not, I'm still having a hilarious time.
So then, being Thursday and Philippe's garage day, we had class with Tom Tom again. And today was an absolutely mental class. It kinda just felt like everybody was a little bit hysterical or something, and it was just crazy. Not in a bad way, just in a kind of weird way. But there were lots and lots and lots laughs to be had, and eventually I even got some of them myself which was nice.
First thing's first: we needed to take the opportunity to be nasty about the new Pope. So a group of five got up, deformed and costumed themselves however they wished, and then came out onto the stage as a group to some really religious music to one by one say a prayer for the new Pope. There was pretty limited success at this exercise on most fronts. Tom Tom kept encouraging people to be nastier with their prayers, but on the whole it was a bit safe and not that hilarious. There were a couple of really good moments, but mostly it was not great. The second group was much the same really (Taylor was particularly embarrassed about his contribution to the exercise, calling it "the worst thing he's ever done on stage").
So I got up with the third group, and for the vast majority of our time we really followed suit with the previous groups in how bad we were. We were up there kind of floundering in trying to make a funny prayer, and then confessing our sins and nothing was really working. I think that there wasn't really enough structure to this exercise to help it work properly - we didn't have any definite character or archetype to play, no specific deformity or costume, all we really had was knowing that we had to make a nasty prayer about the Pope, which wasn't a lot to go off. And it showed in everyone's performances and the way the audience received them.
So everything was going badly until Tom Tom asked for us to one by one tell some dirty jokes. I told a racist one that got some laughs, and so Tom Tom picked up on it and called me forward to tell more racist jokes. I had to think of all the racist jokes I knew as quick as I could and deliver them to the audience: the moment I finished one Tom Tom would yell "more!" I had to make them up. So there I am, on stage in an oversized Disney sweatshirt and no pants (coz that was my costume choice - good one, Jack) walking up and down and pulling racist jokes out of thin air. And when I ran out, I had to keep going, I had to make up my own racist jokes on the spot. I wasn't allowed time to think. I just had to do it. Most of them weren't clever or witty, sometimes they barely made sense. They were mostly very rude. And the audience loved it. Again, I was at the very edge of my brain's capabilities and garbage was just pouring out of my mouth, and it was offensive but apparently very funny. I probably was telling racist jokes for 2 minutes straight, just going with the flow of whatever came out of my mouth first and seeing where it would go. It was exhausting, but people seemed to really like it and I got a round of applause at the end of it.
That was the last group of people praying for the Pope and we moved onto a couple of groups of people being anorexic models before class finished. This had some better moments in it, as there was more of a structure to follow, more of a definite character or archetype to play, just generally more for a performer to work with I think. The clearer the framework around what you're doing and the better you know the material (or the more material there is), the freer you are to let go and to play around. When I was at my freest was when I had the framework of simply churning out racist joke after racist joke, and that was all I had to do. I didn't have to invent something clever or be amazing in any completely original way, I just had to completely commit myself to the task at hand which had a set of very clear rules.
A very very bizarre class all in all. But still really good. And there were some good lessons to come out of it.
Looking back at photos of the workshop so far is very very funny, and you have moments of a removed perspective of everything where you just go "what the hell are we doing?" But that's good. These classes are unlike anything I've ever done before. They are the strangest, most offensive, funniest, most bizarre, craziest place to be. When I stop and think that I've travelled halfway round the world and paid a small fortune to take this course I can't help but laugh. It's absolutely hilarious. But it's a completely unique environment and a unique way of learning that I am sure I won't ever find anywhere else. And in years to come, who knows, maybe it will all start to make sense in a deeply profound cosmic sort of way - maybe in 15 years I'll realise the secret of acting because of my crazy 3 week crash-course in Bouffon. Who knows. Even if not, I'm still having a hilarious time.
Wednesday, 13 March 2013
Day Eight
Train's were slightly delayed again this morning, so Taylor and I ended up waiting at the train station for an hour and arriving at our Movement class about an hour late. The last half of it that we were there for was great though - we did a simple isolation exercise in groups to get you using body parts freely and in isolation from each other, sang a crazy cool song, then we played a couple of great games. The one-on-one tambourine battle game was a particular favourite of mine, closely followed by what can only be described as ruthless-circle-hand-soccer. Great fun.
Then into Philippe's class. Today's entire class was dedicated to the character of the Fanatical Priest - a kind of stock character of Bouffon. Again, the idea is to parody the fanatical priest, not to play them truthfully, but unlike in the bastard exercise you aren't just describing them you are actually performing as them. It's a very fine line. Philippe summed it up as: "If you play the character then it is not parody because you are not commenting on this person. To parody you must do it in a way that you are commenting on the bastard to say 'they are a piece of s***.'" Nevertheless, a lot of people still struggled with finding this balance (and with a lot of other things too).
One of the big mistakes that people made in their playing of this character was that they didn't play a 'fanatic' in the true sense of the word. Even if they were still parodying their person, if the person we're seeing isn't fanatical then they are just a harmless idiot and the parody isn't as funny and is kind of meaningless. One girl had the audience laughing a lot at what she was doing but it wasn't the religious fanatic, so Philippe stopped her and said: "She is not fanatic yet; she is optimist girl scout. A fanatic needs to tell the sinners they were burn in hell. We have to feel the fanatic is dangerous. Even the calm fanatic we feel can still kill someone with a knife."
So the first group up had mixed success with the exercise. There were two people in that group who I felt did the exercise really well - Taylor was one of them and he found some really funny stuff as his particular brand of religious fanatic. It was very direct and kind of angry and blustery and you could see he was having a good time. The other guy did a kind of slightly creepy and a bit camp Canadian televangelist which was very very funny and had some really excellent moments. They both had a lot of fun with it and worked the audience well which are really key components of this work.
So then I decided that I wanted to get up and have a turn with the second group. You had the option to dress up a bit if you wanted and give yourself a deformity if you felt you wanted it. I went pretty simple with just a big belly underneath my black long-sleeved top tucked into my track pants and hair brushed to the side. It was the first time so far in the Bouffon workshop that I feel a costume has worked in my favour and actually helped me, and I think it was to do with the simplicity of it and with not trying to make the costume too outrageous in and of itself. So we walked out onstage as a group to some very happy-clappy music, and one by one had turns addressing our congregation. I was second up, and when it came to my turn I had an absolute blast. I had the audience with me pretty much from the get-go, and I had them laughing and cheering and hallelujah-ing along with me - it was great. I felt that I really just let myself relax into it and I genuinely had a lot of fun. It was also the first time that I was really working in a way that I had abandoned my clever ideas and moment by moment didn't know what I would say next, and that really worked for me. I brought sinners from the audience up on stage with me and with the audience put Jesus into them and preached about light and dark and a house of Jesus built from Jesus-nails and Jesus-gapfiller. I had no idea what I was doing and it was amazing fun and the audience really responded to it. Also, I didn't get banged off at all - I got to finish my sermon on my terms and find my own end to it rather than getting stopped by Philippe (he even said "not bad", which is pretty good praise from him). I got a big round of applause and all in all it felt really good.
Reflecting on it now and trying to work out why it went well for me this time and what I did well to make it happen, I think there are a couple of elements at play. I think there's a fast rhythm that I could find within this particular archetype that served me well: because I think often my mind is working so fast it's really helpful for me to be working that quickly as well so my mind can't plan ahead and sabotage me with good ideas. At the best moments I felt like my brain was about half a step behind whatever I was actually doing or saying, and that produced the funniest moments. However, within this I also took several moments to change the rhythm, to slow down or stop, and to take the time to imagine like Philippe told me to on Monday. The key thing here I think is that these moments weren't planned: it was an instinctive feeling that the rhythm should be changed and I followed it, and then I let myself have fun with it and imagine before I took it somewhere else. I didn't force the scene to go anywhere, I let it take me where it needed to go. Also the relationship with the audience was really helpful for me: the relationship contract was clear and so I knew exactly how I could and couldn't use or relate to my audience and so I was able to play around with it (playing with direct address is also something that I think I'm reasonably good at). Another thing within this particular exercise that I found helpful is the shared familiar vocabulary of the fanatical priest. Because it's such a strong and familiar archetype, there is a certain shared and understood vocabulary that goes along with it - a lot of buzzwords that the performer can use to joke with the audience and these can be a very quick and easy way into a sense of fun.
The rest of the class was watching other people try the same fanatical priest character with varying degrees of success. More confusion over what exactly qualifies as a 'fanatic' and several reminders that the character still needs to be charming and fun, not just angry and hateful, or we lose interest.
As usual some more great quotes and insults from Philippe today. Here are some of my favourites:
Then into Philippe's class. Today's entire class was dedicated to the character of the Fanatical Priest - a kind of stock character of Bouffon. Again, the idea is to parody the fanatical priest, not to play them truthfully, but unlike in the bastard exercise you aren't just describing them you are actually performing as them. It's a very fine line. Philippe summed it up as: "If you play the character then it is not parody because you are not commenting on this person. To parody you must do it in a way that you are commenting on the bastard to say 'they are a piece of s***.'" Nevertheless, a lot of people still struggled with finding this balance (and with a lot of other things too).
One of the big mistakes that people made in their playing of this character was that they didn't play a 'fanatic' in the true sense of the word. Even if they were still parodying their person, if the person we're seeing isn't fanatical then they are just a harmless idiot and the parody isn't as funny and is kind of meaningless. One girl had the audience laughing a lot at what she was doing but it wasn't the religious fanatic, so Philippe stopped her and said: "She is not fanatic yet; she is optimist girl scout. A fanatic needs to tell the sinners they were burn in hell. We have to feel the fanatic is dangerous. Even the calm fanatic we feel can still kill someone with a knife."
So the first group up had mixed success with the exercise. There were two people in that group who I felt did the exercise really well - Taylor was one of them and he found some really funny stuff as his particular brand of religious fanatic. It was very direct and kind of angry and blustery and you could see he was having a good time. The other guy did a kind of slightly creepy and a bit camp Canadian televangelist which was very very funny and had some really excellent moments. They both had a lot of fun with it and worked the audience well which are really key components of this work.
So then I decided that I wanted to get up and have a turn with the second group. You had the option to dress up a bit if you wanted and give yourself a deformity if you felt you wanted it. I went pretty simple with just a big belly underneath my black long-sleeved top tucked into my track pants and hair brushed to the side. It was the first time so far in the Bouffon workshop that I feel a costume has worked in my favour and actually helped me, and I think it was to do with the simplicity of it and with not trying to make the costume too outrageous in and of itself. So we walked out onstage as a group to some very happy-clappy music, and one by one had turns addressing our congregation. I was second up, and when it came to my turn I had an absolute blast. I had the audience with me pretty much from the get-go, and I had them laughing and cheering and hallelujah-ing along with me - it was great. I felt that I really just let myself relax into it and I genuinely had a lot of fun. It was also the first time that I was really working in a way that I had abandoned my clever ideas and moment by moment didn't know what I would say next, and that really worked for me. I brought sinners from the audience up on stage with me and with the audience put Jesus into them and preached about light and dark and a house of Jesus built from Jesus-nails and Jesus-gapfiller. I had no idea what I was doing and it was amazing fun and the audience really responded to it. Also, I didn't get banged off at all - I got to finish my sermon on my terms and find my own end to it rather than getting stopped by Philippe (he even said "not bad", which is pretty good praise from him). I got a big round of applause and all in all it felt really good.
Reflecting on it now and trying to work out why it went well for me this time and what I did well to make it happen, I think there are a couple of elements at play. I think there's a fast rhythm that I could find within this particular archetype that served me well: because I think often my mind is working so fast it's really helpful for me to be working that quickly as well so my mind can't plan ahead and sabotage me with good ideas. At the best moments I felt like my brain was about half a step behind whatever I was actually doing or saying, and that produced the funniest moments. However, within this I also took several moments to change the rhythm, to slow down or stop, and to take the time to imagine like Philippe told me to on Monday. The key thing here I think is that these moments weren't planned: it was an instinctive feeling that the rhythm should be changed and I followed it, and then I let myself have fun with it and imagine before I took it somewhere else. I didn't force the scene to go anywhere, I let it take me where it needed to go. Also the relationship with the audience was really helpful for me: the relationship contract was clear and so I knew exactly how I could and couldn't use or relate to my audience and so I was able to play around with it (playing with direct address is also something that I think I'm reasonably good at). Another thing within this particular exercise that I found helpful is the shared familiar vocabulary of the fanatical priest. Because it's such a strong and familiar archetype, there is a certain shared and understood vocabulary that goes along with it - a lot of buzzwords that the performer can use to joke with the audience and these can be a very quick and easy way into a sense of fun.
The rest of the class was watching other people try the same fanatical priest character with varying degrees of success. More confusion over what exactly qualifies as a 'fanatic' and several reminders that the character still needs to be charming and fun, not just angry and hateful, or we lose interest.
As usual some more great quotes and insults from Philippe today. Here are some of my favourites:
- "Even if the priest is boring the actor who plays the priest must never be boring. So idiot what you suggest. When you say this we are sure you are from Belgium."
- "I know the snow is big problem for TGV. Many TGV will not start because of the snow. Maybe it is the same problem with your mind."
- "Music teacher for Mongol, or fanatic priest?"
- "Was she extremely boring, or was she writing a beautiful page in the story of theatre?"
And, one of my personal favourites, and one that I think sums up a lot of Philippe's attitude to theatre:
"We all have a very strong machine to dream around what is real. It is in us all... somewhere. I don't know where. The 'real' is boring for theatre. The 'real' is boring even for real life. Every time we see something 'real' we are dreaming around it of something else, something more."
Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Day Seven
Snowed in today. Taylor and I made it from our home in Vitry sur Seine to Bibliotheque train station (a 20 minute journey) to catch our train out to Etampes, only to find all the services running out that way disrupted by snow. An attendant told us that the trains would be delayed for at least two hours and possibly would not run at all today, so that even if we made it out to Etampes on the earliest train going we'd still be well late for class and would run a very real risk of being stranded in Etampes overnight. Not really worth waiting round, so we went home.
We were meant to do some more extensive work on the Fat Asses today, which neither Taylor nor I wanted to miss, but I think that many people from class will have been effected by the weather today and so with any luck Philippe will still cover it tomorrow. Snow's meant to ease off tonight so shouldn't be any problems with transport tomorrow. Fingers crossed.
We were meant to do some more extensive work on the Fat Asses today, which neither Taylor nor I wanted to miss, but I think that many people from class will have been effected by the weather today and so with any luck Philippe will still cover it tomorrow. Snow's meant to ease off tonight so shouldn't be any problems with transport tomorrow. Fingers crossed.
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