Day Thirteen

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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:

• "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."

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.

Bouffon - Week Two

Start of week two today - Taylor and I had to miss Friday's Auto Cours classes because of unexpected amounts of travel time required for our weekend in London. Philippe's class started off today with an extended warm-up: a particularly long game of "Samuel Says" (I made 2 mistakes) and then a game of Mr Hit. All this took up close to three quarters of an hour, but it was good fun and quite a nice relaxed way to start, especially since the heaters didn't seem to be working properly and it was absolutely freezing in the studio.

So after all that was done we sat down and Philippe asked if anyone had any bastards they wanted to work on. First up was an Australian girl to work on a couple of different bastards she knows: first a disgusting man she met on the train and second her local priest and godfather. The exercise was an extension on the work on bastards we'd done last week and it really helped to make a lot clearer for the whole class what it was actually about. This particular exercise, unlike playing the swamp people, is not about 'playing' the bastard as such; rather the actor is supposed to take delight in destroying this person but as themselves  This destroying can be done through stories about the bastard, through moments of imitation, through description, but a couple of things are essential: we must get a sense of who your bastard is and we must be able to see them clearly, and we must see the actor loving and enjoying how nasty they are being about this person. As Philippe says: "We see you arrive with the joy to say f*** you to your bastard."

So the first couple of attempts were not all that strong. We discovered that the first bastard being demonstrated probably didn't even qualify as being a bastard - they were either sick or just an idiot. Not a bastard. The litmus test for a bastard is "someone who will write a letter to the Gestapo about their neighbour with the long nose". A certain amount of calculated malice seems to be a prerequisite, not just stupidity. The second bastard on show we could all agree was probably a bastard, but the actor didn't give us a clear enough picture of this person - we couldn't see them - and so again it didn't work. 

The next couple of people again were trying to work with examples of people who were not really bastards. One was just kind of an ignorant trash sort of character and the other was Sophia Loren. It was clear that neither of them were never really going to work. There wasn't enough nastiness towards these people for the actors to take delight in, in fact in both cases the actors seemed to harbour a sort of weird admiration for their subjects. Picking the right bastard is the first important step.

Next up I decided I wanted a turn. My bastard was Mohammed, the homophobic sexist ageist misogynist Pakistani driver's licence tester from Wellington (a real person - and absolutely horrible). I really enjoyed getting up and being able to describe him and my experiences of him to everybody else, and I got some good responses and we were all in agreement that he really was a genuine bastard. I impersonated him, I told stories of his bastardly exploits, I embellished and exaggerated a few details (which you're allowed, or even encouraged to do) in order to make him even more vivid and hateful, but it was all based in truth. All this stage of the exercise worked reasonably well for me and I enjoyed doing it and the audience seemed to enjoy much of it as well.

Then Philippe started asking me questions about Mohammed, prompting me to go further with my nastiness - questions like: "How does he s*** in the morning?"; "How does he f***?"; "How does he speak arabic?"; "What does he have to say about politics?". In hindsight I can recognise that these questions were all about propelling me further into the fun of being nasty and ruthless, but at the time I kind of let them squash my fun - I needed to be able to answer Philippe's question in a funny and nasty way and I needed to do it NOW. I went back to my old tricks of playing for result and trying to play my clever ideas. And Philippe, and the audience, saw right through it.

"We see your idea, not your pleasure. We don't see pleasure in the eyes we see your idea. No. You want to be good too fast - it is no good to be good too fast. Take more time to imagine, to have fun with thinking 'how nasty can I be?' You are too nice. For Bouffon you must be nasty and you must like it."

Another big lesson was about hesitation. once or twice when he asked me the questions I would begin with something like "probably" or "perhaps" or "I'm not sure, but..." - in Bouffon you must know. Even if you don't know you must know. You make it up, you exaggerate, and you have fun to do it. If you are unsure about your bastard then the audience is unsure about them and it doesn't work.

However, Philippe must have seen something in my version of Mohammed, because as I went to sit down he said: "We will see you do this bastard again, but you will have more fun." So I'll get another chance to destroy Mohammed and next time I'll do it properly. Yes! (I've also got a couple of other bastards up my sleeve who I'd love to have a crack at but we'll see how we go.)

The person up after me was parodying this super-wealthy super-upper-class English family that they know. And there were some absolutely great moments in what they did. First of all she made these people very vivid for us all in the way she described and mocked them - the better you know something the easier it is to destroy it. And they were also the perfect candidates for Bouffon bastards. On top of that, she had a lot of fun doing it and that really is the key thing. She ended up being on the floor working for a really long time because she was doing so well, and even moved away from those bastards on to a whole new set of bastards from her time at an English girls' boarding school. Very funny. And I could see her picking up on the mistakes I'd made when I did it and taking on the notes Philippe had given me, and it made a lot of sense watching her do it. 

So this bastard work took up the whole lesson today, but it was really good for us all to get a bit clearer on what exactly this mocking of the bastard thing is all about. From my understanding of it though this is only one layer of the work: in a Bouffon performance I think the actor is supposed to combine the work with the Swamp people and their deformities with this bastard work - so it becomes the Swamp person mocking the bastard, not the actor. What stays the same is the joy of the performer, as this is the crucial element - without it the performance is just nasty and mean and vulgar with no beauty to it at all. And if the actor can pull off this combination well then I imagine Bouffon can be painfully and devastatingly funny. We've already seen that each component by itself can be hilarious, so I can't wait to see both in action.

Day Four

Thursday's at Ecole Philippe Gaulier are Philippe's "Garage Day" - he basically takes the day off every week for his health - so class today was led by another teacher called Tom Tom. It was a really different environment to be in, and I think it really compliments the classes we have with Philippe and works well as a structure. Tom Tom is very laid back and approachable, and probably a bit more generous in the chances he gives you to work and rework something than Philippe is, but he still is able to let you know if what you're doing is bad. It makes for a class where everyone is just a little bit more relaxed and can probably play a little bit more, and take a risk in applying what they've learnt from Philippe or to try something new.

We started with a game of Mr Hit (very different to the version we play in NZ, but good for getting you focused but also kind of relaxed). Then into another deformity: the Fat Ass. The defining characteristic of this one, as you might have guessed, is just a really massive ass. And unlike the others, there are no nubs or legs tied together, so other than a massive ass and whatever costume elements you have you're comparatively very free to move. I got up with the second group of four, and the first thing we have to do is make an entrance as a group to some really loud hip hop music. Then we basically let loose and dance and the idea is to mock celebrity culture, to mock superficial people, to mock superstars and people who are really "cool". I had a great time. I really went to town with my dancing and got quite a few laughs from the audience. I think the freedom with my body compared to the other deformities allowed me the chance to be really large and kind of spastic and I found that comparatively easy to do and to enjoy. The hip hop music and the joy of dancing outrageously to that really helped too. Then into a section where the music would be lowered and one by one we keep our hip hop dancing but also have to make up a rap for the audience. This was ok and I got a couple of laughs, but again I could feel myself pushing at certain moments and trying too hard to be funny. Then into a section where we take turns swearing at the audience, then a section inventing our own swear words, then one of dirty laughter at the audience. And I really struggled through these sections. The swearing was ok, because I do genuinely enjoy swearing, but still it was a little bit off. 

Looking back, the decline started from the rapping section and I only got worse from there. I think that I can attribute this crappening to my brain and intellect beginning to engage in what I was doing, and fun and impulse being slowly dominated by ideas and thinking. Uuuuurgh! To work at my best I have to be working at a rate and in a way in which my mind can't plan or anticipate what I'm about to do or what is about to happen and just has to engage and respond moment by moment. Oh right, that seems like a pretty basic tenet of all acting... I keep thinking about the Commedia work we did at Toi last year and how I was able find many moments of this kind of feeling playing Doctore and working off the audience. I have to find a way to work so that my mind can't cope. Or can only just cope. I think the key is in working in response to something else.

Anyway, we finished that exercise after about four groups had been up, and then Tom Tom asked us to group together in our nationalities to take turns getting up and mocking our own countries. You could choose your own deformity to perform with. First up were two poms to mock Mother England. Most of their act was a bit of a flop, until they got to a really winning formula with their impersonations of Posh and Becks - Posh as a talky know-it-all upper class snobby Queen-type, and Becks as an intellectually handicapped child only capable of a word at a time. It was hilarious. They were having fun, we were having fun, and it was really simple. Next were the Australians, and they found the most gold when they really broadened their accents and got really trashy and just basically swore a hell of a lot. Hilarious. Then us kiwis got up - Taylor, Kura and me. We all had big bellies and bad wigs and we came out as a group singing the national anthem (with a bit of wiri-ing for good measure). It went down really well. We were really loud and with thick accents, and we didn't let ourselves be stopped until we got through the Maori and English renditions. The crowd loved it, and the fact that it took ages only made it funnier. Then we went straight into a haka led by Kura. Again, the audience responded extremely well and found it very funny. And it was because we were having FUN. Lots of it. Then we went into parodying some bros, some politically correct and well-intentioned Pakeha and some tangata whenua. It was a blast and more or less the whole thing went down really well with the audience. I found a character that Tom Tom siad worked really well for me, and I could feel it too, and he said I should continue to explore it (I won't say here who the character was based on). All in all it was really great. I really found something and had a great time for the first time here. Yes!

We then got through the Canadians, a Japanese and Singaporean combo, and an Italian. The highlight was the armless Japanese dwarf as a samurai finding endless ways to kill the Singaporean - everybody was in fits of laughter. That was all we had time for and then class was over.

So now my focus is on finding ways to bring the joy and pleasure that I found today into the next work that I do. There was something about mocking something very close to home, something that I know very well, that really allowed me to just go there and really enjoy it. So then how does that translate to everything else? Hopefully I'll find out and fill you in. First step is tomorrow with our Auto Cours presentations, to try and bring a little bit of it in when Taylor and I get up. We still don't really know if what we're doing is any good or even what Philippe wants, but we've both agreed to just get up and go to town with it and have as much fun as we can. Let's see how we go.

Day Three

Philippe's class started today with him giving us our provocation for Auto Cours on Friday (Friday is the day that every student presents the work they have created and rehearsed within a group during the week based on a provocation, and this is called Auto Cours). He gave us a Bouffon script of a scene between God and Adam where they are figuring out what Woman should be like. It's very vulgar and pretty funny. In groups of whatever size we choose we are to take however much text we like and work on it and present it in a way that we are taking joy in being nasty. It's pretty open ended. Taylor and I are going to work together this week and we aren't entirely sure what we're going to do.

Then straight into work. We started today with work on 'the bastards'. Philippe had someone get up and describe to us, taking great pleasure in being nasty, a particular bastard they know of within their own life. It was a pretty strange, and I think quite difficult, exercise. The idea is not to play the bastard, but to take joy in mocking them. You might imitate or play a certain accentuated quality of theirs for a bit, but you always return to yourself and your own pleasure. Nobody was particularly successful at this exercise. Philippe offered some interesting insights into why this was and into the right way to mock a bastard.

"If you are too stiff with the person you mock, then it is no fun. The fun is what gives the quality of the parody, not your clever idea."
"You are too much serious. We are in sociology class."
"You don't start so nasty. We don't like you then. We appreciate the fun with which you little by little destroy your bastard."
"We buy your spirit, not your bastard."

Someone asked Philippe if it helped you to pick a bastard who is someone you are personally oppressed by, someone you really hate. His reply was really fantastic:
"Stop hating. Have fun. Mock. It is much too painful to hate. It is much more terrible to destroy with mocking. In a way, the mocking is after hate. It relieves the pressure of hate."

Then we went on to working on our deformity of the day: the Fat Belly. Same nubs for arms, same legs tied together, but this time with a really big fat belly that leads you wherever you go. Similar procedure as with the previous deformities; five or so people go up as a group and work through a series of provocations from Philippe, as a group and individually. I got up in the second lot of people, and I immediately felt more comfortable in this character than in the hunchback. First thing we had to do was as a group do a really sexy dance to entice the audience. I had a wee bit of success here, and found a couple of moments of real fun and connection with the audience, and there was a lot of fun to be had with sexily waving your nubs and shaking your belly with all the other freaks. Then individual work: start with the sexy dance for the audience and then when the music lowers you go into a horrible fish-sellers voice trying to sell your fish to the audience while continuing your sexy dance. Again I did ok with my sexy dance - perhaps it was a bit less fun and a bit more self-conscious than when I did it with the group - but it was ok. Then I went into my fish-seller's voice and I really just tried to go for it - holding back at all seems to be the one thing you really can't afford to do in Bouffon. It was ok, but not great. After about 20 seconds Philippe stopped me and told me "Too much force. It was very strong, but we don't see your fun. Not excellent." Oh well, I actually didn't mind that and I agreed with him. And I think I cared less about failing than I did yesterday which is good: I gave it a good go and it wasn't great and I knew it, move on.

I'm finding that my tendency when things aren't going great is to push really hard and try to force myself to have fun and take pleasure in the work and be funny. Hmmmmm... seems counter-productive. Like I said, caring less is a good first step for me, but I need to find a way to just let go and enjoy myself. Sounds easy, right?

After school Taylor and I went up to a park behind the train station in Etampes to practise our Auto Cours for a bit. It was pretty funny and we didn't really know what we were doing - especially funny when people walked through the park and we didn't realise they were there until they were about 10 meters away, us on top of one another with nubs for arms thrusting and grinding and generally being disgusting and looking ridiculous. Oh well, it's all in the name of art...

Day Two

Started the day again with movement class led by Carlo. Lots of stretches and and moving around the room to begin with, moving into more games and a bit of singing to round it all out. We sing a song in rounds which has a really cool melody, and the words are: "I like your eyes when you lie to me / I like your voice when you say my name / But they make me crazy are your funny shoes / When you walk I'm dizzy and I want to die with you." It's great. I don't know what's going on in Carlo's class 100% of the time, or what the exact aim of any given exercise or game may be, but it's always fun and light-hearted and easy enough to go along with and enjoy. And I figure that's maybe enough by itself.

Class with Philippe today began with him talking us through some more history/theory of Bouffon and giving us examples of artists who work in the realm of Bouffon who we might want to look up. This was very interesting, but I think I missed quite a bit of it as he can be quite hard to decipher in the way he speaks and unlike the others I haven't gotten used to it yet. We then straight into working on the Hunchback (yesterday's character was the Dwarf, I found out). Philippe had one actor get up on the floor and then had their arms removed again, legs tied together at the knees, a really large hump put on their back, covered in lots of clothes, and then a stick held over their neck by two others so they can't stand up straight ("If costume is comfortable, then is not hunchback"). The hunchback must also always smile, as "God loves the happy people, the optimists". He then had the person do several impersonations along similar lines as what we did as dwarves yesterday, with varying degrees of humour and success. Some of the best advice he gave was: "You don't have to be natural. Bouffon is not natural. You find something different, and we love you in a special way."

Then it was time to get seven hunchbacks up in a line to work, so I got up in the first group. I got all dressed and made up as a hunchback, and dear lord was it uncomfortable. Then, one by one, we worked through more of Philippe's provocations, getting banged off by his drum whenever we were doing badly. First up, the catwalk model. I did my walk and made it back without much response from the audience, before being told by Philippe: "Is not charming enough. Not excellent at all." Next the singer: I sang Hero by Enrique Iglesias and got some good response initially from the audience and managed to keep singing for about  30 seconds, but was eventually banged off because I wasn't smiling and I stopped having fun with it. Next up is an important director having an artistic crisis: I got three words out and was banged off - completely wrong. Last chance to impress was a snob playing golf: I lasted a little while before being banged off, but I could tell that it was never really going anywhere. I wasn't really taking any pleasure in the mocking I was just pushing too hard and trying to avoid Philippe's drum. No good.

Philippe then went down the line of the seven of us and, based on our performances so far and how much the audience liked us, asked people in the audience whether they would save us or kill us. Unsurprisingly, I think five out of seven of us were killed. It sounds kind of brutal when I write it down like this, but it all happens in a spirit of fun and playing a game that makes it easier to take being bad. It's much better to be bad than to be boring at any rate. When someone does a bad performance Philippe will often take great pleasure in turning the onus of letting you know you were bad onto one of your fellow classmates. He'll turn to someone and ask a very loaded and usually very creative question like: "So, did we think he was fantastic? Did we say 'yes we love you, please come and play again'? Or did we think he was more like a primary school teacher in a neighbourhood of Muslims?" A little offensive maybe, but that's kind of the point of Bouffon. And it does it in a way where everyone knows the answer anyway and Philippe is taking delight from his mockery.

Then we had two more lots of hunchbacks up before the end of the day. Again, it's so blatantly obvious as an audience member when something is working and when something isn't, but I'm still having real trouble pinpointing why it is. And I think it's a really individualised thing that you have to find for yourself by doing it, and you can't just watch and copy what someone else does. It all comes down to the joy and the delight that the actor has within the mockery, because without that it's just kind of mean and hollow (and often boring). I definitely haven't experienced it for myself yet so my goal is to stop pushing and trying to force it to happen and just try and enjoy myself when I work. Of course, it can be a pretty unnatural and terrifying environment when you're up on the floor that isn't always conducive to just 'having fun' but I suppose it's our job to figure out how to do that.

So all in all a pretty difficult first couple of days and I still don't really know what I'm doing at all. It's a very bizarre and unpleasant felling to be up on the floor and realise you have literally nothing to offer and have no idea of how to make something work. And to know that you're supposed to be funny, but that for whatever reason you just aren't. Oh well, I've got three weeks to figure that out. Onwards and upwards.

Bouffon - Day One

First day of Bouffon workshop at Ecole Philippe Gaulier - COMPLETE. What a day. What a crazy, crazy day. Oh, and it just happened to be Philippe Gaulier's 70th birthday.

It all began with the morning commute that Taylor and I will be taking every day: 5 minute walk to a 5 minute train ride to transfer to another 50ish minute train ride out to Etampes and then another 5 minute walk to school. When you get to Etampes you feel like you're much more than an hour out of Paris; it's a kind of quintessential little French village that has a really nice calm feel to it (the sun shining and blue skies helped too). We had somehow managed to turn up an hour-and-a-half early for class, so after a leisurely trip for breakfast and a coffee the day was underway.

First up each morning is a movement class; the majority of them across the Bouffon block are going to be led by a guy named Carlo who Taylor hasn't had before. Being the first day of the block, every person in the course starts today together. I hadn't realised this, but for the rest of the course the class is split in two (probably a good thing as there is nearly 40 of us) and one group does their classes in the morning and the other slightly later in the day - Taylor and I are electing the morning option. (Philippe said that the only way you can change group once you've chosen is if a minimum of 10 family members die back in your home country). But for today we all did it together. And it was intense. 40 actors from all around the world, with 40 massive personalities all taking a movement class together in a room that really isn't meant for that many people. At times it was chaos. We started with some basic stretching and waking up of the body type exercises which were good, and then moved into an exercise where everyone walks around the room and when Carlo bangs a drum you have to stop and be touching a certain number of people, starting with one and growing to as many as you can. That was fun, but also complete madness. This, and the other exercises we went on to do with Carlo (including jumping over sticks while counting, doing the same holding hands with a partner, and a couple of kinds of variations on musical chairs) all seemed to be geared at finding joy and lightness through game and play, but the class seemed to have real difficulty focusing. It was probably mainly due to the large number of people, but the room was never quiet - even when Carlo asked for an exercise to be done quietly - and people would talk over the exercise or laugh or whatever. While it was a fun environment, it was kind of hard to work in at times - I think there's a fine line between taking pleasure and joy in an exercise and just mucking around, and I think the group often crossed that line.

Then came the Bouffon class with Philippe. When he first came into the room everyone carried on their usual business, but I had this moment of "oh my God, I'm in a room with Philippe Gaulier". Even just looking at him you can tell there's something pretty amazing about him. Within about 5 minutes he called everyone in and we all sat down ready to start our work. He began by getting one person up on the floor and then getting others to transform her into a rough appropriation of a Bouffon - this involved altering her clothes so she had no arms or legs, wrapping her head so only her face showed, wrapping her in other gross clothing and dirtying her face until she looked pretty awful - while he told us the story of how Bouffon as a form originated. He then had her perform a series of improvised parodies based on prompts he gave her to demonstrate to us in the audience that this deformed person singing and attempting to dance could be very funny.

Then he had another 10 people get up with her and get deformed too. They then acted out, as a group and individually, more improvised provocations designed to parody something. When it wasn't working Philippe banged his drum and it moved to the next person to try (this would often happen after no more than a few seconds). The group of 10 was up there for about 25 minutes, then we swapped and another 10 got up, then the same thing again. Some of the provocations Philippe gave included:

• Sing a boy scout song soft and well
• Be the Pope
• Be like a snob, someone who directs an art gallery
• Primary school teacher
• Pedophile priest in Dublin
• Group holding hands and singing a religious song and laughing together
• Charming singer
• Prostitute

And more. As you can imagine, these played out by ugly deformed actors in a line on their knees was often quite humorous. Here's a picture so you can get an idea of how it looked.

It was interesting though to see the difference between when something was interesting and funny and when it wasn't - and a lot of the time today, with a few good exceptions, it wasn't really funny. I was in the second group up and had two chances to play something individually and neither of them worked or were very funny at all. My most successful was being banged off by Philippe after about 10 seconds. It seems to be a very fine line between what works and what doesn't, and I don't know what the technical difference is yet, or how to make something work. But as an audience member and as a performer you definitely know whether it's working or not. I just want to figure out WHY.

So what is Bouffon? At the end of day one, through what I gleaned in class today, and my very basic notes of what Philippe said, this is the best I can describe it: a Bouffon is one of those at whom the finger of scorn has been pointed, for whatever reason. Those who were labelled the children not of God but of the devil. Who were exiled or ostracised or otherwise abused and mistreated. They are normally deformed or hideous in some way, but through mockery and parody of those who scorned them (the "bastards" as Philippe calls them) they speak the truth of something terrible and in that way they are beautiful. They are the beautiful blaspheming opposite of what is sacred.

Already I'm finding this course harder to write about than the work I did in Fullerton. There's something incredibly hard to describe about Philippe and the way he teaches and the general atmosphere of the class. In Fullerton I feel that the more technical approach to craft made it really easy to reflect on what I learned in a much more quantifiable way, whereas here things are taught through metaphor and through experience and through recognising where joy and pleasure are in a performance or performer. It's hard to write about because writing is inherently at least a partially intellectual act, but in Philippe's style of teaching you can't really make sense of it with your intellect but just through experiencing and absorbing it. Even that doesn't really make sense now that I've written it. Gaaaah. There's a lot to think about though. And I think my thinking will become more manageable when my class size shrinks a bit. We'll find out.

Final Friday

So I've just returned from my final class here at Cal State Fullerton, and it was a really fantastic way to end my time here. I went through the wringer. There were moments of good, moments of bad, moments of really bad, and even one or two moments of really good. Svetlana is still really sick but made the effort to come in today, so I thought she might be a bit lower on energy and perhaps go a bit easier. I was wrong.

My partner and I were supposed to be the fourth group up today, but after the first group Svetlana said that as it was my last day she wanted to make sure I got to work, so up we went. We started our scene, and I did waaaaay too much - I was fussing about and just being generally very busy and bad. So we got stopped and told to start again. This time I came in and was a little bit better, but Svetlana stopped us and pointed out that the stakes weren't high enough from either of us and we'd lost our sense of history and relationship. Reflecting on these moments now, I think that I'd lost the core of what I was supposed to be doing in that moment - relating, taking it all in, trying to find a way to talk - I just left all that behind, and what remained was just the outer behaviour from when I did do it, so it was very hollow.

So I took a moment to focus myself on what I really was supposed to be doing, and we cracked into it once more. And this time it was good. I was actually there and responding to what was happening and doing things for the first time. It felt good. We listened to each other, the relationship was there, we played our objectives, we played the obstacles, and we played actions towards each other. Until, at the turning point of the scene, I went and messed it all up again. I had what Svetlana called "an absolutely beautiful moment" with my partner as my character confesses his love to his mother, which I ruined by rushing right through it into the next line. And it's so obvious looking back - it felt awkward at the time, I just didn't know what to do about it. I had forgotten about my objective and gotten carried away with my good acting. Dammit. I fell into the trap of not living in the moment but playing result, playing for the final outcome that I know is going to happen. Svetlana called this a "sign of fear and insecurity. You want to be in control, but nothing can happen with control. Creativity comes from God, you cannot control it. So when you try you are putting middle finger to God." Sounds pretty spot on.

Then we entered a period of struggle and bad acting and yuckness. As I tried to work on this moment and make it work, I kept making bad choices and generally getting it wrong. I would go too fast, and the words meant nothing. I would move too quickly around the stage and make dumb choices about where to go. And I would do these things several times, albeit in slightly differing manifestations, all the while Svetlana getting angrier that I wasn't taking on her notes. It was a horrible feeling to just not be able to do it right, and not know how to change what I was doing. And every time I started again or tried to do it in a different way and make it work, it felt so manufactured. I just felt so fake and dishonest but didn't know how to fix it - the harder I tried the worse it got. And the worse I got the harder Svetlana pushed me to work and be better.

At a certain point I just slowed myself right down (in accordance with Svetlana's direction), and I stopped trying so hard and I just was. I found what I needed to find, I let it come to me rather than frantically and spastically pushing for it. It's such a hard difference to describe or even quantify, but the effect it has on the quality of the work is profoundly massive. Suddenly I was able to discover things in the moment again. My choices and actions were specific and directed at my scene partner. And they were born organically from what was happening. I stopped kicking my own ass to work hard and just let myself work with what I had. The frustration and anger and disappointment at not being able to do it right were all still there, but they weren't blocking me any more they were just part of the experience that were acknowledged and allowed to exist. They were harnessed and became useful. I was doing good acting.

There's a point in the scene, the very climax of it, where my mother screams a final hurtful name at me and in the stage directions my character is supposed to break down and cry. Last time we did the scene I forced it, I manufactured it and I rushed it. It was bad and Svetlana hated it. I was doing it because I knew I had to, because it was in the script. Svetlana's direction at the time was to forget about crying - if it happens it happens - just take it in and let it hit home and let whatever happens just happen. So when we got to that point in the scene today, I was determined not to ruin all the good work that we were doing. I took Svetlana's direction: I just let it hit me, I took my time, I suddenly felt like I needed to sit down so I did, I sat and looked straight ahead and just let myself breathe. And suddenly WHAM. It was like being hit by a wave - something in my body just went click - and out of nowhere I was crying and shaking, and I wasn't manufacturing it. And the most important thing was that I didn't just give in to it, I didn't just revert to self-pity wallowy acting and show everyone how good an actor I am because I can cry onstage. Yuck. No, I remained within the circumstances and still played actions and tried to pursue my objective. And the scene just worked. I could feel the effect I was having on my scene partner and the effect she was having on me. And we made new choices in the way we ended the scene that we hadn't made before and they were right. It stayed specific and it stayed truthful right through to the end. And all because I didn't push anything and because I played clear and specific actions.

So we finished the scene and Svetlana was really pleased with the work we did in the end. We had a quick chat about what we'd learned and the way we need to be working and then the next group was up.

And then all of a sudden my classes at CSUF were all done. What a massive four weeks here. I've worked in ways that I never would get a chance to at home, with amazing, insightful and generous teachers. And I've worked alongside some really talented and hard-working actors, who also happen to be extremely friendly and generous people. I've been warmly welcomed, and I've been pushed hard and challenged. It's still probably going to take a wee while to fully digest all that I've gotten out of coming to Fullerton, and to be able to articulate it with any clarity, but I know I've gotten a lot. I feel that the acting technique and skills that are so clearly the focus here are exactly what I needed at this moment in my training. And it's made me extremely excited to move on to Paris and to work in a totally new way, and even more excited to eventually take it back home and start to make sense of it all and put it into practice in the context of my training at Toi Whakaari.

So that's me for now. I'll take a break from the blog - barring any mind-shattering moments of inspiration that need to be shared over my small vacation - and get back to it once I start at Ecole Philippe Gaulier on March 4th. Over and out.

The penultimate day

Started the day with my last Shakespeare class with Evelyn, and it was a really good one. The first thing we did was to learn and run through the elements exercise that I've done many times before, each in a slightly different way, and Evelyn's version was different again. The same basic principles apply to the physical positions, and the positions themselves are more or less the same with a few differences, but Evelyn runs through it fast and many times, rather than just once or twice at a slower rate. We had to run through the whole thing 25 times with a partner before class even started. It brings you to a place of being "your quintessential self." And I like that.

Next up was an exercise called a punctuation walk - which Evelyn had never tried with a third year class but wanted us to be her guinea pigs. Again, I've done similar exercises before, but there were many differences in the way Evelyn does it and I really got a lot out of it. Basically you walk your lines of text, one step per syllable, and for every piece of punctuation (or capitalised word, or proper noun, or long spelling etc) there is a physical action or change of direction or something that you must do. And there is a lot to do when you look at the text in that way. But they aren't just arbitrary actions - like every time there's a semi-colon roll on the floor and imagine you're covered in maple syrup - but they seek to get to the heart, in a physical way, of whatever direction or help that piece of punctuation is trying to give you. It takes the sense of the punctuation away from your brain and puts it in your body, so it's not such a daunting thing that you must think about but it represents something that you do. I really noticed how helpful viewing the punctuation in this way can be during the afternoon session on Twelfth Night. Reading the text with it in mind, using the punctuation as a sort of road map, there are so many concrete cues as to how to move through the text that it's amazing. I think the biggest revelation for me was in Shakespeare's use of the colon, which is used frequently - the action that Evelyn assigned to it really made clear to me the progression of thought through both sides of a colon and what kind of action it implies within the character. Awesome.

The last exercise of the class was one where we started to look at the scenes that people are going to be working on in partners. In the exercise one set of partners sit very close to each other and connect with one another, while two others each act as a 'feeder' for one of the pair, whispering the lines to them blankly so that they can then take them in and repeat them to their scene partner. It was a cool exercise to do at a point before anyone had started learning the lines for their scenes at all, and I found that it really shifted the way you experienced the text. As the person being fed the lines you weren't concerned with remembering text or sense or doing a good performance or anything, your job was just to listen, absorb and then send the text to your partner. And while it is nowhere near a performance level by any means, it helped me to experience moments of genuine connection with the text and with my partner in a scene that I had done literally zero preparation for. In that way it's a very cool tool, and it made the text very immediate.

So that wrapped up my classes with Evelyn, and I then moved into the last of my classes with David and the graduates. We started off with another self-led Fitzmaurice warm-up and I continued to find out more about my own understanding of the exercises and how I can make it useful for myself. We just did a shorter warm-up today because David wanted to spend more time on the Estuary dialect, so we then moved down to his office to continue that work. We went through all the signature sounds and sound substitutions methodically, practising as we went, using the handout David created as a guide. I think I have a reasonably good handle on this dialect, and I think it's probably partly down to the exposure we have to British TV and film in NZ. And it's one of those accents that once you start doing it it's actually hard to stop. So we watched some clips out of Rock n Rolla for a bit more reference material, which was really helpful, then talked some more, and then time was up. The end of my last Voice/Movement class.

So then we went on into Twelfth Night, picking up where we left off near the start of Act 1 Scene 5. And again we moved slowly and meticulously through the text, with David leading everyone in being very disciplined in the way they work through it. We often stopped on single passages for extended lengths of time, discussing the devices, the sense, reading and re-reading, all the while growing a greater understanding of the play and characters and text. I really love this kind of work, and as I said before, the work I'd done with Evelyn this morning gave me a sort of fresh lens through which to view the text, and that was really exciting.

A couple of things struck me today about the differences between the actors here and actors at Toi - well I mean they're things that have struck me for a while now, but today I became a bit clearer about what it was exactly that I was being struck by. So many of the actors here work so hard and really apply themselves very studiously to what they're learning. But while they're doing this, a lot of the time I feel that what they are searching for in their education here are very concrete skills and tangible tools to use, even at times rules that they can apply to their acting work. And I am not in any way trying to imply that that's a bad thing, because we absolutely need that stuff (and at Toi it's the stuff we go a bit lighter on perhaps, the core technical skills). But what strikes me is the way in which they apply these skills or tools at times. It's sometimes like they look at a problem or question in their work as having just one answer, and the answer to that problem must lie within one of their tools in their kit they've accumulated, but they struggle to find which one to use, so they use too many of them. Or they can latch onto one of these tools and seek to apply it in too many situations, in places where it's not quite right. It's like they haven't developed as keenly their ability to read context, and to invest in reading what exists in a problem in order to solve it, rather than just band-aiding it with a patch of technique. It's something I've noticed a lot in my classes with Svetlana and the seniors too: she will ask a question to the class about what's wrong with a scene or something, and if the actors don't know the answer they just rattle off a bunch of these technical buzzwords in the hope that one of them is the right answer, that it's a quick-fix to the situation. Problems (or opportunities to learn something) can become multi-choice questions that they just have a stab at because they want to be right. It seems to come from a desire or need for there to be one way, one answer, right or wrong, and to be able to get it right. While this isn't a bad thing, and in many ways makes for really hard work and discipline in these actors, it makes me really appreciate the ability to not know something that at Toi is held so important. The skill of not knowing, and of sitting there anyway in the discomfort until you can figure out what needs to be done. And, from that, the ability to find a way forward that is suitable and organic and that fulfills what is required in the best (not the right) way. And that's one of the major differences I think I see between the two schools.

So now I have one class left: Acting with Svetlana tomorrow where I'll get up and perform my scene from the Seagull for the final time in front of one of the world masters of performing Chekhov. So no pressure. There is a real chance that the class won't actually happen though, given how sick she's been over the last week, and I haven't heard any updates since Wednesday. So who knows? I hope it goes ahead, because that would be a very anticlimactic way to end the Fullerton leg of the journey. And what better way to end the trip than with a good old fashioned Russian ass-kicking.